[A'elian' nation]

I’m an outlier.
I didn’t start first grade till I was just three months shy of turning 7.

I also didn’t speak much English having arrived in America the summer before starting school. Nor had I had any preschool or kindergarten attendance.

School studies and its regimen came effortlessly for me while younger kids struggled.

Later, as a teacher myself, I have noticed this outlier effect again and again.
Simply put, children start school at too early an age.
Allowing maturational development is preferable to the frustrating pressures of early academics. Montessori and Piaget were correct. Certain intellectual understanding must be preceded by maturational growth.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Players born in January were the most over-represented among the top hockey players in both countries. As young boys, they would have just missed the selection cut-off for that year and would have had another year to grow before the next selection date.

Obviously a boy born the day after the selection date would be virtually a year older when the next selection date came around, compared to a boy born the day before the selection date, even though they were both officially the "same" age, competing for places on the same elite hockey teams.

That kind of difference in age-- at a very young age-- was a big advantage, in terms of size and physical maturity, among boys in a very physical sport. Being tracked into elite hockey teams, early on, allowed that initial advantage to be parlayed into an ever larger advantage of experience and training with elite teams over the years.

I . . . didn’t speak much English having arrived in America the summer before starting school. Nor had I had any preschool or kindergarten attendance . . . [but] I didn’t start first grade till I was just three months shy of turning 7 . . .

[So] I’m an outlier. . . . School studies and its regimen came effortlessly for me while younger kids struggled.

Later, as a teacher myself, I have noticed this outlier effect again and again. Simply put, children start school at too early an age.

A friend's son was just on the wrong side of the "outlier" point, and struggled in first grade. He and his wife bit the bullet and had him repeat First Grade, "falling behind" his "peer group." He said later that it had been a fabulous decision for his son, who subsequently breezed through school and excelled in athletics.

It's enough to make you wonder if, in large school districts, there shouldn't be half-year age cohorts instead of the full-year ones which we take for granted. But then, the optimum obviously would be individual instruction/grading which would obviate the need for invidious comparisons between "two pieces of fruit," which are in fact one apple and one orange. A natural strength of parental tutoring, a.k.a. "home schooling" . . .

A less usual case was of the parent who told me that her younger son's teacher noted in conference that her boy, who had been set back in school by having lived in Mexico for awhile, bossed around the younger kids. She said she replied, "He bosses around the older ones, too - he tells his older brother what to do all the time!" LOL!

My two oldest granddaughters, at least, won't have that trouble in reading - the oldest entered school as a reader, and the younger one is reading at age 4. So that's one less thing to worry about.