Is Skipping First Grade a Sin?

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.

[…]

My former classmates watched me from the other side of the room with the same curiosity I felt toward them. Some were bold enough to cross the distance and ask what I was doing over there.

“I don’t know,” I told them. “I came in, and my seat was over here.”

[…]

The move carried the distinction of a reward, but the disruption of displacement.

I had been separated from what had begun to feel familiar and placed among children who were older, more practiced, and already fluent in a classroom I had entered without preparation.

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