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Whoops, I didn't see wjb's intolerant post as well, so I'll return briefly to defend myself - which is astounding that I would even need to. For the record, I am hardly jealous, wjb, as my D is attending Princeton.
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<p>For the record, epiphany, I was not referring to you. Please try to read a little more closely.</p>
<p>As my mother always said when I railed against perceived inequities, "Life isn't fair."</p>
<p>I wholeheartedly agree with Curmudgeon: This family -- and more important, Chelsea herself, used their resources to their best advantage. And if I had more resources, I would willingly invest them in my children and their education. Or my future grandchildren's. </p>
<p>I don't think it's right to say, "I can't go to a summer program, so I resent you for sending your child to one" or "I can't afford music lessons, so you shouldn't have them, either."</p>
<p>I think this thread has devolved into a litany of complaints about how people spend their money and raise their children. To each his own, and can't we toast each other's successes without acrimony?</p>
<p>"If you enjoy the intellectual stimulation at academic camps, there is no reason not to go. However, it just annoys me when my friends spend tens of thousands of dollars a year to go to Harvard SSP or CTY or TIP in order to prepare for classes that they'll be taking in high school the next year--just to get a small advantage. By all means, if you want to take something cool just because you are interested, there is nothing wrong with curiosity."</p>
<p>Part of growing up is learning not to be annoyed about things that don't concern you and are out of your control anyway. And how other people spend their money typically falls in that area.</p>
<p>What makes you think Chelsea wasn't intellectually interested in the areas that she pursued? Frankly, she sounds like she's TRULY passionate about the things she enjoyed - which is refreshing in light of all the drones-who-are-dutifully-entering-science-fairs-because-papa-thinks-that's-the-ticket-to-Harvard. No offense to science fair winners of course!</p>
<p>"To each his own, and can't we toast each other's successes without acrimony?"
Hear hear! I'll drink to that [ oops, too early in the day out here]</p>
<p>yes, I am a teenager and therefore probably know very little about what parents chose to do with their children. However I still <em>personally</em> dont believe in tutors/prep classes etc. It just makes me feel (personally) that I somehow bought my scores and stuff. It's kinda like donating to harvard and getting in. I am just saying my opinion, sorry for trying to push my views on other people.</p>
<p>And yes I am in an upper/upper middle class town (median family income ~150k) and yes we do have an advantage over innercity kids. However I try to help out by tutoring, donating, etc, through clubs that Ive formed (although they don't help much i know im just a kid :()</p>
<p>Naricssa, so take what pizzagirl/ mom said to heart-</p>
<p>"Part of growing up is learning not to be annoyed about things that don't concern you and are out of your control anyway"</p>
<p>Very few can have it all, and you are lucky enough to be more privileged than most HS students in the US.</p>
<p>cur,
Yes you do, too, know the meaning of the word "discrete." (As opposed to "discreet.") It just means distinct, separate. The "integrated math" approach used by many schools now sometimes does not teach the basics of geometry sufficiently -- as a separate discipline -- to be useful to the geometry questions that come up on the SAT. Btw, integrated math is <em>supposed</em> to teach Alg, Geo., Trig, but often teaches neither Geo or Trig sufficiently. It is esp. a problem at the school my D's attended, whose scores on the geometric reasoning portion of the SAT (reported as a subscore by collegeboard) have been substandard & reduced the overall Quantitative Reasoning Score on the SAT I for these students, consistently.</p>
<p>Other people on cc have reported extremely poor math teaching of basic school math throughout elem., middle, & high school. That is not necessarily corrected by the otherwise excellent drill/discipline method proposed by xiggi. You first have to understand what you're studying, before you "review" it.</p>
<p>Newspaper reporters live off sensationalism and controversy. Too bad the subjects of their interviews often have no say as to what actually would go into the story. My D was once approached and interviewed by a reporter from a major paper, but being a very suspicious kind, D asked the reporter in writing to run the article by her mom before publishing it. Guess what happened?</p>
<p>After reading the original article, I too had questions. My first thought was, "Wow! Amazing kid. But what would this stay at home mom do now that the product of here relentless educational efforts is going to become independent? What would fill this void? And how would this girl adjust to being one of the many faces in the crowd vs. the center of the world?" Post by Chelsea (#112?) answered it all! Mom, who was not a helicopter after all, will devote 100% of her time to her business, and Chelsea will do just fine in this world. And the "private tutoring" was not as expensive as the live in nanny/teacher one family around here still has for their high school-aged girls.</p>
<p>Just a note to Chelsea: time to switch reading material if it is the real science that interests you. Science and Nature are the two finest publications in the scientific world.</p>
<p>It's ok that you were saying your opinion, Narcissa ... it's that you were disparaging Chelsea for taking advantage of resources. I think it's more than evident that she didn't "buy" her way in to anyplace.</p>
<p>I did read closely, wjb. For the record (again) your post followed on the heels of broetchen's, who directly referred to my civilized argument with xiggi, intervening unnecessarily in that argument. (But there's an apology already from that poster.) Rather than distinguish yourself from that & state your own argument, you built on his phrase about intolerance, jumping from there to jealousy. Hence I was justified, I believe, in coming to that conclusion.</p>
<p>(Please try to write a little more closely. Thank you.)</p>
<p>^^^epi, wjb has no control over when her post WILL APPEAR, when many people are posting at the same! I posted something and it appeared 6 posts later than the post I was referring to! She was referring to cgm! lighten up a little.</p>
<p>"Newspaper reporters live off sensationalism and controversy."</p>
<p>A fact which I find not only regrettable, but reprehensible. And I so hope that the Trib author is reading this thread. I would be so embarrassed to be the author, but as Chelsea now knows from my PM, it happened to me as well once.</p>
<p>Epiphany: Sigh. I was continuing a response to cgm, as several other posters easily discerned and advised you. I am sorry you were confused by my posts.</p>
<p>Citygirlsmom wrote:</p>
<p>"And if the article rubbed me the wrong way, that is not my fault,..it is how you chose to present yourselves".</p>
<p>CGM, I am in no way ashamed by anything we have done or by anything said in the Trib article. We presented ourselves as a home schooling family who took an alternative path to meet our daughter's needs, enjoyed every bit of our unique journey and were blessed with amazing college admissions success at the end of it. Why you find this so awful, I really cannot fathom. And it is similarly not my fault that your consistent denigrations of my family and disparagement of my daughter's achievements, saying they are not noteworthy and are somehow ill-gotten, are beginning to rub me the wrong way.</p>
<p>I will also submit to you that I think it is really my music room that rubs you the wrong way.</p>
<p>I will be happy to justify my daughter's coursework to you! I am happy to share information on what worked so well for us with anyone who would like to hear. I can't include the sixteen page document I created detailing every course from the transcript I also created for my daughter, or include the school profile we created for her college applications as well, but I'll try to give you the Cliff notes version.</p>
<p>Chelsea started begging to play the harp when she was four. She didn't get to start lessons until she was more than five and a half, because it took us that long to save up the money to buy her first harp. We were in the early years of starting our company, and that was during the days when we had to search the sofa for change to put together $20 so I'd have cash when I went to Virginia for my grandmother's funeral. </p>
<p>During those days, I looked at every school in our area to try to find a positive school situation for my little girl, who started talking at 17 weeks old, reading just after her second birthday, and solving systems of equations with three variables when she was 5. I found what I hoped would be a good place for her, and my husband and I scraped together the hefty private school tuition while still working to get our business off the ground. My husband and I, just to dispel myths about us being portrayed here, did not come from money. In fact, I am the the first generation in my family to go to four-year college. My grandfather went to third grade. Ross and I both won full need-based scholarships to Cornell, and didn't stop paying the college loans we took out for everything else, including the costs of a U of Chicago MBA, until we were in our forties. That's how privileged our background has been.</p>
<p>Kindergarten was horrible for Chelsea, on so many levels. Whoever posted before that we deprived a classroom of a good student for others to emulate - this is simply not the case. Chelsea was teaching herself to write cursive when she started kindergarten, and signed in each morning in cursive. The teachers became more and more angry and forbade her to do so, believing it would make the other students feel badly. Absolutely not - the other kids loved it and wanted to be shown how to do this themselves. So while the teachers forbade Chelsea to be advanced and punished her for it, Chelsea went underground and taught the kids to write cursive at recess and in the coat closet, and to spell (correctly, not inventedly).</p>
<p>After several weeks of this kind of thing (along with the daily, "OK, everyone come sit in the circle for a reading game - and Chelsea, you can't play") and so, so much more, Chelsea begged us to take her out and home school her. I decided to honor my daughter's gut intuition about what was right for her (especially as that is something it was important to me that she grow up honoring) and give it a shot. I was fairly terrified, but I just jumped in and tried to educate myself and do the best I could. I thought if she just reads and paints the rest of kindergarten, that will be fine, and I could look for another school. However, home schooling proved to be so absolutely fantastic, for Chelsea and for our family life, that we never looked back.</p>
<p>I decided to see what I could put together for the money I was spending on a traditional education that was literally failing my daughter at every level. Let's say I had kept her in that school, as Narcissa seems to believe would have been better. Tuition this year at that school would have cost me $21,000 base price - that's before the fees and add-ons. You might be surprised by what types of experiences and opportunities you can put together yourself for your children with this kind of money. Citygirlsmom, take one more look at my music room. Think of each of those instruments as a year's worth of private school tuition. Would you resent us less if Chelsea had a few years of misery in private schools for our money instead of these musical instruments? </p>
<p>I really wish the online article also included the closeup of Chelsea's face that was in the print version. You might have noticed the light coming from her face - it's brighter than the light coming through my music room's glorious windows (the light is why I bought this house!). If I had spent the money on private school tuition instead - which you might approve of more, who knows - I know in my heart that that light would not be shining from her face like it does today.</p>
<p>And that is what matters to me. You can judge my family harshly all you want, that's certainly your right. Fortunately, that has no bearing on who we really are.</p>
<p>I'm not sure what the limits are on posts, so I'll send this one along now providing some historical background and post later with answers to CGM's questioning of Chelsea's coursework. I'm very proud of it, and will delight in giving you the details you seek.</p>
<p>To those posting about the vileness of the media:</p>
<p>Jeeze, people. My husband is a newspaper editor and I'm a columnist. Not all of us are bad people, and most of us do our best to get the facts right.</p>
<p>A lot of the criticism of newspaper articles comes from people who are appalled by what they ACTUALLY said. It's a lot easier to say, "I didn't mean it that way" or "They misquoted me" than to admit you said something silly/arrogant/idiotic/untrue and it ended up in print. </p>
<p>Oh, and for the person who said that the reporter didn't let the student's mother read the story: that's a journalistic no-no at major papers. In fact, it will get you fired very quickly. Think about it: That's like letting the subject of your story be your editor. How accurate/realistic would that be? Should our White House reporter ask George Bush to be one of his reviewers/editors?</p>
<p>My daughter had something of a parallel experience to Chelsea's.
We were contacted by a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times for an article about unschooling. The reporter was given our email by the head of a local unschooling organization whom I had once encouraged to homeschool.<br>
In December, 2006, my daughter's picture appeared on the cover of the Sun-Times with the headline "Unschooled. What if kids could ditch school and choose to learn on their own? Abby _____ did and she's won early admission to Princeton".
Some people assumed we knew the reporter. We didn't. The article had been in the works for a while and the admission just happened to coincide. Like Chelsea and her family, there was no attempt at horn-tooting on our part.
Also like Chelsea and her family, we welcomed the opportunity to provide a positive example of homeschooling to anyone who might be interested. We live in a liberal neighborhood of Chicago, Hyde Park, and if you think that means automatic tolerance of diversity, it doesn't. Hyde Park is also a center of people who believe in school as a secular religion. Sometimes I feel like a pacifist at West Point.
My daughter never had tutors or took classes of any kind, at home or elsewhere. It is literally true that the largest expense was overdue library fines, if you don't count public transportation expenses for moving about the city. The article focussed on the concept of unschooling and didn't note the shoestring part. I bring it up to encourage people who feel that they need special resources to teach yourself. You don't. I also believe that Chelsea would have had rich experiences with or without the extras her parents were able to provide her. I feel certain she would have the same college results. Her achievements are her own. The money thing is a red herring.
My daughter also used the SAT practice test book as her sole SAT prep. If we knew of the xiggi method at the time, she would have used that. I'm a believer. Oh well, she has a younger sister coming up!</p>
<p>Just a note regarding post 173 & similar well-meaning ones, which I appreciate. I don't think I'm overreacting. When there's fast-paced posting, it's esp. important to reference the post when responding. You don't need to do fancy quotes. (I'm terrible at that.) But it helps if you either quote the post # or directly address the poster by screen name. That avoids a lot of misunderstanding. And if you're being coy because you don't directly want to confront that poster, you do run the risk of inadvertently offending a nearby replier by not being clear to whom or about whom you are speaking. A little responsibility, please, but again I appreciate the effort to clarify.</p>
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I looked at every school in our area to try to find a positive school situation for my little girl, who started talking at 17 weeks old, reading just after her second birthday, and solving systems of equations with three variables when she was 5.
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<p>Chelsea was a wizard. The muggle teachers would never understand her. Her mom did the right thing by homeschooling her.</p>
<p>
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"Chelsea followed the "Xiggi" method of preparing for the SAT!"</p>
<p>(which sometimes works, xiggi, but often does not -- regardless of your belief in your "system").
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<p>Epiphany, while I should ignore the comment, I find it necessary to reply. </p>
<p>For starters, I am not expecting anyone to "buy" into my "system" for the very simple reason that I am not selling it nor pushing it. When I joined this forum more than five years ago, I spent my time reading prior posts with the secret hope of learning from the experiences of others. After seeing a number of problems showing up regularly because they tripped many students, I decided to offer a few suggestions on how to solve them in a manner that followed the spirit of the SAT. In those years, there was a very dynamic exchange of opinions on the SAT forum and there weren't talks of a Xiggi "method." I posted so often and in so many places that a few parents asked me to reduce my "suggestions" to a single post.</p>
<p>And to this date, my method (a term I never liked or pushed) is very much what it was ... a simple and cheap alternative that is supposed to help without investing a lot of dimes but requires a dedicated effort. </p>
<p>Inasmuch as I could argue about your definition of "sometimes works but often does not" I believe that there is no reason to attempt to measure the effectiveness of something that is available to anyone, and at a price that should please everyone. If you feel that you only get what you pay for, I'll simply raise my shoulders and answer with the tween favorite expression, namely "whatever!" All I know, is that I offered a set of suggestions that were not meant to be a cure to all the symptoms of our failing system of education. I focused on a few areas that seemed to trouble many of the Class of 2007 and Class of 2008 and hoped my "ideas" could help a few. </p>
<p>Looking at the alternatives, especially from the commercial side of the business, I'll take that "sometimes works, but often does not" as a quasi compliment. Of course, a better yardstick would have been to count the positive PM and emails I received and weigh them against the negative and complaining ones. But, I think that the outcome is something for me to know and for you to speculate about. From a selfish point of view, I think that the "sometimes works" ended up representing a sizeable positive contribution. </p>
<p>However, my reason for answering was not to defend my method, but to express my dismay about the tone of this thread. My post to Chelsea was not meant to attract attention to my "method" or present an agenda. </p>
<p>Seeing how people feel compelled to see ulterior motives in everything and lend an overly critical (if not envious) eye to the accomplishment of others leaves me as baffled as saddened.</p>
<p>alchemymom,</p>
<p>I'm sorry you're having to defend yourself. Congratulations to your daughter! </p>
<p>Narcissa, I agree that the daughter had wonderful resources and I'm sure that many kids would do better in life if they had tutors and international trips. Still, this young lady's achievements are remarkable and her parents have gone to great lengths to help her academic and musical pursuits. That commitment to family, growth and learning is a wonderful thing.</p>