Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Parenting arms race article

Many people, including me, dislike Everyday Mathematics, the curriculum used here. I expect that the curriculum at the Russian School of Math my middle son attends is better and is taught better (by someone who is not expected to teach all subjects). The term "arms race" implies a deadweight loss, but the competition for college admissions encourages some parents to spend extra time and money educating their childrne. Would it better for society if I spent my disposable income on a fancy car?

I don't want my children to work past the point of exhaustion in high school. One way to avoid that may be to build a good foundation in elementary and middle school.

Maybe there's just a terminology issue, but I don't see why playdates have to be structured. My kid's just had two days on which two different friends came over for the day. I ignored them, except to remind them when it was lunchtime and point them at the food I'd left out, they got on with whatever they wanted to do. I'm also in an apartment, they were indoors all day. That's unstructured play in my book. Even if you can't be the one supervising, someone is - if that someone is someone you're paying to do it, surely you can just ask them not to structure?

My view is arranging the playdate is structured. What they do is unstructured but Levine's book was about total unstructure, at least that was my interpretation.

The child that goes out on its own, finds kids to hang with or not and then they originate their own play was all crucial to development of self esteem.

When I was DD's age, 9, I went to the store, crossing busy streets, figuring out the optimal choice of penny candy for my dime or bought bread for my mother at the grocery store next door. I found friends and we created games, we would go to someone's house, find cookies, make Kool-aid on our own.
Make sandwiches. Parents were often somewhere in the neighborhood but I do not remember a parental presence very much.
We grabbed our Barbies and went to someone's house and created a Barbie village. We had to be far more creative, we had a lot less stuff. We took far more initiative than DD when I arranged a playdate yesterday and today. In Levine's view, the playdates are structural activities at this age, not enough initiative for the kids.

Ah, I see. Yes, that's hard to get these days. (Outside boarding schools, actually! Odd that this might be an argument in favour of those...)

If that were really true, why are kids applying to 8+ schools?

Who wants to admit they are going to the school 5th on their list?

I know of one kid who got rejected by Amherst, her first choice early admission, got wait listed at Princeton, got into Columbia, which is now her first choice. Yes, she will say that. Now, many people will say Columbia is a great school but it wasn't her first choice. My point being the mind changes with the path.

I need to stop procrastinating and work. I get into these topics for distraction.

My kid had a bunch of reaches on her list and she was accepted to her 8th choice. 6 rejections and 1 waitlist in her top 7 schools.

I don't think this article is talking about kids who apply to top schools. If it were, the percentage of students accepted to their first choice school would be a lot less than 75%.

I think the idea of "first choice" changes quite a bit once the acceptance letters are in, and financial reality begins.

And that's why there's all the hype. Even for the kids who are more interested in the state flagship, we've been telling kids for generations that if they earn top grades and/or excel in the right extracurriculars, they'll earn enough scholarships/grants to pay for college. That particular lie has gotten bigger every year.

The acceptance/rejection threads on College Confidential where applicants post their stats and application results are frightening. One can debate aspects of the admissions policies of the most prestigious colleges (weight of extracurriculars, legacy preferences, race and sex preferences, ...) but the hard math is that the number of places at the "top" 10 colleges has been about constant over the decades, while the population has increased and as students throughout the country vie for schools that used to be more regional. So it just keeps getting harder to get in to those schools. To stay sane you (umm, I) need to convince yourself that doing so is not make-or-break.

This is compounded by the fact that the average student can't self-finance university studies through summer work anymore:

http://www.theatlantic.com/educatio...working-your-way-through-college/359735/

It's also based on the composition of the board choosing the scholarships.