So I just read this article about how the kids who are the youngest in their kindergarten class tend to do the worst academically compared to their classmates for the rest of their lives. As I was reading, I thought 'hogwash!', considering that I was the youngest kid in my class (I made the cutoff by four days). My best friend and I were two of the youngest kids in the class, and now Katie's a lawyer and I'm working for one of the top companies in the US.
Then I got to the last section, where they were describing this test that a kindergarten teacher was giving to her students. The youngest kid in the class was a disaster at it; look at this extended quote:
----------
The teacher asked him to draw a person. To pass that portion of the test, his figure needed seven different body parts.
“Is that all he needs?” she asked a few minutes later.
The boy said, “Oh, I forgot the head.”
A minute later the boy submitted his drawing again. “Are you sure he doesn’t need anything else?” the teacher asked.
The boy stared at his work. “I forgot the legs. Those are important, aren’t they?”
----------
The sad thing is that I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what those seven body parts are that are required to pass the test. I would have drawn a head, two arms, two legs, and a torso, for a grand total of six. Do eyes count? Is hair required? WTF?
Also, they may have a point - the other parts of the test were 'skip; jump; walk backward; cut out a diamond on a dotted line; copy the word cat; draw a person; listen to a story; and answer simple vocabulary questions like what melts, what explodes and what flies'. I would have probably gotten the textual/vocab questions, but skipping was beyond me for several years after kindergarten.All in all, think of how brilliant I could have been if I had not a) stopped breathing for several minutes when I was born, and b) gone to kindergarten a year later. Then again, given how bored I was in high school, maybe it would have just made matters worse. And also, I was the kind of kid who sprayed paint into her eyes, and no amount of preparation for kindergarten could have stopped me from doing that.
2 comments:
ha. i think the kid had to only name at least 7 body parts, not some sort of fixed essential 7 parts.
i met an labor economist from BU who also studied kindergarten entry age and school/career performance.
he'd say that because of your parent's socio-economic status, it really shouldn't have mattered for you. you've probably maxed out your smartness.
I'm going with the direction being to draw seven different body parts (don't double the arms/legs) thus 1)arms 2) legs 3) torso 4) head 5)eyes 6)ears 7)nose.
I googled the article, it didn't mention preschoolers who color their pumpkins black, so I'm in the clear.
Post a Comment