FWIW, one parent's take on redshirting (sort of) now that DS has started K in MCPS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And if you think it is bad now, just wait until middle and high school.

I guess. But I'd rather have the problem of a child who is bored compared to a child who is totally demoralized for two years because he can't keep up with the kids in his class, has sloppy handwriting, can't write, and thinks poorly of himself....

It's hard to know what's the right thing.

Someone has to be the youngest, and being the youngest doesn't doom a child to failure. This doesn't have to be hard. We make it hard by thinking we can engineer our kids' futures by gaming the system.

Well, let it be YOUR child then.

I agree. If you are not leading by example? Then you are a hypocrite.

[Anonymous]

I overheard a dad on the phone the other day talking about how they were going to have their son go to Landon next year and planned to have him repeat 3rd grade so that he would be bigger for sports. And he said that Landon was all for that because they liked to have bigger boys. Sounded like extreme redshirting since it was soley based on physical size.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I overheard a dad on the phone the other day talking about how they were going to have their son go to Landon next year and planned to have him repeat 3rd grade so that he would be bigger for sports. And he said that Landon was all for that because they liked to have bigger boys. Sounded like extreme redshirting since it was soley based on physical size.

Interesting. Good for them for looking out for their child's best interests. It's a competitive world out there and anyone who suggests they shouldn't? Is really just looking out for their OWN child's best interests, but unwilling to own up to it (because they think we won't figure out that they don't own the moral high ground).

Go Landon!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I overheard a dad on the phone the other day talking about how they were going to have their son go to Landon next year and planned to have him repeat 3rd grade so that he would be bigger for sports. And he said that Landon was all for that because they liked to have bigger boys. Sounded like extreme redshirting since it was soley based on physical size.

Interesting. Good for them for looking out for their child's best interests. It's a competitive world out there and anyone who suggests they shouldn't? Is really just looking out for their OWN child's best interests, but unwilling to own up to it (because they think we won't figure out that they don't own the moral high ground).

Go Landon!

I think I've just lost any interest I ever had in sending my son to Landon.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I overheard a dad on the phone the other day talking about how they were going to have their son go to Landon next year and planned to have him repeat 3rd grade so that he would be bigger for sports. And he said that Landon was all for that because they liked to have bigger boys. Sounded like extreme redshirting since it was soley based on physical size.

Interesting. Good for them for looking out for their child's best interests. It's a competitive world out there and anyone who suggests they shouldn't? Is really just looking out for their OWN child's best interests, but unwilling to own up to it (because they think we won't figure out that they don't own the moral high ground).

Go Landon!

Let me guess-- Ayn Rand is your idea of a good philosopher-- and writer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I overheard a dad on the phone the other day talking about how they were going to have their son go to Landon next year and planned to have him repeat 3rd grade so that he would be bigger for sports. And he said that Landon was all for that because they liked to have bigger boys. Sounded like extreme redshirting since it was soley based on physical size.

Interesting. Good for them for looking out for their child's best interests. It's a competitive world out there and anyone who suggests they shouldn't? Is really just looking out for their OWN child's best interests, but unwilling to own up to it (because they think we won't figure out that they don't own the moral high ground).

Go Landon!

Whoops - I guess it was your husband I overheard!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Someone has to be the youngest, and being the youngest doesn't doom a child to failure. This doesn't have to be hard. We make it hard by thinking we can engineer our kids' futures by gaming the system.

Well, let it be YOUR child then.


It is my child, even though he has a Spring birthday. I don't mind that because I think he'll be fine, but I admit I do kind of resent the fact that there is a very wide range of ages in the class which I don't think it particularly conducive to learning either, and some kids are physically a lot bigger.

Someone's child has to be smallest.

[Anonymous]

As a teacher, I can tell you that being the youngest boy in a class doesn't "doom a child to failure". But of all the children I saw as a teacher who had a great deal of difficulty and ended up being referred for various learning difficulties or disabilities, most of the boys were those with spring birthdays.

There were far fewer girls, and for the girls the correlation with being older/younger was not as noticeable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a teacher, I can tell you that being the youngest boy in a class doesn't "doom a child to failure". But of all the children I saw as a teacher who had a great deal of difficulty and ended up being referred for various learning difficulties or disabilities, most of the boys were those with spring birthdays.

There were far fewer girls, and for the girls the correlation with being older/younger was not as noticeable.

Who knew, I always thought spring would be the perfect time to have a baby to avoid all this crap.

[Anonymous]

No. If you can manage to "plan" your baby, I'd aim for October - December birthday to "avoid all this crap".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I overheard a dad on the phone the other day talking about how they were going to have their son go to Landon next year and planned to have him repeat 3rd grade so that he would be bigger for sports. And he said that Landon was all for that because they liked to have bigger boys. Sounded like extreme redshirting since it was soley based on physical size.

Interesting. Good for them for looking out for their child's best interests. It's a competitive world out there and anyone who suggests they shouldn't? Is really just looking out for their OWN child's best interests, but unwilling to own up to it (because they think we won't figure out that they don't own the moral high ground).

Go Landon!

So the lesson is that in order to win you should play younger/smaller kids? Not sure that's good in the long term...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a teacher, I can tell you that being the youngest boy in a class doesn't "doom a child to failure". But of all the children I saw as a teacher who had a great deal of difficulty and ended up being referred for various learning difficulties or disabilities, most of the boys were those with spring birthdays.

There were far fewer girls, and for the girls the correlation with being older/younger was not as noticeable.

I'd be interested in hearing more on your take on this. DS has a summer b-day and is now in first grade. He's also about to undergo psycho-educational testing -- very likely a form of dyslexia and possible processing issues. It sure doesn't seem to us like the "gift of time" would magically make the dyslexia disappear...If anything, we're grateful that we did not retain him for another year in preschool/have him repeat kindergarten, because we've caught the concerns early. I'll also say that his public school has been very attentive/proactive to these concerns and teachers/staff concur in the likely diagnosis. He was among the younger, but not the youngest, kid in his K class last year.

[Anonymous]

I want to thank OP for the post. I have a ds who is within a few days of the cutoff date. We are going to hold him back and have him go to K next year instead of going this year. I am also a middle school teacher and the kids I often, not always, have trouble with are the boys born between August -November, who are the youngest in the class. A year spread makes a big difference, even in the middle school. While yes someone always has to be the youngest it is nice if the youngest and oldest are not a year apart!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I'd be interested in hearing more on your take on this. DS has a summer b-day and is now in first grade. He's also about to undergo psycho-educational testing -- very likely a form of dyslexia and possible processing issues. It sure doesn't seem to us like the "gift of time" would magically make the dyslexia disappear...If anything, we're grateful that we did not retain him for another year in preschool/have him repeat kindergarten, because we've caught the concerns early. I'll also say that his public school has been very attentive/proactive to these concerns and teachers/staff concur in the likely diagnosis. He was among the younger, but not the youngest, kid in his K class last year.

PP -- I can't say anything about your son's specific issue, because I don't know him.

But the term "dyslexia" is just a word meaning "poor reading". If a child is having trouble learning to read, there is some underlying reason. It can be many things from the obvious -- the child has poor eyesight and can't see the letters -- to the less obvious -- child has a visual processing disorder, a phonological processing disorder, etc.

"Poor reading" can also be a result of "poor instruction". I have seen children enter my school with a learning disability diagnosis when it turns out they had just plain not been properly instructed in how to read. Once they recieved proper instruction, they lost their LD diagnosis.

"Poor reading" can also be the result of good instruction but at the wrong time. Reading instruction that is appropriate for most 7 year old would not be appropriate for most 4 year olds, because 4 year olds don't yet have the neurological skills to be able to make use of the reading instruction being presented to the 7 year olds.

In order to learn how to read, and write, children need to be able to break words apart into phonemes and blend phonemes together to make words. Some children can do this at age 4 (or 3!!) most can do it at age 6, and some kids do not develop this ability until age 7 or 8 (or even later).

If schools are starting reading instruction in kindergarten, there are a lot of 5 year old boys , especially, that don't yet have that phonemic manipulation skill. THey can try to participate in the lessons using the skills, but since they don't really have the ability to break words up and blend them together, attaching letters to the sounds they hear doesn't really make a lot of sense to them./ If they are smart and have good visual memory, they try to compensate by memorize the whoole word by sight. Howveer this system starts to fall apart by the time they hit first and second grade.

Some younger kids DO have the necessary skills to participate and make meaning out of that instruction, but others do not. If they then head off to first grade, they have bascally missed a full year of reading instruction that was of some beenifit to their classmates; meanwhile, most teachers are no longer teaching the beginning reading skills -- however, now the children have "grown into" the ability to blend andsegment phonemes. NOW they are ready for initial reading instruction -- only their teachers might assume they already have it.

These children then get diagnosed as having a "processing disorder" when they are just a little behind where other kids their age are -- they are on the lower end of the bell curve for developing the necessary skills. This diagnosis allows them to go to the special LD teacher, who then appropriately teaches them the same beginning reading skills they should have gotten in kindergarten, only they weren't ready then.

So it's great that they finally get the reading instruction they need. But if they had had say a late August birthday, and their parents just held them out that year and put them in the next year, very likely none of this would have happened. By the time kindergarten started, they would have had a much better ability to bledn and segment phonemes, and reading instruction would have "stuck" with them much better.

It's not that it would have made the "phonological processing defecit" magically disappear -- it's that there would never have been such a deficit to begin with.

[Anonymous]

While yes someone always has to be the youngest it is nice if the youngest and oldest are not a year apart!

OK, this makes no sense. Unless we start doing half grades, there will ALWAYS be a 12 month spread in a classroom no matter what the cutoff is. The problem with redshirting is that it INCREASES the age spread in any classroom. So if everyone sent their kids on time the spread would only be 12 months. By trying to game the system, the problem gets worse!

IMO the real answer is to make schools use a developmentally appropriate curriculum so that they aren't asking younger elementary students to do fine motor tasks that are outside of developmental norms.