|
The good thing is, it's Friday!
2006-12-08 - 9:01 a.m. Hmmm. I'm at work today, but judging from the out list, very few others are. Hmmm. Also, the weather is very odd. There was a beautiful sunrise. There are some high fluffy clouds. But it's quite warm. I guess it's going to rain. M went to a thing at her old elementary school last night. She was representing LUPS. I came to pick her up, and then hung around for an hour talking to the director. V. odd. I liked that school very much, in some ways, and in others did not. The director likes to send kids to a certain middle school (middle school A), and it gets to be a kind of ugly scene -- it seemed to me that her pets got sent there, and if you weren't her pet, you had to go somewhere else. It's all related to the usual insane parent-schooling neuroses. She's very proud that her oldest son went to Y*le, but then her younger son whent to UC S*nt* Cruz, and apparently (miraculously!) that turned out to be okay, too. It seems to me, in my great wisdom, that she herself is pretty neurotic about who goes where, and that she likes to be in control. She's worried now because a lot of 5th graders are leaving to go to middle school, so that they can get into Middle School A, in fact, instead of staying in her program through 6th grade. But in a certain sense, I think it's a problem of her own making -- if she hadn't been so invested in getting to hand out Middle School A spots to all the most deserving (as chosen by her), parents would not be so desperate to go there rather than other places. Now that there's a new director at Middle School A who does not save spots for her, she has lost this control. She talks the talk of "there's a school for everyone," but perhaps in her heart of hearts she doesn't quite believe it. I should say, in the interest of full disclosure, that N did not get in to Middle School A, which at the time was crushing to all of us, including N, I think. It's not nice to think that there are other people out there judging your worth. That perhaps in some objective way you are not as good as your friend Roz. It was even worse, actually, since Roz had been touted since kindergarten as some kind of math whiz, and that N, who according to the math teacher was as quick, mathwise, as Roz, but had come to the school later after being on a regular math track, believed that R was indeed some kind of math whiz and that she was not. (This, actually, drove me absolutely batshit crazy.) Now -- big surprise -- they are at exactly the same level at LUPS. Oh, this is all petty and ugly, but actually, it was kind of good to get it all over with when N went into 6th grade. I realized that although Jane thought Middle School A was better than Middle School B, it in fact wasn't, at least for N. And I was so exhausted by the whole thing that there was no way I was going to go through it again for high school, and we didn't. And although N might actually have been better off in a smaller, more thoughtful high school, she's actually learned some useful stuff at LUPS, and now I think we have an idea of the kind of college that would be good for her. In a sense, it was smart to fall off the fast track early on. It makes you really know what you already kind of know -- that there's not only one school out there that's worth getting in to. Anyway, this was a good sort of test, because as N gets ready to apply to college, I know my dispassionate stance is going to be seriously challenged. I think it's real, and nit just what I'm hoping. It feels real. But we'll see. Also, I walked in a different way today, and boy -- there's a main street here that used to be fairly vibrant and full of shops. But it really isn't any more -- a big bookstore just closed, and that's too bad. I would have liked to buy a few books. There doesn't really seem to be anything else, either. Hmmm. This is not looking good. Something is quite wrong -- Okay. Now I'm doing stuff ...
find me! - 2008-02-12 |
design by simplify.