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The Watering Hole
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Mothers Who Hate?
Preschool Preview... The Saga Persists
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It Isn't Just One of Your Holiday Games
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Nursery School Is Nowhere Near Through With Me
Another preschool open house has come and gone. This one had snacks, including Halloween candy tidbits, which were so very welcome. I don't know how I'm going to get off the candy corn, frankly. I suppose it will just happen, cold turkey, when candy cane season starts.
Anyway, yet again the room was full of concerned parents brimming with the spirit of competition. It is a little distracting to talk to someone and realize all of their questions, which you felt were largely about how to find good birthday presents for kids and whether or not you feel like having to get on the subway to take your kid to school, are actually geared towards measuring up how much of a rival your kid would be for his kid's spot.
And there was this other odd New York Factor, which is that everyone, EVERYONE looks familiar. I saw about fifteen people I am quite sure I knew from somewhere, but sadly my faculties for such recall are limited and I often make mistakes. I have a strong memory of childhood mortification when I ran up to try to tackle my father in a drugstore, only to realize after the fact the this guy was a stranger. (No, at the time my eyesight was fine.)
A friend of mine remembers with some amusement having lunch with me a number of years ago when I was really depressed about something and surely did need a new prescription for my glasses. I spent the meal kind of contorting and shrinking behind my menu because there was someone at the next table I recognized from high school and I didn't want to have to do the greet-and-catch-up thing since I couldn't remember his name and was feeling I had made a hash of my life. Finally, she took a glance and told me I was an idiot because I surely had not gone to school of any kind with Matthew Broderick.
So after looking at classrooms and talking to teachers, squinting at semi-familiar and very familiar faces, and dodging the an extremely nervous mother who really hit the ceiling when she caught a glimpse of a sleeping class pet (mouse), we went in for a question and answer session. These things are odd because I have this sense that people are either inclined to ask incredibly specific things about their own children or just want to ask something for the sake of asking it, so they tend to fall back on patterns that have worked for them in their professional lives.
One business-type father asked the director of the school where she saw herself in five years, as if she were applying for a job from him. This yielded an interesting digression about Reggio Emilia education, which was probably not what that dad was hoping to hear.
Someone else pursued a strangely aggressive line of questioning about how this preschool would help kids get into public schools, forgetting that in New York City, kids go to the public schools that are zoned for one's residence, unless they score well on certain city-administered standardized tests that get them into other specialty schools. There are other special circumstances of course, but none of this has anything to do with what a preschool can do.
I don't really begrudge anyone the anxiety that produces insanity. It's a completely weird thing to have to do- figure out what school will make your kid happy when it is unclear what the kid will even be like in 10 months. Or what school will have space for said child, for that matter.
For the record, I am not done yet. There are still some places I have to see and frankly, I'm glad I didn't wind up applying to as many as I was told to put on my list, because even with the set I have, I'm fried, fried, fried.
And thinking it may be time to get my eyes checked again.
posted by Elise at 6:21 AM
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said...
Ha! That Matthew Broderick story is hilarious, Elise.
I also like that story about "your dad" in the drugstore. My husband did that once, except he thought he was sneaking up behind me and patting me on the behind, and it was another woman (who was at first horrified and then amused and understanding about it).
11/04/2006 12:08 PM
said...
12/08/2006 5:48 AM
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