"No student is going to lose anything by not skipping a year, by completing seventh grade in a regular middle school."
Speaking as someone who started Uni after a year of sixth grade at Edison, a school which I would describe with the use of a scale from "minimum security prison" to "intellectual cesspool" depending on how generous I'm feeling, I would like to take a moment to argue that the excerpt above represents a position far too simplistic. Another year spent at my preeminently Regular middle school would have retarded the development of my independent thinking, and if anything original or profound had defied the odds and popped up in my mind, I would have learned to keep it to myself. I would not know the people I do now, and when I graduated, I would have had at least one less year (probably more, given my nutritive habits before Doug's and Merf's influence) of life as a responsible, cognitive, self-respecting person. In short, I would have lost several things of great value to me.
To my knowledge, I'm the youngest (April 92) male among the seniors. Is there any statistical method of affirming that from objective data about my behavior and academic performance? Yes, I'm shy, but that's not a function of age; in any case, if I had spent another year at Edison, I would be shyer and more reclusive still.
This has all been a somewhat roundabout way of saying that I appreciate Uni more than I can express, and of voicing my concern about the vague resentment of our school's failure to be "regular" that this article and others in years past have evoked. Normalcy is not much in the way of an ideal, and maturity doesn't just happen over time, it has to be actively encouraged.
Respectfully (even though it probably didn't sound like it),
I am no student
"No student is going to lose anything by not skipping a year, by completing seventh grade in a regular middle school."
Speaking as someone who started Uni after a year of sixth grade at Edison, a school which I would describe with the use of a scale from "minimum security prison" to "intellectual cesspool" depending on how generous I'm feeling, I would like to take a moment to argue that the excerpt above represents a position far too simplistic. Another year spent at my preeminently Regular middle school would have retarded the development of my independent thinking, and if anything original or profound had defied the odds and popped up in my mind, I would have learned to keep it to myself. I would not know the people I do now, and when I graduated, I would have had at least one less year (probably more, given my nutritive habits before Doug's and Merf's influence) of life as a responsible, cognitive, self-respecting person. In short, I would have lost several things of great value to me.
To my knowledge, I'm the youngest (April 92) male among the seniors. Is there any statistical method of affirming that from objective data about my behavior and academic performance? Yes, I'm shy, but that's not a function of age; in any case, if I had spent another year at Edison, I would be shyer and more reclusive still.
This has all been a somewhat roundabout way of saying that I appreciate Uni more than I can express, and of voicing my concern about the vague resentment of our school's failure to be "regular" that this article and others in years past have evoked. Normalcy is not much in the way of an ideal, and maturity doesn't just happen over time, it has to be actively encouraged.
Respectfully (even though it probably didn't sound like it),
Andrew.