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Summer School
There's little I can actually do about this preschool panic that's so much in the air these days. But the Fear is everywhere.
A while ago, Nightline (ABC's news magazine) aired a kind of scare-mongering two-part story called "Inside the Cutthroat Preschool Wars," which managed to make each parent interviewed seem craven and eccentric. The one school official who consented to be interviewed was clearly miserable and hated being put on the spot with questions of this sort: "So do you mean to tell me that if someone writes a check for $1,000,000 you don't admit his kid?" One wonders why the institution thought it would be a good idea to put someone on this show in the first place. In a different part of the segment, some lunatic woman who supposedly facilitates school admissions (by accepting enormous sums of money) comes off as a nasty, crazed, poorly informed harridan in an ugly sweater set... (Even I know that some of the things she was spouting aren't even half true.)
I figure the show served its curious purpose, which was to make people who have young children and who live in New York City feel embarrassed and pathetic and further convince the rest of the country that New York City is some kind of insane parallel universe. And that's always good for a laugh.
The media has been pretty successful, since someone who doesn't have children told me recently that she feels hopeless about the prospect of getting her not-yet-conceived kid(s) into school.
As for me, just the other evening during one of those now rare, post-moviegoing strolls, my musings on A Scanner Darkly were interrupted by one of my companions picking a good moment to rain on my parade:
"Where are you going to preschool? If you haven't already applied you've probably missed the boat."
Happily the movie hadn't filled me with a sense of wellbeing and faith in the world- otherwise my bubble would surely have burst.
And fortunately for everyone I already attended preschool, though I don't think the things I learned there are necessarily going to help me get my act together in September, when all of this nagging should force me into action.
Until then, I'll just be curling up with a book that is designed to help people navigate the dicey social circles that everyone encounters in new schools. One of the featured titles on my nightstand is: Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads (sequel to the text that inspired the movie Mean Girls, Queen Bees & Wannabes).
posted by Elise at 12:06 PM
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