Serious Lunenburg Youth Football Player Taken Off Team ‘For Being Smart’

Who is right here?

  • The league

    Votes: 6 30.0%

  • The Kid's family

    Votes: 14 70.0%
  • Total voters
    20
lol smart people don't play sports

It is the league at fault here, though it seems more likely an oversight than some sort of vendetta against nerds. I have to admit that I find the whole concept of skipping grades kind of weird, though. Aren't you theoretically missing out on learning whatever would be taught in that grade?
 
Nyktos said:
lol smart people don't play sports

It is the league at fault here, though it seems more likely an oversight than some sort of vendetta against nerds. I have to admit that I find the whole concept of skipping grades kind of weird, though. Aren't you theoretically missing out on learning whatever would be taught in that grade?
Click to expand...

as someone who skipped second grade i can safely say there is literally zero knowledge distributed during that year which i have not since picked up
 
right, but that's second grade, where all you do is look @ a frog's growth cycle and do basic arithmetic

edit: and faint proves me a retard, disregard
 
Last edited:
such a misleading article title. the ayf operates by grade level, not age, weight or height (like pop warner does). therefore he should be playing with his grade level.

also lady salamence he skipped third grade which was why pwnemon replied.
 
Pwnemon said:
as someone who skipped second grade i can safely say there is literally zero knowledge distributed during that year which i have not since picked up
Click to expand...
Well that's probably true at such an early age, but then what is even the point of skipping a child ahead? It's not as though grade 3 can really be expected to be much more intellectually stimulating than grade 2.

Faint said:
such a misleading article title. the ayf operates by grade level, not age, weight or height (like pop warner does). therefore he should be playing with his grade level.
Click to expand...
According to the article kids who are held back a grade still get to play with the people their age, so it should work the same if they skipped one.
 
Nyktos said:
According to the article kids who are held back a grade still get to play with the people their age, so it should work the same if they skipped one.
Click to expand...

"And if Nowd had been held back a grade, instead of advanced, he would be eligible to play with the team."

Eligible to play with the team =/= playing with students the same age. The line following states:

"A league spokesperson told WBZ-TV national rules dictate kids must play with the team for their grade level."
 
Faint said:
"And if Nowd had been held back a grade, instead of advanced, he would be eligible to play with the team."

Eligible to play with the team =/= playing with students the same age. The line following states:

"A league spokesperson told WBZ-TV national rules dictate kids must play with the team for their grade level."
Click to expand...
If he'd been held back a year he still wouldn't be in the same grade as the team. I read it as there being an exception made for that case that isn't made for skipping a grade.
 
Nyktos said:
Well that's probably true at such an early age, but then what is even the point of skipping a child ahead? It's not as though grade 3 can really be expected to be much more intellectually stimulating as grade 2.
Click to expand...

I skipped first grade because i was way more advanced than the kids in my kindergarten class, so they sent me to the first grade class for an hour a day because i was answering every question in kindergarden. then they put me in second grade the next year because i had taken it already. the only thing i missed out on was penmanship and some other fine motor skills, but im a mostly ok adult who is doing an extra year in college since he was a typical fuckup for a couple semesters.

other notable users who skipped first grade: darkie DougJustDoug
 
You can learn "a year's" worth of American schoolwork in a month. It's all babysitting until college, why not skip grades if you're actually applying yourself.
 
Nyktos said:
lol smart people don't play sports

It is the league at fault here, though it seems more likely an oversight than some sort of vendetta against nerds. I have to admit that I find the whole concept of skipping grades kind of weird, though. Aren't you theoretically missing out on learning whatever would be taught in that grade?
Click to expand...
Not in primary school, to be honest in primary school there's not that much vital stuff covered except basic skills (which some children already have). I skipped Year 2 and never struggled for it, I was in a year 1/2 composite class in Year 1 and I'd already done second grade reading so I'm pretty sure all I missed was the term they learned about Japan. I think it could be okay in high school for some exceptional students; many students are able to take grade-advanced classes in high school and not struggle at all, especially if the students have already learned stuff from that part of theccurriculum outside of school. Plus it's not like those concepts and facts aren't touched upon again in the future. Some people learn better if they're being challenged too. I mean, knowledge gap is definitely a problem but if a kid is motivated they can catch up on it extracurricularly and in the first few years most of that knowledge is only important for the fundaments which most kids who are being accelerated will already grasp quite well. In my case I know I read quite widely outside of class and didn't struggle with the material so there wasn't much point holding me back.

For what it's worth though my school was interested in accelerating me another grade after that but at the time I was socially very stunted and since I'm born late in the academic year I was much younger than other kids in my class (I was in another composite class at the time), which, at that age, is a pretty severe disparity. I was never teased much by that class but there was a definite maturity gap that made interactions between us awkward at times (not to mention I was really sheltered). So there's another problem with skipping worth mentioning -- it can be problematic to remove children from their peer group.

Re. the thread: this is silly, he definitely wasn't penalised because he was 'too smart', he was removed because of the rules... It seems sensible to me that he be allowed to play with his team; teams who play together for a long time build up a real bond and that kind of positive social interaction should be encouraged. It does seem that was it technically against the rules so the league was technically right to investigate, but I think it would be more just to leave the kid be if there's no other reason to take him off the team. Since it's a national ruleset though it might be better to enforce the rule, I can't answer because I don't know anything about it. Is there any on-the-ground benefit to having a kid play with their grade level rather than age group or is it more of an administrative thing? I guess there's potentially a problem with graduating, but yea... the article didn't do a good job of laying out both sides.

Lasagne21: Oops, I always edit my post a thousand times after posting and that time I failed. :s
 
Last edited:
as some of you know i skipped two grades (first and second) when i was very young and thus i've been among those two years older than me for almost my entire life. i used to play chess competitively as well, and i played it with kids of my age because it wouldn't be fair in the directors' eyes to have me play with kids who are more developed both mentally and physically. anyways not to brag or w/e but i was really good and in the finals of the state tournament i shit on this rich guy's kid. so the rich guy went and told one director who didn't like me fsr that i was in fifth grade (when i was playing vs third graders) and the guy asked me and i told him i was in fifth grade but i was only 8 years old so it was ok right? but the rich guy bitched some more and from that day forth i got forced to play with kids who were in my grade and not my age group. so yeah people are douchebags and this stuff happens a lot
 
Nyktos said:
lol smart people don't play sports

It is the league at fault here, though it seems more likely an oversight than some sort of vendetta against nerds. I have to admit that I find the whole concept of skipping grades kind of weird, though. Aren't you theoretically missing out on learning whatever would be taught in that grade?
Click to expand...

I skipped second grade as well and I didn't miss anything at all, in fact, I was the best student in the class I was moved to despite having 'missed' a course. The main problem with skipping grades (at least in Spain) is that the rest of children are very envious of you which leads to having almost no friends no matter how nice you're to everybody. That changes at the end of secondary school and high school (for me at least). However, I did have a lot of problems when trying to join sports teams (because they would always told me ''I was too young''), trying to get scholarships and even when I tried to sign up for a music school; which is ironically the opposite to the guy in the article.

I understand that the league would rather have the teams only including players of a determinate grade, but it's kind of stupid that they have only enforced the rule after 7 years and that students that have been held back are eligible to play for their old team. But yeah I definitely agree the article is not very clear about the rules of the league.
 
The message I'm getting here is: skipping grades is a band-aid fix for serious problems in the educational system(s) that nobody feels like solving properly. I guess that makes sense.

FWIW I spent most of my elementary school career in the gifted program, which I guess could be comparable to skipping a grade in what it's aiming to do. The difference is: instead of skipping one boring-as-shit year and moving onto a slightly more advanced one, I actually had four years of wanting to go to school in the morning and enjoying my time there. I feel like that's a better solution than skipping grades, though separating the kids into "gifted" and "non-gifted" is still far from ideal.
 
Nyktos said:
The message I'm getting here is: skipping grades is a band-aid fix for serious problems in the educational system(s) that nobody feels like solving properly. I guess that makes sense.

FWIW I spent most of my elementary school career in the gifted program, which I guess could be comparable to skipping a grade in what it's aiming to do. The difference is: instead of skipping one boring-as-shit year and moving onto a slightly more advanced one, I actually had four years of wanting to go to school in the morning and enjoying my time there. I feel like that's a better solution than skipping grades, though separating the kids into "gifted" and "non-gifted" is still far from ideal.
Click to expand...

the obvious problem with gifted programs is that young children develop at different times, and gifted programs grab people halfway through the period where they're developing these basic skills and says "ok you early developers who really have no evidence to prove that you're smarter than these other people other than the fact that you got started first, we're going to actually treat you like we should treat students, and the people with the misfortune to have started late are going to be taught like they've got bricks for brains for the next ten years until they learn to hate school entirely." It's as logical as taking a class of 7th graders, putting the upper half on a travel baseball team and giving them excellent coaching and spending the next three months teaching the lower half how to roll a baseball from first to second. Of course, the ones who hit puberty earlier in their lives are going to end up being better at baseball and enjoying it more than those who simply had the misfortune to develop later—regardless of natural talent or affinity to the game. (incidentally, this actually happens—you are almost twice as likely to make the major leagues if you were born in August than July, because most elementary schools' summer leagues cut off age divisions at the first of August, and the extra 11 months you'll have on the youngest kids makes you more likely to be on a travel team).

from here an educator who quit after like 30 years of being called the top educator in his state says:

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can’t tell which one learned first—the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too. For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won’t outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education" fodder. She’ll be locked in her place forever.

In 30 years of teaching kids rich and poor I almost never met a learning disabled child; hardly ever met a gifted and talented one either. Like all school categories, these are sacred myths, created by human imagination. They derive from questionable values we never examine because they preserve the temple of schooling.
Click to expand...
 
Right, gifted programs are a band-aid solution too. I just think they're probably a better one than skipping grades. I don't think I was actually smarter than everyone else as a kid, but all the same my educational experience was improved substantially by being in the gifted program. Like I said before, I don't think it's reasonable to divide people up into discrete categories like that. But I think having a gifted program is a lot better than sticking everyone into the same category.
 
I fail to see the issue with skipping grades, speaking as someone who skipped one.

The logical question is why the sports aren't broken down by age division, even that really gets uneven between 13 and 17 or so, but still.
 
In Primary school we had a group of 6 of us that got taken out of our normal classes for one day a week and we spent the time out with a university lecturer that would run us through a bunch of analytical thinking exercises and high school to university level stuff (depended on the topic) to show us that there would be cool stuff for us to do later and keep us interested instead of finishing all the work ages before everyone else and sitting around twiddling our thumbs.

Then they stopped the program when I got to year 6. Made me hella mads and so I spent the whole year trolling my teacher. She hated it because every single inaccuracy she made i'd pick up on dog her out for it until they sent me off sometimes to help the gifted students in lower years with their work. And I got forced to do triple homework which is why I find it infuriating when people tell me to do work now. (Honestly, I can pretty much attribute my failure at high school to a cronic need to do the opposite of what I got told to do by my parents and teachers in regards to work.) My Primary school had a Dux award, no idea why seeing as it's primary. But yeah, I got in a fight and decked a kid that was bullying other kids and still managed to get Dux.

I wished they advanced me, but nope. They even wanted to make me do year 6 twice because I was 'too young' to go to high school or some shit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top