The Thing About 6th Grade

Have I ever explained about 6th grade?

You see, I actually started kindergarten when I was 4 years old. My mother thought it was a good idea at the time because I was already reading. When I was six, we moved from Florida to New Orleans and I transferred into this fundamentalist private Christian school — not that the old school wasn’t the same; I mean, I don’t know because I was too young, but I do know it was a private Christian school then too.

Anyway, the new school was using this program called The Pace System where everyone is given workbooks and you are put in little tiny cubicles along the wall and you work at your own pace; if you have a question, you put a little flag up to signal the monitor to come to your cubicle to help you. If it’s a really tough problem, you put a different colored flag up to request to go up to the teacher’s desk. When you finish your assigned number of pages per workbook for the day, you take your workbook to the grading tables and use your own red pen to check your own work; then you go back to your desk and correct the wrong answers and go back to the grading tables, etc.

O.K. Here’s the deal. First of all, they put two grades in each class room and for some reason almost every year they kept adjusting it so I was almost always the youngest in the classroom for both grades. Plus, The Pace System was incredibly easy for me. I totally breezed through it. By the time I was “officially” in the fifth grade at the ages of 9 and 10, I was doing the Pace work of sixth graders and having to go into the next classroom to do my grading.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky. I was really too bored and too smart for my own good. I had figured out the system and I had a good memory. I could basically remember the answers I saw while grading my own work and go back to my desk and change my answers in my workbook and be done fairly quickly without having to really struggle or rework anything. I don’t consider this “cheating”. It’s not my fault that I could remember the answers in the one to two minute walk back to my desk.

So, I was suspended three times for cheating. I also apparently had a detention problem at the school due to some “talking in class” issue. My parents decided to pull me out of school before I got expelled and I suddenly found myself in the New Orleans Public School System, which doesn’t have a reputation for excellent education and that was especially the case back then.

I found myself in a public school fifth grade with old books and teachers that were perfectly happy to let me go assistant teach in the kindergarten and a home room teacher that actually told me she didn’t like me and refused to allow me to test for the gifted classes. I probably would have welcomed No Child Left Behind because perhaps the classes might have been driven toward something, but in actuality, I felt very bored to be covering old material in a very slow manner.

Sixth Grade in the public school was not an improvement and I spent a lot of it helping the first grade teachers.

By the end of what I then considered my second round of six grade, my parents had found me another private Christian school, one that would turn out to be a little less fundamental, but still a bit on the kooky side. The guidance counsellor there convinced my mother that at 11 years old, I was too young to go to junior high school — this new school ran from pre-K through 12th grade. Since no one asked me, I was dropped back into sixth grade. It would be another year before I would actually start to learn anything new and challenging. We actually did string art in my third year of sixth grade.

To this day, I believe that three years of sixth grade stunted my brain. I truly believe that if a child is bright enough and ambitious enough to plow ahead in education, encourage him or her. Bring on the challenge. What I needed for those three years was to be challenged not punished. I was bored. I wallowed. Afterwards, I struggled to live up to the potential I should have had.

Tagged as: childhood, cultural messages, education