I am 100% certain he is simply lying.
You raise a good point. I actually did skip a grade myself, although for me it was first grade. As such, I too was always the youngest in my crowd. But the fact that it happened so early for me gave me a chance to adjust. I’m sure it would have been very different during my teenage years.
Oddly i had the exact reverse experience - i was offered to move up a grade but my parents decided against it. Junior High and High school still sucked!
Maryland and New York state are now both “Come get tested, it’s free” states. No need to present symptoms or evidence of contact.
Any other states with similar open at will testing at this point?
I dunno, seems sketchy.
Colorado is doing the same.
I skipped 4th grade. There was a fair bit of social weirdness until high school.
I could have skipped 1st grade and graduated a year early but my parents said no both times. I regret they didn’t give the go ahead. Would have been cool to graduate at 15 (I hit puberty early so looked older than I was anyway.)
I skipped 5th, but it wasn’t all that much of a thing. I was one of the older kids anyway and big for my age, plus we had loosey-goosey classrooms in my elementary and my best friend (mostly “only friend” heh) was in the grade ahead of me anyway.
The one thing I really wish I’d done is take a proper gap year, or at least like a half-time year at the community college or something. I was not ready for college the fall after I graduated, though that was due more to events in my life leading up to it than my age specifically.
Pretty much my experience. I skipped 6th grade which meant I went straight from grade school into junior high. Everyone else knew each other so it took forever to fit in. I had a pretty late birthday so a lot of people were 2 years older than me. Would definitely only recommend it if done much earlier.
I skipped the last half of my senior year in HS. I had taken a few night and summer classes- not as make-up, but because mom didn’t want us to sit around the house in the summer, so I had extra credits. I doubled up and got all my required aid out of the way the first semester, and got the hell out. Finished HS on Friday and started community college on Monday morning.
I’ve actually met her, just in the last couple of years. Nice, straightforward, (and very direct) lady. She peppered me with questions about myself as if she were a friend of my grandmothers. It’s sad, but she led a very long life. She was very close to blind, and I know she was ready to move on after John died.
Fun fact: she was played in Right Stuff by Mary Jo Deschanel, mother of Zooey and Emily. (Caleb Deschanel was the director of photography!)
While we’re on this tangent, I sometimes wonder if my socialization would have been easier if I’d been able to attend the same school for more than a maximum of two years in a row growing up. I was my parents’ oldest, and for reasons of my dad’s academic career we moved/traveled often, so the only grades I had two years straight at the same school were 3rd and 4th, then 7th and 8th, then 11th and 12th. What then made matters worse was that I went to an all-boys Jesuit high school, which did a great job of preparing me for college academically but not so much socially for obvious reasons, especially with my history to that point.
All the traveling/living abroad we got to do, plus growing up bilingual and then becoming trilingual while living in Germany for a year at 16-17, certainly provided its countervailing advantages, however. Still, maybe the other is one reason that I’m perennially single (briefly married almost 30 years back, some relationships before and after but none that lasted).
ie is his mouth moving?
NC is getting close to that. This is encouraging because they were one of the hardest states to get a test in. One of the issues in NC is folks don’t believe it’s mostly easy to get a test, so they aren’t trying (and this might be combined a lot of belief that it isn’t really that prevalent here outside of Charlotte/Triangle/somewhat Triad/ prisons)
I suspect the recent uptick in NC is largely due to increased testing due to hospitalizations in NC remaining steady. (NC is using hospitalizations as their metric for if the infection rate is rising or falling)
Also it’s sounding like NC hits phase 2 this weekend. Personally I wish it was next week, because the holiday weekend is gonna make folks go nuts, but I’d finally get to do the one thing that brings me happiness in life, and I’d risk a lot just to do it- though I will take steps to reasonably minimize that risk.
The question now is just how big the second wave will be.
Yes, we may pay a price. I’m back in the office. My own safety measures will be simple – no dining in restaurants or going any places where people gather. It’s home, office, grocery store, and carry-out indefinitely. The office is the most perilous place but I need the paycheck and health insurance so I have little choice.
We’re WFH until the end of the month but I have a feeling that will change in June. At that point my plan is similar to yours. If I have to go into the office I will but for everything else I’ll be isolating as much as I can. I don’t want to get sick myself of course but my worst nightmare is bringing it home and infecting my wife, who has some risk factors.