Category Archives: Home & Family

My 18-year-old daughter Jessica and I are on her last college selection trip.
I am writing from Northampton, Massachusetts, home of Smith College. Tomorrow evening,
we fly to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for a last look at Carnegie Mellon University. Her
final decision is due to the schools on 1 May.

Jessica is staying over 2 nights with Kat, one of her Cantilena choir friends who graduated from
Harker last year. We arrived yesterday in time for Jessica to go to Smith’s Spring
Fling dance. Even though Smith is a women’s college with a vibrant lesbian population,
Jessica said the event had about the same 60% girl, 40% guy ratio she sees at most high
school dances. She observed that the drinking was less intense than what she saw during
her Rice University visit but there was more making out (girl-girl and girl-guy)
on the dance floor than she was used to. Tomorrow morning, Jessica will to sit in on several
music and Engineering classes and is going to meet Kat’s voice coach.

Today, I went to church at St. John’s Episcopal while Jessica and Kat had brunch.
Then, Jessica and I drove to nearby Amherst to tour the
Emily Dickinson Museum. Both Jessica and I are fans of her poetry and enjoyed seeing her
bedroom, cookie basket, and some of her things. Upstairs is a reproduction of one of the poet’s house
dresses with a special pocket for carrying writings on paper scraps. The reclusive poet stood well under
5 feet tall and (even though the famous picture is of her in black) our guide said Dickinson usually
wore white that showed off her auburn hair. We were the only ones on the 1:30 p.m. tour and our guide was
disappointed that we just wanted the half-hour version (which does not include the poet’s brother’s
house next door). Our guide was also bitter that so many of Dickinson’s possessions
and books had been sold to Harvard University in the 1940s and that Harvard was not going
to give them back. She ended the tour with all three of us standing in the warm sun reading
poems under the trees among the new white and purple crocuses. Because we share our last name with
the poet, I bought books, t-shirts, and other gifts for my family at the museum gift shop.

After lunch, Jessica and I returned to Northampton to buy Jessica’s prom dress. The town is full of
fun clothing shops, coffee and baked goods shops, craft and jewelery stores, plus at least
three shops only selling lingerie. I even saw a shop featuring ceramics by
Laura Zindel. I own two of Zindel’s dragonfly vases
and I admire her designs. Northampton reminds us strongly of Ashland, Oregon, home of the Shakespeare
festival. On Northampton’s Main Street, Jessica and I found a delightful shop called Ultra Gal which
sells new and used clothes as well as theatrical costumes. It has three basement levels to explore.
Jessica ended up buying two formal dresses – one white and one black – to use for both the senior
prom date with Matt as well as her senior singing recital. Together with a sparkly frog pin for me,
both dresses cost $106 (very reasonable!).

Much against my best judgement and personal preferences, last Friday
my son and I went to see
“TMNT” – the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. After several days
of working his way through all of his usual teenage tricks (puppy eyes, sulks,
showing me the trailer to get me interested, wheedling…), Paul finally got
around to offering me a straight trade. He agreed to watch two Shakespeare
videos before Monday plus giving me a shoulder rub in exchange for my taking
him to see that movie.

He absolutely loved “TMNT”. I have seen worse movies; there were some funny
bits. After picking over my Shakespeare movie collection, Paul dutifully watched

“Twelfth Night” (1996 – Director: Trevor Nunn, Starring: Helena Bonham-Carter, Richard E. Grant, Nigel Hawthorne, Ben Kingsley) and
“Richard III” (1995 – Director: Richard Loncraine, Starring:
Ian McKellen, Annette Bening, Jim Broadbent, Robert Downey Jr.) the next
day. He said Richard III was evil and that he had seen worse movies.
The shoulder rub was lovely.

My brother Pete sent us a note today pointing out a New York Times
article published on 1 April called “For Girls, It’s Be Yourself,
and Be Perfect, Too” by Sara Rimer. It sounded depressingly like
my daughter’s recent experience.

Below are Jessica’s final college admissions results. She is spending
this Spring Break week hanging out with her boyfriend, baking, gardening,
and researching again the five schools which accepted
her. Her assignment is to decide if she needs to see any of the
schools again in person before she decides which to accept. CMU invited her
to join a special multidisciplinary program which sounds very
interesting. Other schools are sending her letters welcoming her
to look into their music or pre-law programs. I think Jessica is feeling
good about her college choices.

Princeton’s rejection letter said they had 18,900 applications for
an entering undergraduate class of 1,245 students.

We are getting our garden ready for the Easter Bunny. Every year, we
invite the kids of our family and friends for an egg hunt in our back
yard. Right now, my teenagers (who are on Spring Break) are putting in
their two hours each of gardening a day. Since we filled in the
swimming pool and built a rail line for our caboose, we have a new yard
area in which to hunt. Next Saturday afternoon before
we go to church, the Associate Bunny will dye dozens of hard boiled
eggs and stuff dozens of plastic eggs with toys and candies for the
Easter Bunny to hide.

There is a standing ritual to our annual Egg Hunt on Easter Sunday morning:

• To begin, all hunters gather in the living room where relative
  ages are determined and the Egg Hunt rules are explained. Rule #1
  is always: There are no eggs in the flower beds. Other
  rules have to do with timing and the boundaries in which where
  eggs may be found. All hunters must repeat Rule #1.
  Anyone expressing doubts about the Easter Bunny is excluded from the hunt.
  Only true believers allowed!

• Every egg hunter has a basket and an advisor. The advisor is a
  small stuffed animal who accompanies them on the hunt. Each child gets to
  pick their basket and advisor (picking goes in order of age, starting
  with the youngest). They get to take their advisor and basket home along
  with any eggs and candy their parents allow.

• Kids line up at the back door in order of age, youngest at the front.
  Parents are not allowed outside until the teens go since it is
  hard for parents not to offer unfair help and advice. (The advice
  is rarely needed anyway since the little kids always find the most eggs.)

• Each child gets 2 minutes of hunting before the next child leaves
  the house. There are easy eggs at ground level and harder eggs
  higher up, both in and under things. Eggs have been known to hide
  inside of lemons on the tree and on the dog kennel roof.
  Some eggs are not found for years…

• In addition to hiding the eggs, the Associate Bunny leaves 2
  poems. Each poem describes in obscure and maddeningly bad verse the
  unreasonably hard to find location of the gold or silver egg. The gold
  and silver eggs are usually found by the teenagers or adults but
  sometimes the littler kids figure out the puzzle first.

After the hunt, everyone eats a potluck brunch. The kids sort their new
treasures and try to convince their parents that they need to bring home
all of the eggs they found, no matter how squashed.

Yesterday was being referred to by
Jessica and her friends as “Suicide Thursday” or “Ivy Thursday” because so
many of the major U.S. colleges released their admissions decisions then.
My High School Senior daughter has now heard back from
all but one of the nine colleges, universities, and music conservatories
to which she applied for admission as a member of the undergraduate class
of 2011. Jessica is pleased that she was accepted into five excellent
schools and we in her family feel lucky and happy that our girl has only
good options to choose from in the next month. We expect
to hear Rice’s decision by Monday.

Our friend Danek found this good idea with regard to improving the
college admissions process in the article

“Make college admissions a crapshoot – Top schools are already too selective, so why not draw names from a hat?”
(By Barry Schwartz, Professor of Psychology, Swarthmore College)
March 18, 2007, latimes.com.

The tragedy of all this selectivity and competition is that it is almost completely pointless. Students trying to get into the best college, and colleges trying to admit the best students, are both on a fool’s errand. They are assuming a level of precision of assessment that is unattainable. …

There is a simple way to dramatically reduce the pressure and competition that our most talented students now experience. When selective institutions get the students’ applications, the schools can scrutinize them using the same high standards they currently use and decide which of the applicants is good enough to be admitted. Then the names of all the “good enough” students could be placed in a metaphorical hat, with the “winners” drawn at random for admission. Though a high school student will still have to work hard to be “good enough” for Yale, she won’t have to distort her life in the way she would if she had to be the “best.” The only reason left for participating in all those enrichment programs would be interest, not competitive advantage.

When Jessica read Brown’s online rejection letter to me yesterday, it said
that 19,000 students had applied for next year’s Freshman class. You could
make up a complete university (or city) from the 19,000 students who
applied to Brown alone! A
Brown admissions web page says that last year they rejected 86%
of applicants. Regardless of the quality of their applications, records,
accomplishments and potential, all 19,000 of those students probably
(like my own daughter) spent days if not weeks writing essays, arranging for
recommendation letters and transcripts and paying fees. They then waited
three months for an answer. A lottery makes more sense and would
surely be more humane to the applicants, their parents, and the
admissions staff.

I am reminded
of a description of the U.S. national spelling bee in the book
Complete and Utter Failure – a Celebration of Also-Rans, Runner-Ups,
Never-Weres and Total Flops by Neil Steinberg (1994: Doubleday):

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The image of so many students being forced through that funnel, where
a solitary student emerges at the end, a victor, while the others slink
off in defeat, drew me to the bee, making it seem a paradigm for so
much that goes on in organized mass education….

Not only does just one child out of 9,000,000 win, but the 8,999,999 losers
lose in a public and humiliating fashion. As will be seen, it would be hard
to think up a way to make failure in the bee more demeaning, particularly
at the later stages, short of having a quartet of circus clowns drive
deficient spellers from the stage with selzer bottles and flappy paddles.

The colleges which are sending out their admissions decisions now
clearly take a great deal of trouble to write kind, hopeful, and supportive
rejection letters as well as gleeful personalized acceptance letters.
The decisions
are given privately on passworded web pages and in paper mail. However,
I suspect that many high schools are like Jessica’s where the Seniors have
been comparing college lists all year. This month, school hallways are
full of Seniors offering congratulations or commiserations to their
classmates as each school announces its decisions.
In the end, all is known.

Here is where we stand so far on Jessica’s admissions:

My High School Senior daughter Jessica has been hearing back
from the colleges, universities, and music conservatories to which she
applied last year for admission to the undergraduate class of 2011.
This has been going on since 8 March and will continue until 2 April. We
expect to hear back from Brown and Princeton tomorrow, and from Oberlin
and Rice on Monday.

Waiting is hard. Once we have all of the replies, we get to decide
which schools she should visit for a last look around before deciding.
Jessica’s acceptance decisions back to the schools are due 1 May.