red shirting question
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Anonymous
Multi-age classrooms are different as kids are taught at their grade level. |
Anonymous
You did not redshirt - redshirting is for older kids and sports. You held back your child. Not all standardized tests are age based nor are all sports, some are, some aren't. I truly hope you got your child the therapies they needed during that hold back year. |
Anonymous
What even are you talking about? No, asking children to sit quietly and do worksheets at 5 years old is not developmentally appropriate. It doesn't matter if the child CAN do this or not -- it's not good for them. Kindergarten used to be more play-based with more socialization, games, music and movement, and less direct academic instruction. But over the last 20 years, schools are increasingly shifting the 1st grade curriculum down to kindergarten, especially with regards to reading, due to parent pressure and uninformed media coverage about test scores (there is no evidence that teaching reading leads to higher ELA scores later, and in fact some indication that the opposite may be true). No amount of preparation can magically make a 5 year old (or in your case, a 4 year old, poor kid) into a chid who should be sitting in a chair spending a significant part of his or her day learning math facts and sight words, but that's what kindergarten looks like in much of the country. Which is one reason some parents redshirt, because it sucks. But instead of giving parents broad leeway to redshirt, we should return to the old kindergarten model, which used K as an opportunity to develop kids socio-emotional skills and prep them for the more intensive academic instruction they would begin in 1st. |
Anonymous
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To the OP and ditto PP-
What is being asked if kids in k is NOT developmentally appropriate. And that keeps being the case as the kids get older. What the curriculum is pushing is not based on what kids can do at the age- ask elementary teachers. If the curriculum and behavior expectations are not deveopmebtally appropriate then I can choose to start my kid a little late. It has nothing to do with you and your child. It isn’t about being competitive. It is about the curriculum and instruction matching what kids need. It is on you making this a competition among kids. I’m simply thinking of my child’s educational experience. |
Anonymous
Yes, in the short term, choosing to start your kid late is a good solution for your family. In the long term, a policy that continues to push developmental inappropriate curriculum on ECE kids while somewhat liberally allowing parents who have the means to redshirt to do so, doesn't really fix the problem. It might fix your problem, but it doesn't fix the problem. |
Anonymous
In my experience, whatever systemic problem the schools have (and there are many), parents have to do the best for their child, while advocating to change the system. Even then, the system will resist change, but your child will not suffer in the meantime. Parents who don’t like school lunches can and should advocate for better lunches, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t pack lunches for their child in the meantime. My kids were in a school system with a lousy curriculum. I joined a curriculum committee, attended community forums, discussed it with school board candidates, etc., but I also addressed the gaps in my children’s education along the way. Having children in a class they’re not ready for will not motivate the system to redesign the class, it will just make the child miserable, and if they are disruptive may make everyone else in the class miserable, as well. Parents should work together to make the system better, but they also have an obligation to look after the welfare of their child. |
Anonymous
I will always choose what's best for my family. It's not my job to fix the problem, I'm just another cog in the wheel, trying to get by. |
Anonymous
They do harm the poorer kids who can’t access those kids significantly. In fact, there been lots of writing and analysis in professional educational literature about how outside programs like Russian School of Math skew teacher perceptions of adequate grade level mathematics. This is something that educators are struggling to address, and it’s a known and widespread issue. The reality is that outside supplemental mathematics and other programs significantly harm the classroom experience of other young children whose parents can’t afford or don’t know about supplemental math. This is what I don’t understand about anti-redshirt parents. Every single one of the parents who I’ve known as being anti-redshirt in person (as in they’ve said something at some point over the years) engaged actively in parenting choices that are far, far more harmful to other children than redshirting. But they are totally blind to those. It’s a peculiar pattern. I suppose it is because the anti-redshirters are the people that Jeff once accurately characterized as the people who see education as some sort of Mad Max Thunderdome. That probably makes it hard for them to look at their own culpabilities with any sort of accuracy. |
Anonymous
I’m not the PP but do you think your clearly insincere and profoundly nasty last line makes anti-redshirters look good? I don’t understand why anti-redshirters always feel compelled to attack vulnerable parents in these threads. And you are also just wrong. The PP did redshirt. |
Anonymous
My very-young-for-grade kid started kindergarten on time and cried every single day. She hated kindergarten. She'd sob and sob that all she wanted to do was play and didn't want to go to school. It was too much sitting and listening for her. She was well behaved and had done three years of a good preschool, but was absolutely miserable. First grade was also pretty tough. She'd matured more by 2nd grade, but those first two years were super hard. She's always been far above grade level academically, so we didn't hold her back, but at a big emotional cost. I wish K and 1st were less academic and more play. She would have done much better. |
Anonymous
K is just one year of school there are 12 more years to come that other think and plan ahead for. Plus you have no idea what the reasons are people are holding back. Asinine advice that workbooks are the answer. |
Anonymous
Well…How is it fair for a kid with a late august birthday to be in a class with a kid with a September (of the previous year) birthday? |
Anonymous
+1 as a teacher it is painful to see that short-sighted response |
Anonymous
Why is it okay for the kid to be with kids who are 12 months older, but 13 months older is suddenly is UNFAIR!!!? There’s nothing magical about a 12 month span. Why not start complaining when kids are 11 months older than yours? |
Anonymous
+1, we sent on time because we couldn't afford to hold back and because there was no reason to except age. She was above grade academically and could meet the behavioral expectations. It just sucked. My observation of a class with redshirted and nonredshirted kids is that the issue is really not lack of academic preparedness. It's that children this age cannot spend as much time on academics as K now requires of them. And also, I'm not really convinced the extra time on phonics and math benefits them. The kids are tired, ansty, anxious for more social interaction, and need more releases (physical release via more exercise and outdoor time, but also creative release and playing -- just more chance to relax and not be working so hard). I think the intense focus on academics tends to bore kids like mine who understand the concepts quickly an don't really need to spend 3 hours a day drilling phonics and math -- they need some exposure and then a chance to explore on their own. Meanwhile, the kids who don't get these concepts quickly don't benefit either -- they are spending. significant portion of their school day feeling frustrated by concepts they aren't getting. They need more play-based learning that help them get familiar with concepts in a less pressure-filled way. While my kid would whiz through a worksheet and then get bored, these kids would struggle with the worksheet and get frustrated. It's honestly a narrow group of kids in the middle who are engaged with this sort of approach. I wish we'd been able to afford Montessori for early elementary. I don't love everything about it, but for a kid like mine who is self-motivated and picks things up easily, this would have allowed for a lot more fun and freedom at that age. I still feel like we're addressing mood issue that emerged during K, when she just got so bored and angry, and started pushing back hard on the myriad of rules (some of which truly were arbitrary and dumb, frankly). I don't regret no redshirting. I regret sending my kid to public elementary school at all, but we didn't have a choice. |