Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums High School Boarding Schools

I have brought this subject up a good year ago.
Here is the old thread:
http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/14184/1.html

The subject is dear to my heart again as DS has decided to apply. He has even posted this as his status on FB a few days ago (I had to laugh at this).
So we are in the turmoil again. But this time he wants to go (well, sort of, in a teenage kind of way) and I am willing to let him go.
He has started HS and both him and us are seeing that the next three years are going to be a HUGE challenge logistically and time wise as well. We live in a small town, he gets up at 5:30 every day to be at school at 7:35. Once a week he is up at 5:00 to have a violin lesson at 6:00 (crazy!!!).
Right now he is down with the flu, high fever and really sick
Share your experiences please if you are familiar with the process, have something to add. He will apply to Andover, Exeter and St.Paul.

Dear friend of mine's son just graduated from St. Paul. She is very impressed.

She mentioned that lots of kids decelerate a year when they start a boarding school. Is this something you are looking for? If not, it's like a 'built in' gradeskip. KWIM?

My DS13 seems to be 'precocious' in his drive for independence, so I can certainly see the benefit. But summer camp led to powerful feelings of missing us. How does your son do while he is away?

Overall, boarding school seems like a very reasonable way to develop talent.Best Wishes to your son's application!
Grinity

Best Wishes,
Grinity

I know how you feel, TIRED.

We get up at 5:00am almost every weekday of the year either to beat the bulk of morning rush hour traffic en route to my kid�s schools or to get to the community swim team practice in the summer. The bonus is that we get to wake up at 4:30am during the dead of winter so dd15 can join her school swim team (in another state) by 6:00am.

With the $27,000 average in financial aid from Exeter for middle-income families, plus the cost savings of not having to feed a teenage boy or drive him to school an hour away, we could actually be ahead financially if ds went!

Dd could be driving herself soon. When is the deadline for application?

I was at Andover for 11th and 12th grade during the mid-1980's, 10 or 12 years after George W Bush was there.

It was academically challenging enough for me: I was able to take enough AP classes that I cut a year off of college. I had a number of good teachers, some of whom I remember fondly. No teachers that I remember being bad. I remember being frustrated, though, that I knew more about computer programming than the programming teacher. (But this was early in the PC age, and they weren't quite equipped for it yet.)

As a prep school, Andover naturally had an active college counselling program and my counsellor gave me good advice. ("If you don't feel like you fit in here, you should apply to MIT--you'll be right at home". She was right!) Andover was traditionally a feeder school for Yale (and Exeter for Harvard). A number of classmates went off to Ivy League schools, but it was by no means a guaranteed in. Lots of kids went off to respectably preppy state schools like UVA.

Keep in mind that these are schools for the upper class, not schools for the gifted. Andover and Exeter are two of the top prep schools, and they do have high academic standards: I remember my first day at Andover the headmaster saying something about my classmates being in the top 3% of the nation. So that is sort of normal gifted-program level of giftedness. It is not a school of HG or PG kids, but there are, of course, some there.

At 16, I was ready for, and enjoyed the independence of boarding school. But as a socially awkward and nerdy kid, I did not feel that I really fit in among the preppys. I wasn't an outcast, but I wasn't particularly happy, either.

The dorms did all have an adult living in them, and I suppose I could have gone to them for help or emotional support had I needed or wanted it. They must have checked in with me to see how I was doing at some point, but I have no memory of it, so it must have been kind of perfunctory. I would imagine that the 8th and 9th graders would have had more adult supervision.

The hallowed halls and academic prestige were a backdrop but teen life went on as normal, except with fewer adults around. My first roommate in 11th grade was a pothead whose father was someone important on wall street. That didn't work out, so I ended up rooming with someone more straightlaced like me. But then he took to partying with his older brother, and started staying out late drinking.

For 12th grade, I got a single room (no roommate) and that was a better situation for me. I lived directly above the guy who was said to be the coke dealer. Other dormmates included a guy who owned oil wells and had his own holding company and the son of the president of a Hollywood movie studio. He was a nice guy, and let me play with his CD player and Macintosh computer back when those things were brand new expensive high-tech. He seemed to decide I wasn't cool enough near the end of the year--around the time that he started spending the night in his girlfriend's dorm...

Hope this helps!

Delbows - I do not know if there is a specific deadline for applications. Check with every school.
Thanks for the insightful information. No, we have not visited and will not visit unless DS is accepted.
Registered for SSAT today - Ghost inquired if they would take his SAT scores instead and was told that no, he needs to take SSAT. That test is expensive - $110.
He is down with the flu now and I am so grateful he is at home and not at BS

I think maybe I'd summarize my longer post above like this. I'd only consider sending my DS to Andover if I felt:

1) He was independent: eager and able to be away from home.

2) He was socially mature: able to make friends easily and likely to be happy there.

3) He was emotionally mature, secure in himself and well grounded: so he could resist teen peer pressure with less adult oversight than he'd have at home.

So you think there is more peer pressure at the boarding school vs regular HS?

Probably not more peer pressure. I'd worry about more sophisticated and seductive peers and less countervailing adult presence.

PJF,
Thank you for the objective post about your personal experience at Andover. The way you describe yourself as a teenager reminds me of my son.
Like CFK, my son also attends a day/boarding school. He is still considered a geek, but it is not a hostile environment. Unfortunately, due to the commute, he can�t participate in extracurriculars to the extent that he would like. He particularly enjoys working with the older geeky kids in his math and physics courses although the best aspect of the school in his opinion, are his teachers and mentors. They are all so well qualified in their particular subjects and they treat him more as a professional underling than an annoyance or at best, a tolerated student. Ds�s conversations with his teachers are never confined to the parameters of the weekly lesson objectives. A few have commented to me that they enjoy his depth and the intellectual challenge he often poses. I do not think he would ever want to go back to a regular school.

BTW, he did have some teachers and an administrator who appreciated his interest in learning at his previous (high achieving) regular school, but the structure is so very different.

Delbows - do you mind sharing which school it is?

PJF - very thruthful, personal view. Thank you for your honesty.
Do you mind if I ask why you stayed at Andover, since it looks like you did not fit in/did not enjoy it to the fullest?
Do you think spending two years at Andover has shaped you in a way that your local HS would not be able to?

DS has asked that, if admitted, he will have to stay even if he dislikes it. My response was that he will have to make it through Christmas and after that it is going to be his call. It is going to be his call to begin with when he visits, but one needs a little more than a week to know what it is really all about...