This is what happened:

"So do you wanna do it or not?" my dad asked me.

I had stalled on his question for as long as I could. The next sentence that I said would influence who I am for the rest of my life. "I wanna do it," I said.

I decided that day that I was going to skip fifth grade. I skipped all the fifth grade classes: fifth grade math, science, reading, history, and the one that proved the most challenging later on: English.

I played junior high and now high school soccer a year younger.

I didn’t know a single person in the sixth grade.

In my sixth grade year I faced my toughest challenge that came as a result from skipping fifth grade: sixth grade English. In the first week of English I found myself very far behind. Everyone in the class was happily singing their Shirley Jingles about verbs, nouns, prep-prep-prepositions, and any other part of speech I was utterly unfamiliar with, while I sat at my desk mouthing words trying to fit in. I had never felt so out of place in my life.

It seemed like even the teacher was against me.

About two months into the school year, she assigned us a short, one-page essay about a super hero or a band of super heroes that we invented. My twisted should-have-been fifth grade mind came up with a story about patriotic cats dressed in stars and stripes fighting off evil monsters in downtown New York (It was something like that.) I felt extremely confident that my essay would be the best in the class because it always had been in third and fourth grade, but this time it was more towards the realm of the worst.

Well, it was the worst. My teacher picked up all the papers and began scanning through them. She stopped at one and read it over and over with a strange face of confusion, awe, and bewilderment.

I sat there praying to God, Zeus, Spiderman, whoever I believed in when I was ten years old, that the paper wasn’t mine, but it was.

She began to chant out run on sentences, tense changes, punctuation errors, and anything else that could’ve been wrong because if it could’ve been wrong it was wrong in my essay.

I was already embarrassed enough with my super cats, they were no match for everyone else’s amazing super heroes that had super strength, could turn invisible, or could shoot fire out of their eyes, but then my teacher looked up and said somewhat disgustingly "Boy it’s obvious this person wasn’t in our class last year!" I felt like crying but knew it would only add to the long list of embarrassing things I had already done.

I sit here at this computer typing an English paper about skipping fifth grade and what it taught me.

I didn’t understand what the sea of experience and mountain of perception were at first like some of my classmates did, but I looked for the answer like I had learned to do in previous classes. I found the answer and am now writing a halfway decent paper (I hope) about the biggest and toughest decision I’ve ever had to make.

This is what would have happened:

I tell my dad that I don’t want to skip a grade, that I don’t want to leave my friends, and that I don’t want to go through the sort of pressure of being younger than my classmates. "Ok. That’s fine. I understand," My dad says with a strange lack of disappointment in his tone. That’s the last I ever heard about skipping the grade.

I take every fifth grade class and pass every one of them. I not only pass them, I have the best grade in the class in every one of them.

My English teacher assigns my class an essay. I write an excellent paper about an amazing, super strong, invisible super hero who can shoot fire out of his eyes. My essay is the best in the class and I laugh at the kid in the corner whose essay was about stupid patriotic cats and their pointless fight against monsters in downtown New York. The teacher chants out run on sentences, tense changes, and punctuation errors in that stupid kid’s paper and I can tell that he is holding back tears.

My Shirley Jingles are perfect. I’m the leader of the chorus of students singing them to my teacher and if I hear one person miss a word or go out of tone, like the kid in the corner so often did, I immediately tell them to get their act together and learn the jingles perfectly.

My sophomore English teacher four years later assigns me an essay about something that has influenced my life. I write a paper about moving out of the house that I had lived in for my whole life. It was an ok essay but it lacked personal meaning. I got a "c" on the paper like I had on my other papers and I still searched for the answer to what my essays lacked.

This is how it influenced me:

Being that kid in the corner, to be honest, sucked, but it taught me more than any fifth grade class could have taught me.

It taught me never to give up even when things are looking bad, it taught me to have confidence in myself, and it taught me that I could do anything I set mind towards.

My English teacher shot me down more than the time about my essay. The kid that was the chorus leader and had the best essay in the class shot me down all the time too, but I never let them get to me. I always persevered and tried my best, even though my best was not the best in the class all the time.

Now, four years later, those lessons continue to help my efforts in school, on the soccer field, and in overall life. I don’t have to worry about the age difference anymore because I realized that even though I skipped fifth grade, I took a class that nobody else had.

I hated that class but now that I’m finished with it, it has proven to be the most beneficial class I have ever taken. The age difference just doesn’t matter anymore because I’m used to dealing with it. I have caught up, for the most part, with everyone in skill and intellect whether it’s soccer or school, because I took that class.

The class was called skipping fifth grade. It had no set curriculum. The class was all of the challenges and hard days that I had to get through because of skipping the grade. I didn’t learn that the Battle of Tours was in 732, that acceleration is measured in meters per second squared, that quadratic functions form a graph in the shape of a parabola, or anything like that.

No, I learned about perseverance, hard work, and self-belief.

Other people have learned to have those values, but nobody has learned them like I did.

I skipped all those fifth grade classes, and it wasn’t easy, but I made up for it because I took the class.

That class proved to be more beneficial than any fifth grade class ever could have been.

I played soccer a year younger than everyone else but got better because I did.

I know sophomores at Webb and at my old school that I never would have known if I had not skipped fifth grade, if I had not experienced the class that no one else has taken.