Well, it’s August. The first fall catalogue arrived in the mail the other day, a sure sign that summer is on the wane. Meanwhile, Target is out of beach towels, and the special back corner of the store is now fully stocked with school supplies (soon to morph into Halloween Central and Christmas Decoration Heaven).
And my thoughts are starting to turn to the coming school year, counting down the days until school starts and–yes, sad to say–summer activities for next year.
[Note: the sweet spot of summer is that two weeks before the 4th of July, when the days loom with anticipation and promise. It's quickly all down hill from there.]
But first, this summer. C. had a fabulous time at her 2-week immersion language camp. Granted, she did get off the plane in quite a snit, railing at the “condescending” airline staff and vowing never to fly with them again (our seasoned traveler had to fly as an unaccompanied minor). Once that storm passed (traveling since dawn with minimal food didn’t help), she just chattered on about the wonderfulness of it all: the songs, the activities, the counselors, her fellow campers, the food, bathing in the lake. She loved, loved, loved it.
They returned the raves. A week later I received a summary of her session, noting more than once how helpful she was to her fellow campers, how she had “such a positive attitude and smile on her face,” that “she was very patient,” and–again–how it was a pleasure to see her “each day with a smile on her face and lots of questions to ask.” For a mom getting feedback on her child, it doesn’t get much better. C. also seems to have brushed up on a fair amount of the language. She had wanted to attend this camp last year, but I blanched at the cost with airfare…plus the traumas of 7th grade were a little too fresh. This year I felt differently as a) I’m working now b) she’s a year older, ready to spread her wings, and c) I thought it was important for her to solidify our somewhat sketchy foreign language homeschooling prior to entering the high school, where it’s expected she’ll be ready for 3rd year level instruction.
Bottom line: she loved it and wants to go back next year. But I found myself hemming and hawing and “we’ll see-ing” in part because of a book which in her absence I had picked up against my better judgment, What High Schools Don’t Tell You: And Other Parents Don’t Want You To Know, by Elizabeth Wissner-Gross. What can I say? It was mentioned on a listserv and while at Borders my curiosity got the better of me. I caved.
It was an insidious read, sort of like Edmund’s experience with Turkish Delight. At first it felt kind of good, because (by chance and not design), we had managed to hit several of the author’s breathless “secrets.” Yay us. But the further one got in, the queasier one felt. Oh dear, all these strategic summer plans were based on the idea of four summers before senior year, which meant this one counted. And it was all predicated on your child having a “plan,” a “goal,” and area of “passion.” All those sample “ideal” resumes, stuffed with prestigious activities and awards, each building neatly one upon the other. How to choose? Were we too late? And how the hell could anyone afford it all?
And then there was the tone. Well I shouldn’t have been surprised, it was right there in the title. The overt competitiveness and sly gamesmanship. The little morality plays: Valedictorian arrives at competitive university with confidence and high hopes. Finds that the other students all know each other from years of math and science competitions and will have a tough time making top grades and getting in this crowd, “quit[s] the pre-med track entirely, realizing that her defeat had happened years before she got to college.”
I have to admit, it played me like a violin, tapped directly into a vein. I was that kid in many ways. Although I don’t fit the stereotype, I’m first generation–my parents really didn’t have a clue about how the American system worked or what to do with this bookish kid who sprang up in their midst. I’ve done well, all things considered, for someone who had to figure it own on her own. But having gone as far as I have, I realize how much farther I could have gone had someone fostered my talents, offered guidance. And it didn’t help that I was born in that demographic sliver at the very end of the “baby boom.” At times It feels as if I’ve been served up their dregs for the past 40 years, missing the boom times, managing to graduate into recessions after high school, college and graduate school. This recent Post magazine piecec on college superachievers stated it well:
Members of this generation are notoriously attached to — and coached by — their parents, which would mean, um, me and my cohort, those of us who came of age in the Reagan-era recession and who had not the faintest idea what we were going to do when we graduated, in large part because nobody seemed to want to hire us. Back in 1982, when I graduated, classmates who participated in on-campus corporate interviews literally wallpapered their rooms with the rejection letters they received afterward….
When I mention this to Edwin Koc of the college and employers association, he responds sympathetically, remarking that “1982 was the worst job market since the Great Depression.” In large part, he says, this was because the country was making the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy. “For a couple of years there, it was like Death Valley.”
This may partly explain why our generation — having traveled through the valley of the shadow of a workplace that didn’t want us — is so eager to make sure our children don’t go through the same dispiriting process.
Guilty as charged. I want L. and C.’s amazing talents to have the chance to flower fully. I want them to have the opportunities I didn’t. The luxury of choices. Plus in the case of C. there’s the fact that finally (finally!!) she’s old enough to do the things that she’s been ready for and wanting to do for the past 7 years, so how does she now pack them in? Then there’s what I see at work. Competition is fierce for (unpaid!) internships. I see who is considered, and who not. One thing builds on another, experience begets experience.
The problem–for which I suppose…hope?…I should be thankful–is I have a child who doesn’t want to get with this program.
“I’m not doing anything just to build my resume!” she has flat-out proclaimed. The idea of using that scholarship for a summer class at UMD that she earned? No way. School during summer is definitely not in her picture. As for the book, I sheepishly showed it to her a few days ago.
“Could you just look at this section?” I asked.
“No.”
“It’s not ‘resume building,’ it’s finding what you…”
“Stop it. Just. Stop. It.”
C., much to her credit, has always fiercely guarded her down time, and Lord knows fiercely resisted pressure of any kind. She’s her own Zen Mistress. Me? Yes, I read all the stories about stressed out area teens and shudder. I wrinkle my nose at Ms. Wissner-Gross. And yet the feeling nags. So I breathe deeply. I read Study Hacks and Zen Habits, and want to believe.
Because in a perverse way it may all work out well in the end. Parents on one of my lists were recently commiserating over how for years they were advised that their profoundly gifted children should learn to fit in and be like everyone else. Now that their children are high school age, the message is “be yourself, be an individual, be unique, be authentic”–and one hopes not in the programmed, Ms. Wissner-Gross way.
Marching to her own drum, or in C.’s case a chihuahua, may bring C. the very things I hope for her. And most importantly, that she hopes for herself.
(Camp Conflicted is right down the road from Camp Codependence. See Judith Warner’s recent NY Times blog–and endless comments on–over-the-top parents, summer camp, “sharks,” “minnows,” affluenza, class and happiness. It’s worth a read.)
The “No idea what to do when I graduated” idea also definitely applies to me — and my parents basically said that whatever I wanted to major in was fine with them.
I appreciate the freedom, but on the other hand, I really wish someone had pointed out some of the realities of being an English teacher — and pointed out how many entire swaths of the job market I was excluding myself from by not really learning math all that well.
And yeah, I’m trying to avoid that with our child. We’ll see…
I was a pre-med at an Ivy caliber university for my freshman and sophomore years and got fine grades even though I never did any prestigious math or science competitions. I quit the pre-med track halfway through college not because I couldn’t compete but because I finally came to the realization that going to med school was my parents’ dream and not mine. I wanted a larger family, and felt a clash between my biological clock and the requirement of 4 years in graduate school plus another 3-5+ years in residency to become a M.D. This was during the time frame that those infamous “baby bottle hourglass” ads were running with the reminder that a woman’s fertility starts to decline at around age 27.
“I really wish someone had pointed out …how many entire swaths of the job market I was excluding myself from by not really learning math all that well.”
That was me! I was on the advanced math track through middle school, the top girl in my class. Decided I didn’t like math/science in high school and decided to stagger the two my last two years, such that my last math class was in jr. year (never took calculus) and I skipped chemistry and took physics my senior year. No one ever said, what the h*** are you doing?! I satisfied my undergrad math requirement with a computer course, and stats for the social sciences (I got an A, but I retained absolutely NOTHING from that course–went in knowing how to do an average, that’s still all I know.) For grad school I chose the program that didn’t have a quantitative econ requirement, and even then I barely got though because I had never learned differential equations.
Needless to say, both of my girls have heard this story, and–exactly as you say–how this severely limited my career options. No one ever told me this. No one ever said you CAN do this.
My experience in college mirrors the pre-med student very well. I came from a very under-resourced high school (no acceleration, no science lab, computers only when the school could afford to buy one or someone donated one) and felt defeated my freshman year of college. I decided to take it a step further than that student and try to drop out of college. My German professor convinced me to stay, but I dropped my ideas of a dream career catering to the abilities that I had thought I possessed. Fortunately, while I was volunteering at an alternative high school, one of the students and several teachers encouraged me to reconsider my decision after I lectured on health topics. After returning, I have worked hard to catch up with those students who had done everything right, and many of my professors have commented on my abilities, reassuring me that I could succeed even without the opportunities that most students had experienced. Although it has been an arduous task to overcome my educational disadvantage, it is possible for one to pursue such a course without the “right” resume. As a tutor working with inner city students, I have tried to stress this fact, as many horror stories of limitted options do exist.
It is good that your daughter is following her interests and passions, rather than trying to create the perfect resume. In the long run, I feel that I have gained more insight into myself as a person and have cultivated more interests through my path than if I had taken the “right” path to my career.