Child-Free by Choice

Recently found out about a neighbor their child is in kindergarten and was doing horrible in the class, getting all F grades's and not paying attention. So they have pulled her out of the class and she'll have to start preschool until next semester and she'll start kindergarten again.

You would think that with 2 grandparents as teachers she would have absorbed something! But usually the kids when they are over there at gp's.. they play by themselves, usually screaming or crying.

Also, I said next semester, I meant next year, is when she'll start kindergarten.

The older sister has had problems, they were going to keep her back last year, but kept her in the same grade. Who knows what the third girl will be like.

It used to be that when a kid flunked kindergarten it was because they were not emotionally/mentaly capable of handling it yet. My sister flunked kindergarten TWICE because she was always babied and never learned to do things on her own..

Though with the coming of standardized testing, kindergarten is no longer the place where you go to learn your ABCs, colours and numbers and various social skills. You're expected to be able to write your ABCs and numbers and identify all the colours (plus lots of other stuff). 5 year olds today are expected to know and do things that they may not even have the mental capabilities or be physically coordinated enough to do yet.

This was actually one of my reasons for moving out of the US. If I ever do have children I'd like them to go into a school system that isn't systematically dumbing down its children with crap like No Child Left Behind and standardized testing that pushes everything that isn't on the test out of the ciriculum.

Turdle