
Youngest kid, smartest kid? - tokenadult
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/youngest-kid-smartest-kid.html
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Negitivefrags
I went to a very small rural primary school when I was a kid. The entire
school was only 20 or so children.

There was one full time teacher, and a second who was part time. That's
actually a pretty good student to teacher ratio compared to the overfull
classes of today.

Perhaps half the days activities were done in a single group and the other
half we would be split in to two groups to do academic work.

I think that having mixed age group was very positive. It allowed kids to
learn from the older ones but in addition everyone moved forward at their own
pace. The school had to be designed to handle each student being at a
different place in their education by it's very nature.

When I moved to a larger secondary school at age 11, I was miles ahead of my
new peers. It was at least a couple more years before any of the content being
taught caught up to what I had learned in primary school.

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cardine
I think the best solution is to not have rigid grades. Each kid should have
their own dedicated teacher who teaches them at their own pace. That way each
kid is kept at the perfect level of difficulty, enough that they need to try
really hard, but not enough that they are overwhelmed.

This might be impractical now, but in the future as technology gets better, I
think that kids would benefit from being directed from their own personalized
computer teacher, with a real teacher there just to manage the environment and
address any circumstances that the computer teacher can't deal with, and for
necessary group activities. That way each kid has an education that is
tailored to them and nobody is lost in the cracks, bored kids becoming lazy,
or overwhelmed kids learning to hate school and thinking of themselves as
inferior or stupid.

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tokenadult
_I think the best solution is to not have rigid grades._

I fully agree. That is the topic of my very oldest online FAQ, first composed
in 1992.

[http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html](http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html)

Dividing up children into school grades by age is a modern form of insanity,
which would have astonished educators in any earlier era.

~~~
jonnathanson
We do it because it's practical and because it's scalable. We do it because
we're a society that loves standards but doesn't really understand how they
work. So we're comfortable painting everything as a bell curve.

The outcome is something resembling a lowest-common-denominator education for
all. Outstanding students don't pull a class upward, but unproductive or
struggling students _do_ slow a class down. That sucks for the student who's
ahead of the class, because her potential is being wasted. It also sucks for
the student at the bottom of the class, because he shouldn't be there. (That
sounds harsh, but it's true).

Solving this problem will require implementing a scalable way to aggregate
students by some level or set of criteria other than age. We need to organize
them _somehow_ , because it's currently impractical to teach them all
individually.

And it's tricky to organize them by _any_ "potential"-based criterion at an
arbitrary age, because the brain is changing almost continuously throughout
childhood. Plucking a group of "gifted" students apart from the pack at, say,
age 2 is poorly predictive of who _actually_ turns out to have high potential
later on. So we need to do better than that.

These are nontrivial challenges, but the solution would represent a giant leap
forward in our society.

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narfquat
Huh, I had never thought about birthdate giving students a leg up in terms of
mental capability.

I was in a gifted program in for elementary and middle school, and now that I
think about it, in 8th grade, of the top 5 academically performing kids, 4 had
birthdays in January or February, and 1 was redshirted... hmmm

I wonder if their parents planned that, or if it was a result of their
developmental advantage/other environmental factors/own personality/aptitude?

Anyways, fascinating idea.

~~~
chrischen
Logically, the most gifted and smartest kid will advance faster, and be placed
in higher levels, resulting in them usually being the youngest in the class.

For example, if your school told you your 5 year old is smart enough to start
1st grade, you'll likely enroll it into 1st grade, making it younger than the
average 6 year old 1st grader.

Unfortunately this has the problem of straining the kid, and rather than
seeming and being exceptional, it'll appear average. Later on in life when
grades, extracurriculars, become important for college admissions, the kid
will be disadvantaged because of this, since age is usually never considered.

Moral of the story: it's better to be a big fish in a small pond.

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summerlunch
This sounds like a different version of smart kids being lazy because they
learned that they can get away with it, while those who were taught to work
hard as kids become successful.

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tokenadult
I would hope that no smart child ever gets the message that he can get away
with being lazy, and yet I have seen school settings that produce that
mistaken idea.

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contingencies
What is 'effort'? Why is it required? Why can't we learn freely with our own
time and interest? Why should that be considered 'not being lazy'? Why are you
judging children?

In our culture, laziness and curiosity are considered two of the three virtues
of a programmer. (Hubris is the other, but I don't think that's as important)

Anecdotally, I know I for one got away with being lazy in school years.
Generally I would do work in class only until I understood what was going on,
then stop. Homework was avoided wherever possible. Requests from teachers for
repetition of essentially mindless acts was considered a form of condescension
and actively subverted wherever possible.

However, my curiosity meant that self-directed learning in my free time
outside of school (computing, photography, geography, history, etc.) more than
compensated.

My advice to children is this: Spend time on what you feel like (but don't
waste opportunities to learn, and don't tread on other people's toes), feel
free to ignore authorities (with modes of peaceful resistance), do something
physical if you get the chance, but _use the internet_ to satisfy your
curiosity about the world. Never let it die. Most adults you see have let it
die, and sometimes they are like husks of true people... never a free moment,
never an idle thought, never a playful tangent. Avoid that fate, and you will
always be knowledgeable, always be fed, always be respected.

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pchristensen
Most people have only two valuable assets - their brain and their time. Effort
in education and experiences can make all of your future time more valuable.

~~~
contingencies
_Most people have only two valuable assets - their brain and their time_

While I don't disagree I do think the statement itself is amusing for its
inherent assumptions: that we can usefully generalize about all people, that
it is logically coherant for strangers or society at large to attempt to value
the activity of individuals, and that actions should be directed towards some
commonly agreed upon goal. There are many cultures and philosophies out there
that would reject such assumptions.

 _Effort in education and experiences can make all of your future time more
valuable._

It depends how you choose to value your future time. Would you value it now,
guessing at what you want in the future? Would you value it in the future,
admitting that you may be totally ignorant of or worse - outright incorrect -
about your future wants and needs, here and now?

If you go the defacto route of economic rationalism, then you'd usually be
right (ie. 'education leads to more income' is still true in many
circumstances, but more weakly of late) though one could draw in to question
the associated costs in non-economically rationalizable experience, skill and
thought, such as art and philosophy.

If you just relax about decisions in life, adding effort where curiosity
deigns to dangle its carrot, would you be any worse off?

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anvarik
Have you read "Outliers" from Malcolm Gladwell? There he was mentioning that
most of the successful hockey players have a pattern in their birthdays and I
found it quite similar:

"in any elite group of hockey players the very best of the best 40 percent of
the players will have been born between January and March,30 percent between
April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between
October and December."

"The explanation for this is quite simple. It has nothing to do with
astrology, nor is there anything magical about the first three months of the
year. It's simply that in Canada the eligibility cut off for age class hockey
is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January2, then, could be playing along
side someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year and at that age,
in preadolescence, a twelve­ month gap in age represents anenormous difference
in physical maturity."

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srunni
This is very interesting to me because I had the opposite experience - my
parents had me start school early. I went to a private grade school that
allowed me to start kindergarten while still 4, a few weeks before my 5th
birthday (I was born in mid-September).

I don't think it was an issue at all academically - I was able to skip another
grade, starting 2nd grade at 5. However, the school and my parents decided to
stop it at that point, which was probably a good idea. However, I ended up
starting middle school at 9, high school at 12, and college at 16, which made
things difficult socially. Although things worked out, being any younger would
probably have been detrimental to the experience.

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kevinmchugh
You're saying you excelled academically despite always being the youngest?
That's the point of the linked article.

~~~
srunni
My age was less of an issue at the grade school level, where students of
multiple grade levels were in the same classroom (because it was a small
school). However, things were not so easy socially once I moved to a public
middle school, where everyone else in the classroom was of around the same
age. The article refers to both social and academic benefits to being younger
- my experience was the opposite for the former. Things were a lot easier when
my classmates didn't know I was younger than them.

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Tichy
I like that story because my kid has such a birthday that will make us have to
decide.

But it is a bit annoying that now there are conflicting statements: some
research seems to claim the disadvantage of being the younger kid is
statistically significant throughout the whole life (or at least university,
not sure about jobs), and now this which claims the opposite.

I guess they cancel each other out. Perhaps it is best to not think about it
at all and just let things run their "natural" course, and leave it to the kid
to deal with whatever the world throws at him :-/

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sliverstorm
I wondered through the whole thing, could it simply be that the children who
start late have had their education postponed? We already know a young brain
is very impressionable, and that starting things like reading early is good
for kids. So why shouldn't enrolling in primary school earlier also be better?
As opposed to the child that languishes until they are 6 to start
kindergarten.

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rflrob
Presumably, if the primary effect is having a slightly lower kid around, then
younger siblings would also tend to outperform only children, or those with a
sufficiently large gap to the next older sibling. Anyone know if there's any
research on this?

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disgruntledphd2
In terms of birth order and IQ, the results show the opposite actually. Oldest
children tend to have higher IQ's than their siblings, with the exception of
youngest children when there's a large gap, who also show increased IQ.

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russellsprouts
I have a summer birthday, and our schools use a September cutoff, so my
parents had me do kindergarten twice, so that I would be the oldest, rather
than the youngest. Instead, I ended up skipping 1st grade after that, negating
my age boost.

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why-el
There is a whole chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers dedicated to this.

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Dewie
Youngest kid is smartest, oldest kid is smartest... as an only child I reckon
I win either way.

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gingerlime
did you read the article? It's about relative age in the classroom, not
between siblings.

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Dewie
Oops, I didn't. Nevermind then.

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ximpathy
lol

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Dewie
I'm glad that I could entertain you so much that you made an account just to
express your appreciation. :)

