Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Red shirting

Well, I take exception to the cultural stereotyping.
However, I agree with the statement about the relative time involved for sports vs academics. DD in middle school has 3-4 hours of homework every night. Her classmates involved in sports spend 3 plus hours every night with team practice and games. DD has decided that she can't afford to spend that much time away from academics, so she chose not to try out for any teams this year. I think it's a very mature decision.

I completely agree with this idea--even amongst kids who are actually gifted, I think that this can be confusing.

Our DD was one of 4 kids in her K class who were considered an academic cluster. However, she was nearly a full year younger than two of those kids. This was not due to redshirting, just to late summer/early fall birthdays. Still, I have come to believe that performing/learning at the same level/rate as kids almost a year older is significant at that age. As kids age and share instructional experiences, perhaps making within grade comparisons becomes more valid--regardless of age, classmates would have at least the same number of instructional years under their belt. However, when they're just starting school, I think that the age differences are more telling--especially when the kids you are compared to are already leaps and bounds beyond the rest of the class.

DD's ability to keep up with, and in some areas consistently exceed the benchmarks set by the peers in her cluster, was one of the significant "aha" factors in our starting to think about giftedness. I realized that if she had been born five weeks later (thereby starting kindergarten a year later), she would certainly have been *vastly* ahead of even her strongest grade level peers.

I don't at all regret starting her on time. I do think though, that being clustered with "same age" peers who were really a year older, obscured her school's sense of her as a learner. Certainly it made it easier for them to brush off our concerns.

That said, I think the solution is probably not about the question of when to start children in school, it's about the question of improving identification tools/protocols. It seems to me that while, achievment measures are most appropriately based on grade level (post kindergarten/first grade), aptitude types of measures need to be age based and more widely administered and used. That would make it more obvious when a child might need a more compacted curriculum and/or other types of interventions.

Wonderful post, Taminy. You put my thoughts together much more cohesively and with much less emotional rambling. I am more bothered by those issues of younger kids being brushed off when compared to older grade peers due to seeing what that exact thing did with younger dd. My oldest managed to be so obviously different that it was hard not to recognize her as gifted even with a fall bd and being younger. My youngest blended in more with the bright kids and wound up being tracked such that it has taken much longer for the school to realize that she was unusual. As a result, her image of herself has been really set as someone who isn't that bright. It certainly wasn't helped by a year with a teacher who was convinced that she wasn't that bright and let dd know that, of course, and that had much more to do with a poor teacher than anything else.

Great comment.

Polly

It can also make it that much harder to get the school to agree to acceleration or grade skipping, since they are afraid of creating a situation where a very young child who needs the grade skip would be put into a class of children mostly 18 to even 30 months older.

I agree that *very* selective redshirting can be beneficial for children who need a bit more time. But in my limited experience, it is more often used by uber competitive parents (whether for academic or sports reasons) or recommended by schools more worried about test scores and how an older student population gives them a higher average score.


on edit- I should have read the other posts first, since others already pointed out these issues! : )

It is very hard to hold a gifted kid back. We have been trying to slow down DS4 because of his emotional maturity, well not exactly. To us he is actually more mature for his age, always tries to be good kid, actually extra hard but that just isn't enough at school. Things like being adamant at times and interrupting are the issues we are facing now.
He is reading like a champ, I would say at second, third grade level, started doing multiplication on his own and many other things and this is when we are trying him to slow down, scares me like hell.