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I was at a fun event, chatting with husband-and-wife doctors, when the guy said, "I have to go. I have to help my sixth grader study for his midterms." Oh my God! Help my sixth grader study for his midterms? I hadn't thought of that! Are people doing that?
So I went home. My sixth grader was watching Nyan Cat videos.
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In line at the bank yesterday, there was one of those snoburban moms behind me who was chattering away to her four year old: "You looked at art today at school - what was it? Monet? Renoir? Picasso? What did you learn?" and other loud questions, for all of us to hear.* That's because her child is the only child in the universe, and none of us ever has had children.
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* We had the Appalachian equivalent of this in my hometown, when the old guy at the front of the city bus would talk to the bus driver about his goiter.
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Overheard at Montgomery Mall, from a loud gaggle of Ugg-booted, abercrombie be-jegginged group of preteens:
Tween 1: I made the honor roll!
Tween 2: So? Everyone makes the honor roll! I got all As and one B
Tween 3: I got straight As!
Tween 4: So did I!
These kids would have been beaten to a bloody pulp in my hometown. They certainly would have kept this information to themselves or within the family unit until they received their college acceptances.
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In snoburbia, you just never know what will occasion a mention of how impressive your child is.
During the weekly announcements at Mass,* while talking about an upcoming holy event, the announcer casually let it slip that her daughter had received a [amount] scholarship to [name] university.
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* I used to be a C and E Catholic, but now have downgraded to a when-my-mom-is-in-town Catholic.
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How to tell if your local public high school is snoburban (from announcements):
All Squash Club members...don't forget to come to the Potomac Squash Club at the corner of Seven Locks and Montrose today to play after school.
There are seven places remaining for the trip to Italy this spring 2012.
Come to the next Peace and Social Action Club meeting today at lunch in room G35.
Science Olympiad meets after school today in room 221.
The Feed Hope Club will be having a meeting on Wednesday in room 111. Please join us in our fight against hunger in Montgomery County.
The International Club presents Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah. Come join us at lunch in room 123 on Wednesday.Would you like to help disadvantaged children in Nepal? The Nepal School Club’s first meeting is on Thursday at lunch in room 138.
Habitat for Humanity will meet in room 111 on Thursday at lunch.
The Cricket Club is going to play cricket Thursday after school on the softball field. Be there.
Come to the Tea Club in room 114 at lunch on Fridays. Members will sample different teas every week.
The SAT word of the day is: auspicious (aw spish us) which means favorable, promising, pointing to a good result.
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I am finally a snoburban soccer mom. I actually go to all of my son's high school games. This change was a long time coming. At his games through the years, I used to pull the car right up to the field and read a book during the game. "Did you see my goal?!" he would ask, as I looked up from my reading. "Yes, of course I did! It was awesome!"
But now I go to the games and actually watch. That's because his team is really, really good. A D.C. United pro player and a college coach came to the last game.
Being a hillbilly, I hoot, holler and woohooooo! Where I'm from, the crowds are loud, the cheerleaders are almost professional, and raucous hooting and stomping are expected. Not in snoburbia. Now that the team is way ahead, the crowds are picking up, but the volume barely is. When the ref makes a questionable call, the kids shout, "But, sir! But, sir!" They are trying to win the sportsmanship award (so tongue-in-cheek, yet admirable!).
I guess I shouldn't bring a milk jug filled with pebbles to shake at the next game.
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Observed, in front of a snoburbia high school [snicker, guffaw, snort]:
So I looked it up on the MCPS website:
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I and my friends are feeling wistful around here at summer's end. Everyone is returning to town or getting one last weekend in before shuttering the beach house. But most notably, all* the 18-22s are disappearing again, headed back to Connecticut and Boston. Graying dads are buying dorm refrigerators and XL twin sheets. Soon we'll see no more tattered Volvos with 15 bumper stickers at the ice cream parlor. No more Tom's shoes. We'll see them next spring, when they return for their D.C. internships.
Have a great school year, everyone!
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* Everyone in the snoburbs goes to college.
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I just saw the school supply list for 6th grade. It said: "TI-84+ graphing calculator for IM, Algebra & Geometry." The rest only need "an inexpensive calculator."
Oh no!
Now I'm feeling really, really guilty that I didn't put my kid in the two-week summer math prep class to get him into advanced math. Now he's going to have to carry the badge of shame - the "inexpensive calculator."
But he's already a year above grade level, so no need to worry, right? So not true. In snoburbia, above average is below average. It is not enough to be one or even two years above grade level in math. If your middle school child is not picked up by a special school bus that drives him and a select few to the high school for Algebra II, he is not going to MIT.
We still have a few weeks of summer - maybe I'll get him a tutor and have him do an extra math packet!
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So the "Senior Scatter" came out this week. Everyone waits with bated breath for this list of the colleges to which kids from our local snoburbia high school are going this fall. It is our annual parental pat on the back for all those years of toil and tears and tutoring. Even if we don't have a senior. Or have one of the kids who toil.
Yes, it's a public school. And yes, I'm going to post this every year when it comes out, because, well, you private school parents can just suck it. Here are some of the schools the class of 2011 got into:
Harvard (3), Princeton, Columbia, Penn, University of Chicago (2), Haverford, Carnegie Mellon (3), UC Berkeley, Vassar, Hamilton, West Point, Tufts (2), Tulane (3), Emory (2), Pitzer, UVA (3), Cornell (2), Brown, Wake Forest (2), Barnard, UNC Chapel Hill (2), Edinburgh (3), Pratt Institute (2), William and Mary, University of Michigan (4), Carleton, NYU (3), Wellesley, Northwestern (2), Wesleyan, University of Maryland College Park (44), Oberlin, Georgia Tech, Eastman School of Music, Bard, Mount Holyoke, Kenyon, Denison, RISD, UMBC (8), Penn State (8), Dickinson, Macalester, St. Mary's of Maryland, and many others.
Plus: Marines (3), Empire Beauty School (1), and CIA (um, seriously?).
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Sitting across from me in the waiting room in snoburbia was a darling blond boy, about nine years old, intelligent and charming, wearing his private school khakis, blue oxford and striped tie, sitting with his nanny, doing his homework and talking on his iPhone (worrying about his science project), waiting to see his therapist.
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The kids at a nearby overclass snoburbia high school just held a charity drive, to raise money for a worthwhile cause. They did stunts like duct-taping the principal to the wall.
The haul? $38,000. It is rumored that one boy gave $700.
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In snoburbia, there is a hierarchy in everything.
High school kids in snoburbia must take as many Advanced Placement classes as they can cram into their schedules. But, in a high school where not one, but two kids just became Intel semifinalists, there is snobbery about which AP you take. A boy I happen to know very, very well is proud to be taking his first AP class - AP Human Geography. He spends hours learning the rivers, countries and capitols of Africa and South America and neatly coloring in maps.
His friends tease him for taking "AP Coloring."
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So, yeah, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is getting its share of attention in snoburbia... as a manual, or as validation. I know many parents like the author, Amy Chua.
One child plays her piano for hours a day. ("Wow, Anna, that is beautiful!" I say as I walk through the front door. She's amazing, her small fingers flying over the keys. "No - don't tell her that! It doesn't sound right yet," says her Tiger Mother.)
I'm more of a capybara mother ("Fun fact: Capybara dive and may remain underwater for as long as five minutes"), or maybe a giant panda mother ("primarily spends its life roaming and feeding in the bamboo forests of the Qinling Mountains").
My son has recently learned how to do a back flip, to juggle, to break-dance, and to recite the Declaration of Independence by heart. And, and! He can do the Hammer dance and knows all the lyrics to U Can't Touch This.
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Reportedly, the Apple iPad is the Christmas gift most desired by children in the under-13 set. (It starts at the "unbelievable price" of $499.)
Um... no.
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I have just spent four hours helping my son with his science fair project - mostly through motivational speaking, with occasional bouts of sighing. In this quadrant of snoburbia, science fair projects are a serious affair - for parents. Some of my son's classmates' parents are scientists at National Institutes of Health or at one of the genetics companies in the area. Or they're just lawyers.
Even in fifth grade, you should see the projects these kids come up with.
Then there's high school. Here were the titles of a few of the Science Montgomery high school contest winners from last year: "Validation Of Parabolic Ion Trap Geometries For Application Within Quantum Computing," "Decycling Densities Of Tessellations," and "Investigation Of Nano-structured Super-hydrophobic Coating On Structural Substrates."
My kid's project: "Comparing the bounciness of balls of different materials."
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I want to talk to you about... ED. No, no - not that ED, not the one in those creepy ads where silver-haired couples are holding hands and smiling knowingly.
It's the other ED: Early Decision. Early Decision is what you do when you have been groomed your whole life to attend a particular college, Williams, say, or Stanford. (There is a whole hierarchy of decisions to confuse you: Early Action, Restrictive Early Action, Early Decision, or Early Notification. But it's okay - your parents will hire a college admissions counselor to figure it all out. Or you will camp out on College Confidential.)
Before I lived in the snoburbs, I thought college applications had to be in by January sometime. But that is so regular admissions, so public university.
The deadline is nigh. Now it's a nail-biter until you hear the news. If you get in, you're golden. If not, you are stuck with your reach school, which is devastating.
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Something snaps in regular people the minute they have a baby and move to snoburbia.
I was watching the show, Modern Family. There was an exchange between Mitchell and Cam, a gay couple* raising a young daughter, Lily. It was a pitch-perfect capture of the angst snoburban parents feel.
Mitchell came home, panicked, after noticing that Lily's usual playmates and their moms were missing from the playground. Where were they?
Mitchell: [T]hey all sent their kids to preschool!
Cam: What?! We agreed to wait until next year!
Mitchell: It was a fake-out - to make sure their kids got a spot.
Cam: Those skinny b*tches...
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* We don't even notice whether parents are gay in snoburbia, because we are so tolerant.
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From the application form for the Montgomery County middle school Mathematics, Science, and Computer Science Magnet Program. Children apply for it at age 10, in fifth grade:
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My son took his first kung fu class today at the local snoburbia martial arts academy. The instructor told me they used to mix all levels in one class and everyone was considered equal. But, she said, "For some reason, that didn't work around here. People always wanted to know what level their kids were as compared to other kids. So we had to go to a colored sash system."
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Montgomery County Public Schools has issued a booklet, Seven Keys to College Readiness. The first key is, "Advanced reading in Grades K-2." The third key is, "Advanced math in Grade 5." Every few weeks, some vexed parent pops up on one of the listservs on which I lurk,* worried that her kindergartner is not yet reading Harry Potter or her third grader is not yet doing Algebra.
Not to worry - in MoCo, forty percent of children qualify for the GT tag or "gifted and talented." Most live in the green zone, another term for snoburbia, where college is a birthright and it is assumed one's child is GT. On one listserv, a commenter said a more accurate moniker would be AA: "Advanced and Advantaged."
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* because "lurk" is a funny word, that's why
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At the parent meeting for my son's new elite soccer team*, a gasp went up in the room when the coach announced, sheepishly: "Coaching staff requests that parents do not attend training sessions (practices). The boys need to learn to self-advocate."
What? What?!
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* I thought he was already on an elite team. Wrong. Turns out there are ever more elite teams. This is so snoburban helicopter parents can gleefully conquer the next level.
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The TI-84 graphing calculator. In snoburbia, every student in Algebra 1 or above is required to have one - at $99.99 apiece.
The TI-84 is a gold mine - but not for math. The real benefit is that snoburban dads can use it to drop how advanced their kids are in math. Bonus! For example, this recent listserv request: "Does anyone have a TI-84 calculator for my 7th grade daughter who's in Algebra I?" Or this article disguised as a rant against the costly TI-83:
I turned to my Daughter. She's just finished 9th grade pre-International Baccalaureate Geometry, and also has a mandatory TI-83 graphing calculator.
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Some enterprising youths have made a killing on eBay with my son's TI-83 calculators - four stolen in two years. My husband is convinced he has bought back the exact same calculator four times.
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At our local snoburbia elementary school, graduating fifth grade is a momentous occasion that calls for... a whole month of celebration. It's all on the continuum of indulgence to which overclass kids have become inured. (Shouldn't "graduation" be reserved for high school and college, or maybe for celebrating your Ph.D.?)
There's the awards and graduation ceremony. Okay. But there is also a pool party, a dance party (some kids came in a limo), and a class trip to Philadelphia. One thing I love, though: All the school stands outside and "claps out" the fifth graders - everyone claps and cheers as they leave the building for the last time. I'm verklempt.
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It's out! It's the Senior Scatter, the end-of-year newspaper at our local snoburban high school answering the age-old question: Did I get into a better college?
So... Our seniors are going to (ahem): Stanford, Penn, Mount Holyoke, NYU, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, UVA, University of Michigan, Haverford, Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Claremont McKenna, Notre Dame, Kenyon, Vassar, Georgetown, UC Berkeley, Cornell, Emory, Brandeis, Georgia Tech, Bard, RISD, William and Mary, Hamilton, Amherst, Tulane, and many others.
More are going to University of Maryland, St. Mary's and UMBC*. This being overclass snoburbia, only one person is going into the military.
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* UMBC, the nerdy science and technology campus of the University of Maryland, is sometimes nicknamed, University of Maryland, But Chinese.
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This week, I am registering my daughter at our excellent local high school. She is leaving her private school behind. The people at her private school are incredulous. A public school? Seriously? They keep asking us if we're sure. (Subtext: But, but... why? We're so uniquely awesome! We're not a school - we're family.)
It's like leaving a cult.
I was chatting with a guy this weekend, and within minutes, he told me he had two children at Sidwell Friends and a son at Stanford. His face lit up when I told him my daughter went to [private school]. Then he asked where my son went to school and I mentioned the name of our local high school. His face went blank. Didn't know what to say. I wasn't in his tribe anymore.
Many people who send their kids only to private schools seem to think all public schools are alike: filled with hordes of gum-throwing kids, criminals and bad teachers (à la every Hollywood depiction). Our local high school (one of the W schools) is an amazing school, with rigorous standards, lively teachers, and very involved parents.
(And some of its students end up at Stanford.)
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I just spent all day at the snoburbia soccer tournament. The travel soccer tournament: This is where overclass parents drive overachiever children two to 10 hours away from home, and then hover over and shout at their children for hours on end.
If the child's team wins the game(s), this means he or she has a future (Stanford? Yale?). If the child's team loses, all hope is lost forever.
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It's spring break in snoburbia. No one is here. Everyone who isn't in the Carolinas or the Caribbean is on a college tour. We just returned from ours.
If you are a high school sophomore, junior or senior in the overclass snoburbs, visiting colleges is de rigueur, a rite of passage. This is where your parents drive or fly you all over tarnation to visit colleges and to impress adcoms* with your credentials and charm.
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Back in the day, this was my college tour: My parents bought me a trunk, into which I packed all my stuff. On the day before classes began, mom and dad tearfully waved goodbye as my older brother drove me to my college, sight unseen, and dropped me off.
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* The most important people in the world: college admissions officers.
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In snoburbia, our cars do not wear "My child is an honor roll student at [outer suburbia elementary school]" bumper stickers - or any of their iterations. One presumes every student in overclass snoburbia is of advanced standing.
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[Yeah, I know, I know, but] I actually kind of liked this one: "My kid sells term papers to your honor student."
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If you are a private school or Catholic school boy between the ages of 12 and 18, and you are going to the snoburbia mall to hang out with your friends, it is mandatory that you wear:
1. A hoodie sweatshirt emblazoned with your school's name and a sport, preferably crew, hockey or lacrosse
2. Really baggy grey sweatpants (or, in a pinch, baggy khakis)
3. Timberland boots
Must. Not. Deviate.
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Does this mean North Face finally is on its way out?
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This year, in-state colleges are dissing in-state applicants. This has gotten the overclass Ivy League-or-die crowd interested. People in snoburbia thrive on rejection*.
University of Maryland is turning away in-state kids in droves - even those from the hot magnet programs in Montgomery County. A Blair magnet student was overheard protesting that she got in but didn't even get a scholarship. (How dare they?)
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Why reject native sons?:
* of others
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The Washington, D.C. area was hit this week with a record-breaking snowfall of 30 inches. This has brought out the best in neighbors all over the region, as we help each other dig out. But, in snoburbia, everything is competitive. Everything.
On my local snoburb's listserv, several high school boys have offered to shovel driveways. But one student (let's call him "Shovel Kid") offered to donate all his snow-shoveling money to a charity, LLS. How nice, I thought. Then a few hours later, this appeared on the listserv:
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From our local overclass snoburb's high school listserv:
* a tragic event, yet an awesome opportunity to lend gravitas to my ECs on my college applications
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I was listening to Car Talk on NPR yesterday, and I heard a segment from a caller who certainly was from snoburbia. Here were the clues:
1. She was a super-confident, articulate 15-year-old girl.
2. She was talking about her mom's BMW that she was about to inherit.
3. She was from Connecticut.
But the dead giveaway was when she mentioned her pets' names: "Sartre" and "Nietzsche."
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Yale pranks Harvard in this new video from the 2004 Harvard-Yale game. Of course, this was replicating the famous Caltech Rose Bowl prank from 1961.
Students at MIT once stole a cannon from the Caltech campus and drove it across the country, posing as a moving company.
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Around here in downcounty Montgomery, people still talk about the giant cow that Richard Montgomery students painted on the roof chimney of snoburban rival Walter Johnson High School - which had been built next to a cow pasture - in the early 1960s. The cow remained until construction workers recently mistakenly painted over it. Senior prank, anyone?
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In the overclass snoburbs, high school kids do not miss class unless they are under anesthesia or a CDC quarantine.
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Today, I sent an email to my child's AP Biology teacher to say he was feeling too ill to go to school. Would she please tell me what work, if any, he has to make up today from home? Her response:
My friend texted me one day last week. Her son had left his backpack
at our house and she wanted to pick it up right away. He was worrying
about getting his homework finished. He was in
the hospital, just coming out of painful surgery, in the recovery room.
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In the overclass snoburbs, you must take the SAT, not the ACT.
If you want to take the up-and-comer ACT, you must drive 45 minutes to one of those high schools in outer suburbia.
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Read more about geographic ACT - SAT preference here.
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Let’s talk about math. In snoburbia, it is crucial that you do Algebra 1 as early as possible, certainly by seventh or eighth grade. (If you do algebra in ninth grade, you are ordinary. You might as well live in... no, it’s too horrible to think about.)
To get there, it doesn’t matter if the third or fourth grade teacher speeds through the basics at breakneck speed, leaving a class of dazed kids who cry over homework. Why look at the multiplication tables for more than two days? Division? That is so last week. We must move on!
What’s important is that you can do AP Calculus in 11th grade. If an Honors Pre-Calculus teacher has to stop class and re-teach long division, that’s okay. It’s what keeps the tutors of snoburbia happy. What matters is that we are advanced.
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Nationally, only 25 percent of students take Algebra 1 by eighth grade.
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It’s September in snoburbia, where back-to-school means dawn-to-dusk activities that enhance our children’s already keen intelligence and coordination – and ultimately, their Bowdoin and Stanford applications.
In the overclass, not spending every moment on academics or scheduled extracurricular activities is simply unacceptable.
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When I was a kid, my brother and I basically ran loose for hours a day after school, as we had virtually no homework or formal activities. We went all over the neighborhood (get ready) … without cellphones. My parents didn’t know where we were for hours at a time. We got dirty, climbed tall trees, cut open our feet on pop-tops, and fell off our banana seat bikes – without helmets. We built Evel Knievel jump ramps. Unless we had an injury requiring hospitalization, we went home only when my mother rang the cowbell that signaled dinnertime.
And I turned out okay, right? Right??
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Overheard at a party in snoburbia:
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Lately, I have been obsessive about reading the College Confidential discussion forums. It’s an insight into snoburbia like no other. Like this (troll):
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On our local snoburban high school’s listserv was an “invitation to participate” in a summer academic program at University of Maryland. How nice! An invitation! So I scrolled down to see the cost, if any:
$4,000.
In overclass snoburbia, overachiever high school students can beef up their college applications by going to a summer pre-college program at a university. But bring a checkbook, because getting ahead of your urban, rural and regular suburban peers is not cheap.
For instance, what nerdy kid doesn’t want to learn how to create computer games? He can, if he attends Carnegie-Mellon’s pre-college High School Game Academy – for $6,169.
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In snoburbia, the after-prom is a wonderful time for hanging out with your friends for the last time before you all go to college. But more importantly, in Bethesda and Potomac, Md.’s W-Schools, it’s also a time for hauling home some major loot, like laptops, flat-screen tvs, and iPods.
But alas – not this year, according to the Gazette newspapers. Because of the worsening economy, this year the W-Schoolers will have to make do with board games and bean bag tosses.
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From the bio of Huffington Post blogger and overachiever Paul Abrams:
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In the snoburbs, a 9 year old is too old. I was considering having my son, who is still in elementary school, try out for a higher-level soccer team. But I was told that, “it’s probably too late.”
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From The Overachievers:
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A woman I met recounted how, when she was four years old, she attended a junior kindergarten class at an overclass private school in Washington, D.C., for one day, as a trial. The head of school told her mother, “Your child is a subversive influence,” and said the child might not be accepted. The woman relaying the anecdote took great pride in that statement years later.
Of course, this story was a quick way of letting me know – within minutes of meeting her – that she went to the kinds of schools that have a “head of school,” and call preschool, “junior kindergarten.” You know – the ones that don’t accept all comers.
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It’s the start of soccer season – a big deal in snoburbia. In a Division I travel soccer team in a nearby snoburb, all parents must sign a Parents’ Code of Conduct:
But, but! …. My son’s future college soccer scholarship could depend on this very game! Lives hang in the balance!
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