The Greatest Man in the World is upstairs listening to My Pal Foot Foot.
If you've never heard of My Pal Foot Foot, then you are missing out on what's possibly the worst band ever to have existed: The Shaggs. Really. They're so bad that it's almost good.
I'm down here searching for shoes...both shoes for my sister's wedding in August (yay!) and for my Highland dance competition at the end of the month.
I like these for Sister's wedding (pending her approval, natch) dyed light gold. As for the dance shoes, no clue. I'm hoping my current pair of ghillies will last through the competition, but it's probably a good idea to have a Plan B in case they don't.
Oh, and Foot Foot don't live here no more.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
The only sane person in the room looks crazy
A few years ago, my sister and I had a conversation wherein she repeated to me this little gem of pithiness: "When you're the only sane person in a sea of insanity, it's hard to convince yourself that you aren't the crazy one."
True.
I just finished reading The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins and I want every single administrator, teacher, parent, and student at my school to read it as well. As I read the book, I thought to myself, My gosh, I know all of these kids. And that thought really frightened me.
I think sometimes, as someone who graduated high school nine years ago, that I'm more likely to fall into the trap of thinking that school now is the same or quite similar to school when I was a student than someone who graduated twenty or thirty years ago...and I'm wrong. I knew kids when I was in school who definitely were overachiever poster children (aforementioned sister and best friend among them), but there wasn't a culture, at least not as far as I could tell, of overachievement. Maybe it's because I was a militant underachiever for the first eighteen years of my life, or maybe it's because the kids at my high school were applying to Auburn and Alabama, not the Ivy League.
But now, where I teach, the culture of superstardom is endemic and it's heavy. I remember the student I taught my first year who seemed to be killing herself with extracurricular activities and advanced classes as a junior. When she came to me and asked that I sign off on her application to run for student council co-president, I told her that I was doing so with serious reservations because of her other commitments; I felt strongly that she wouldn't be able to juggle everything successfully.
She ran and she won, and she did a terrible job as co-president because she didn't have the time to keep up with her coursework (got a bad grade in a math class that kept her out of her first-choice college), take large roles in every single school play, be a managing editor for the paper, and devote energy to student council.
I asked at the time, and I'm still asking three years later, why didn't we as responsible adults tell her to stop? Why don't we have some sort of policy in place about extracurriculars and leadership positions like we do with AP courses? If we don't let our students take more than three APs in a year, why in the world do we let them play two varsity sports AND have officer positions in five clubs AND the lead in the musical AND be retreat leaders?
Because, the Older and Wiser Heads told me, that's how things are here. Handle the pressure or quit. We like our superstars. We make them our poster children every year. That's our standard of excellence.
Graduates tell me overwhelmingly that the most important thing they learned in their years at this school was time management -- how to schedule their lives at a breakneck pace for four years. And to me, that's sad.
The head of the guidance department said once that parents want to put the bumper sticker on their car that says "University of Georgia Parent -- but the Kid Turned Down Harvard, Stanford, and MIT." Not that it's fair to blame parents or teachers for the whole thing, though, because it isn't. The kids put lots of pressure on themselves. They have to be the best at everything all the time, or it isn't worth doing.
Reading this book sharpened my resolve to homeschool our (eventual) children -- I really don't want my family to believe that this lifestyle is normal or desirable.
But it's probably not good enough for me just to advocate for my own family. I've been unsettled by seeing this trend for the past several years, and my desire to be an agent of change for my own community has now crystallized. I might just be the person who everyone else thinks is crazy, but I'm betting there are enough other sane people floating in the crazy ocean who will agree and sign on.
True.
I just finished reading The Overachievers by Alexandra Robbins and I want every single administrator, teacher, parent, and student at my school to read it as well. As I read the book, I thought to myself, My gosh, I know all of these kids. And that thought really frightened me.
I think sometimes, as someone who graduated high school nine years ago, that I'm more likely to fall into the trap of thinking that school now is the same or quite similar to school when I was a student than someone who graduated twenty or thirty years ago...and I'm wrong. I knew kids when I was in school who definitely were overachiever poster children (aforementioned sister and best friend among them), but there wasn't a culture, at least not as far as I could tell, of overachievement. Maybe it's because I was a militant underachiever for the first eighteen years of my life, or maybe it's because the kids at my high school were applying to Auburn and Alabama, not the Ivy League.
But now, where I teach, the culture of superstardom is endemic and it's heavy. I remember the student I taught my first year who seemed to be killing herself with extracurricular activities and advanced classes as a junior. When she came to me and asked that I sign off on her application to run for student council co-president, I told her that I was doing so with serious reservations because of her other commitments; I felt strongly that she wouldn't be able to juggle everything successfully.
She ran and she won, and she did a terrible job as co-president because she didn't have the time to keep up with her coursework (got a bad grade in a math class that kept her out of her first-choice college), take large roles in every single school play, be a managing editor for the paper, and devote energy to student council.
I asked at the time, and I'm still asking three years later, why didn't we as responsible adults tell her to stop? Why don't we have some sort of policy in place about extracurriculars and leadership positions like we do with AP courses? If we don't let our students take more than three APs in a year, why in the world do we let them play two varsity sports AND have officer positions in five clubs AND the lead in the musical AND be retreat leaders?
Because, the Older and Wiser Heads told me, that's how things are here. Handle the pressure or quit. We like our superstars. We make them our poster children every year. That's our standard of excellence.
Graduates tell me overwhelmingly that the most important thing they learned in their years at this school was time management -- how to schedule their lives at a breakneck pace for four years. And to me, that's sad.
The head of the guidance department said once that parents want to put the bumper sticker on their car that says "University of Georgia Parent -- but the Kid Turned Down Harvard, Stanford, and MIT." Not that it's fair to blame parents or teachers for the whole thing, though, because it isn't. The kids put lots of pressure on themselves. They have to be the best at everything all the time, or it isn't worth doing.
Reading this book sharpened my resolve to homeschool our (eventual) children -- I really don't want my family to believe that this lifestyle is normal or desirable.
But it's probably not good enough for me just to advocate for my own family. I've been unsettled by seeing this trend for the past several years, and my desire to be an agent of change for my own community has now crystallized. I might just be the person who everyone else thinks is crazy, but I'm betting there are enough other sane people floating in the crazy ocean who will agree and sign on.
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