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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I posted anout the child who everyone was singing his praises at baseball that he is the best on team etc. I just learned this kid is also in the gifted and talented program at our school. Teachers identift students for it. So this first grade boy was identified by his first grade teacher as gifted.... but he is June 2014... a full year older than my June first grader. So is he gifted or supposed to be in second grade?[/quote]

I was a June baby who started K when I was 5 and didn’t turn 6 until K was over. I really wish my parents had held me back. Socially, I never really fit in. I usually had 1 or 2 close friends, but not always. I was picked on a lot and often excluded. By the time I was in high school I had established circles of friends at school and at church, both of which were made up of kids at least a grade level behind me, and sometimes more. I didn’t have a single friend in my grade level.

My kindergarten class learned to read, but I struggled and it didn’t click until the following summer, which I believe was in large part due to maturity/readiness. It was frustrating and depressing, not because an older kid was a star, but because I was behind everyone. After that, I generally excelled academically even though most of my classmates were almost a year older (without redshirting).

Redshirting was so rare back then, that it didn’t occur to people as an option. However, I think if it had been, I would have benefited greatly from it. Not because it gave me some competitive edge, but because it’s where I fit best.

Kids aren’t widgets. They don’t all develop at a uniform pace. Even a single child at any age will have areas where they are more developed and areas where they are less developed, creating pros and cons for any grade placement. Moreover, childhood isn’t a competition. One child thriving does not harm another child. Ideally, they should all be encouraged. Finally, as the youngest in my class, I wasn’t bothered by the threat of superior performance from kids who were older (the few kids who stood out as singularly talented in an area, I don’t think were significantly older than my other classmates), but I was frequently bothered by kids disrupting the classroom with immature behavior. I think if you want to maximize you’re child’s achievement potential, you’d be better off encouraging parents to redshirt immature kids so that their classrooms and activities are able to focus on their purpose.

I think gifted assessments are usually age based. Consider that there is greater difference between September-June than there is from June-September. For a five year old, 9 months is a significant variance that they account for. There is reasonable cause to question the validity of any measure of giftedness and plenty of grey area, but redshirting just isn’t one. Being older might give him an edge in baseball, but there’s always going to be someone older, faster, stronger, bigger, more coordinated, etc., and they won’t necessarily be the same kid, or stay the same over time. Even if they are, and you remove that kid from the team, any benefits that are correlated with age will likely go to the older ones on the team, and there will remain an age difference.  Not to mention that some old kids may be short for their age, or poorly coordinated, or slow, etc.

It is entirely possible that the kid is gifted and good at baseball, and belonged in first grade. If his parents had not redshirted him and he was in second grade, he would probably have still been identified as gifted, but might have had other issues, or caused issues for the other kids. [/quote]

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