Georgetown, Ontario, 1962, Chapel Street School: Skipping Grade 5…a crippling blow
My grade skipping saga began oh so long ago, in 1961, when I was in 4th grade. Back in the day, kids were routinely “skipped” if deemed academically meritorious by some individual or board.
This fate was my social undoing.
During first term in Grade 4, the teacher, Miss Virginia Walker, informed my parents that I had been selected to leapfrog Grade 5. I was to be loaded into a scholastic howitzer and catapulted like a bespectacled guided missile across an academic landscape far below, to land with a thud in the perilous war zone of Grade 6.
My mom was delighted by the turn of events. The product of an impoverished Polish family of eight children, a first-generation Canadian, she took inordinate pride in and derived no little vicarious pleasure from my good grades.
For my part, I was generally miserable in school. High marks bestowed very little status among pre-pubescent boys; in fact academic success counted as a liability. Doing well on tests and the like made one a “browner,” and I also had the misfortune of being chubby and wearing glasses, long before specs were cool. So I was “fat, fat, water rat; 50 bullets in your hat” and “fat four eyes.”
A good time was had by all.
I was the only kid of the male persuasion – there were only two genders in those days – among the four lucky eggheads selected for academic take-off. Vicky Chappel, Debbie Wilson, Anne Golden, and me.
We were periodically segregated during the Grade 4 year so as to be stuffed like Strasbourg geese with the most delicious morsels of fifth grade fare in preparation for our dizzying ascent to the summit of sixth grade.
For me, beginning Grade 6 without the classmates of the previous five years was like moving to a foreign wasteland strewn with landmines.
The sybaritic pleasures of adolescence were lurking in every nook and cranny of this new group. Hormones were snapping and crackling like Rice Crispies. Some of the girls were particularly “mature.” There was talk of parties and smooching. Of Twister and Spin the Bottle.
The Elvis look and brush cuts vied for popularity among the boys. I took to greasing back my hair with enough Brylcreem cement to secure the foundations of a towering skyscraper:
“Brylcreem — A Little Dab’ll Do Ya! Brylcreem — You’ll look so debonair. Brylcreem — The gals’ll all pursue ya; they’ll love to run their fingers through your hair!”
Realizing how appearance conscious I had become – especially obsessed with all matters hirsute – my mom proffered tips on how to train stubborn hair: I would wear a stocking cap each and every night. That and the morning applications of hair glue were valiant but futile stabs at the elusive phantom of popularity.
It took about seven years and three different schools before I felt like I had caught up with my classmates where it really mattered, in the social sphere, the realm of unspoken sensuality, where good grades mattered not a whit.
Your friend,
Robert
Robert McBryde – robertmcbrydeauthor.com
P.S. I’m fourth from the right in the back row of the photo, the plump, bespectacled boy, stocking-trained hair glistening with gel. The teacher, a kindly British dude named Mr. Homer, who loved soccer and smelled of pipe tobacco, is the adult presiding over this bevy of photogenic Baby Boomers who attended a school now gone, long gone.
For the debate concerning grade skipping, click on the links below:
Grade Skipping: 5 Reasons Why It Doesn’t Work
(PDF) Should talented students skip a grade? A literature review on grade skipping
TIME for Kids | Should Skipping Grades Be Allowed?
