8/17/2023 0 Comments The drama of the gifted child(Out of a possible 99, my percentile was 7-that’s right, one digit-a number so low it inspires almost Talmudic awe in those who hear it uttered.)īy contrast, today’s top students don’t seem to have the sheer Falstaffian airspace in which to belly flop-and even when they do, they enjoy odd new protections. ![]() However, the result was not Ivy League entry but instead, as my sister will joke, “my strange German syntax, to shake, I have never quite been able.” When I was a senior at Caltech, my Shanghai-born scientist dad kept calling my dorm to shout, over the thumping ZZ Top, “Sandra! Apply to any grad school in any engineering major!” Sadly, thanks to the freedom of the EZ student loan the great cheapskate himself had helped me secure, I was already off dating a rock-bagpipe player and spectacularly bombing my physics GRE. Yes, my Danzig-born mom wrote all my sister’s school papers (which my sister then dutifully copied and presented as her own). I too had insanely pushy parents, but in retrospect they seem like pikers. (One imagines Brian and his lawyer mom, or Blair and her judge dad, years down the road, sharing a lone Zima at a vast granite kitchen island as the pair of them nostalgically go through old torts.) On the other hand, I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the sheer professionalism, the smoothly oiled Bonnie-and-Clyde teamwork of these academic parent-child hit squads. On the one hand, I worry that unless they join some sort of MTV-sponsored witness-protection program, such children have no hope of ever getting laid. Also in 2003, the Michigan valedictorian hopeful Brian Delekta challenged district regulations that allowed him at most an A for summer legal work, as opposed to the A+ that-yes-his own attorney mother had awarded him. Talk about chronic fatigue!) After winning sole-valedictorian status and settling with the district for $60,000, Blair, in a bizarre twist, was de-admitted from Harvard upon discovery that she had plagiarized some material in her local newspaper columns. (In June 2001, Blair Hornstine also received a Congressional Award Gold Medal, an honor that requires a student to have performed 200 hours of personal development, 200 hours of physical fitness, and 400 hours of community service. ![]() Her father, Superior Court Judge Louis Hornstine, didn’t just support his daughter’s campaign he helped complete her volunteer work, driving groceries to the local food bank on her behalf. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue, Hornstine had completed much of her coursework at home with private tutors, while being allowed to skip gym class (where even an A+, valued at 4.3, would have lowered her AP-fueled GPA of 4.6894). In 2003, with acceptances from Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and Cornell already in hand, the New Jersey senior Blair Hornstine sued her school district for $2.7 million for the pain and humiliation of having to share her valedictorian title with another student. At a certain point, one might ask who is actually hoping to pull on that crimson sweatshirt.įrom Atlantic Unbound: Interviews: "Stop the Insanity!" (September 5, 2006) Sandra Tsing-Loh describes the elite, utopian island of urban private education-and explains why she opted to steer clear of it.Īnd when these litigious parents’ work is well done, they need only stand back as their mini-me’s shamble forward, robotlike, hurling lawsuits for them. For our most obsessively college-minded parents, it seems foolhardy to allow high-school seniors to track the progress of their own applications, to solicit their own letters of recommendation, even to write their own autobiographical essays about why they want to go to college. Winning admission to a coveted college is so do-or-die that today’s über-protective parents leave nothing to chance-which is to say, nothing to the bumbling students themselves. I say, let’s hurl them, one by one, at today’s frenzied “helicopter parents,” who deserve to be, if not bombarded, at least given a simple clonk over the head with a frying pan while a trained therapist yells, “Stop the insanity!” ![]() Of course, I’m a biased reader in my estimation, there can’t be enough books written on the topic. The titles reviewed here are all excellent: I give them all A+’s-or, in the parlance of today’s elite high schoolers, weighted GPAs of 4.687, including 5’s in fifteen AP courses and a combined math/verbal SAT score of 1540. The frenzy of academic competition, particularly among affluent American families, has triggered a spate of cautionary new books.
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