Is Skipping First Grade a Sin?

Arbor Hill did not propose punishment. It proposed movement. The adults believed I needed more challenge and decided that I should leave first grade for second.

Whatever my parents explained to me, I did not understand the decision in the language of acceleration. I understood it when I returned to the classroom and discovered that my name had moved.

The room was open enough for first and second grade to occupy the same broad space, separated less by walls than by distance. Mrs. Weglowski and her students were still there. The life I had entered only weeks earlier continued almost exactly as I had left it.

Except my seat.

The strip of cardboard bearing my name had been placed on a desk across the room, perhaps twenty feet away, among the second graders.

I could still see first grade from where I sat.

That made the change easier to understand and harder to accept.

[…]

Six weeks after entering first grade, I was in second.