Speak up (to your school) if you are worried about all the redshirting

[Anonymous]

That's a good question.

On a different note -- I was thinking that if people are really opposed to parents choosing to redshirt their kids in kindergarten for no other reason than to give their child a competitive edge in team sports later on -- wouldn't this practice be stopped if athletic leagues imposed age, not grade, restrictions on kids who were competing?

I know one of my son's team sports has league requirements that are based solely on calendar age.

[Anonymous]

PDD stands for pervasive developmental delay and it is the umbrella for autistic spectrum disorders. Here is the DSM-IV listing:

http://www.agre.org/program/criteria.cfm?do=program

I am not the psychologist, I am the mother of a child with a PDD. I am utterly chocked that your learning resource teacher is using this term as a generalized catch-all for children with global delays. This is a very specific diagnostic term. And it has been used entirely incorrectly. Wow.

But my point stands. If you thought PDD meant general delays than you still can't generalize and say all these children should be not be held back. You were using the term in an extremely broad, watered-down (and as I said, incorrect) way and yet you still thought there was a one size fits all solution for these kids.

Child development, including disordered child development, is enormously complicated. Again, you have no business asserting that your role as teacher gives you any particular insight into what everyone's kids should be doing.

[Anonymous]

I meant "shocked" of course.

[Anonymous]

PP-

Trust me, I understand the complexities of child development. I realize that I did not have an accurate understanding of PDD, or, more precisely, was using the term inaccurately.

I do think it's a bit arrogant of you to suggest that my role as a teacher gives me no insight into best practices for children. I've studied early childhood education for 6 years and worked in the field for 10. I hold a BA and an MA. Do I know everything there is to know? Clearly not. But am I qualified to speak on best practices for children? Absolutely. I won't always be right. And we won't always agree, in situations where there isn't a "right" answer. That being said, part of the problem with our education system lies with the idea that everyone thinks they are an expert because we all attended school. I'll be the first to acknowledge there are a lot of horribly unqualified teachers out there. I am frustrated to be lumped in with them. That being said, for you to act as if being a teacher somehow disqualifies us from the conversation on what is best for children is ridiculous. My job is to know children and to know what's best for them. Again, I won't always be right, but I'd venture to guess I'm more qualified to speak about children in general than most parents. That is why I am a teacher. As I said before, I don't walk into your place of business and tell you what to do and it's frustrating as hell when parents do this to us. Good day.

[Anonymous]

PP, again.

I don't tell teachers what to do. I know there are parents who do but I'm not one of them.

You are on a parents forum, here, telling us what to do. As parents. I could say that was "frustrating as hell."

And frankly, since you started the name calling here, you are the arrogant one. Many of us are saying these are complicated issues and there should be some flexibility or at least some acknowledgment of the complexity involved. What you're saying is that there should be one way -- your way -- in all situations and anyone who disagrees is uninformed.

But see, you are uninformed. When you feel the need to preserve the purity of your ideological argument but stretching it to include special needs kids, and you very clearly have no idea what you are talking about with special needs kids, you really need to be a bit more humble about your positions.

No one ever said you were disqualified from the conversation. Its just that its a conversation and your "my way or the highway, I know cause I'm a teacher" bit is not a conversation.

I have no basis for questioning your qualifications as a teacher and I haven't. But I'm glad you don't teach either of my children. You could be perfectly fabulous, but your disdain for parents and your lack of flexibility is not what I would want for my children's teacher.

[Anonymous]

PP, one last time,

Teacher,

Rereading your posts, the persistence and the length and the anger you direct at parents as well as your grandiosity (even in the face of a fairly large error), I'm starting to think there is something going on here besides a teacher's disdain for redshirting. And it makes me concerned both for you and your students.

[Anonymous]

This discussion has gotten a wee arcane. I hope this isn't off-topic but when holding a kid back in K, you might want to consider this: that if you switch him into the private system from a less competitive environment the new school may want to hold him back again--we purposely didn't hold back our very young son because precisely that had happened to his older brother and we find ourselves discipling a kid old enough to be a sophomore in college by the time he was a senior in h.s.--just a little weird. Murphy's law, the private we switched the younger one to did not hold him back, and so he is now very young for his grade. But you know what? He's catching up physically and doing well academically, so it's okay.