Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Any PG kids never skipped a grade?

If she goes to a competitive university, ie MIT or Caltech, then she will get her first B and maybe C grades. A friend in college had straight A's all her life and absolutely fell apart when she got a D on her first Organic chemistry test.


There are really three approaches to studying. One, just do what the teacher says. Two, do a lot more than the teacher says. Three, analyze your weaknesses on the subject and focus on those with a bit of drill thrown in. The latter is the best from a time perspective.

To get really good grades you have to know the subject and be FAST/no mistakes on producing work. These are two different skills. One is knowledge based and one is performance based.

Yes, it's teaching to a test, but I work in a public school under restructuring (two-thirds of the schools in my state and all of the high schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress this year). We are currently teaching to two different tests: the 3 times a year, state test and the monthly one from our restructuring consultant. Except in high school they only test 10th grade on the state test. Juniors and Seniors are either studying for the SAT, or the ACT, or they're not.

I shouldn't say "we". In restructuring it's only the reading/language arts and math teachers that are forced to teach to the test. As a social studies teacher, I'm free to pursue such frivolous pursuits as critical thinking and writing paragraphs.

Please forgive me for "pursue...pursuits". I can't believe I wrote that.

I can't wait until you finish this book - I really like the book in a way, full of advice and ideas to try, but then....there is the offhand (paraphrasing from memory)'well of course if a child is in a classroom where they never get a chance to work hard because of poor fit, then of course they will be underachievers even if Mom and Dad are doing everything right, but of course this isn't the majority of cases.'

Well it is the majority of cases around here!

I love it when books 'sound' anti-skip, but then when you read the fine print they do acknowledge that skips are vital in some situations, and explain why very clearly. The truth is that kids in the top .05% of ability are rare (expect for a few neighborhoods, and forums like this one.) Rare is a relative term.

Love and More Love,
Grinity

P.S. Oh Dottie - I shall miss you here! So glad we keep in touch offlist! What a gift it has been to know you. May everything you touch blossom just like this forum has - I couldn't have done it without you when we started out, but you are right - we have a great bunch here knows and shares regularly.

A couple of pps addressed my last comment so I'm just going to respond without quoting them all. Yes, I worry about perfectionism and yes I understand being the straight A student going into a high performing uni and falling apart. I had a lot of other reasons than that myself (personal and family) at the time, but I went into Berkeley at 17 having never really experienced the need to work and fell apart my first semester.

That is why we agree to skip a child with a fall bd in a school system where redshirting is common. She was already more than a year younger than some of her classmates and is as much as 2.5 yrs younger than some of them now with just the single grade skip. The work level has not been appropriate in most subjects still and she gets As pretty easily.

Where it has been appropriate has been math and in the quantity of work, which was huge for her in middle school. Going into high school, the counselors told the incoming class to expect five hours of homework/night if they are taking pre-AP classes. Dd is not only taking pre-AP biology and literature, she is also taking a second science class as an elective in order to accelerate more in science and has a heavy load of other core classes. She is not a fast kid. She could not handle any larger of a work load than what she has now, so further acceleration is not reasonable for her. Even if what is holding her up is speed and too much busy work, it is what it is.

I also stand by my statement that I would not want her in a position where the best she could achieve with her full effort is high average. I want her in a spot where she has to work to achieve highly (all As if that's what she wants -- and she does -- and upper 90s on achievement tests if that's what she wants -- and she does). Pre-skip she was getting straight As by writing papers in the car on the way to school and winding up in the 99th percentile of everything for just showing up on test day. While she's still in the 99th in a lot of areas, she has to put in a little work at least to be there. And, in some areas, she has to put in a pretty good amount of work to maintain in the accelerated class (math).

I'm with you Cricket. I wouldn't want my kid to skip into a grade where he had to struggle to understand most of what is being taught. It would be nice if there were no grading systems at all, but rather the kids are just taught new things at their readiness level. In early elementary, where my kid is, there are no real grades, so it doesn't really matter (it's "meets" or "exceeds expectations," or "needs to work" on something). I don't think we would have chosen to skip our child if most everything was going to be a challenge - that would not be his readiness level. We want him to be able to "learn how to learn" - meaning he doesn't already know everything being taught, and he has a safe place to fail so he can learn to persevere. When my kid does get a grade when grades matter, I would be happier with a hard-earned B than an easy A, but I would expect As and Bs.

I see the value in having to struggle to do well. I think it's good preparation for real life.

One of my kids skipped two grades. The second skip (over 5 to 6) was hard. The middle school environment was different and I had to spend a lot of time with him to help him maintain Bs. To be honest, I expected Cs, and was pleasantly surprised when his first report card came in with Bs and a couple As. But homework was a huge struggle. At the same time, he was also advancing in an extracurricular sport, and he had to struggle to learn some new moves. For a while, he despaired that he'd never be able to do an X in this sport, but he persevered and eventually did.

By 7th grade, he only needed about 10% as much help as he'd needed the previous year, and he ended the year with 5 As, plus he got the math award and a few of the teachers gushed about what a wonderful student he was. He'd also advanced a few more levels in that sport.

In his case, the struggling was a good thing. It helped him start to internalize the idea that perseverance is a key to succeeding when things don't come to him right away.

I'm not trying to say that I'd throw one of my kids into sixth grade when he was clearly only ready for fifth. That's different! As weird as the idea of a second skip seemed, it just seemed pretty clear at the time that elementary school didn't have much more to offer him. So we made the decision to put him into an environment where he wouldn't be the top student.

The assumption going into the second skip was that it would be hard for a while, but he'd adapt, eventually perform well, and would be better off for the struggle he had survived.

I feared you were completely serious.

I wonder, though, where you developed your understanding of the US educational system, as what you describe is totally foreign to my experiences in multiple states across the country.

You seem particularly disturbed by the idea of the valedictorian award. (Is there no equivalent, such as Dux Litterarum, in Scotland?) How does recognizing the academic achievement of one or more individuals result in (or from) the failure of fellow students? Perhaps with the exception of someone who misses the mark by a fraction of a point, I can't imagine any non-first-place student being particularly disappointed --- and he certainly wouldn't consider himself a failure... any more than an Olympic silver medalist would consider missing the gold to be an abject failure. Speaking from personal experience, those of us who were no where near contention for top spot didn't give it a second thought! It was just one more boring speech on graduation day.

As for straight As, how exactly does that condemn a lesser student to a life of failure? You do know that more than one student can earn straight As, right? That sounds to me like the same system you describe with the example of a UK student being "awarded a Level 3 in writing." I'm assuming that every student in a particular UK class could potentially earn the top "Level," right?

So you had your "opportunity to attack the US teacher-given-grades-led system," but I believe you did so without enough of an understanding of how it all works.

Will you be sponsor?

I would love to have a system in which grades are irrelevant and understanding of the material is the only/primary goal. Instead, we have a system in which inflated grades seem to be doled out rather routinely and in which a student can cram for a test, get the grade by memorization, and then not be able to discuss the subject intelligently 2 years later.

And don't get me started on how much the children compare themselves, even at incredibly young ages. I don't know how much is human nature and how much is picked up by the kids from their parents (I suspect this to be a huge factor), since my child was the topic of conversation among parents pretty frequently over the past few years. Even in my presence.


I do think some of the problem lies in the fact that we don't have the vocational training that the EU countries have and instead pretend that everyone should go to college. It's raised the stakes for families trying to send their children to a place they don't belong at a cost most can't afford, but they have so few other options to actually learn a trade or craft in this country.

Because of this, everyone fixates on GPA or some other numerical determinative of college entrance rather than simply asking "is our children learning?" (sorry for the Bush reference, I couldn't help myself)

I could be wrong, but I read her posts to be critical of the Great Grade Chase in the US. Another poster pointed out something a teacher friend of mine has also told me, that the vast majority of her grades are expected to be As and Bs. How in the world is that justified? You can't tell me that the vast majority of students are more than 80% proficient in every single subject taught.

Some metric is regrettably necessary, but, admittedly anecdotally, my experience is that certain grades are simply expected by some parents and students, regardless of actual knowledge of the subject.

That was how I read it, anyway, but I could certainly be wrong.