coexistapart's Diaryland Diary

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admission

I have kind of dropped the ball on a couple of personal projects I wanted to finish by the end of July (editing this blog's archives, ordering photos from 2008) but I am working on other pertinent things as they come up, so maybe next week--when I stop sleeping in.

And now quotes I culled from "Admission" by Jean Hanff Korelitz when I was reading it about two weeks ago.

"She was used to piercings, tattoos, reveling clothing, even attitude, but the point was, even in the toughest high schools, the schools where educators were frantically trying to get their students out the door holding a diploma and not a baby or a gun, even there, the ones who bothered to turn up at her presentations were the very ones who wanted what she had to offer—-not just wanted, but yearned for, dreamed of." (35)

"And this last, from a girl in Greenwich, Connecticut, who was smart enough to know that she wasn't smart enough, only just very, very smart, and wrote with preemptive defeat about her hospital internship and the inspiration of her older brother, who had survived childhood cancer to attend law school. Smart enough to know about, or at least imagine, the ones she would be compared with, who had been handed so much less than she, and done so much more with what they had, while the children of privilege were penalized for having been fortunately born, comfortably raised, and excellent in all of the ordinary ways. Sometimes those were the ones who got to Portia most of all." (4)

"College is where you go beyond the official version...where you read the sources and look past the canon." (38)

"I'm not implying that education is the only path to making a contribution. But if contribution is your goal, why would you choose to impede yourself, or limit your abilty to make an impact?"
It's just I think we should be educating ourselves to be citizens of the world, you know? Not just citizens of that guarded, suburban enclave.” (37)

“Or do you want to have the kind of education where your initial impressions are never challenged?”(36)

“Inside every one of her fellow students, she understood now, was a person who didn't live up to his or her own expectations, a person too fat, too slow, whose hair wouldn't hold a curl, who had no gift for languages, who lacked the gene for math. They were convinced they were not all they'd been cracked up to be: the track star, classicist, valedictorian, perennial leading lady, campus fixer, or teacher's favorite. The driven ones she'd known in college feared they weren't driven enough, and the slackers were sure they'd find out how deficient they were if they ever did apply themselves. Up and down the corridors of the dormitories...the Dartmouth she'd attended was populated by young people who were terrified of exposure. Twenty years later, it was worse.
By now, Portia had dwelt in the world of the college-aged, and the nearly college-aged, for a very long time. She knew these kids intimately, more intimately perhaps than when she'd been one of them....She knew that their arrogance was laced with self-laceration...and that their stated passions were, more often than not, arid things assembled in their guidance counselors' offices or at the family dinner table. She knew that the creative ones were desperately afraid they were talentless, and the intellectuals deeply suspected they weren't brilliant, and that every single one of them felt ugly and stupid and utterly fake.
This generation, raised with a mantra of self-esteem and extravagantly praised by their parents for every scribble, knew how to talk a good game. They know how to accumulate accomplishments...how to sell themselves to teachers...but inside they were crippled with doubt...they feared they were ordinary kids, in other words, and not the brilliant sparks they had unexpectedly persuaded the grown-ups they were. Ordinary and thoroughly average. Ordinary and undeserving." (190-191)

"Why anyone would bother to lie in the age of Google was baffling." (211)

“Don't. Don't try for this. Don't want this or, worse, make some terrible connection between who you are as a human being and whether or not you get in.
The pool, once again, was absurdly strong, the applicants more driven, more packaged, more worried, even than the year before. They were decent kids...they wanted to fix things, cure diseases, make it better. They wanted to turn into the amazing people their teachers swore they were and their parents had always planned for them to be. They wanted not to fall short at this finish line of their entire lives (so far) and be that kid who'd thought he was so great, who'd aimed so far above himself...she wished, as she checked again and again, the box reading "only if room" (and there would never be room)....that she could reach through the folder to the kid beyond and say anyone would be ecstatic to have their child turn out as great as you, and, Please, go and do all the great things you say you intend to do." (219)

"For her, as for so many members of their generation, time had stood still. Obviously, the Ivies were tough, at least some of them. But other New England private colleges were supposed to catch the overflow. Wasn't that their job?
"You know," Portia said wearily, "It's just brutal for these kids. Every day I feel lucky that I'm not applying to colleges now. The field is so much bigger and so much better prepared. Which is a wonderful thing, of course. But for the kids, especially if they've gotten the idea that there are only a few places they can go and feel good about themselves, it's very difficult."
"Sure," Diana said dismissively, "but how are they supposed to feel if they can't get into their parents' colleges? I mean, what kind of message does that send, when they work hard and are so accomplished? And I can tell you, in a lot of cases I know, the kid's a much better student than the dad ever was. Some of Kevin's friends—-Kevin is my busband—-you know, they just trotted off to Yale and Dartmouth, and they weren't exactly intellectuals. Then along come their kids, thirty years later. And they've got straight A's, and they've dug, I don't know, sewage pits in Ecuador, and their teachers are raving about them, and they all have toll-free scores...And these kids not only are not getting into Dad's alma mater. They're not getting into Dad's safety school. They're not getting into some school Dad's never even heard of, the the guidance counselor swears is the so-called new Ivy or the Harvard of the Upper Plains. I think it's just a catastrophe.
Portia, by this time, was actually appaled.... "I mean, catastrophe? Maybe if the few schools you're talking about were the only places to get an education in this country. The're not. I think the landscape of higher education is pretty fantastic right now. All kinds of places are attracting great faculty....
She would have smugly, sharply, explained to Diana that the system—-the much maligned system that so perplexed and offended the woman beside her—-did not exist to validate her child's life, let alone her child's parents' lives. It did not exist to crown the best and the brightest, reward the hardest workers, or cast judgement on those who had not fulfilled their poetnetial by the ripe age of eighteen. It certainly did not exist to congratulate those parents who had done the best parenting, pureed the most organic baby foods, wielded the most flash cards, hired the most tutors, or driven the greatest distances to the greatest number of field hockey games. The system, as far as she was concerned, was not about the applicant at all. It was about the institution." (297-99)

"Fair is kind of an imprecise concept."

9:21 a.m. - 2009-06-26

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