<p>Agree: No reason to be coy, boastful, or ashamed. Years later, it’s what you did with your life that counts. If you’re a successful businessman, it doesn’t matter if you went to E. Podunk college or Big State U or smallish Ivy. </p>
<p>And if your life is a total nonsuccess story, you might not want to mention you went to that Ivy. ;)</p>
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<p>Well put, TheGFG. That’s not to say that a person took advantage of the quality education or has a lick of common sense, LOL! </p>
<p>(umm…BTW, what is the meaning behind your screen name, if it would not be impertinent to ask?)</p>
<p>Ya gotta love traditions and protocols. When my older daughter attended Oxford during her junior year, she wore her Cal Berkeley “gear” and the Brits loved it–and tried to filch it. She “learnt” that when at Oxford (on campus or in the town), it was gauche to wear her Oxford gear–she could only wear her college’s gear–but that when not at Oxford (in London and beyond), it was absolutely appropriate to wear Oxford Blue everywhere and proudly. She subsequently went back to Oxford for graduate school and the same protocol was in place, along with the proper “subfusc” (go look it up!) for matriculation, exams, and formal dinners at her college. She also learnt, after living in the UK for several years, that it was gauche to carry around Burbury handbags and wear clothing that “shouted” Burbury, so guess who has all her smart handbags? ;)</p>
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<p>From what I’ve heard from British friends and the BBC, it more sending signals one is a “Chav”: [Chav</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chav]Chav”>Chav - Wikipedia). </p>
<p>Burbury branded wear has been so closely associated with the “Chav” subculture that few Brits outside that subculture would be caught dead donning/wearing that brand.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why kids should refrain from wearing their future school’s shirts as soon as they decide where they’re going. I would hope that the future leaders of America who are attending competitive high schools are made of stronger stuff. If the policy is to keep the other kids from feeling bad, well, it’s this poster’s opinion that that’s ridiculous. If the other kids are disappointed because they didn’t get into school “X”, well, too bad. I agree with Dean Skarlis in the article: life is filled with disappointments and the sooner a kid learns to feel it, live with it a while, absorb it, self-soothe and then move on, the better the kid’s emotional resilience, the better he or she will be able to navigate life’s bigger problems, especially on the job. I read somewhere that it’s not necessarily the smartest people who have the greatest success in life, but the ones who can recover quickly from adversity and get on with it. </p>
<p>That said, there is a way the school could play this up to benefit everyone: they could designate some day in May as the “Big Reveal”, with all kids coming in wearing the swag of their chosen institution and make a school-wide event out of it. Make it an annual custom. Heck, maybe even get the teachers to come in wearing their school sweatshirts as well to show their school spirit. That way, the “secrecy” would have a purpose: to create a sense of excitement and surprise for the Big Reveal. It would also empower the kids who didn’t get into an Ivy to realize that they’re in the same boat as a majority of their classmates.</p>
<p>cobrat - wear what you want. Wear Star Wars, Star Trek, MST3K. whatever. When you find the right woman she will be wearing those T-shirt too and it won’t matter. OTOH I went to college with a guy who would wear his T-shirts until they fell apart. He is 50 and still single. Please tell me the shirt isn’t 15 years old, is clean and in good repair.</p>
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<p>I don’t wear shirts in disrepair or otherwise in poor unclean condition…certainly not when hanging out with friends…much less a date. </p>
<p>However, I do save them for times I’m doing dirty jobs such as cleaning the bathroom or working inside dusty computers belonging to friends/relatives and myself.</p>
<p>If I were a twenty-something meeting a guy for a date, I’d hope he could pull it together enough to go beyond a high school or college t-shirt.</p>
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<p>As I said…seems you and others on CC have more upscale dress requirements even for a casual coffee date than what I’ve seen in the Boston or NYC areas where coffee houses had plenty of couples in high school/college t-shirts and no one gave it a second thought. </p>
<p>I’ve also had several coffee dates with women who wore college t-shirts ranging from Hunter to Columbia Business School. </p>
<p>Always thought coffee dates were meant to be casual…not upscale dress-up dinner dates to highly rated Zagat/Michelin rated dining establishments.</p>
<p>Kind of ironic: Isn’t that why parents shell out the big bucks to send their kids to these prep schools? And isn’t that what the schools advertise? [Horace</a> Mann School: College Counseling](<a href=“College Counseling - Horace Mann School”>College Counseling - Horace Mann School) The school not only lists where students of the class of 2011 attend college but also where they were admitted.</p>
<p>I met a mom at a college visit day who was delighted that her daughter had been accepted early decision because the child’s school allowed students to wear school gear any time after they had been accepted, and that meant the kid could avoid school uniform every Friday for the rest of the year. Apparently that perk meant more than whatever college the shirt might be from!</p>
<p>@TheGFG
“jonri–yes, he pulled my daughter aside after practice and told her she was his best distance runner (she is objectively is), but that she’s “too good.” He seemed to mean that he doesn’t see how the other girls can beat her unless he takes her out of the way.”</p>
<p>Totally ridiculous. That’s the beauty of running. It’s not so much that you “win,” especially if the faster runner is being pulled by the coach. It’s that you beat your own personal best time. Otherwise, everybody but the fastest runner will be disappointed. At my kids’ school, the x-country team was the largest team because the coach nurtured and challenged every single runner. She did this by keeping statistics of every single runner, how they improved from race to race, and from year to year. The fast kids realized that having a new faster runner on the team made them run faster, too, i.e. their PRs improved. On the other hand, there were kids on the team who during their first year of running finished their race while pretty much everybody had already eaten their snacks, ready to hit the showers. Still these kids stuck with it and over time improved immensely. And many of these kids who never saw themselves as athletes are still running just to keep on exercising. You should tell the coach that this is the goal: To get kids to work hard to improve their times, not to “win” and to start doing a sport that they can continue for years to come.</p>
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<p>Hmm … my experience, as an alum of 3 selective schools, over the last 30 years I’ve tried being direct and I’ve tried hedging and both ways I lose.</p>
<p>My joke about this is … if someone wears school gear of a school at the level of a poster kid’s school they are showing school spirit … if someone wears the gear of a more select school they are being a snob.</p>
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<p>In my circle of friends, high school/college T-shirts are at the higher-end of “whatever wear” we’d don for everything from hanging out at local pizzerias and burger joints with friends or…yes…coffee dates. </p>
<p>It’s a way to allow us to relax and take it easy in the evenings/weekends after a long workweek of having to abide by stuffy corporate dress codes.</p>
<p>Having a big reVeal day assumes eVeryone is going to college. Kind of obnoxious inthink to assume that everyone is able to go to college who wants to. We read on this site everyday about kids whose money didn’t come thru, have horrid life circumsa ces and they have to postpone school, who have not yet fully embraced their disappointment and having to parade around school for all to see seems kind of mean.</p>
<p>Having sat thru a reunion of hs kids who graduated 8th grade together and the kids have got stand up and say where they are going, and some were kind of embarrassed, and for several it wasn’t that they couldn’t get into a state school, it was that they couldnt t afford it. Some kids didn’t show up because they didn’t want to have to explain themselves. There were some really guache parents as well. </p>
<p>Maybe I’m a style snob, but twe thy some thins should move beyond high school Tshirts. It’s just lazy. And to me kind of sad that people haven’t moved past high school. There are lots of casual ways to dress that aren’t what 17 hear olds wear.</p>
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<p>At all of the schools named in the story, nearly 100% are going off to college with many kids receiving FA/scholarship money to some really nice schools. </p>
<p>The few who weren’t at mine were either a few well-off kids taking a GAP semester/year or a few kids who decided to enlist in the US armed forces. </p>
<p>One younger alum from my HS enlisted in the US Navy’s Nuke program and after doing her enlistment…was able to get engineering credits for her military training at her undergrad. </p>
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<p>One of the most wonderful things to have happened in the last 5+ decades is the consigning of such notions like “Adults shouldn’t wear what 17 year olds wear” to the proverbial dustbin. </p>
<p>Especially if the occasion is hanging out with one’s best friends and the social circle isn’t one filled with fashion dictator types…except those who accept we’ll gently tease them by calling them “fashion models” and “GQ wannabes”.</p>
<p>I also know plenty of kids who aren’t going to get to go to college. These are families where there isn’t any extra money to the point where there isn’t always enough food. A person doesn’t necessarily know who these families are. They don’t broadcast it and they don’t want other people to know. I know about a couple of situations because the kids involved are really close friends with my own kids.</p>
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Cobrat, out of curiosity, when did you graduate from high school? Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever read one poster in the parent’s forum mention their high school (elite public magnet high school) days as much as you do. And that includes current high school students.</p>
<p>BTW - I graduated high school in 1974. I’m not shy to say.</p>
<p>And of course, feel free not to answer if you think that question is too personal. Or ballpark it by decade.</p>
<p>And if my post violates some TOS, sorry, feel free to delete. I’m really just curious.</p>
<p>Beenthere2- Track is different from cross country in that the number of runners in each event is more limited so that the meets don’t last forever. Otherwise, I totally agree. The beauty of running is competing against your own times. It’s nice if you can win, but it is still rewarding for anyone who continues to improve.</p>
<p>Agree with Beenthere2 and MomofWildChild. In our experience with both XC and track the coaches do a dance to groom their runners to peak, but not pass their peak in time for county, regional and then state meets. They also need to form a team that can score the most number of points, and not exhaust their runners during each meet. So sometimes the distance runners had to NOT run in some events because of the timing of events during a meet. Individual runners needed enough time between their events to recover. It really is a matter of protecting individual (particularly distance) runners during track meets. It took us awhile to understand that our son couldn’t run in every event in which he was the fastest runner on the team. He would have bombed trying to run in all those events, so other runners who were boat as fast ran in some events. . The coaches had to carefully pick the runners for each event. Our high school won states in cross country and track as a team three times during my son’s high school career, and sent individual runners and relay teams to state track meets during other years.</p>