My column this week (that appears in several newspapers) is about how boys--especially those born in the fall--are often shortchanged in the school system.
If you’re trying to get pregnant right now, you should probably get a move on. Your window is rapidly closing this year—at least for the sake of your potential sons. If you have a boy, you definitely want that child to be born before July. If they’re born after that, they are far more likely to have trouble at school. The various Ministries of Education don’t advertise this fact, but schools are meant to be populated by girls born between January and June.
Let me explain what I mean. When our society, in its great wisdom, decided to educate children solely based on their year of birth, they decided that children should be able to read at 6.4, do multiplication at 8.3, and add fractions at 8.5, or roughly thereabouts. But what if your child is 6.4 at a time when other children are often 7.1? Does this matter? It does, especially if your child happens to be a boy.
I have a friend who had the unfortunate luck to give birth at 11:00 p.m. one fateful December 31. She didn’t want her little boy to have to start school in the assigned year, so she asked to hold him back. She was told she could not, lest she wanted him labeled learning disabled. So she packed him up at 3 ½, and off he toddled onto that school bus.
A close family friend of theirs has a daughter who is six weeks younger than this little guy. They are reading the same books. When they do math problems, they do them at the same speed. They are completely comparable academically. Yet she is receiving all A’s, and he is receiving B’s and C’s. Why? Because he’s in the wrong grade.
Any woman who remembers puberty will have no trouble telling you that girls mature faster than boys. This isn’t necessarily a good thing; having hormones run ragged over your emotions at 11 means that things like who sits with whom at lunch get blown way out of proportion, as opposed to worrying about rational things, like where in the world I stashed those leftover Easter bunnies. But girls aren’t just more mature; they also have a leg up in language arts, tending to read and write at a younger age than boys do.
So if your poor little guy was born in the fall, and he’s thrown in with a bunch of girls who were born in the spring, he’s going to look like an idiot, even if he is absolutely, perfectly, fine.
Picture a little 5-year-old boy who is active, social, and loves life. He is excited about starting school. But when he gets there, his teacher tells him he has to sit in a circle and listen to a story about the feelings of turtles or badgers or bears. He has to learn what sounds letters make, but he can’t hear any sounds when he looks at the page. Instead, he starts talking to the kids on either side of him. The teacher gets mad. Now the little boy doesn’t want to go to school. He starts getting stomach pains. And because he doesn’t read in first grade, he falls further and further behind, often acting out in frustration. By the time he’s in fourth grade, he’s become sullen. He resents the adults in his life, all of whom make him feel stupid. He never caught up, because he wasn’t ready to start in the first place.
My husband, a pediatrician, used to see many children in his office for ADD and school problems. Those boys were three times more likely to have been born in October than in February, to choose the highest and the lowest months. If our boys with school problems are congregated among fall babies, then maybe the problem is not with the kids. Maybe it’s that the school system just can’t cope with kids who don’t fit their mold. Not every kid will learn at the school’s pace. All of us have our own internal clocks. Ultimately it’s up to parents to figure our out kids’ timing and work with them so that they do learn. Schools, with so many kids in a classroom, aren’t always up to the task.
It's so odd, isn't it, how the school system expects all kids to learn at the same age? Not only that, but they expect all kids to learn at the same pace in each subject.
I don't know about all you other homeschoolers, but my kids are in different grade levels for different subjects. They're moving at their own pace.
I just feel really sorry for parents of December babies who fail to learn, and then fall further and further behind while everyone labels them "problem kids". Maybe the problem is with the school system, not the kid.
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