A Reference Post on What It’s Like to Skip a Grade so Y’all Stop Writing the Weirdest Nerd Characters Ever
All right. Let’s start from the beginning, I suppose.
How does this even happen?
I’m speaking here only from an American perspective, because I’m American. Although I did just look it up, and it appears Japan bans skipping a grade at all until the senior year of high school or the senior year of university. Probably for social conformity reasons. I don’t really know. But something to keep in mind, anime fandom. I know you’re following me.
Anyway, back to America (alas). Because the American school system is so decentralized, the requirements/handling of this probably varies from school district to school district so even people in different states might have different experiences. But I have met a grand total of two other people in person who have skipped a grade, and they both did it in different states, and there were actually a fair number of similarities in a lot of ways, so I have at least. A statistically meaningless test group to extrapolate from.
(And I guess my dad, who was briefly promoted a year in early elementary school as well until his Catholic school meant taking First Communion a year early and they punted him back down. We’re not going to factor that in here)
Because grade skipping is extremely rare, for reasons I'm about to get into.
In all three of our cases, the grade skipping did not come from the schools or teachers. They came from our parents.
See the thing is, public school districts…hate doing work. They are mostly not good or caring about their students. They don’t want to have to deal with anything complicated or exceptional. Kids who have disabilities have to be accommodated legally, and they’re still bad at it. Kids who are out-testing their classmates in every area have no legal protection because…uh…why would we have that; that’s absurd.
My school’s proposed solution was to send me a school legitimately five times as far from my home as the one I went to, an entirely unreasonable commute, for their “Advanced” classes. Because that was the district-approved system for this, not promoting kids up a year, and they did not want to have to come up with individualized solutions.
And so my parents fought with them for an entire year about how I needed to be promoted. I remember. Not a lot of this, because I was five (and six, I guess). I remember a lot of days spent in rooms with adults asking me lots of questions about all sorts of stuff. Evaluations on my “intelligence” and emotional maturity. Probably some kind of social worker or therapist or something.
And then they finally agreed to start me the next year in second grade instead of first and enrolled me that way.
My mother promptly told every parent of the "gifted" kids in her preschool classes to do anything but enroll them in my school district because the teachers proceeded to treat me as a built-in tutor for my classmates when I was also supposed to be getting an education.
Okay, but why?
Why did my parents fight for this so hard?
According to them (again, I don’t remember this much and the answer to this is not something I could have remembered), they saw the rate at which I was picking up new things plummet off a cliff. What’s also important here is that I have an older brother and my mother worked in early childhood education (preschool). So my parents knew what a normal development of child development and the rate at which they were supposed to learn things was. And they saw mine drop off suddenly and sharply for no reason.
And, look, my parents did a lot of things wrong, but they were always very protective of my and my brothers’ intellectual development.
They were legitimately scared that school was fucking up my ability to learn in irreparable ways. And…they probably weren’t wrong.
My parents didn’t fight about this for status. Or because they thought I should be recognized for being a bright kid. Or because they thought I could handle it. They were scared for their child. Not because they wanted a smart kid. Because the school was clearly inhibiting my growth as the person I was supposed to be.
But as far as my school district was concerned, it was easier to break someone’s legs to keep them from growing to be a tall poppy in the first place.
So that fixed the problem, right?
Honestly? I don’t think grade skipping is that useful a tactic.
The people I know who skipped a grade all were still put in solid blocks of honors and AP classes. Fundamentally, no system has a way to handle the actual issue, which is that we were picking things up too quickly for the system to accommodate. Skipping a grade might level out the difference for a moment, but if one person is still running faster than the others, they’re going to end up outpacing them again in short order. And they’re not going to keep getting promoted through school grades. Again, schools don’t really like doing this.
Some more catchall admin questions to address before getting into the experience of being promoted
Yes, they did test my emotional maturity when getting promoted, to ensure I could actually handle being a peer with people physiologically older than me. I guess I did well? It’s not just about test scores.
I’m pretty sure no teacher past like second grade or elementary school at the most was actually informed I skipped a grade. Because it just did not matter. Why would they be told this.
I don’t know if there was a record anywhere of this happening in the school files. Probably somewhere? But they fundamentally just. Enrolled me in the grade I was supposed to be in, and that was that. I have no idea how that side of things worked. Again, I was tiny and more concerned about DBZ.
No, I do not remember being emotionally invested in this happening or not. Again, I had DBZ and karate and swimming to care about.
Now then. Let’s get into more character-related stuff
So you’re smart, right? What’s your IQ?
I’ve no earthly idea. If they tested it at any point (unclear if they did), my parents kept that information on “need-to-know basis” and I did not need to know. My dad was tested as a kid and scored….uh. Highly. And became kind of an arrogant dick about it once he had a number. My parents refused to have any of their children IQ tested because they knew we would also test highly, and they were operating on the principle of "having children who are tolerable to be around."
And I don’t care, because IQ is a silly thing that means nothing in the real world anyway.
Quite frankly, this is all primary and secondary school shit and doesn’t matter much in the real world. But people keep writing about it wrong and it’s definitely something that impacted how I grew up, so here I am writing this absurdly long post.
You liked school, right?
Why are kids like this portrayed as invested in school? I’m pretty sure no one really likes things they find boring. School was boring.
I was in fifth grade being stuck off in a room during math class to read the middle school algebra textbooks instead. I read all during class and still got hundreds on tests. Homework was repetitive busywork. I drew and wrote in class and kept getting my art taken away from me or ripped during classes by teachers because I wasn’t paying attention. I kept getting tripped up on those things where we had to take turns reading aloud in class because I was about 20 pages ahead reading on my own.
No, I did not spend time studying. I didn’t need to. No, I didn’t spend time doing homework. Homework was the mind-killer. In college, I went out to dinner with my childhood best friend’s family and her parents asked me if there was anything my parents could have done to get me to turn in my homework because their younger daughter was having the same problem, and I sat there thinking about it for a couple minutes before saying, “No.”
I mean, there were some undiagnosed mental health conditions involved there, but. No.
School was not a challenge, and it was not interesting. I like learning. I like knowledge. I love reading and science and logic puzzles and overthinking things and analysis.
I did not especially enjoy school. I got my bachelor’s and bounced.
But…your teachers liked you?
Kind of split on the subject. Some liked me. Some hated me. Most were constantly frustrated because they knew I understood the material still wouldn’t put in the work to get a decent grade.
I remember correcting my 8th grade social studies teacher on a minor slip of tongue on like my first day of class and him giving me this very particular smile that meant he knew I was going to be That Kid, but he wasn’t upset about it.
Well, but you still did well in school, right?
Enhhhh.
I did well on tests.
But school is, alas, not all tests.
I got mostly Cs because I would never do or turn in my homework and aced the tests. I did best in classes that didn’t grade me on my notetaking, because I did not take notes at all. I didn’t study for my AP tests and still got all 3s and 4s. I was kept up all night before my ACT test and still got a 31. When I was in middle school, I was allowed into a program to allow me to take the ACT and SAT early. I outscored all the averages of college-bound seniors as an 11 and 12 year-old. I could’ve gone to college on those alone.
If it was a test, I did amazingly well because I knew the material and could answer test questions and never got nervous because I knew I’d be fine.
But oh my God, homework.
But what about my straight-laced school-focused nerd character?
Look, those people exist, but those people are not typically the type for whom all of that comes easily. The people I know who skipped a grade all had extremely large, loud personalities that had nothing to do with being a nerd. In fact, one of them got punted from the National Honor Society, because during the Induction Ceremony when everyone was dressed in nice suits and dresses, he pranced across the stage in a hoodie wearing a bright pink fox tail from the Ren Faire pinned to the back of his jeans. He was asked to write an apology letter. He refused. He was punted.
I mean, he was a very immature 15/16 year-old, but we were extremely good friends at the time (I…still thought his behavior was awful even at the time). “Smart” teenagers are…still, y’know, teenagers. I snuck 18+ BL manga home in my backpack to read instead of doing homework, and I was the “responsible” one of my friend group. I read all of Twilight in one Italian class and traded it for New Moon at lunch.
School didn’t take effort, I didn’t need to study, and I wouldn’t do homework. Plenty of time to develop other interests and skills and personality traits. I was basically obsessed with my own writing and drawing and reading and didn’t really give a damn about school.
Graduating early?
I could have done this in high school except that my dad did that and wouldn’t let me. I could have graduated a semester early in college except that my senior capstone was only offered in the spring semester. Anyway, it would have been even weirder to graduate high school as a 16yo instead of a barely 17yo. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one, even though I don’t know anyone who did both.
Your classmates, how did they react to this?
One of the reasons my parents wanted me promoted so early is so that it would “even out” as I got older and no one would remember/need to know.
This had mixed results. Obviously all my friends knew, because “how old are you turning this birthday” is like. A thing you tell your friends. So I got picked on a lot for being younger than everyone else. I still do. It’s a very sore spot for me.
In 6th grade, I got asked if it was true that I was only 10. I said no, because I had already had my birthday that school year and was 11. It was like May. But I was 11!
In 2nd grade, when it was all new and fresh, a classmate tried to tell me I would have to take first grade after I 12th grade in order to graduate. Uhh…what? I knew even at the time this was rock stupid because…a 17yo learning how to cut circles, or whatever it is you people do in 1st grade? Also, like, what was the point of skipping if I had to do it later? No sense at all.
People were less impressed and mostly kind of dicks about it if they had to know at all. I did not go out of my way to tell many people.
I did rock school games of “Never Have I Ever” though.
I wasn’t really friends with my classmates. The honors and AP kids in my school district were largely wealthy with like doctor parents or something who went to lower-level schools than I did and all knew each other and were kind of snobs. In middle school, we were divided into “Houses” (yes, really. In America.) and only one house in each grade had honors courses, so that was always mine (they claimed insistently that they were all intellectually equal. Only one house had honors classes. Come on.). My friends were almost never shuffled into it. We got yelled at for not wanting to sit at our “house” lunch table because we were supposed to “spend time with people we had things in common with.”
Yo, principal, I don’t want to sit with people who have the same teachers as me. My friends are over there and I want to talk about YuYu Hakusho and swap the notebooks we were co-writing stories in, not listen to people ask me if I was actually a boy and was I a lesbian, and btw would you like some gum hahaha prank.
So, you know, they reacted like asshats, and I didn’t get along with the “smart” kids in school, mostly. They were mean to me and I didn’t have hobbies in common.
So the age thing…
Yeah, my friends made pretty much constant jokes about me being younger than them in a mostly harmless way that quickly grew grating anyway. I still get them. I was also the “responsible” “Mom” friend, so add that to the pile of weirdness.
When I was a college freshie and met another freshie in my Japanese class that had skipped a grade, he was so excited to meet someone else who had skipped a grade (same), and even more thrilled when he discovered his birthday was in January and mine was in March, making him finally older than someone in his grade.
There was a lot of heavy sighing on my part, but in good humor, because this guy got it.
I was a college sophomore before I was allowed to even check out a movie at the rental place in my college town (they required you to be 18). I didn’t have my 18th birthday until after spring break of my freshman/sophomore (by credits) year. Which meant my parents were trying to enforce a bedtime and curfew from 5.5 hours away (wonder why I went to school so far away, Mom). I barely scraped out of school old enough to drink to celebrate (I don’t drink anyway, but).
After graduation, it’s mostly a novelty and forgetting to adjust the years I was in school and graduated for other people my age. I have a baby face so people think I look younger than I am anyway. And am younger than people online tend to think I am on top of that. At one of my first jobs out of college, the youngest person on my team who was already there thought I was like 20 and was a little alarmed to discover I was born the same year he was, and in fact, since I was born in March and he was born in May, I was finally older than someone.
Not to mention the fact that I graduated before he did.
So it kind of leaves me a peer group with both people born my year, and people born the two years before me. Both as equals. Obviously at my age they’d be peers anyway, but going back to childhood still puts me in “yes, I remember this the same grade you do.”
It likely had some impact on the way I was expected and almost had to act older/more responsible/more mature than my friend group because I was attempting to make up for being older. It’s probably a lot of just my personality anyway, which apparently I needed to even get promoted.
But that sure as hell didn’t mean I tried in school.
How come you don't talk about this more?
I made a lot of my friends and even my mother very insecure by. You know, existing. As myself. Without really doing anything else. This was partially a grade-skipping thing, partially not. It really gets in people's craws when you're good at something they work hard at and you don't even care. It frustrates people to see someone younger than them do bounds better at something society "cares" about. And it's even worse when you're blithely doing it without even thinking.
It's probably where some of the age jokes came in. A kind of protective measure against being insecure standing next to me goofing off. It's probably why I hate them so much.
Look, I was younger than my friends and still got asked to tutor them in math. Do you think they didn't notice that? Do you think they didn't feel awful about themselves for needing that kind of teaching from me, or that my test scores in middle school beat theirs as seniors in high school.
Because they didn't like that, and I don't blame them. But it wasn't my fault, either.
It's not actually fun to make people you like and care about insecure about things they don't need to be insecure about just by literally being yourself in their presence. In fact, it feels pretty terrible.
So why would I have reminded everyone of this fact whenever I could?
Okay, that’s it for now. Let me know if I missed something or something doesn’t make sense!
