Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Our local public high school

I had to LOL at this. Seriously though, isn't Lynbrook better than Cupertino High ? I thought Lynbrook/Monta Vista/Saratoga High/Paly/Gunn were the top-tier high schools in the valley/forest.

It also bothers me so much that a lot of school districts are not good in most towns in the Bay Area.


I agree with this. The focus on extracurriculars is crazy. And what's even crazier, once the kid gets into a college of his/her choice, they drop the extracurricular like a hot potato. I joke saying that the extracurricular is actually more parent-driven than child-driven.

Those schools aren't as good as they claim to be. Most of those kids are being driven like beasts of burden by their parents (and homework-happy teachers, more homework doesn't make the school better). I know; I see them in the libraries in the summer doing AP coursework, and I know/have known some of them. I also read about them in the paper when they kill themselves to make it stop by stepping in front of trains (9 since 2009 with that method alone, IIRC).

The pressure starts young around here: I've probably written this before, but my DD had to have routine but major surgery a couple years ago, and her roommate was a kindergartner with the same problem. She was doing homework while still hooked up to an IV line. During Thanksgiving break, no less.

Write that journal! Do those sums!

Yeah. 5 is too old to take your first gymnastics or dance class for fun around here; my kids were embarrassed because their skills were not even close to those of the preschoolers who'd had 2-4 years of weekly lessons already. The teachers didn't even know what to do with a kid who was so behind.

Along those lines, I worked at a skating rink on weekends for a year, and you do not want to know about the parents and their miserable offspring. There was a girl doing a gorgeous axel during free skate one evening, and I complimented her to her mother. Mom was frowning. She said that the daughter was only doing "all right" (I was told that she had merely placed second at a recent competition). I started to watch them. The girl didn't look happy on the ice and the mom was frowning the entire time.

I've seen parents go out onto the ice to yell at their kids for not doing a perfect jump or spin. I've seen kids struggling for weeks to land a jump and then not smiling when they finally do.

The day I started, the other teachers told me to stay in the middle of the rink on report card days so that the parents couldn't complain to me about not passing Little Johnny or Little Susie from alpha to beta (or whatever). When some kids failed, their parents would sign them up for the next level anyway. I remember one of the teachers once had a whole class of kids in Freestyle 2 who should have repeated Freestyle 1.

Oddly, ice skating is the one thing you can start late, here. It's actually a family-fun kind of thing. Lots of moms laughing with little ones, kids can start at four or fourteen or bumble onto the ice with no skill at twenty. I wonder if it's partly because they won't take kids under 3.5 for lessons, while dance and gym start at 12-18 months.

Sorry, the snippet of info about the aschool band going to play at Carnegie Hall distracted me while I was making that list - Cupertino High's band is reputed to be one of the best nationally (according to someone who knows more about local high school bands than me).
I will change the list again to:
Lynbrook/Monta Vista/Saratoga High/Paly/Gunn/Cupertino High

I agree. The relatively low ceiling of the SAT also has the same effect, as does the reporting of AP exam scores only on a 1:5 scale, where the score 5 corresponds to a wide range of raw scores.

My DD10's gymnastics experience involves a wide range of ages. She's one of the youngest in her tumbling class, but one of the oldest in her gymnastics class. She actually likes being one of the oldest, because the coach lets her and her friend lead warm-ups. The basic idea is that kids end up in the right group for their skill levels, and age isn't a factor.

This is a gym in which the owners/head trainers speak about their Olympics experiences in thick, Eastern European accents, where competition trophies line more than one wall, and where bad parents are all too easy to find.

At the end of this journey, you've either got the degree, or you don't, so I don't see any point in fussing over a couple of percentage points on a single exam.

Yuck. Checkpoint … Are your kids truly happy?