Month: January 2011

I have developed a uniform which I wear when I visit schools to which I hope My Kid will be accepted with open arms.

I wear black, white and neutral tones with the exception of the pop of color as advised by the skinny lady in the pencil skirt on the TLC show, What Not to Wear.

I wear my chunky carved stone necklace (which is not really my style) because I hope it says; “statement piece”.

I hope it says: “I’m artistic!  As evidence; I present the chunky stone necklace purchased at a street festival.”

But, see how I pair it with a tailored jacket to indicate that I am a professional with multiple degrees.

However, I do hope you will think of me as the type of creative likely to have a flexible schedule which will enable me to volunteer during the school day more than the average parent–which I hope will more than make up for the fact that I cannot donate large amounts of money to your school.

Also, I have this nice charm bracelet with a quote on it by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  Would you like to see it?

Look.  Lots of black.  That says, “I’m a New Yorker!”

Say something–but don’t say too much!

My child wants to be a physicist.

My husband is an executive.

Please let My Kid into your school.

Can you see (as I do) how much she belongs in your gifted student body.

I won’t say, “I’m a clown!”

No, not now.

Keep it a secret.

People stereotype.

I want them think I’m normal.

So they’ll let My Kid into their school.

I was in six different shows between August and December my senior year of high school.  I didn’t have to apply to college because I was going to the University of Montana to which I would be automatically accepted as a graduate of a Montana high school.

My 10-year-old daughter is applying to public middle schools in New York City and I have turned down performance opportunities in order to be available to guide her through the process.  Already she has done more work to get into middle school than I ever did to get into college and she is only just starting the interview/audition/test phase of the process.

Next Saturday she will have to miss a soccer game in order to take a test.

She doesn’t have a zoned school.  There is no default option.  We can’t quit the charade.

There was reprieve, but only a short one.  The applications to the NYCDOE ranking the schools in the districts in which we were eligible to attend were due and turned in on Friday December 17.  There was relief, release, and a few rankling conversations bringing up doubts about the ordering of particular schools due to the fact that the selective middle schools, the “It” schools are so popular that they do not even interview and consider students who don’t rank their school first or second.  So the difficulty for 5th graders and their parents is the mental machinations required to get to point of choosing “The One”, the one school, the best school, the school that the child wants to attend, the school parents want their child to attend.

The DOE would like us to believe they’re all fine:

“We expect all of our schools to be academically challenging and nurturing learning communities that cultivate the diverse interests and skills of middle school students.”

Ask yourself questions about your child and assess how good a fit each school would be for him/her:

*What are your child’s interests and strengths?

*What is your child’s learning style?

*Does he/she work best in a group or individually?

*Does he/she thrive in a more traditional environment or and open one?

Next Steps for Students:

Familliarlize Yourself with the Middle School Directory

Create a list of factors that are important to you in choosing a school:  your interest(s) and the schools special programs, size, location and the amount of time it will take you to travel there and back each day.

Are there lockers?  Is there a lot of homework?  Do you have to wear a uniform?  What time is lunch?  How many of my friends are going there?

Look through this Directory with your family.  Become familiar with the different middle schools from which you can choose and make a list of those that you think meet your personal interests.  For example if you are interested in taking Latin and playing Basketball, look for those things in the directory page.  Also be sure that you meet the Eligibility requirements for the school or program.

(FYI there is exactly one school available to our children that offers both Latin and basketball.)

• Write down any questions you may want to discuss with the support staff at your school or your teacher, as you review the Directory.

Why?

There are a few good and popular schools favored by the entitled well-educated white people of Brownstone Brooklyn and then there are all the others–many of which are filled with the children of  just as educated people of color who don’t feel entitled and have faith in the system.

I don’t know what to do with that.

…we talked about what happened in Arizona and asked My Kid if they had talked about it at school and she said, “Yes”.

She knew all about the girl who was at the event because she had just won a student government election and wanted to learn more about the political process.

My Kid and the rest of her classmates are learning all about the political process this year, studying the constitution and everything, in preparation for the big 5th grade overnight trip to Washington, D.C.  These kids, who grew up in post-9/11 New York City, know it could just as easily have been one of them.

I read about the New York connection to the grandparents of the little 9-year-old girl who was shot to death.   Dallas Green, had managed both the Yankees and the Mets.

But, nothing prepared them for this.

His wife made the call to their son after they saw his town on the TV news.

She was just casually wondering what the locals were saying about this Tucson shooting that had made the national news.

They were not prepared to find out that their precious grandaughter had been there, had been shot, and was dead.

Christina-Taylor Green and Sasha Obama are the same age.

There was a lot going on in the life of Christina-Taylor Green.  She was at the Congress On Your Corner event to meet Representative Gabrielle Giffords and learn more about the political process because she had been elected to the student council of Mesa Verde elementary school.  She had recently made her First Communion and was going to learn to play the guitar she’d just gotten for Christmas.  She was the only girl on her baseball team and loved swimming and horses.  The 9-year-old third grader was born on 9/11.

This is so sad.

My Kid’s team got the Judges Award!   The reason given had something to do with the 2nd and 3rd graders who proved that they belonged there in that competition.

Last year a second group of competitive “Lego Boys” graduated leaving my daughter as the most veteran member of the team.  It was intimidating.  The competition is for students through 8th grade.  Some of our smallest team members calmly controlled their robots next to middle-school competitors with facial hair!  Our kids held it together with poise and enthusiasm.  It was a joy to behold.   No wonder the judges gave this team an award.  Our teachers who sponsor the after school program were so proud, deservedly so.

An award for research went to the team from the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, which made my daughter’s eyes light up.  She wants to go to that middle school, only a block away from the NYU-Poly campus where the Brooklyn FLL Robotics Tournament was held.

Most my daughter’s friends want to go to schools that focus on the performing arts or maybe writing and drawing.  They and are not interested in going to an all girl math and science school even if it does have dance and art and three foreign languages.  I didn’t see many familiar faces from her Brooklyn Heights elementary school at the open house last fall.  Ideally that is because it’s a school intended for a very specific demographic to which my child happens to belong.  But, I’m afraid it is also because this school is not one of the schools that is on the radar of the uber-involved public school parents of Brownstone Brooklyn.

I suspect that parents of the Brooklyn Heights/Park Slope demographic are put off by the dearth of pale faces represented in the student body.

I came to the realization, during the course of this FLL Robotics Tournament, our fourth, that the Robotics Team is the only extracurricular activity at my daughter’s elementary school which includes borough-wide competition.  We we are exposed through FLL to large numbers of tech savvy children of color being videotaped and photographed with their robots by large numbers of involved parents of color who are spending all day Saturday whiling away the long tournament hours checking their blackberries and smart phones and working on their laptops while waiting for the next round of standing-up-to-cheer-for-kids-robots-and-schools.

When a family’s elementary school experience includes events like the annual Brooklyn Borough-wide First Lego League Tournament, they are less prone to dismiss a school at first glance because they don’t see their pink child reflected in the brown faces of the students attending that school, because they do see her there.

December 17 was the Deadline for Families to Return Middle School Choice Applications in All Districts.  We turned in the forms and after that there was nothing we could do.  So we had Christmas and we had New Years.  Now the kids are back in school and the respite is over.  I got an e-mail from the Good Public School in Manhattan with open enrollment that My Kid had been assigned an interview appointment on this coming Friday.  I have received a letter from the Best Brooklyn Gifted and Talented School assigning my kid a date and time for her audition and I have gone on the website of the Manhattan Gifted School to sign up for a date and time to take their personalized IQ test.  We’re in the thick of it again.

I’m so grateful for the opportunity to see Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch play A Little Night Music before it closes.  To watch mature women take the stage with such skill is a gift.  I was eager to get home to compare today’s program to the one from the Catherine Zeta-Jones Angela Langsbury version I saw last year.  Elaine Stritch brought her own conductor with her.  I have Stephen Sondheim’s new book and I want to read all about the creation of this show which is so tightly constructed that the actresses had the freedom to own their parts.  So much skill.  So much talent.  I’m so glad I saw it.

WOW!
Just saw the film Up In The Air for the first time.
Didn’t expect…
So subtle.
So real.
So “of the moment”.
No wonder it was such a presence at the Academy Awards last year.
and
the George Clooney character who reminds me of my brother (as well as the Jason Bateman character and/or actor who also reminds me of my brother) lives in Omaha–
where I was born!

It’s a good movie.

If you live in New York or LA…

It’s a good picture of the rest of the country—you know, the flyover states.

But the movie is even more than that.  The movie is the same story as The Velveteen Rabbit.