An education

I can’t tell time on analog clocks. I never learned how, because I skipped the second grade. My cursive is not very good either, I don’t remember how to write a capital Q or Z.  Skipping the second grade and having a birthday at the end of summer means that I was freshly 10 going into middle school, had just turned 13 when I started high school at a private boarding school, and still 16 when I went to the summer week of freshman orientation for college.   My age was problematic in some ways, a convenience in others. I had to use a fake ID to get into R-rated movies with my boyfriend in high school, but I could pay the child rate at all the museums when I first moved to Boston. Even after skipping ahead I usually ended up in the “advanced” groups or honors classes, which reassured my parents and teachers that they had made the right decision in moving me forward at an accelerated pace.

My homeroom teacher in sixth grade was Mr. Cole. He seemed intrigued by me on the first day at my new school in Blue Hill.  I was very short and smalll, I was younger than everyone else, but I raised my hand a lot. We studied ancient history in social studies and when Mr. Cole asked for examples of history on the first day of school, I was met with incredulous stares by my teacher and classmates when my answer was “the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia” instead of “cavemen”.  I won the geography bee that year which Mr. Cole moderated, against a 14 year old eight grader named Cliff who was also president of student council and a starter on the varsity basketball team.

Skipping a grade didn’t present a problem academically, I thrived in a classroom setting and aced every standardized test placing well into the post-high school percentile in 7th grade. But physically I was developing well behind my peers. This was most obvious to me when I started boarding school, and the girls living in the room next to mine happened to be in their post-graduate year, both having stayed back numerous times but doing the extra year in order to secure hockey scholarships at one of the frozen four universities. One of my neighbors was 18, the other about to turn 20. They would talk about diaphrams and urinary tract infections, while I was still shopping for training bras.

As a method of social survival I developed ways to play down the obvious age difference between myself and my peers. I knew I was younger and smaller, but intellectually I felt the same, if not more sophisticated than the teenagers around me.  Luckily my love for reading exposed me to a lot of things I wasn’t otherwise experiencing personally so that if nothing else, I could keep up with the conversations the girls in my dorm were having. I could provide statistics about STDs and tips culled from the pages of Vogue and Cosmo about which were considered the best brands of mascara and perfume. I became a walking encyclopedia of facts that made me sound mature beyond my years. The more information I collected, the older I felt. It made me gravitate past my 9th grade classmates and form friendships with popular juniors and seniors. I dated the most desired older guys too, and soon added first-hand knowledge to the scores of trivia facts I had memorized about sex and relationships.

Back in the classroom my yearning for maturity made me gravitate towards literature that dealt with darker subjects. I read Plath and Wurtzel, Vonnegut and Thompson. I dove into philosophy, overwhelmed but fascinated by Nietzsche and Sartre. I was obsessed with feminism and communism and so many other subjects that trying to pick a college or university, let alone a major, felt like an insurmountable challenge. Despite my love for learning and the social status I had achieved,  I lacked direction and during my high school graduation I sat silently while my classmates names were called over and over for different awards and scholarships, listened as their future alma maters were read allowed. After my name, only “undecided”. After getting to the end of the race ahead of the pack, I stalled in college and never actually crossed the finish line to receive a diploma. I’ll be graduating at 24, years after the first grade classmates I left behind in elementary school.

There has long been a debate within the educational community over skipping “gifted” children ahead in school. Opponents claim that social development is just as important as intellectual development, and just because a child is book smart doesn’t necessarily mean they have the skills to navigate a social scene where everyone is older and more physically developed. Others feel that since everyone learns and grows differently, we shouldn’t cling too strongly to traditional parameters and let children develop at their own pace, whether that means making them stay behind and repeat a grade, or skipping them ahead if they clearly demonstrate that they can handle advanced curriculum.  

My personal experience hasn’t left me decidedly pro or against the issue. What is has taught me, is that humans are resilient and possess the extraordinary ability to adapt to their surroundings.  I value the social skills I learned in school as much as the facts I memorized or the books I read.  More importantly I’m happy I got to see that subscribing to the status quo or the preferred system isn’t vital to success. Whether you develop faster or slower doesn’t matter, what matters is that you develop at all.  I was ahead, and now I’m behind, but I’m confident that I have the ability to survive and adapt to whatever life throws my way.