Testing

I told this story to a colleague the other day.  The late Sophomore and Junior year in high school is such a stressful time for the children of high achieving parents.  The kids can goof off in school until junior year, when they have to make the good grades to show they are growing, and they have the ability.  The hormones kick in and the opposite sex becomes a major attraction.  Friends are much more diverting than the boring old parents.  The kids have to learn how to drive - or we as parents have failed.  Essentially, the parents are pushing out of the nest, the kids kind of want to leave, but it is a scary world.

At Fordham, Joseph took his PSAT's one beautiful spring weekend.  A couple of weeks later his scores came in the mail.  I thought I understood the scoring, and the grades seemed not spectacular.  That night when he came home I sat Joseph down and told him that he really had to buckle down if he was going to get into an exceptional college - his test scores could be improved.  The next day the Dean at Fordham called him down to his office.  Joseph was scared, and thought he had done something wrong.  Wrong indeed!  Joseph had the highest scores of all the Fordham kids on the PSAT, and the Dean was congratulating him.  He told Joseph that his parents must be very proud, and wondered what we had said.  Joseph told the dean that his mother had yelled at him for under performing.  The original Tiger mom.

After that I decided I should just say nothing about grades and tests - my boys were going to do alright.  And they did, and they do.