<p>Totally agree. In son’s smallish private school, unless the child and parent were both social outcasts, it’s impossible not to know this stuff. People love to talk about their kids and kids love to brag.</p>
<p>It’s very common in private schools where the parents all tend to socialize outside of school functions. For example, the majority of kids at my son’s school live in a certain part of town. Many of them belong to the country club (we didn’t). Most of the kids have been there for 10-12 years. Many of the parents use each other for services. For example, a lot of the parents at our school will engage the service of other parents for things like legal advice, accounting or medical services. And the mothers all spend a lot of time volunteering at the school. So…it’s really hard to avoid. Although, I could see in a larger setting with kids from lots of socio-economic classes and geographic location and less parental involvement, you might be able to escape knowing all this stuff. I’ve never gone searching for that information. It just seems to fall in my lap. Honestly, one of the biggest things I don’t miss about having a child in school there.</p>
<p>“Totally agree. In son’s smallish private school, unless the child and parent were both social outcasts, it’s impossible not to know this stuff. People love to talk about their kids and kids love to brag.”</p>
<p>That was also very common at my urban public magnet high school in the '90s…and we had around 3000 students! In addition to the oversharing was the snobbing and belittling of students who didn’t meet standards by students and even some teachers. </p>
<p>One thing I remembered most was that anyone scoring 1350/1600 on the pre-1995 SATs was considered a “■■■■■■”. Also, some classmates were so lacking in perspective that one from a previous graduating class was crying like the sky was falling because she received one 95 in a sea of 99s despite having already been accepted to Harvard ED on a near-full ride. :roll:</p>
<p>DH grew up in a country where everyone went to after school tutoring. I’m therefore assuming it was affordable, and not the private, secret world of the well healed. It’s no doubt part of the reason that distant eastern country scores so well on standardized math tests…</p>
<p>In our area many children go to tutoring - both the academically strong and the weak. The difference is that if you are a strong student, you don’t talk about the tutoring your parents pay for. It’s like paying for the private college consultant; it’s hush-hush and available to those who have the resources to pay for it. It makes a very uneven playing field. </p>
<p>I know people who’ve paid more for their kid’s tutoring than we paid for our first house. Even if I could have afforded it, I wouldn’t have wanted that kind of pressure for my kids. I preferred to spend the money I did have on music lessons for both children and some very short term help with math/calculus when the teacher was struggling with language and cultural differences. I don’t think my kids got the worst end of the deal.</p>
<p>I heard about others’ scores from other parents and my kids’ friends. Didn’t hear much about GPAs. Once both my kids got into colleges, they felt more comfortable about sharing their GPAs – mainly to point out that one could get into some darned fine schools with less than a 3.75, or (gasp!) a 3.5, from their programs. You should have seen the look on some of the parents’ faces when they found out my older S’s GPA! </p>
<p>My kids both felt the rat race was unnecessary, but also unavoidable, given the programs they chose to attend. They steered clear of the aspects of their programs that were crazy-making, and they probably paid a price for it. OTOH, they didn’t pull all-nighters the way MANY of their friends did, and because they stayed honest academically, they could look in the mirror, too.</p>
<p>Thanks to the parents of S1’s older friends, folks on some other GT/LD listserves, and CC, I was able to find a lot of info that helped our family navigate the whole education process. I am still grateful to a listserve member who emailed me when S1 was in 3rd grade and told me that about the deadline for a particular program was in three days. Our principal had conveniently refused to share that information. It was a life-changer for both of my kids.</p>
<p>I would be livid. I wouldn’t care if my kid got a 36 ACT / 2400 SAT / 800’s on every SAT II, how dare a commercial organization publish his / her scores for public consumption?</p>
<p>Well, I do keep to myself, though I’m not a social outcast :-). But I guess the thing is – there are things that you hear that you retain, and things that you hear that you don’t retain. </p>
<p>You know how they publish honor rolls in the paper? To me, this is what they look like: XYZ High School announces the honor roll for this semester: blah blah blah, blah blah blah, blah blah blah, MY S’S NAME, MY D’S NAME, blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah. I just couldn’t bother to retain any other kid’s info. </p>
<p>It’s like standing in a coffee shop line and hearing other people ahead of you order their drinks. You might hear it, but you don’t retain it, know what I mean?</p>
<p>I am fortunate enough to be able to pay full-pay and many / most of my kids’ friends’ families are not. I am using someone to help on essay consulting. I would see absolutely no reason that any of that would ever be known to any other parent at my kids’ school. None. Not their business, not their concern. I don’t even see the point of discussing colleges with my kids’ friends’ parents, because what’s the point of letting them know that I don’t have the financial constraints they do? What’s the point – to make them feel bad or resentful? I don’t see the point. Leave it at vague generalities as to where the kids are looking (“yes, she’s looking at X, Y and Z schools”) and that’s that.</p>
<p>hi, Pizzagirl, just to go one more. I will try to find a particular college admissions/standardized testing advertising flier I kept (somewhere) that was so memorable. It is from fall 2004. I believe it also contained little photos of the kids’ faces. I’d like to confirm that. It would reinforce that the kids/their parents were perfectly ok with them being used in the advertising campaign. This, I assume, was distributed to the “top” HS in Silicon Valley. I recall the prep service was located in Cupertino, CA. It particularly proclaimed things like “perfect SAT” etc. Talk about completely lacking any class. I hope my (at the time) freshman didn’t see this flier - talk about unnerving someone upfront. OK, you are a freshman, and you need multiple perfect scores (along with a HS which is academically demanding and tough to earn top grades). Yeah, the notion is that everyone is aiming for ivies, though they’ll deign to list a few other schools like UC Berkeley :D</p>
<p>In my DD’s high school in a freshman orientation, the PRINCIPAL of the school told them they will need nearly perfect scores and nearly perfect GPAs to go to a “good” college. Please, I am so disgusted with everything right now. I have a middle schooler who is dealing with this nonsense and she has totally bought into it.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, the tutoring services probably had the parents’ permission to print those scores. Like I said, around here it’s a bragging point.</p>
<p>My son got a perfect 36.0 ACT score at his first sitting. He’s not into self-promotion and only mentions it when a classmate point-blank asks him what his score is. I’m a proud dad and not nearly so shy about mentioning it. However, my son reviewed for the test on his own, often laughing at the unnecessarily-complicated “solutions” his prep guides provided. I cannot imagine what sort of child OR parent would want it to be widely known that, if he managed to achieve the top score, it was only through the help of a tutoring service!</p>
<p>^ I bet there are no more than 50-80 kids in a graduating class in the entire country who got 36.0 on the ACT (not any 36) at the first sitting. They have nothing to do with tutoring I guess.</p>
<p>Lake, you’re probably right and that’s one of the things that surprises me: neither the ACT or SAT is all that hard, relative to, say the AP Chemistry or AP Physics tests, and practice helps the diligent. It shouldn’t be all THAT hard for a top tutor to take a typical A student and get him well enough prepared to earn a 35 or low-36 composite. If this trend toward tutoring top students is so prevalent, why aren’t we seeing a 10-fold increase in the top scores – given that this is the single most important college admissions test?</p>
<p>It is funny, at my kid’s urban high school–no one talks a lot about scores, etc. But at the private schools and the suburban ones, everyone talks about them A LOT.</p>
<p>In our neighborhood, the only person who ever reeled of her kid’s (high) stats was from the east coast, and her kid went to a competitive private school…everyone else just is pretty laid back & I would HATE it if everyone knew my D’s scores. I’m even vague about them on here and it is an anonymous forum! The people I brag to are relatives who don’t have children!</p>
<p>I do understand that on here, people need to discuss stats sometimes to get help/be helpful, though–I’m not saying everyone who discusses is bragging. What makes me sad is when my friend’s kid came home from her (very competitive suburban school) in tears because her PSAT sophomore year was (just) under 200. She was made to feel like that was a failure, by the other kids who had had it drilled into them that doing well on such tests was a mark of status. I hate mindless competition like that. It just eats people up. It’s why my father had a heart attack at a young age. Not what I want for my kids.</p>
<p>"Miami…Parental academic is not a bad thing but once it crosses the line to hours of worksheets at home every night than the balance is gone. "</p>
<p>-It is not what I mean by parental academic support at all. Very opposite of that. What I meant is to be willing to help when asked. I am very much against busy worksheets homework and has never supported this type of assignments. Nope, I meant to figure out calc or discuss current economic / political issues but only when asked (several times / year, not every day, and make sure that all assigments are completed by student, not you). </p>
<p>Kids who have this at home have huge advantage over kids with paid tutors. It is always there, sometime it was done in a car, while driving from place to place to various EC’s. Nobody knows kids better than parents, nobody can connect to them at the level that parents can. And it was always fun to us (my H. and me). It should be fun to show off your brain power to your own kid without putting them down of course. And nobody could assess gaps in HS classes better than parents, because, let’s face it, parents had much better education, it went down considerably, particularly in math and science.</p>
<p>My H and I were able to provide any support that was needed in the early years, but once the children hit high school we were of little use. I did not take advanced classes in math or science in college, and in my high school the only AP science that was offered was AP Bio. Of what I did learn, I remember little since I haven’t used advanced math or science in 30 years. So I was unable to assist with courses like AP calculus, AP physics, and AP chemistry. Even my H, who majored in chemical engineering, did not always remember enough to help the kids, since he’d moved into sales and marketing years ago. Sometimes he could figure something out if he read the textbook and re-taught himself, but that wasn’t always practical due to time constraints, or because S or D needed the book! Also, H traveled a lot for work and wasn’t available.</p>
<p>So, parental tutoring only went so far in our home. In fact, speaking to other parents, we didn’t meet many who were able to help their kids once they got to the AP level in math and science. Even those stereotypical science and math-oriented Asian parents we met confessed that either they didn’t remember the material anymore, and/or that the work these kids got in high school was such hard stuff they hadn’t ever learned it! (eg. AP Chem and AP Physics BC) Fortunately, D knew several classmates whose parents had PhD’s in math or science and got from those friends the answers their parents had helped them solve. Untutored kids or kids without PhD parents, came to school with uncompleted homework. Frankly, I was confused as to why a PhD was needed to be able to do high school homework anyway!</p>
If you say so. I still think I was kinda spot on. (Don’t mind me. I’ll just keep fumbling along. ;))</p>