Look, speaking from my experience as a teacher—and I say this with all due respect to both sides—I’m really against pushing school start dates back for no reason, but I’m just as much against rushing kids into enrollment earlier than they're ready. You can actually see the fallout when they hit 7th grade and hit the wall with science classes like physics and chemistry. At twelve years old, most kids haven't quite developed that capacity for abstract thinking that these subjects demand—mostly because that cognitive leap usually doesn't happen until they're around thirteen. So, you end up making everything unnecessarily difficult for them, turning what should be learning into a total nightmare of frustration and "why am I even doing this?!" moments.
So, basically, you guys didn't actually want an extension—you just got talked into signing up early so they could clear out some space. It gets even worse than that.
Susan James said:Now you're going to hear that they can't implement that because not every school district offers those specific tech requirements.🤣
(It doesn't really matter if some schools lack the resources or the motivation to send kids to sports competitions, since those points still count toward their standing just as much as academic competition scores do.😬)
The thing is, they have what they need. Since they had to update the curriculum for 5th and 6th grade just so Blaž could hire his MIT grads, every single school now meets the criteria and is basically forced to offer elective computer science from 1st through 8th grade. It's just like how everyone offers elective foreign languages, but—well, damn—the Supreme Court ruled that using those points for admissions was discriminatory, so that was that.
Me, should I? Haha, no way—my little gremlin is going to start school when she’s actually eligible. It’ll give her just enough time to mature a bit, maybe learn how to handle those impulses, and hopefully turn into a slightly less chaotic little creature.
And Garf, I’d honestly suggest holding off too. Like I mentioned before, I really think an older kid handles things better—you know, when they don't get as frustrated by all the stuff that seems easy for everyone else but feels impossible for them.
So, I’ve got this very average five-and-a-half-year-old girl—she was born just a month after the cutoff date—and honestly, everyone around me is riding my back like I'm some kind of criminal. They keep asking, "Why aren't you just putting her in kindergarten this year? If she starts in 2024, she'll be SEVEN AND A HALF!" And seriously, what's the end game there? Is she going to be sitting in high school coloring in books because she's behind? The thing is, it's so obvious that she isn't emotionally or mentally ready for school yet. She’s stubborn, she doesn't take "no" for an answer, and she really just does whatever she wants. If I actually dropped her into a classroom this September, I’d probably be spending every single week in parent-teacher conferences because she refuses to follow directions—or rather, she'll just do her own thing whenever she feels like it, regardless of whether it's time to work or not. 🤦
Drew Johnson2 said:I’m facing a bit of a dilemma this year regarding my son’s school enrollment, and frankly, I am at a complete loss as to what the right move is... He’s been in speech therapy for three years now, dealing with a developmental language disorder diagnosis. For a long time, it really showed in how he struggled with grammar—we finally managed to get a handle on gendered nouns, but he still trips over his cases quite frequently. His sentences tend to be rather clipped, and his ability to retell stories is a major struggle; we are still wrestling with concepts like yesterday, today, and tomorrow... If today is Friday, he can easily tell you Tuesday is four days away, but if I ask him what he did yesterday, he’ll just tell me what he did this morning... His focus is actually quite remarkable; his therapist mentioned she rarely sees a child with these specific challenges who possesses such an intense level of concentration... He has mastered analysis and synthesis, can read simpler sentences, and handles addition and subtraction up to 100, as well as multiplication, without much trouble. On top of that, he is quite emotionally immature for his age, so we are working through that with a child psychologist, and he’s started some sports to help build up his self-confidence...
Now, here is where the conflict lies: his private speech therapist is strongly advocating for him to delay starting kindergarten. She believes that having one more year will make a massive difference, particularly regarding his emotional maturity... However, the therapist at his preschool—who doesn't see him nearly as often since he's already in their specialized program and spends most of his time with other kids—is against delaying him. Her argument is that he’ll need Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) eventually anyway, so one extra year won't change much of the long-term trajectory... but it feels to me like she’s mostly focusing on his chronological age, repeatedly reminding me that if we wait, he’ll be entering first grade as a full eight-year-old... I find myself leaning heavily toward the opinion of our private therapist, who works with him twice a week and seems to have a far more realistic grasp of his actual capabilities, yet I feel this immense pressure from the preschool staff to align with the institutional view... They keep bringing up his age as if it were the only metric that matters... I truly don't know... I can't help but feel it might be less damaging to let him start school at eight than to push him in now only to have him feel completely overwhelmed and crushed by the workload right out of the gate... I suppose we will all go through the standard testing process soon, and then the school district will weigh in with their own assessment, but I would dearly love to have my own stance firmly established by then... though, honestly, I haven't the slightest clue what the smartest path forward actually is...
My two cents: ask for the delay. That extra year could mean everything for his emotional and psychological well-being—it'll make it much easier for him to deal with the fact that some things come harder to him than to others. If you ask me, it feels like the preschool is just eager to clear a spot in their enrollment. ☕
Yeah. And honestly, I know plenty of people who jumped from math straight into linguistics—just as many who started out in humanities or language studies and ended up finishing degrees in math, computer science, physics, and all that stuff.
In third period, we’ve just got one hour of geography, but then in fourth, we have three hours of general studies—with history taking up three and language being two.
So, figured I should probably introduce myself: I'm Sarah Hall53, and honestly, I’ve been strictly an e-ink reader person for about 10 years now. 🤣 I actually ended up getting my kid their own device recently—mostly because it was driving me crazy having them constantly borrowing mine whenever they wanted to read.
As for audiobooks? Yeah, those just never really clicked for me either, and it's for pretty much the same reasons: a) there are way too many distractions and b) everything feels just... too slow. — I mean, let's be real, it's probably just my ADHD acting up. 🤣
Using things like pears, apples, kale, or even bakery items—it’s all just a way to squeeze them into other subjects, right? Like, you’re drawing apples in art class or adding up loaves of bread in math. Honestly, I can't stand it—I mean, I truly hate it—because it just eats away at my actual lesson time. Then you have the environmental clubs or home ec stuff, which are technically extracurricular. You can't exactly work through a required reading assignment during an after-school club. You could try doing it during English class, but we’re already short on hours for actually practicing our core curriculum as it is. Plus, not every school even offers an after-school program, and not every kid stays for it anyway, so using that as a time or place to get through the reading list just doesn't work in practice.
... honestly, trying to squeeze all of that into the school year just isn't happening. There aren't enough hours in the curriculum to make it work. I mean, maybe if we bumped up the required hours for American Language classes, we could find some breathing room to tackle it all at school—but with the way the schedule is set up right now? There’s just no time.
We basically kept two different journals: one was just for pulling quotes and scribbling down stream-of-consciousness thoughts about them—sometimes they were tied directly to the plot, other times we'd just wander off into some random tangent related to the book. Then came our weekly hour-long debates, which we used to call "quote slapping." It got pretty competitive—we’d show up with books twice as thick as the actual hardcovers because we had stuffed them full of little scraps of paper marking key passages. That way, during the debate, you could whip out a quote at lightning speed to back up your point and shut down the other side. 😍 I absolutely LOVED those sessions. We even held a mock trial for Judith over a murder mystery. 😂
I was honestly just responding to that point about how kids these days don't read in their free time—you know, because they’re just so completely burnt out from all those mandatory school reading assignments that they can't even bring themselves to pick up a book for fun anymore.
By the way, they actually asked about the ring's color on the SAT—right after a passage that says something like, "To cast a crimson light upon the fingers..." If you give it even a tiny bit of thought—and, let’s be honest, if you aren't totally lost while reading—you can pretty much figure out they're talking about fingers and rubies, which means the ring is likely red.
I’m definitely not an expert on the American education system, but I’d say using creative assignments really pushes students to actually think about what they've read—just in a slightly different way. It’s almost like personalizing the reading experience, you know? Like, finding a way to weave their own perspective into the whole process so they’re actually putting in the effort to truly grasp the material. But honestly, why do we even make them write these reports? If there wasn't a grade attached or a deadline to meet, half the kids wouldn't touch the book. Their total word count outside of school would probably just be... "play" and "pause." Is that really the kind of intellectual standard we're aiming for as a society?
The thing is, about 90% of students aren't actually going to use their extra free time to pick up a book they actually enjoy—they’re just going to be glued to a PlayStation or scrolling endlessly through TikTok instead. Maybe one or two kids per class might read just for the fun of it, and yeah, they'll tackle the required reading too, but for everyone else? That assigned reading is basically the only thing they'll touch all year long. So, honestly, it just makes sense to cut down on the workload. ☕
Don't even get me started. One question on the exam was just the present tense of the verb "to be." That's it. Just write it down. There’s a poster hanging on the classroom wall—it’s been there for, like, fifteen years—and if they mess up the present tense, I practically shine a laser pointer at it just so they can see how it's supposed to look. And yet, they still won't bother to glance over and copy it. The whole point of the question was basically just to have them copy it off the wall. 🤦