Not-so-sweet 16

Ah, Facebook. A high school friend was tagged in a scanned copy of our school literary magazine's yearbook photo, which alerted me to its social-media presence. At first I wasn't sure I was in the group photo, but yesterday several friends and, more definitively, my husband, confirmed. It's from either my sophomore or junior year, making me 15 or 16 at the time. (I presume WWPD has an international audience - a very glamorous one at that - that might need this spelled out.) I can tell it's not my senior year in part because of the presence of students I know graduated before me, but also because I must have looked better than that by 17. At least that's my recollection.

'Hi, I'm on the school literary magazine! Please read my thinly-veiled short stories about unrequited crushes!'

It's hard to explain exactly what was most unimpressive about my appearance at whatever age this was. (I'm estimating 16; 15 was worse, and involved glitter barrettes.) I looked a bit fatter then than I do now, going by this photo, but probably weighed the same - the well-known phenomenon of "baby face." I don't think I still own that exact sweater, but wouldn't rule it out, and in any case still dress like that. I haven't found drastically better things to do with my hair. The eyebrows look a bit 1990s-tadpole, but that's to be expected. None of the clichéd adolescent complaints (acne, braces, bad glasses). 

No, it's the expression. The face that radiates no life experience, and so, so much awkwardness. While I may not look better at 30 than at 23, and while no age thus far has left me looking like a supermodel, there's something nice about knowing that whichever ravages of ancientness have yet to reduce me to looking as I did at 16.

Let this post be a lesson to the pop-evo-psych-PUA contingent, who insist that women peak while still technically girls, and that it's downhill from 16 on. This may be true of the handful who go into runway modeling at that age. Not so the rest of us.

10,000 words

Which, just off the top of your head, sounds like a better way to get a diverse student body: Requiring that applicants do well on the SAT and get good grades (the former evidently relating to family income,  and then there are the families paying for tutors; but the latter by necessity opening things up to students from all schools), or asking them to write 10,000 words of research paper? 

Bard's new way... strikes me more as a way to make sure applicants consider your college their first-choice school, than a way to make that college more accessible. I get that as with all applications, the college applicant must appear to believe that they'd flourish best and contribute most at this one institution, while at the same time applying to a bunch. Which means, if nothing else, getting the name of the school right for each essay. But anything that asks a student to demonstrate enthusiasm by turning applying to that school into an extracurricular activity of its own seems... potentially more about selecting the kids who, to put it generously, are the best match for that school, than about avoiding the evils of the standard-issue college application process.

But then there's the diversity question, ostensibly at the heart of this, but the most dubious. Would essays bring in more disadvantaged students, or just more academically weak but quirky rich kids? Most obviously, anything that time-consuming will be tougher to pull off for the kid with lots of household responsibilities. And are we really thinking parents aren't at all going to help with these essays, and that this won't alter the outcome? 

I suppose the idea is that the assignment is just this pure way of looking at how different people think, it seems unlikely to play out like that: 

Bard’s audition is open book: Along with the menu of 17 questions, the college’s Web site will provide all the relevant source materials — from a Nobel lecture about prion disorders to the United Nations Charter to an Aeschylus play — with which to address them. (Additional research is permitted if properly documented.) Mary Backlund, Bard’s director of admission, said that that access will place students who may not have encountered the subjects in school or do not have good local libraries on equal footing with those who attended elite high schools.

Note the parenthetical bit. Kids who appear to be doing graduate-level work (citing scholarship, etc.), aren't they just that much more impressive? Or on a simpler level: kids who cite outside sources seem more committed to attending Bard. Kids who demonstrate existing contextual knowledge about the topics are bound to come up with something more impressive. The ability to write at the college level while still in high school seems like a good proxy for how nice of a high school you've attended. (You'll have an edge if you were in Mr. Gern's Stuyvesant English class, it seems, because by coincidence he assigns the same poetry as the Bard application. While yes, just reading that passage was a bit jarringly high-school-flashback, it's always nice to see a former teacher be the voice of reason.)

But to return to the main issue here, it's just bizarre to think that fairness is achieved by throwing primary sources at kids from all backgrounds, as if the ability to write a long essay on a complicated topic without any particular training is something equally distributed throughout the population. I understand the appeal of eliminating "potential" from the equation, but the way of doing so can't possibly be expecting college-level work (the real deal, not what APs cover) from those who haven't yet dealt with the steep learning curve of first term freshman year.

On nearly failing Mr. Bologna's gym class

It didn't seem possible, but there it was: another email about a blink-and-you'd-miss-it formatting problem with my dissertation. Not something mentioned in the last round of edits, but maybe alluded to? Something about how I needed to fix the problems and do X, but phrased in such a way as it seemed likely that doing X was what would solve the problem. Maybe (definitely!) I ought to have phoned the office then, but I thought I'd made all the changes, or else obviously I'd have called to check. But anyway. Everything seems to be sorted out such that I don't need to make a special trip into the city just to deal with this, but that's not to say there wasn't a moment of panic when I saw the email pop up from the Office of Your Dissertation is Formatted Wrong.

This brings ABD to a new level. I can understand never really getting going with a project, or finding a job elsewhere and not seeing the point of getting the degree, or just generally something coming up between the qualifying exam and the defense. But if what stands between me and the doctorate is that two lines of the title page are incorrectly spaced, I think I'm a walking don't-go article.

In other news, my high school called to let me know that I did in fact fail Mr. Bologna's gym class, not just for one marking period, but for the whole year, thereby preventing me from starting college. My elementary school has land-line phoned me up to tell me that the remedial handwriting class I was in (which I was; this blog is basically a celebration of typing) hasn't ended. Whichever other anxiety-dream scenarios, those too, while we're at it.

14, 29

Tonight, Rufus Wainwright himself graced us, the rural 'burbs next to the famous university, with his presence. There was a very elderly crowd, which was not quite what I expected for a Rufus concert, but exactly what I expected for the venue. The evening began with a previously unannounced Wainwright sister who wasn't Martha, who Wikipedia tells me* attended the same high school and college as Lena Dunham. She first played a song, then introduced herself, and yeah, perhaps the word "nepotism" came to mind (as did the possibility that there are an infinite supply of musical Wainwrights), but she was actually quite good. She made it abundantly clear that she was well aware no one had come to see her, that everyone wanted Rufus or at the very least the sister they had heard of, whose talent had already been verified. And this kind of dragged on, with songs broken up by questions getting solicited from the audience. And the audience for the most part didn't have any, although this one guy wanted to know what her favorite Rufus song was, and then her second-favorite. She promised Rufus was imminent.

And then, Rufus! In a velvet-looking blazer, with a huge, vaguely holographic brooch, a massive scarf that was more winter-wear than accent piece, and what I believe were hiking boots. Appropriate for the terrain, I should know. His hair was short, but, like, Rufus-short, so still scruffy.

Oh, and there was music as well. He sang a bunch of songs at the piano and guitar, complained about a cold sore, forgot much of his own oeuvre mid-performance, seemed at various points on the cusp of a nervous breakdown, complained in possibly offensive terms that "Gangnam Style" was the reason his latest album never hit it big (which, fan as I am of "Out of the Game," no), and then made like he was done when he wasn't really done, as is done.

He then returned, in much stronger form, and "The Art Teacher," sigh. A song about male beauty, sung from the perspective of a woman, but by a gay man. I will spare you the 10,000 words I could toss off on that and just say that it's a lovely song. (Also "April Fools" - hearing it will always make me feel 14-ish, which is all the stranger a feeling the older one gets.) "Going to a Town" felt oddly out-of-date, very much a song of the Bush II presidency, certainly not of second-term Obama, but he sure performed it well. And "Hallelujah," a little treat for the not-as-Rufus-enamored in the audience.

And, Rufus will always be Rufus. Even if he's forgotten his own songs. Rufus is early high school, and as Jennifer Senior told us, that time stays with us forever.

*Also from the Wikipedia sink-hole: Loudon, and thus Rufus as well, are descended from Peter Stuyvesant. My mind is blown. Suddenly, everything makes sense.

Assorted injustices

-I'm not alone in protesting YPIS. I skimmed this on the train, but will need to investigate further.

-Rachel Hills continues to be fabulous, explains the Alexa Chung physique controversy to us all. This was my favorite part:

One of the misconceptions that skinny privilege relies on is that life is better when you’re thinner. It sustains itself on the belief that even the most incremental differences in size and shape will have a profound effect on how we are received; whether we will be rejected and passed over, or embraced and revered.

I couldn't agree with that more!

My only quibble is that while Chung is right that women should be judged more for brains and less for looks than is currently the case, this is a woman who is, among other things, a model. I don't think beautiful women are under any moral obligation to artificially experience life as the plain-looking do, as if this were even possible. But - barring human-trafficking-type situations - one makes a choice to be paid for one's looks. Models are certainly not directing societal beauty standards, but each woman who might have that job has decided that she will be the person with said features to do that job. Sure, if it hadn't been you, it would have been some other woman who looked just like you, but if it's you, it's you. It's wrong to judge a woman for being startlingly thin, but something else entirely to judge her for selling thin. This holds regardless of how she came to have that physique, regardless of how much effort or lack thereof went into it for her personally.


-NYC private schools, even more of a mess, diversity-wise, than the public magnets. Jenny Anderson's piece on what it's like to be a minority student at a Manhattan prep school is spot-on, or at least appears to be to me, as one of the not-as-rich white kids who attended one of those pre-high-school.

Anderson effectively conflates scholarship-kid with minority, which makes sense both from the stats she provides and in the context of these schools: there are special programs (such as Prep for Prep) that specifically recruit underprivileged, brilliant students of color. The way the admissions process works - how I remember it, and how the article portrays it - these schools have only rich and poor kids, with the handful of middle-class (lower- and upper-) effectively lumped in as "poor." The aloofness in question manifests itself as this overall sense that "we" are "normal" and anyone who has to god forbid attend a public school or take the subway might as well be featured on "Save the Children." This was mildly irritating for those of us who were merely upper-middle class, but often disastrous - as this article well shows - for kids whose families were actual-poor, as opposed to merely private-school poor. I allude to my own example not to summon tiny violins, but to explain what a weird atmosphere these schools create.

Anyway, it was obvious to all who were the scholarship students (even though some of the "rich" white kids received financial aid) because of the Prep for Prep influx in certain grades (7th and 9th). A new, smarter, darker-skinned kid in the class who didn't live in Manhattan-below-96th was readily identifiable. All of this culminated memorably one year when, apparently due to self-selection, one 10th-grade yearbook photo had only white kids, the other only students of color. This was NYC, in the 1990s. I was pleased to see Anderson pointing out that these schools are somewhat optimistic, deceptive, you choose, with their depiction of diversity in their promotional materials.

That American schools tend to remain de facto segregated is nothing specific to NYC's fanciest schools. Several factors make this case different (PG, take note), most obviously the near-absence of white people who aren't wealthy, and of students of color who aren't super-serious. The latter arguably promotes a positive stereotype - there's no broader stereotype in the U.S. that black and Latino kids, at least, are particularly studious, so if one emerges from this program, so it goes. But the former is more problematic. Yes, there's such a thing as "white privilege," but it doesn't generally come with, say, a Manhattan townhouse with its own elevator. The social gulf between (to simplify) blacks and whites is typically not what it is at a school where things are so extreme. Because private schools hand-pick their classes to contain only rich white kids and ridiculously impressive, bootstraps-story students of color, they manage to avoid having any kids who are, well, ordinary. That's just about the worst. But the absence of any kind of averageness makes for a screwy environment. As for what the stakes are of this arrangement, I suppose the problem with it is that if the goal is creating a diverse, integrated elite, it doesn't appear to be succeeding.

But what first jumped out at me was this:

There is no doubt that New York City’s most prestigious private schools have made great strides in diversifying their student bodies. In classrooms where, years ago, there might have been one or two brown faces, today close to one-third of the students are of a minority. During the 2011-12 school year, 29.8 percent of children at the city’s private schools were minority students, including African-American, Hispanic and Asian children [....]

Interesting, I think, that when we're discussing the city's private schools, Asians are considered a "minority" and perhaps even "brown," whereas the article about Stuyvesant from the very same NYT series mentions that the place is 72.5% Asian as a way of saying what a rich-and-fancy place it is. Which... seems kind of fair, considering this anecdote:

[Minority students] describe a racism that materializes not in insults, but more often in polite indifference, silence and segregation. Albert, an Asian-American boy in “Allowed to Attend,” says: “You can do a lot of psychological damage to people by ignoring them for an extended period of time. For, like, four years.”

It's striking, then, that Prep for Prep considers Asians "of color" - striking insofar as it tells us just how 1950s that world remains.

What's missing from this entire conversation is something like context. Not to keep harping on this, but harp I must: we're talking about how exclusive schools like Stuyvesant are because there exists a prep course that some take to get in, and it costs $750. A year - one year - at a private school is $40,000, which isn't counting the myriad official and unofficial activities fees. I get that in this country, we allow private educational institutions a great deal of leeway, homeschooling and all that, but I'm not convinced that as social-justice issues go, the public magnet schools' unrepresentativeness comes close to that of private schools' arrangement.

I'm still not convinced either private schools or public magnets are beneficial to society or to the individual students who attend, that the benefits aren't basically about which family you came from, which factors got you to that school in the first place. But what Stuyvesant manages and few other city schools do is socioeconomic diversity. Not "diversity" as in a handful of poorer kids to make up for the super-rich majority, and not "diversity" as a euphemism for everyone's really poor. "Diversity" as in you get the whole range. This is helpful in terms of having a sense of where you yourself stand, privilege-wise, and also in terms of not feeling like it's you against the world. It's far from perfect, but it's something.

Whaddya get?

Miss Self-Important has included me in the category of "everyone who's anyone," which is flattering. But she's also included me in the list of people across the political spectrum who oppose meritocracy, and... I don't oppose meritocracy.* I'm not sure which reforms would best get it functioning properly, but as an ideal, I prefer it to the alternatives.

Meritocracy fails when we care more about grades and test scores (which predict achievement) than accomplishments. But it also fails when we try and assess the "accomplishments" of high school juniors. It fails when all it does is replicates generations of elites, when children of doctors and lawyers do better than equally-talented-and-hard-working children of Kmart cashiers. When, in other words, it creates the illusion of far more social mobility than exists, thereby getting hopes up in vain.

But the newest criticism of meritocracy - or maybe not so new - is that meritocratic elites are simply the worst. Why the worst? Because they have all the same power as elites ever did, but they, unlike earlier elites, a) see themselves as ordinary folks and thus don't own up to their privilege, and b) believe that the system that got them where they are is entirely fair, entirely just, and therefore that they deserve their power. They, you know, merit it. (See also, from the New Yorker denunciation of billionaires who don't heart Obama, "America’s super-rich feel aggrieved in part because they believe themselves to be fundamentally different from a leisured, hereditary gentry.")

I don't find this critique all that convincing, because even if social mobility isn't 100% - and it's not - there's a huge difference between privilege passed down effortlessly and panicking, tutoring, etc. All this helicoptering is of course about preserving status across generations, but that ought to tell us that preservation is not a given. This gets us back into luck vs. privilege territory - one can be lucky in life, but if one was not born with privilege, one is arguably not privileged, just rich/lucky/etc. Also: it's not as if members of hereditary elites don't feel entitled to their status.

There's an older criticism of meritocracy, though: that meritocratic elites are illegitimate. Not in broken meritocracies, but in functioning ones. Those making this criticism tend to be - or to identify with, however implausibly - members of some older elite. It's a pro-aristocratic impulse, in other words, that finds all that UMC fuss about tutoring and prep courses to be crass and grasping.

The pro-aristocratic critique of meritocracy is plenty old, but has shifted in form: These days, it disguises itself as progressive. As in: if you want to complain about a system in which Asians - it used to be Jews - are "overrepresented," you can present this as being about underrepresentation of blacks and Latinos, even if your real concern is that Asians are taking the place at the top from white people,** that the culture at whichever institution you hold dear isn't what it was in some Golden Age. Or maybe it always posed as progressive - back in the day, this would have been about the honest worker vs. the nouveau-riche. Anyway.

So my preference for meritocracy was challenged recently, when the Stuyvesant cheating scandal*** reminded me of the near-ubiquity of cheating at the high school, and of the Scantron-covered dark side of meritocracy. It's a high school famous, above all else, for being a meritocracy, or as much of one as possible. (It's free to attend, admission is by test only so connections don't count, etc.) The existence of prep courses (which not everyone who gets in even uses, and which cost a tiny fraction of tuition at a private school) garners as much rage as it does precisely because the expectation is that the school is pure, Platonic-ideal meritocracy. Those who want the cheating scandal to be about entitled brats who feel above the law will be disappointed. Stuyvesant is meritocracy in its shabby, unvarnished state: there’s no pretense of a nurturing environment that reaches out to the student as a human being. Not much pretense of learning for learning’s sake, even if learning occurs despite this. And not, it seems, much integrity. If Stuyvesant=meritocracy, it's not looking good.

The level of cheating - 80%, they say? - is not new. I - class of 2001, so pre-smartphone - remember having the sense that I was among the few who didn't cheat, and that I was screwing myself over grade-wise by having the qualms I did. That I didn't cheat was in part about my own coming-from-privilege-ness - I didn't need to strive to enter the upper-middle class, just to stay put, which meant going to class and doing homework but not OMG-Harvard-or-the-gutter panic mode. I did a team sport because College, but never bothered to join the honor society, if I even qualified for it. I could afford, as it were, to find the kids hollering "whaddya get?" tacky. But I also thought - and continue to think- cheating is just plain wrong. Caring intensely about grades is understandable, but cheating crosses a line.

The article about the scandal vividly brought back those four years, and left me wondering if I'd maybe my professed fondness for my high school comes from having conveniently forgotten what it was actually like, day-to-day, to attend.

But what is the broader message to take from this? There’s a part of me that really appreciated the no-frills approach, and that found this kind of meritocracy refreshing, after being at a school where some kids' parents had donated millions, and where maybe this didn't not impact how patient teachers were with them if they were not as quick as all that. (The parents' own merit may have gotten them where they were, but once it's your kids, it's privilege.)

A lot of what's used instead of, or to disguise, meritocracy is either silly or hypocritical - see "holistic" college admissions, which are meant to sound gentle, but which nevertheless leave ever-more kids sobbing into their thin envelopes, knowing that not their applications but they, as people, didn't make the cut. Meanwhile, 'learning for learning's sake' sounds nice, but is often used snobbishly to mean learning with no regard for the social-mobility potential of education, i.e. as a way of favoring kids from privileged backgrounds, and of ignoring the very legitimate desire for a higher income on the part of kids who are, say, the first in their families to go to college. I had a teacher in high school who would only write letters of recommendation for kids who wanted to go to college "to learn, not to make money," I paraphrase or maybe even quote directly, it's been a while. On the one hand, I saw what she meant, but on the other, it seemed even at the time something unfair to ask of kids who were commuting in from one-bedrooms in Queens that they were sharing with their extended families. And what does this even mean, going to college to make money after? If your family is poor, it might well mean graduating and becoming... a NYC public school teacher.

And - and this is less about social class - there's a sense in which kids aren't the best judges of their own educations. Stuvyesant's no-frills approach maybe isn't one that is going to appeal to that many kids as they're actually experiencing it. A well-written but somewhat misguided 2010 op-ed in the Stuyvesant newspaper demands more "critical thinking," less regurgitation of facts. It's interesting that some students see their cheating as a form of noble resistance against rote memorization, and I’m sure there’s busy-work, but I do wonder what happens when these kids get to medical school, law school, or even - yup - French literature grad school, and are required to absorb and analyze huge amounts of material, because this is what makes for professional competence. (Evidently the most cheating occurs in foreign-language classes. Well, as a foreign-language instructor, I'm curious to know what this new pedagogical approach is that engages students critical-thinking skills, but doesn't ever require them to go after class, sit down, and memorize the conjugations of être.)

In other words, sugar-coating the educational experience, pretending it's all about intellectual enrichment and not competition or material gain, isn't ideal. But there's a point at which grade-obsession drowns out everything else - ethics, but also, you know, interesting conversation. Why, if attending this school might well decrease an individual's shot at getting into a good college, if the teachers aren't unusually good or the classes unusually small, does anyone even attend this high school? Isn't the point that you're supposed to get something out of being with a bunch of clever kids? Shouldn't the collaboration be over something more useful (and ethical!) than cheating on math homework?

But I don't think the cheating comes out of the meritocratic nature of the place. Nor do I even think the problem is the just-a-number approach to teaching. No, it's something much more basic, and much easier to fix: rather than giving out letter grades, every grade is out of 100 and to the hundredths place. The stress from this makes a good chunk of the school not merely grade-obsessed but insane. And, while grades/GPAs do tell you something about a student, the difference between two A students is negligible, merit-wise, a difference in how each one's social-studies teacher happened to grade. I'm no great fan of "holistic," but if the Ivies had to choose between two A students from Stuyvesant on the basis of something other than which one had who had a 95.23 (this, as I recall, meant Brown) vs. 97.45 (the euphemistic triumvirate), or even just went and picked one of the names out of a hat, that might not be the absolute end of the world.

*The post she links to, which I called "The referendum on meritocracy," wasn't me providing such a referendum, but rather a description of what I believed was the unifying theme of the two national political conventions. Both sides both embraced and rejected meritocracy, but in different ways. The RNC had "we built that," but the case for Romney was basically, here's a 1950s sitcom patrician you can trust, a born leader who never was or will be distracted by petty concerns like the fact that a dollar tip is now expected in coffee shops, and shoe repair - just the soles and heels! - has gone up to $65. Romney's privilege is - at least according to his wife's final remarks - his main selling point. At the DNC, meanwhile, we were repeatedly reminded that self-made is a myth... by the absolute most impressive self-made individuals that could possibly be assembled.

**The irony being that in this country, "aristocrats" are just the recent-ish offspring of meritocratic elites.

***Secondary takeaway from the article: sounds like Stuyvesant may have an opening for a French teacher. I'm not not interested.

"[A] school populated by very good test takers"

Does Stuyvesant have a "toxic culture"? Tom Allon, who attended the school a while back and is now running for mayor, thinks so. His critique of the school, one he's not at all alone in making, strikes me as borderline bigotry, if not as definitively crossing any line. There's a well-known form of racism that involves stereotyping Asian/Asian-American students as robots, personality-free automatons, capable of obedience but not creativity, etc. Allon veers dangerously close. Specifically, I'm not sure what to make of this:

For generations of New York immigrants, Stuyvesant has been the holy grail, the first rung on the ladder of success and prosperity. But the eagerness to enter its hallowed halls has become so fierce that special tutoring centers have sprung up in the last three decades to rigorously prepare students for its entrance exam. Most of these are in Queens, particularly in the heavily populated Asian section near Main St. in Flushing. To my knowledge, I was the first Stuyvesant teacher to work at one of these in 1986. The Elite Academy hired me to teach 26 Korean third-graders every weekend to prepare for the English section of the exam. Yes, third-graders. Five years before the test. That summer, my Stuyvesant colleague Frank McCourt took over my class. For 30 hours a week, he drilled these driven 9-year-olds in their focused effort to gain admission. Five years later, when they were in the eighth grade, 25 of our 26 students passed the exam. Frank and I used to amuse ourselves by wondering whatever happened to that 26th kid. Stuyvesant has now become a school populated by very good test takers.

I mean, how horrible, a school made up of students who test well!

In all seriousness, my problem with all the critiques of Stuyvesant's admissions process is that they always seem to miss what the stakes are of who gets to attend. It probably if anything hurts your chances to go to a good college if you apply from a place like Stuyvesant, as opposed to if you're someone who tests well enough to get in but applies from just about anywhere else. (Yes, there are lots of APs, at Stuyvesant but with caps on who can take how many, not to mention unwritten - or written? - caps on how many kids from the school various elite colleges will admit). This is less true, of course, if your alternative was an especially violent high school, but if it was just a non-famous one? Not sure.

Stuyvesant is "elite," except not really. The city's actual rich and influential families don't even have their kids take the test for what is, after all, a public school. (Allon notes that the school won't admit you because you come from a famous family. But he doesn't add that if you do, you almost certainly aren't applying in the first place.) Yes, kids who did well on an exam at 13 often-but-not-always do well later on, but correlation, causation... As in, I'm not sure what the school really does for the kids who attend. I'm not sure what role it has in yanking anyone into a different class, say, as can happen for scholarship kids at private schools, who will make whichever connections, take private jets to the Hamptons, things of that nature. Being around a handful of driven kids may help keep some on the straight-and-narrow, but for plenty it does no such thing. For a good number, being at a place where you learn at 15 just how mediocre of a mind you are - even if you'd have been one of the smart kids elsewhere - encourages a why-bother attitude.

The conversation about Stuyvesant implies that getting in is winning this amazing prize, when the prize might be 90% that you now know you test well (or can, with preparation), 10% things that take place in the building itself. Yes, it's a famous name, as high schools go, but past a certain age (20?), no one cares where you went to high school, and putting anything about your high school years on your resume will be held against you. Whereas if you go to a famous college, this might well interest employers 30 years down the line. The stakes of the discussion are quite different, then, depending on whether the place is or is not a ticket to anything particular later in life.

Anyway, back to Allon. While, like I said, I'm not sure the stakes of who gets in are as high as popularly imagined, but I'm certainly more sympathetic to diversity concerns when they're framed as 'not enough blacks and Hispanics' or 'not enough poor kids' than when it's 'OMG sooo many Asians'. Allon suggests the school admit all middle-school valedictorians, in order to increase of-color diversity. Fair enough. But he also wants an essay component on the entrance exam, and not in order to suss out who's how underprivileged. He wants the best writers to get in, which, if we're talking "essays" by 13-year-olds, would basically mean more native-born, UMC kids, the ones whose parents read to them and made them read from utero on. Not kids who've been screwed over by the public-school system. Iffy, all of this.

It's certainly ironic that Allon expresses nostalgia for a time when Stuyvesant was a place for the 'good' immigrants, the ones who weren't from school-obsessed families. Back in the good old days, the strivers who attended - Jews, not Asians - were totally stereotyped as... not robots, exactly, but too studious, insufficiently well-rounded, you get the idea, you've read about how 'well-rounded' as a concept basically emerged in order to make it so Harvard or whatever wasn't made up entirely of Jewish kids. Pardon my French, but plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

"Sheltered, privileged, spoiled"

YPISfest of the day at Jezebel is about Stuyvesant. Someone thinks that because the median household income at Stuyvesant is higher than that of other city schools, and because some of the students had enough spare, not-down-in-the-coal-mines time to protest their new, sexist-in-wording-and-enforcement dress code, OMG THEIR PRIVILEGE. When:

-One of the big failings of YPIS is the insistence on conflating a life stage at which it's normal not to have major adult responsibilities and "privilege." Kids in high school or college who are partly or entirely financially dependent on their parents are not "brats," but kids. Privileged not to be stitching together H&M clothes in Bangladesh, but that's not what's meant when this variant of YPIS is hurled. This comes up especially with grad students, who are virtually required to consider undergrads "privileged," and to dwell on how their Mommy and Daddy pay for everything. When it's like, probably about as much parent-money goes to these undergrads as did to today's grad students when they/we were undergrads. If we're nobly paying our own way now, it's because we're old, not because we're scrappier than Kids These Days. (If the only grad students with this complaint were those who paid their own way through public colleges, and who are now T.A.s at private universities, that might change things, but that's not how it goes.)

-That a kid is protesting this dress code isn't evidence that this is the kid's "biggest problem in the world," let alone that he's "sheltered, privileged, [and] spoiled." I'm not sure where the idea was born that anyone who complains about something relatively-no-big-deal doesn't also have big-deal issues to worry about, but it's nonsense. If anything, YPIS if you think that only the wealthy, only people without tragedy in their lives, have the luxury of caring about small-potatoes issues, and that the great They are only ever thinking about Serious Socioeconomic Concerns. I mean, are we to believe that only the children of white professionals are upset when their crush rejects them before prom?

-Now the petty/repetitive: Yes, on average, Stuyvesant kids are wealthier than at other public schools. Also so much less wealthy than kids at private schools, of which there are so many in New York. The money some parents spent on pre-exam tutors is peanuts in comparison with what private schools cost. (Last I checked, $750 vs. $40,000 x 4.) It is a privilege to go to Stuyvesant, but there are privileged kids in New York, and they're typically not going to a public school at all, however "prestigious." This bothers me not because I wish to prove my own scrappiness - prior to Stuyvesant, I went to one of those private schools, and I was precisely one of those kids whose presence at the school contributed to its not-a-real-NYC-public-school-ness, thus not scrappy - but because accounts of the place, esp. when it comes to the dress-code controversy, are getting the place, and the dynamics, all wrong. That a student body generally focused on obeying authority - and not on pushing boundaries, not on thinking themselves above the law - is fighting back on this is actually quite impressive. These are not, in other words, a bunch of entitled kids, which is what every reference to "elite" or "privileged" implies, inadvertently or, in this case, intentionally.

"'We still have to cater to the administration’s personal and exceptionally professional fashionista tastes.'"

The NYT links to a new, and evidently controversial, dress code policy at Stuyvesant, which goes as follows:

As we approach warmer weather we would remind students to wear appropriate attire to school.

Guidelines for appropriate dress include the following:
• Sayings and illustrations on clothing should be in good taste.
• Shoulders, undergarments, midriffs and lower backs should
not be exposed.
• The length of shorts, dresses and skirts should extend below
the fingertips with the arms straight at your side.

Let's do a close reading of this dress code. There are several clues that the matter at hand is what girls wear. Inappropriate slogans on t-shirts would have been just as much of an issue before the weather warmed up, given that kids do not wear overcoats to class, and given that (and we all know this to be true) the boys who wear those are not leaving home with a tasteful v-neck merino sweater over them, and at any rate the ACLU can swoop in in their defense. This is, as the girls themselves note, about girls.

My first guess was that this was about the sleazy male teachers-and-administrators, who were certainly sleazy in the 1997-2001 era. Teachers, and rarely male students, did the ogling. (Even though, as one quoted student notes, “'Most students don’t really push the envelope so to speak, and I don’t think I’ve seen anything too provocative at Stuy [.]'" The most ogle-happy teacher would turn his head for a girl who wore jeans, but filled them out to his liking.) This was certainly supported by what the principal (whom I don't remember as particularly sleazy) had to say in the school paper:

“Many young ladies wear denim skirts which are very tight and are short to begin with, and when they sit down, they only rise up, because there’s no where else to go,” Teitel said. “If they’re at finger length when they stand, then at least when they sit, the length will be livable.”

Seems like he's really thought this through!

But it also appears that culprits include female school employees who are either sleazy in their own right or, as is statistically more likely, who are being forced to contend with the sad fact of life that we are only 17 once. Or who quite simply have a screw loose. One student writes (and this is worth reading in full):

I have been stopped to justify my clothing many, many times since the beginning of this school year, and nine out of 10 times, I wasn’t breaking the dress code. I’ve been told that even though my skirts were technically acceptable, they were still too short for me to wear, and once it was suggested that I should follow a separate dress code, wherein my skirts should end at least four inches past my fingertips, and preferably at my knees. Even though hearing that I needed an individual dress code was hurtful, it wasn’t even the worst thing that’s happened to me regarding the dress code. That would be the time that I walked in wearing a dress that did in fact follow the rules, only to be stopped by one of the women sitting by the scanners. She told me that my dress was too short, and that I would have plenty of time to “show off my curves” when I wasn’t in school (I found this to be ridiculous because the dress I was wearing was shapeless). She then went on to say that the dress code was only instituted for my protection, because there are a lot of bad men outside school, and if I was raped nobody would be able to take that away from me. Then, she said, “and you want a husband, don’t you?” I called my mom later, in total shock, and told her what had happened. She called the school, and funnily enough, I haven’t been unfairly targeted since then.

Another student notes that different body types mean the same outfit gets a different response depending who's wearing it. Which, of course, continues to be the case into adulthood. Thus the choice of many hourglass women to steer clear of styles that would look conservative on Kate Moss. But the message that there are inappropriate ways to dress is one that these kids are going to learn just fine, and the danger that they will show up for their McKinsey interviews in hot pants and stripper heels is approximately nil. This is, as is abundantly clear, not about Life Lessons, but rather about easily titillated school employees behaving far less appropriately than the students whose clothing might be riding up ever so slightly.

******

Aside from all the general issues this raises, it also bothers me on a personal level. I remember it being great fun to transfer from a school with a uniform (not just a dress code) to one without. One ostensible point of school uniforms - that they make it so kids aren't begging their parents for the "right" jeans - only works insofar as they instead must have the right shoes, backpack, etc. It's never a mystery who has money/whose parents indulge their every whim. And the "appropriateness" one... let's just say what I wore in eighth grade, a navy pleated miniskirt and white polo shirt, was far more appealing to the creepy-man-on-the-street than was my ninth grade "uniform" of unflattering boot-cut jeans and gray v-neck t-shirts. The only possible good reason for a school uniform would be for the parents/caregivers of very young children, who then don't have to worry about what the kid is going to wear to school each morning.

At any rate, once I got to high school, I don't remember any rules whatsoever about what we wore. Most students wore nothing worth remarking on. There were a handful of Russian girls (of all builds) in crop tops, gay boys I inevitably had oblivious crushes on in leather pants, goth kids, thrifted-paisley-skirt-wearing girls, some recent Chinese immigrants who for some reason in 1998 favored Nautica logos, etc. There was even a Muslim girl who regularly paired a conservative headscarf with a skimpy tank top. Every possible high school look, with the exception of the one look otherwise definitively adopted by American high school students in that era - Abercrombie - which for whatever reason all the school's many subcultures decided was unacceptable.

And oh my goodness does this bring me back:

It was 7:55 am when I swiped my I.D. card through the scanner one morning. I was in a hurry to get to physics on the 8th floor (my teacher has a tendency to give pop quizzes at the beginning of the period).

At least I know the setting for my next anxiety dream.

A big deal

You know when you find out that someone you went to high school with is now kind of a big deal? And you feel that special mix of excitement at having known them when (assuming this wasn't someone you remember disliking) and the horrible realization that it's been X years and your... deal isn't so immense? Up there today for that Facebook thing where everyone got billions of dollars or whatever was... yup. Front and center next to the most famous names, on the usual news sites, plus, because we are of course Facebook friends, the entirety of today's feed. I mean, "billionaire" is effectively incomprehensible to a humanities grad student. That's a whole lot of... asparagus? dry pasta? There are other uses for money? The incomprehensibility of sums like that, except in the context of, I don't know, GDP, aside, it's kind of cool to realize I was, I vaguely remember, kind of acquaintance-friends with this person. Less cool when I think of what the market value is of knowing a lot about nineteenth-century France, but cool all the same.

40 of 3,295

Like the unpaid internship, the question of why Stuyvesant doesn't have more than a handful of black students gets raised every so often, and yet the problem seems to get worse. This time, NYT reporter Fernanda Santos tells the larger story through that of Rudi-Ann Miller, one of the school's few black students. The article is misleading in places - much of what Miller experiences is just Stuyvesant and not particular to being black. The long commute, for example. The overall nameless, nothing-but-a-number atmosphere. But the statistics are jarring, and the broader points hold. The piece is being shared, albeit without much comment, among the trillion of my high school classmates who are active on Facebook. What does it all mean?

My immediate and insufficiently-thought-through thoughts below:

-Just to properly situate myself in this discussion, I'm definitely on the side of thinking it's a problem that Stuyvesant barely has any black or Latino students. A problem, if nothing else, because this isn't about PC-types criticizing just-how-it-is, but because, as this article demonstrates, kids from certain schools and communities are never even offered the test, never even aware of the test, of the schools it could get them into, etc. Also, you know, legacies of slavery and all that, with the twist that the "overrepresented" groups are not exactly Mayflower descendants, and have some bad-if-not-as-bad legacies of their own.

-Speaking of, I also find it plenty unnerving that this is presented as that there are too many Asian and Asian-American students. Just as it's not the fault of black kids if they didn't even know about the test, it's not evidence of some kind of cabal that Asian immigrants learned of it while still in Asia. And, as an aside, there's nothing like four years of predominantly-Asian-and-Asian-American high school to banish whatever notions one may have had about the kids themselves being especially studious. There's something that goes on in Asian immigrant communities or families that gets a lot of kids passing the test, but Americanization is Americanization, and just like my own people, Ashkenazi Jews, did before them, once arrived, they slack and delinquentize like everyone else.

-If it were up to me, I'd go with the extensive-outreach-to-middle-schools-if-not-elementary-schools method, but not the scrap-the-test one. Interviews and essays might achieve racial balance, but it would so radically change the makeup of the student body in ways that have zilch to do with race. It's hard to say exactly what the test accomplishes, but I could say easily enough what not using grades, interviews, or letters of recommendation does. The student body was incredibly diverse as students, from creative-but-not-diligent slackers to the incredibly driven. And in terms of who's ultimately done well, it's such a mix. I think the school is a more interesting place for not being uniformly composed of teacher's-pet-types. Also, when the only factor is a test, you can always say, how unfair, it's just a performance on one stupid test this one day. And that is, to a certain extent, correct. Whereas once it's holistic, it's not that you didn't get in, but that you weren't good enough. Basically, I'd much rather if they just decided to admit the top scorers of each race, or to give underrepresented applicants an automatic however-many-point boost, than to see a Whole Person approach take hold. Especially when the applicants are, let's remember, thirteen years old, and I'm not entirely sure what there is to assess holistically when it comes to middle schoolers, who are, however delightful they as individuals were or will be, kind of... difficult.

-So, awareness-raising about the existence of the test, yes, there needs to be much more of that. I suspect, though, that too much is made about the power of prep courses. I don't know how many students take them, or what miracles they offer, but my hunch is this angle has been overstated, even if it's a hunch based on anecdote. Maybe I got in because of ambient upper-middle-class-white-person-with-educated-parents privilege and ambient unfairness, but I didn't take a course or have a tutor or, for that matter, even want to go to Stuyvesant, although once I got in I came around. Coming from a private school might have helped, or not, because the acceptance rate from the private middle school I applied from wasn't amazing (of the few students who applied, which I'll get to in a moment), and I was definitely less prepared for the math-science end of things than many kids from regular public schools. The feeder schools were public schools, but only certain public schools, in a city where rich parents send their kids to private school. In other words, there's of course all kinds of unfairness behind who does and doesn't get in, but I don't think it's as straightforward as well-off parents buying their kids' way in.

-The science high schools are their own bizarre quasi-meritocratic entity, but not the bastion of privilege we're meant to see them as. Poor black and Latino students don't apply, but neither do rich white kids. Stuyvesant is about social advancement, and is of virtually no interest to those already at the top. When I applied, maybe six of my classmates (out of 60) also did, and two of us got in. It is, in other words, hardly automatic that well-off white people get in (and of course, those of us taking the test in the first place skewed a whole lot more middle-class than the rest of our classmates). It's incredibly unlikely for families of immense privilege to even want to send their kids to the school. As in, I got sniffs of disgust/pity that I was transferring to a public school, either because my classmates didn't know what Stuyvesant was, or because it was public which trumped the rest. And it was public - it's a huge school with no personal attention, no hand-holding, no finishing-school-ness.

-The science high schools are presented as the home of New York's fancy and schmancy, when there's this substantial network of private schools (and boarding schools!) whose contribution to the general unfairness of life is a wee bit greater than that of a school which is, if nothing else, economically diverse. Which private schools - with their mix of super-rich, UMC, and poor-but-brilliant - are not. Yes, $750 for a prep course to enter a free high school is a lot of money for some families, but compare that with $40,000 a year. At Stuyvesant, maybe half my homeroom was on free lunch. At Spence, my classmates thought I was poor because my family doesn't have a house in the Hamptons. Perspective.

-The fact that rich white kids who don't need it aren't applying doesn't make it somehow OK that poor kids of color who do need it aren't applying or aren't getting in. But the way this issue is always presented is reminiscent of the way, at various points in history, Jews were used as stand-ins for royalty/rich oppressors of peasants, because Jews were, after all, easier to take on than the real elites. An intermediary, a scapegoat. Along the same lines, here, one sees lower-middle and middle-class Asians/Asian-Americans used as a stand-in for 'coastal elites', when it would seem that the real folks in power (which is to say, the rich and white, of whom, these days, of course some are Jews) are left off the hook.

Between Penny and Sheldon

Much like Isabel (who, as seems relevant for the content of this post, I "know" only via blog), I've been following the Asperger's stories as they appear, from the perspective of someone who reads these things and thinks, uh oh! And then remembers: no, not really. We all of us feel special and different and unique and all that fun stuff, and those of us with concrete evidence to support it (consider your standardized-test-score to gregariousness ratio) can't help but wonder.

But this is what I've concluded, anecdotally of course:

-There is definitely a thing, whether we're calling it Asperger's, mild autism, or something else, that explains a certain type of behavior that anyone who's taught, anyone who's been a student, certainly anyone who's spent time in nerdy environments will recognize as being more-than-nerdy, more-than-awkward. It's if anything more obvious in a geeky milieu that this thing is not simply awkwardness, because there's so much run-of-the-mill awkwardness around. People with the capacity for speech, but not for holding a regular conversation. I can think offhand of two kids in my high school class (one boy, one girl) who fit the bill. And then there were the Magic kids, the mathiest of the math kids, the debate kids, etc. Many would have been outcasts at a normal high school, and had that distinctive know-it-all speech pattern, but they were (and are, I suspect) functioning just fine if not far better than fine. I can think offhand of maybe two kids at my high school who didn't fit this, and they were these upbeat blond girls on the soccer team who were always kind of mysterious, like they'd been dropped in from a New England prep school and weren't entirely sure what to make of their surroundings.

-So there's another thing, a type of person who, when introduced to the 40 peers with whom they'll be sharing a Birthright Israel bus for the next ten days, or the 35 other kids in their gym class, will prefer to be alone or to gravitate to one or two like-minded sorts. There will be a requisite libertarian phase. Do you mostly prefer staying in to going out, but sometimes you do get stir-crazy? Do you attract friends who are snarky and/or good at math? Do you have a blog that isn't devoted to posting cute outfit pics? This is the Daria-Sheldon spectrum, and if you're on it, you know who you are, and I have my doubts that this sort of person is any more deserving of a medical diagnosis than someone who's incredibly outgoing and up on the Kardashians. There are entire milieus of people like this, and if you're like this and you find yourself in one, bingo. You won't suddenly want to go out every night, but nor will you feel that only a couple of people get you.

Personally, I'm something of a hybrid between this second thing and no thing in this regard whatsoever. If I'm around a bunch of Pennies, I'm a Sheldon who can pass as a Penny but who, given a Jane, will be a Daria. But if I'm surrounded by Sheldons (which is where I'm most comfortable), I'm aware of my Penny-like nature, my VIP status at Zappos. If we're defining "the spectrum" to begin with Penny and end with Sheldon, I'm on it. But if it starts with Sheldon and ends with severe mental disability, not so much. The question that I (and all the other NYT readers, no doubt) keep coming back to is whether "Sheldon" is a medical condition, or simply a personality type with its plusses and minuses like all the others.

OK, one more genre: The "Bad" Jew, Redux

It's like Philip Roth, Woody Allen*, that entire generation, that entire outlook, never happened, and it's still provocative - still fresh - for a Jew to be "bad." It's as if there are still secular Jewish parents who care about intermarriage, and that you finish your gefilte fish. Last month, a Facebook friend posted something intended to be edgy about how don't tell his ancestors but he was putting up a Christmas tree with his non-Jewish wife. I wanted to be like, dude, you're fifty years too late, but restrained myself. Mostly because I don't make a habit of leaving potentially inflammatory wall comments, let alone for acquaintances I haven't talked to in years. But also because this attitude is at once incredibly dated and so-very-now.

We are seeing a revival - and, I hope, a last hurrah - of the "unapologetically paranoid, guilt-ridden, self-loathing Diaspora kvetch." A touch of nostalgia for a time when "Jew" meant Ashkenazi, male, and with an overbearing mothah. ("Howwwwahd, somebody's at the doaaahhh.") It feels stale, yes, but motifs are persistent.

The mystery, it would seem, is in how the "bad" Jew can persist, when it's not as if anyone's secular Jewish parents care if they stray in this or that capacity from traditions the parents probably never even observed. We need to remember that if multigeneration secular Jews are not interested in being "bad," there are always going to be the newly-secular children of observant Jews - and lots of them, what with the observance-babies connection. Another source would be our friends the former-Soviet Jews. Thanks to them, we have a new cohort of Ashkenazis prepared to talk about the intersection of the immigrant and Jewish experience. We have, that is, Gary Shteyngart.

And because we're living in a women-are-like-so moment, and because it's probably easier for men than women to defect from orthodoxy, do not expect to hear much about secular Ashkenazi Jewish women's particular concerns. (Didn't you know? We're all either nagging our Jewish husbands or complaining to Mary Richards about our perpetual singledom while engaging in futile battles with our inherently Jewish weight problems.) So by all means, expect more and more NY-centric fiction (sorry, Amber) by neurotic male protagonists preoccupied with blond or East Asian women; the Holocaust; and their own inability to fix things around the house.

A note, for the sake of clarity: This kind of "bad" Jew is something else entirely from the kind of Jew whose Jewish identity compels him or her (remember l'Affaire Benedikt!) to become a serious critic of Israel, or an enthusiastic supporter of the Palestinian cause. (On the distinction, presented in different terms than I'm using here, see Marc Tracy on Matt Gross as versus Philip Weiss.) These are not the "ASHamed Jews" of The Finkler Question. No, the "bad" Jew is proudly non-observant, proudly unaware of what's going on in the Middle East, and thus incapable of being a supporter or harsh critic of Israel. The "bad" Jew doesn't simply marry out (as many of us secular Jews do, because there isn't much compelling a non-believer outside of Israel not to do so), but inscribes his (always his) marriage to a non-Jewish woman (the "bad" Jew is heterosexual, the revival of a "type" that came about before LGBT issues were on the mainstream agenda) into a pre-set narrative.

*Trivia of the day: the Mariel Hemingway character in Manhattan was based on an affair Woody Allen had with a Stuyvesant student. Shteyngart's alma mater! Seinfeld's fling with a Nightingale girl, fair enough, but geez!

Where every teacher is above average

Teaching (as in, elementary-though-high-school), like any other profession, has pros and cons. Summers off! Low pay. A chance to shape the minds of the next generation! Grading. Not having to sit in a stuffy office all day! Not getting paid to surf the Internet like your friends with office jobs. And so on.

But the aspect of being a teacher of younger kids that strikes me as the most frustrating is the (understandable!) vilification of the Mediocre Teacher. Not merely the teacher who's a child molester, a drug dealer, or otherwise unfit to work with children. Not even the teacher who comes in late and unprepared. The teacher who fails to inspire, who just... teaches, but does not create that magical, Dead Poets Society spark. The teacher who's mocked a bit during the semester, then promptly forgotten. (I'm thinking of a high school science teacher I had who'd been assigned to a branch of science she knew nothing about, who lectured and graded just fine, but who answered every question that went at all beyond the material telling you she'd check after class, and I think we're still waiting.) Often, what "bad" means isn't spelled out, but it's clear enough that what's meant isn't restricted to situations in which children are in any kind of danger.

With the possible exception of open-heart surgeons, in no other profession is someone who does the job just OK viewed as not merely mediocre, but evil. Think of the children! (Thus why this phenomenon doesn't really impact college profs/adjuncts/TAs. In some situations, too much interest in teaching is stigmatized, but in none is so-so teaching viewed as a near-criminal offense.) No one wants to be bad at what they do, and everyone should strive to do the best they can in their field. But the idea of being in a field in which the stakes are so high, in which if you fail to be among the best, you are the very definition of a social problem, where the reward for being one of the good ones is not much financially, the stigma attached to being not that great immense... not so appealing.

Because of teachers' unions, it's generally assumed that teachers are if anything excessively accounted for as workers, and that the right thing to do is to overshoot the mark in the opposite direction, and to think of them not as human beings with jobs, but as out-of-the-goodness-of-their-heart born nurturers (is this gendered, you ask? you bet!) who, if they really cared, would always give 110%. If poor performance doesn't - as it does in other fields, including all but tenured higher-ed teaching - mean risking getting fired, it ought to at least mean being the recipient of a unanimous, indignant tsk-tsk from society.

Everyone wants all kids to have the best teachers, but teaching is, like any other profession, going to have a range of performance. Fire the worst 5% of teachers, waiters, or accountants, and there will be a new worst 5%. As the graduate of a public high school (and Stuyvesant may be special in other ways, but teachers were placed there, we were led to believe, according to seniority, not how likely Robin Williams was to play them in the biopic), I'm sympathetic to the idea of making it easier to fire the truly inept.

And I don't know enough about this issue to begin to guess what could improve teaching - more pay? less job security? new pedagogical approaches? - only that whatever reforms take place, there will still be some teachers worse than other teachers, and unless at the end of every school-year, the lowest-performing half get the boot, but even then, there will always be some classes taught by teachers who are not, by definition, better than average. And I'm not sure the think-of-the-children approach to the mediocre-teacher question is making the profession more appealing to more potential entrants. Given that one obvious way to up the average teacher performance would be to make the field more competitive to enter, that's worth taking into account.

Reunification

My ten-year high school reunion is coming up, and my apathy towards this means that if I were to opt in, I'd now have to pay the non-early-bird fee of $75 (or even $100) to attend. Plus the usual $33-plus-Metrocard-fare to get into the city. On the one hand, I suppose I'm well-enough-situated to go to this sort of thing, in that I am married, near the end of a PhD program, and not substantially worse-looking than I was at 17. Movies and sitcoms tell me that I ought to go to my high school reunion given those conditions. (Although I suppose being single would be an extra reason to go, in that you might meet an old flame. Especially with a math-and-science high school, I can't imagine anyone would go to a reunion to show off "accomplishments" like marriage or kids. Of course, not too many had high school sweethearts, either...)

I have not gone on to make a lot of money (to put it mildly), so there's that. But I'm a Stuyvesant success story by association, what with my husband's astrophysicist-ness. (That I've gone on to a grad program in the humanities probably owes something to my delight at a version of school that doesn't involve back-to-back periods of science.) Point being, I could go with my head held relatively high, and the normal reason not to go to reunions is a sense that you're not where you thought you'd be/imagine others would be at whichever age.

But the main reason not to go is that the main reasons to go are absent. I only just now left my hometown, so unlike the five-year reunion, which was fun because most had been away for college, this time around I've had years to keep in touch with, see at parties, or awkwardly run into, my classmates. NY is funny like that. Most of the class - those who made a go of some career and those in the proverbial parental basement alike - probably lives there.

But more to the point, there's Facebook. Not only has Facebook told me, over the years, everything I've wanted to know and more (thank you, "hide" function) about said classmates. I can see, on the event page on Facebook, who's attending. I can see what each of those people have been up to, what they now look like. And this is a high school whose grads (and, no doubt, current students) are all on the site. One of my classmates is even employed there and in Zuckerberg's inner circle, which I know thanks to guess which site. On account of Facebook, there are no surprises.

So, readers who have faced the reunion-in-the-age-of-Facebook dilemma. Is it still fun to go to one of these things when there are no surprises? Or are there surprises, because online everyone's putting their best selves forward? I have until Friday to decide.

Trendiness reviewed

Torrisi Italian Specialties: I remembered this as a new sandwich place near campus where the food was Italian but made in the States. I remembered sandwiches in the $4-7 range, and so suggested it as a lunch option. They've shot up to the $10 range, thanks, presumably, to this. That, and the place is this odd mix of table-service (food is brought to your table and dishes are taken away) and order-at-the-counter (and pick up your own water, cutlery, and paper napkins, cafeteria-style), where it's not clear what to do in terms of a tip. I opted to leave one of about 15%, which makes me, I'm convinced, either a miser or a fool.

Super Sad True Love Story: Fellow Stuyvesant grad and longhaired dachshund (and James Franco) aficionado Gary Shteyngart has written another novel, and it's serving as my reintroduction to contemporary fiction, after a deep foray into the parallel universes of 19th C French newspaper fiction and 20th C Fran Fine. A full report would require me having finished the book, but I'm almost there. If the ending changes my view, expect an update. But lord almighty. Do we need another story about the tender yearnings of a nebbishy New Yorker? (Asks this nebbishy New Yorker.) As with The Ask, I like the book, but I feel as though this is not so much a narrator as part of some kind of giant narrator-thing, constant across novels and authors. Genre fiction, for those who don't hold it against a book that ones just like it have been written before. As much as I get a certain insider's kick out of reading about the shame of having a mediocre GPA at unnamed-math-and-science-high-school, I keep cringing. Cringing at the fact that a story set in the future centers on (along with Existential Angst as experienced by Woody Allen 2.0) an older, unattractive man's lust for a younger, universally-agreed-upon-to-be-attractive woman. What makes this woman so special? Well, she's Asian-American, which fits the protagonist's self-proclaimed type (he's a Jew with a thing for non-Jewish women - finally, a novel on that topic!), and she weighs less than 90 pounds. At Jezebel, so many references to a woman's weight would be called "triggering." However, I find the discussion of whether Tiny Asian Love Object weighs 83 or 86 pounds triggering me to wish I had talent in the literary arena, and that I had it in me to write a novel about for god's sake any romantic attraction that has not already been explored on "Seinfeld." What bothers me isn't that the book is set in NYC - it's a giant city, and there are more than enough stories to tell. It's that this story has already been told so so so so so so so many times. If you're a neurotic, high-libido, heterosexual Jewish man in Manhattan or Brooklyn, approaching middle age, think hard, think really hard, before unloading your semi-autobiographical fiction on the reading public.

American Apparel "bamboo" tights: The hipster cashier warned me they were non-returnable. I took this as a good sign - who wants to wear pre-owned tights? They lasted a few hours before a decent-sized hole formed in the toe, probably a lifetime record for shortest lifespan for tights. And these weren't even pantyhose/stockings, but thick tights, the kind that are supposed to be worn for more than five minutes, and that can't be repaired with nail polish. So, readers in search of "sweater" tights, I suggest Nordstrom Rack, which has the same Hue ones as sold at Ricky's, but for half the price. Barring any unforeseen burst of creativity, leading me to write a New York Jewish novel that hasn't already been written, expect a post in the near future on the difficulty of finding so-called "basics" in the clothes-shops of our age.

They like my early stuff better

Once again, a big-blog has linked here... to a post I wrote years ago.

But seriously. They can't ban crush lists! They are if anything the opposite of the kind of youth sexuality adults should find disturbing. Rather than a bunch of 13-year-olds actually having sex, this is a bunch of 17- and 18-year-olds meekly admitting they found people attractive - but failed to act on it - months or years prior.

Things that are distracting on the Internet

-People I knew in high school who now blog, in their own names, about their attempts at finding boyfriends. Yes, "people," as in, more than one. You know how Facebook lets you waste time learning that Acquaintance A is In An Open Relationship and viewing all 500 of her photos to figure out which guy is Open Boyfriend Z? Thanks to this one blog, I now know the minutiae of Acquaintance B's attempts at getting a dude, how her relationships tend to go south, where her mother and therapist stand... If someone had straight-up asked me, "Do you care what Acquaintance B is up to these days, and wonder as to the state of her love life?," I'd have had to say not really. But it's just there.

-Cheapness Studies. Hey, I'm trying.

Local adventures

Just now, after croissants and a mostly-failed trip to the by-then-picked-over Tribeca farmers' market, Jo and I came upon a massive book sale to benefit the Stuyvesant robotics team. They had these amazing shirts that said 'Stuyvesant Robotics', but the books were more promising still. I had my choice between not one but two books on Flemish painting, and ended up with one on the Ghent altarpiece, along with one on German-Jewish history, one on Vienna, some novel, who knows what else between the two of us, but one of the tote bags destined for Whole Foods ended up fully out of commission.

My old drafting ("CAD" for those in the know) teacher was among those helping the not at all geeky team-members sell the books. I took advantage of the fact that I went to an enormous high school where I looked like just about all the other non-East Asian girls and so did not acknowledge this when interacting with him. But it was really Jo who had the interaction - the teacher overheard him saying something about a physics book and got very excited, urging him to buy a set of Physics I and II. I feared where this might go if Jo revealed anything about his profession, but luckily he did as well, so that was that.

It was soon after that point that we came upon a rather odd choice for a school book fair, particularly in a cultural climate where Halloween costumes deemed too scary are prohibited: Mein Kampf, in English, but with the title left in its recognizable form. Hmm. I wondered what might compel someone to decide, you know what, today's the day I'm going to donate my copy of Mein Kampf to charity, and what better charity than the Stuyvesant robotics team? Did an intellectual Upper West Side parent decide enough was enough and that he needed more room for his Roth? (Or not. There was also, unsurprisingly, a Portnoy's Complaint.) Did an alum leave it to the robotics team in his will? Someone's name was carefully written in the front, but it seemed like a not-so-recent original purchase. I was all set to just place the book next to a copy of some book about the Third Reich, but we sort of decided maybe the people selling the books should know this was one in the pile, not to demand that they censor, but to leave it up to the people selling the books to decide if this was one they wanted. Jo mentioned it to a teacher I did not, thankfully, recognize, and he moved it back into a box. I'm 80% sure he knew why we were pointing this book out to him, but my memory of social studies classes made me think we'd be better off with someone old enough to possibly remember World War II than with a student.

Something about the combination of high school teachers and my adult life, of the robotics team, the Greenmarket, and Mein Kampf, made the whole thing feel very much like an odd dream I could very well have had. Only our now-overstuffed bookcases bear witness to its reality.

Group running and regression

Ever since moving to lower Manhattan, I've had this idea that I should ask if I could perhaps rejoin the Stuyvesant girls' track team.

Let me explain.

My 'new' running path is the same one the team uses most of the time, or did when I was on it and there's no reason it would have changed. The path is right there, but I can't motivate myself to go more than once a week. The only time in my life when I ran regularly was when the strict-and-scary track captains made me do so. All that I would ask would be permission to follow their orders. I don't know how my pace would compare, and would at any rate have an iPod. I would not join the team for stretching in the school lobby, let alone compete at track meets. My participation would entirely consist of a 17-year-old senior yelling, 'run four miles, now! and do the same tomorrow!' and me obeying. Could they help an out-of-shape alum out?

Apparently running in a group has its advantages. But I don't especially want to run alongside anyone else, nor am I interested in improved 'performance', just frequency. I could, I suppose, just summon the memory of the captains from my own time, although I think honest-to-goodness yelling is in order.