Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Kindergarten redshirting on 60 minutes tonight

We may have a semantic disagreement here, but I don't consider repeating a year in light of a known issue (be it medical, academic, or social) to be redshirting. It may be that 60 Minutes did (I didn't watch the piece), but redshirting in the elementary school context usually means delaying entry to kindergarten in the absence of any known issue.

I wouldn't consider either of your kids to have been redshirted, any more than I'd consider DD's (extremely bright, extremely immature, despite being old-for-grade) classmate who repeated K for maturity reasons to have been.

This made me ponder... the kids in those leagues are obviously talking on the playing field, and at some point the question has to come up for the redshirted kids: "Why are you only in nth grade?"

How many of these kids respond (internally) with, "because I'm dumb"?

No, the lady interviewed clearly said that she held her kids back because "you give your kids every advantage you can". Not that I think holding kids back gives them a long term advantage (a la Gladwell's 10,000 hours). But I support her efforts to parent her kids how she sees fit. I don't think it's fair that she can redshirt & I couldn't get early entry (which I think would have given my kid a behavioral advantage of having the bar set higher for maturity.)

My mom always said they did it backwards, they should send kids to work since they have energy to burn and adults to school because they would enjoy it.
Eta: I don't even know if redshirting's available everywhere, but I don't want to see that "loophole" closed. I'd like to see more parental discretion encouraged, not less.

If I had taken the kindergarten teacher's advice to redshirt my child who had a mild muscle weakness and fatigue issues, he wouldn't have been able to move ahead and learn as fast as he needed to learn. We had no way of knowing that at age 11 he would need to start wearing a painful brace and he would need to wear it for years. Because he was ahead academically, it didn't worry me as much when we had to take breaks.

It has been very difficult this year and we had to take a lot of breaks. He did almost no math at all for three months while he was getting used to the new, more painful brace. We took time off when my mother died. We are taking time off to help my dad who lives next door and just had knee replacement surgery. My dad is in a lot of pain right now. We went through the stress of knowing that he could suffer severe complications like my mother did and be left severely cognitively impaired for the rest of his life. Sometimes we take time off for a mental health day and sometimes it is for me when I am overwhelmed by all the pain I see around me and know that there is nothing I can do to alleviate my child's and my dad's pain except to be there. My son and I also have a hard time getting enough sleep so we have to work around fatigue issues. Then there is the problem with our internet. We never know when it will work and we have no other choices here in our small town.

With all that we are dealing with now, I am just so glad that I never held my son back. Since we homeschooled after he finished kindergarten, he is not behind academically because I let him learn at the rate he was capable of and move ahead when he had the chance.

Alexsmom- I would agree my son was not Redshirted but how do you draw a line about what gets services and who doesn't because the district wanted to forgive his absences. My daughter was redshirted- she could have gone on to 1st grade- it would have been harder on her and she most likely not be the same confident leader she is today but her scores were good- not like my sons but high and I made the decision based on how her emotional development would be affected. Her whole world was rocked when her brother got sick too- so it all happened at the same time. So I think it is fair to say I redshirted her .

I guess that I'd say that in a perfect world, to remove outside influences on who is placed in GT programming I'd like to see the following:

* GT placement based on age normed individual IQ scores not achievement, teacher recommendation, or other subjective factors
* individualized GT programming that doesn't exclude 2e kids b/c of erratic achievement and focuses more on abstractions, depth, and self paced work so it better meets the needs of gifted kids who don't just need more of the same faster but still honors that some gifted kids need significantly increased pacing (thus the self pacing)
* no studying for GT placement tests (no outside tutoring, no teachers who prep the kids who they think ought to be in GT, etc.)

Of course, this would cost a small fortune...

Do we all want to move somewhere and start our own school like this, lol? I recall a bit back someone in the Mensa Bulletin talking about starting a planned community of Mensa members (e.g. something like this.)

I guess that if we want to nullify the effect of redshirting on GT placement, we'd want to take out the impact of teacher recommendations too.

The advantage is to have them academically compete for valedictorian with people who are younger than they are, assuming that valedictorian = more college $$$.

Scholarships and GPAs are a zero sum game. If I get more, you get less. If I'm higher rank, you are lower rank.

It has little to do with the GT issue or success in a given field, such as Gladwell's 10,000 hours. It only applies to the zero sum game aspect of education.

I don't know. Maybe I am thinking that graduating high school at 16 as my oldest will, with a lot of AP classes and in the top chunk of the class, if not as the valedictorian, might look as impressive to scholarship committees and colleges as graduating as the valedictorian at 19.

This is our first go at high school, though, (she's our oldest), so I could be wrong. Even if I am, I suspect that we would have put her into college grossly unprepared to work had we held her out a year and not agreed to skip her b/c she'd be sleeping through 7th grade this year with straight As for bothering to step foot in the door. That would leave her with terrible work habits when she got to the point of needing them even if she was #1 in her high school graduating class.

For that matter, she could have chosen to attend our assigned high school or pretty much any other high school in our area other than the one she choiced to and been more likely to wind up valedictorian even with graduating at 16. She's in the highest performing high school in the area save for one charter. Point being, we didn't stack the odds in her favor if all we were looking at was making her appear to be #1. We have, however, hopefully placed her such that she is learning something.

Are parents really saying that they'd rather their kids look great and learn little than learn more and have to work harder at it? I don't believe in putting kids in over their heads, but this seems to be a bit too far in the opposite direction.

Yes.

And yes, that seems to be a bad idea for the development of the child.