<p>Yes, we complain about the kids who cannot sit still, and then we complain about the lack of energy in the adults around us.</p>
<p>We punish the daydreamer in the school, and then when they grow up, we send them to expensive “creative visualization” classes.</p>
<p>We decide recess is unimportant, and then we wonder why we are wildly obese, as a nation.</p>
<p>We do so many things to get the exact opposite result we actually want, and then the kids are 17 and feel as if they have “sacrificed” so much for this, and they “need” these acceptances to validate what they have “given up.” But, what can you do? I don’t have an actual solution, unfortunately. I wish someone did.</p>
<p>I believe some of the decisions were made to punish me for refusing to do what they wanted me to do. They wanted me to sign my son up for Title I program when he was in Kindergarten and I refused. They also wanted me to obtain official diagnosis for his ADHD and obtain IEP and I refused. I remember they were telling me that if only I did what they wanted me to do, they could help me.</p>
<p>I am so glad I did not. I open enrolled him into another district when he was in 8th grade. They looked at his standardized scores and his ECs and signed him up for Honors Science class even though he did not meet GPA cutoff (the concept of turning the homework in was foreign to my son in 7th grade). If I did what our original school district wanted me to do, he would not be able to open enroll in our current school district (it is the law in our state).</p>
<p>In our current open enrollment school district the emphasis is on learning - they only assign 10 or 15% to homework and tests that measure child’s knowledge is 85-90%. Moreover, even without official diagnosis the teachers are willing to work with my son and other kids at his current school. More than once, I have heard a teacher say: I want to help my students to learn, so I am available before and after school to go over material, tests, assignments, etc. This was never an option at our previous school. </p>
<p>If I had to do it over again, I would start in our current open enrollment district (can’t/shouldn’t do home-school and can’t afford private). My daughter is striving in that school district (she is in elementary). They actually developed a program that allows kids to move out of lower level classes throughout the school year. And they have multiple level gifted and talented programs too (including one for exceptionally talented, which my daughter is not).</p>
<p>Maybe my judgement is clouded by my negative experience with our home school district, but so far I have not encountered glaring negatives with our current school district.</p>
<p>I agree that what you do in elementary will place you in middle school classes. However, this teacher I mentioned was telling the whole class they wouldn’t even be going to 6th grade! One kid even cried!</p>
<p>OP - I wish you the best of luck in your acceptances. I’m also worried that my S will not get in anywhere - we have one deferral and that’s it so far. You’re at least better off than he is at this point!</p>
<p>During a recent college visit, my DS and I met with a wonderful biology professor. He expressed the importance of hands-on learning, even at the college level. He recounted studies that showed how much less knowledge is absorbed by the students in a lecture-based teaching model versus one in which multiple learning methods are utilized. He also talked about how students teaching other students is often superior, since they are coming from a similar knowledge base. It reminded me of my neuroscience teacher who was unable to ‘dumb down’ his knowledge to a level that would be absorbable by our introductory-level brains.</p>
<p>It is nothing to do your qualification. It is only because that WC does not want too many Asian American girls. It is sort of discriminations. But it does not worth your time to fight it. Luckily there are many excellent colleges who do want students with your qualification and WC is not as top as you think. Move on and enjoy your life.</p>
<p>I loved my son’s first grade teacher, when the lunch monitors didn’t take the kids out on the playground, she’d take them. She said they were impossible to teach otherwise.</p>
<p>^genem29: Are you serious… I thought only Asian guys had issues… </p>
<p>Ahhhh I love administrations, they’re so inefficient and they make life terrible for me. They forced me to take ELD, even though I only needed SDAIE English. ELD is for those who don’t know English AT ALL, and need this class for extra help. I only needed SDAIE English, a specialized English class that would help me transition to an all-English environment. That took away a precious period from my freshman schedule. Then they were going to make me take ALGEBRA 1, because I had no transcript from my school in China. (I actually skipped 8th too, but the school admin doesn’t need to know that… I took 3rd twice and I didn’t want to be a year older than everyone else in my grade) They only backed down when my father got super firm and met up with principal. They were also going to force me to take a foreign language, even though I had already learned Chinese and passed the SAT and AP test. I was barely catching up on English; juggling a third language would just completely destroy me. The school also wouldn’t let me take AP Calc BC after finishing Honors Trig/Pre calc, thus I’m taking AB this year. It’s as if the school is intent on pushing everyone back and trying to lower everyone’s standards… I couldn’t understand why I was given such a hard time. </p>
<p>Then when I signed up for AP Lang, my freshman SDAIE teacher was like: “yeah, you’re probably going to have a hard time in that class”, aka “you’re going to fail, why even try”.</p>
<p>I always thought mean teachers and administrations were a Chinese specialty… until I came back to the States that is. </p>
<p>chaosakita: you’re stats are great… I don’t think you should be discouraged. Most colleges haven’t released decisions yet :)</p>
@chaosakita - Just because the tiny subset of people that is CC yaps about alternatives, keep in mind that almost everyone goes to a normal public HS. You’ll be fine.</p>
<p>@YuhikoJay - don’t let the turkeys get you down. I guess there are jerks everywhere. :(</p>
<p>Sorry to say…you just experienced a case of LCD(Lowest Common Denominator) teaching/advising common at many US K-12 schools. As you’ve probably surmised…it’s probably a flipside to what you may have experienced back in China where according to relatives…teachers tended to teach to the top half/third and expected everyone else to follow along or sink.</p>
<p>So what if no one from your high school has ever gone there? My D is probably the only person in the history of her high school to have even applied to Wellesley (and to Smith and Bryn Mawr, for that matter). Plenty of her classmates at W come from schools where it wouldn’t be common for applicants to wind up at a place like W. I really wish people on CC would get over this stupid assumption that it’s all about the school – they seem to be ignorant of the fact that there are 25,000-30,000 hs in this country, that with very few exceptions someone’s high school choice is not a reflection on them but just the happenstance of where their parents chose to live, and that elite schools want to expand their reach of high schools, not just recruit from the same 100 high schools over and over again.</p>
<p>As for your question as to how they track who visits campus – gosh, W tracks it the same way every other college does; you sign in when you visit and it gets plugged into some database. It’s not that hard. </p>
<p>And genem, you’re completely off base in your assertion. W has an extremely high number of Asian American students compared to their % in the population. There is zero evidence of “discrimination.” Get a grip, honestly.</p>
<p>Chaosakita - are you in an area where it would be reasonably easy for Wellesley to set up an alum interview? If so, then you really have no one but yourself to blame if you could have had that opportunity and didn’t do so. I’m not sure where you are, geographically speaking.</p>
<p>@cobrat: yup, they divide the year into the special class and the regular classes. Since my school was in a rural village and in a province where there were literally no good colleges, only the students in the special class were taught carefully and to the final gao kao test; so far, no one from the regular classes have been accepted to a Chinese top 50 university (which is pretty bad).</p>
<p>Pizzagirl - actually my S’s school has the same problem with Harvard - nobody from his hs has been accepted there in years. He goes to an elite prep school in a wealthy area. Maybe something the school did in the past ruffled Harvard’s feathers?</p>
<p>There is an arrogance about this question that is really offputting. There are 25,000 - 30,000 high schools in the country. What makes anyone think that any one high school is so important that Harvard “owes” someone from any school admittance? They don’t HAVE a goal of admitting-one-person-from-each-high-school. The common sense explanation - that it’s just a hard school to get into and has a single digit admissions rate -is the correct answer, not some silly belief that Harvard cares passionately about showing some high school who’s boss.</p>
<p>Oh Come ON Pizzagirl, you know there’s a conspiracy!</p>
<p>Actually, around here, people are more annoyed that UofI, arguably one of THE most overpriced instate schools in the country, cannot accept everyone qualified and that even Indiana is getting tough to get into. LOL.</p>
<p>I think there are kids around here who really would turn down Harvard for UofI or UW-Madison.</p>
<p>But, the top 25 or so schools do take kids from the High school.</p>
<p>They may not necessarily hold grudges…but they do have institutional/personal biases which influences which high schools are preferred and more importantly…which high schools to avoid/minimize number of admits due to factors ranging from academics lacking in any reasonable rigor to an observed pattern of too many applicants/admitted students exhibiting off-putting attitudes and/or practically all of them turning down their school for higher ranking ones. </p>
<p>Those factors are a reason why many elite/respectable private and OOS universities were willing to admit classmates from HS like the one I attended with far lower GPAs than applicants from academically mainstream high schools. </p>
<p>On the other hand, my GC also recounted that a certain elite college ended up rejecting everyone applying one year* because they admitted several dozen kids the previous year and they all turned that Ivy down to attend HYPSMC or free rides at other private or in-state/OOS public colleges. </p>
<ul>
<li>Sometime in the mid-late '80s.</li>
</ul>