In competitive hockey, most players were born in the first part of the year. It's because canada is obsessed with hawke and coaches start picking players for all star travelling squads at the age of nine or ten. The same phenomenon holds true in other sports, socker, swimming, you name it,. And of course, it also applies to the classroom. Teachers aren't any better than coaches at disentangling ability from maturity. I should have made it clear that i was not trying to teach neurotic, upper middle class helicopter parents how to gaime the system. I just wanted schools and sports leagues to stop behaving like idiots.