When I was 13 years old, I wanted everyone to call me “Han”. And to speak fluent Latin. Just admitting that up front as research material that’ll be helpful in a few minutes. Also, I knew I wanted to make music, but my favorite album was a toss up between the Star Wars Original Soundtrack and Barry Manilow: LIVE. And then… disco.
Ok.
The local Board of Education just wrote us an email asking our opinion of their high school selection process.
We had opinions, and suggestions, and even the lightest of criticisms, but they weren’t having any of that. They sent a multiple choice form which lacked the space necessary to truly describe the experience. I would like to use this forum to compose a brief yet more comprehensive reply.
It is only fair to point out that the task is nigh-impossible; a million children of which nearly 80,000 are graduating from middle school at once with 542 choices spread out over 300 square miles.
I can’t imagine that many of anything being sorted anywhere. Even a talking enchanted wizard hat would need a lozenge around kid number 24,080. I am not heartless regarding the vastness of the task.
However, given that a great deal of people my age attended “the school closest to their house”, it is difficult to understand this different beast, where children are asked not only what building they want to go to, but the focus of their lives beyond the next four years. High Schools are now specialized with the focus of preparing children for specific career paths. They make no pretense that this school is great in one thing and doesn’t focus so much on the other, so if you have an “other” kid, you should probably look through the extensive database and find an “other” school.
We, have an “other” kid, definitely, and did all due diligence to find that “other” school, but again, it is difficult to ask someone so young what they want to do for the rest of their lives.
Also, “Han”. The person I dreamed up for myself to grow into when I was 13 years old had a leather vest on all the time and a dance floor in his basement that lit up different colors like in “Saturday Night Fever”. I needed, desperately, a high school that taught me about EVERYTHING, so that I could fill in the (incredibly large) gaps in my curiosity, interests, and whatever talents I was attempting to cultivate. A general education, like a grocery store, but with those little tasting stations on the ends of the aisle so I could figure out what I really liked.
“Mmmm. Latin.”
“Eeeugh. Trigonometry.”
The application process was intense. Schools shared a list of basic requirements and then added specific extras on top of that. All of this was laid out in their descriptions, which also had a calculation of “your odds to be accepted” which compared the amount of seats available to the number of applicants adding in a mathematical odds science born not of Las Vegas, but of church basement raffles: every student was assigned a random lottery number. These were not, as you may first imagine, actual numbers, but coded alphanumerical hex lines, as not to alarm anybody who got the last ones.
Of course, someone decoded the numbering system, so that we all could tell where we were in the overall scene of things.
We, got the last one. We were, indeed, alarmed.
Shortly after the lottery assignments, parents began to compare percentiles, trying to casually pop them into conversation.
“Yes, well, kids clothes are more expensive than ever, you’re 100% right. Speaking of percent, we found out that we were in the 32nd percentile for schools last week! What? 44? Well, that’s still above 50%, you should do fine! How did you do?” I was asked.
I always paused a tic before saying, “97.”
AGHAST. Blanching, mouths open, the whole thing. It was kind of wonderful to watch. The looks pushed beyond pity to a Hunchback of Notre Dame kind of revulsion and fascination. Only one person was brave enough to ask “What are you going to do???”
We found some schools that did not use the lottery system, and The Child created, scanned, photographed, and uploaded many portfolio pieces to their server. She filmed videos: animations and narrated collections of curated work. If we weren’t lucky, we would be industrious.
I’ve heard parents say that the complexity and stress level of their children’s applications to college paled in comparison to this experience. Again, it is an impossible situation, tens of thousands of students, but if all the schools kind of taught all the same thing except maybe for some electives, it would be fine. It’s the pigeonholing that’s the main problem.
So if the DOE survey did allow comments, I would have included this letter:
We accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole six weeks to complete whatever it was you needed from us, but we think you’re crazy to make our kids tell you who they think they are. What do you care? The world sees them as they want to see them, in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. My child could be either a brain, an athlete, a basket case, princess, or a criminal. Correct?
But it is our greatest hope that, no matter what school she attends, she discovers that she is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a whole lot more. Not a criminal, though…she can skip that.
Sincerely yours, The Michaels.
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