<p>Hearing about this kind of craziness makes me glad I homeschooled! No preschool whatsoever, and my kids still somehow managed to turn out great. A minor miracle, I suppose… :)</p>
<p>I’m not saying that going to the 92nd street Y is the only way to be successful in life.</p>
<p>I am saying that New York is a very competitive place and the Y, while not nessecary, is extremely beneficial to the private school application process. </p>
<p>It’s not like in Montana or wherever that nursery school doesn’t matter because everyone goes to public school. The public schools aren’t good in the city and many of our private schools are better than even Andover and Exeter, which seem to be very highly regarded on this website.</p>
<p>Actually, purpoisepal, we’ve lived in NYC, Philadelphia, Boston, and Toronto so I’m very familiar with what it’s like in ‘a different world’!</p>
<p>My point about the coloring and the parents cleaning toilets is that I consider my children and myself extremely lucky to have had the experience we had, rather than those who felt the need to spend that kind of money.</p>
<p>The children of several of our friends attended Collegiate in the city, after we had moved, and none of them went to these exclusive pre-schools. Not one. So it isn’t a necessity.</p>
<p>We had chicks in an incubator at my public kindergarten. It was a pretty ****ty K-8 school, too, in a blue collar Boston suburb. Admittedly we didn’t play outside everyday, as those Boston winters can be brutal, but fortunately I seem to have survived those traumatizing experiences of having to play inside every now and then.</p>
<p>I’m not criticizing your preschools, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t criticize mine. Also, I just wanted to say that first of all, we were very happy with my preschool experience, and second of all, the 92nd street Y wasn’t as notorious/famous as it is today. It was just another preschool. Maybe a little better than most, but still considered normal. It wasn’t nearly as elitist as it is today. I’d also like to emphasize that there’s a reason why everyone wants to go to the Y. If it was just like every other preschool, it wouldn’t be so desired. And when I was there, they didn’t take you if you had money. Madonna couldn’t even get her kids into the Y. I learned to read before I was 3 and had a 5th grade reading ability by the time I was 6. Although I did not learn to read at the Y, they knew how to deal with kids who knew how to read when most people were still learning the alphabet. Most nurseries don’t know how to handle kids like that. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have gone there, and I think that if you never sent a child there, or actually went there yourself, you couldn’t really understand why it was worth the tuition. It’s not a regular nursery school. It really is special. Those teachers are the some of the best early childhood teachers in America. They choose the kids for each class in a way so that each child gets along with each other (for the most part). There were no aggresive children and they were all really well-behaved. My mother told me this (I don’t remember whether they were well behaved or not, but I don’t remember any fights with my classmates either).</p>
<p>ah yes, and who can forget the wall street scandal…
Analyst Jack Grubman couldn’t get his kids into the 92nd st Y preschool, and so…
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<p>
My daughter had that with chicken eggs and raising chicks when she was in kindergarten in our local public school. (For what it’s worth, this was in the lowest-wealth school district in the state of California). They candled the eggs and sketched the development of the embryo inside - my daughter’s kindergarten book is of the same quality the one I did in my 9th grade biology class. </p>
<p>You don’t need a lot of money to get this - all you need is a teacher who is willing to put in a little effort and a handful of supportive parents. (e.g., it helps to have a parent who knows somebody who knows someone else who lives on a farm and can provide the eggs).</p>
<p>My daughter was also reading well before the time she entered kindergarten. We also have a very good co-op preschool in the community but my daughter didn’t go there, simply because she was doing so well in her home day-care setting at age 3 and 4 that I didn’t want to make any changes. </p>
<p>No one disputes that the 92nd St. Y is a very good preschool – but you are mistaken if you think it is so many orders of magnitude above the rest. Like all cities, New York probably has some very good public schools and some very terrible ones, and a whole range of options for private schools. I am sure that many of the high schoolers who end up at Bronx Science or Stuyvesant came through public elementary schools and middle schools and managed to survive the experience and become top students. </p>
<p>I think that well-to-do parents sometimes delude themselves into thinking that it is absolutely necessary to get their child into whatever their peers think is the “best” school, and of course they want to believe wholeheartedly that in fact every dollar they have spent was crucial to their child’s success. But I think it’s a little bit sad when that belief gets passed on to kids who have grown up only attending the coveted private schools – you are making assumptions about your own schools as compared to other that simply aren’t true. Yes, your schools are excellent and they were hard to get into. But te point is, so are many other schools that are less costly and somewhat easier to gain access to.</p>
<p>Did we not see the episode of the West Wing where the Santos’ put their kids in a PUBLIC school? :)</p>
<p>It’s bloody ridiciulous.</p>
<p>since we are talking about science experiments I have to share the inadvertent one, in my older daughters private elementary school ( the same one where Bezos and Gates send thier kids)
All teh parent take turns providing snacks for a week or so during the year,and one parent brought one of those big glass jugs of apple juice.
It was still more than halfway full and sat on the windowsill,… and sat… and sat. Until something began growing in it… and growing and growing.
Then it started to be referred to as " the class pet", I don’t think it was thrown out until the end of the year.
But glass jugs of apple juice are probably inexpensive enough that even low income neighborhoods can have the same opportunities to grow their own class pet!</p>
<p>Soon to be found at Amazon: Katherine Cohen’s “How to Ace your Nursery Application.” </p>
<p>According to the author, parents should stop worrying about their toddler’s inability to master The Alphabet Song, London Bridge, My Bonnie, or Old MacDonald Had A Farm. The recently announced publication should appease the most neurotic parents by demystifying the ins and outs of the nursery school admission process. </p>
<p>However, Katherine also added that the most discerning parents will soon have access to her latest program “Early A-B-C is for Admission in a Better College.” For a fee of $50,000, the multi year program starting soon after the child’s first birthday will cover the entire spectrum of nursery tutoring. With a heavy reliance on world class psychologists, speech therapists, and other experts, the children will approach the study of Baa, Baa, Black Sheep, The Farmer in the Dell, Happy Birthday to You, Hickory, Dickory, Dock, umpty Dumpty, If You’re Happy and You Know It, and I’m a Little Teapot with renewed confidence. </p>
<p>In addition, due to overwhelming demand, an expert program that covers Jack and Jill, Little Jack Horner, London Bridge, My Bonnie, Old MacDonald Had A Farm, This Old Man, Pat-a-Cake, Pat-a-Cake, Pease Porridge Hot, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, and the unmistakable Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star will be offered for an extra fee. This program “ABC: All Before Crayons” starts right at the birth of the Ivy Bound prodigy and is comprehensive enough to include the possibility of hiring professional stand-ins to represent the parents or the children at the individual interviews.</p>
<p>Nice, xiggi! :)</p>
<p>Xiggi, you should expand that and turn it into an NYT Op-Ed.</p>
<p>All this talk about competitive preschools made me look up the old preschool that I went to. I have lots of memories of preschool/kindergarden (they were the same school), compared to my friends’ experience with preschool, my experiences were extremely different. </p>
<p>We had to wash dishes (no joke), make sure the room was clean before we could go home, and we learned how to read/write in a basic manner before the start of kindergarden. We got lots of playing time and many of the fun games were educational related. For example, we had a few minutes to memorize about thirty cards all laid out; they would flip the cards over, and we would have a certain amount of time to match the cards from a different deck to the cards that were flipped over. Our gym class was a gymnastics class (till this day I can still do a cartwheel and a round-off).</p>
<p>The class sizes were small. Looking at the current statistics, the school has maintained its small class sizes. There were no standardized tests (in my current school district they have standardized testing for kindergarden…this is public school). The students in my preschool/kindergarden class came from diverse backgrounds. My friends were Russian, Eastern European, and hispanic, and some of my old classmates came from old money, while others were living on welfare.</p>
<p>The reason why I remember so many of this stuff is because I learned a lot during those years…they are the only memories I have of actually being excited to go to school. Even though we all came from diverse backgrounds, we didn’t self-segregate or discriminate, even though we were well aware of our differences. </p>
<p>I always thought that my preschool was average, and that everyone had the same experience. Imagine my surprise when I did a google search, and the school turned up as a private school. Maybe it was designated as a private school after I left, or maybe they list it under private schools meaning charter schools. All I know is that it was free for me and for the other kids who weren’t rich. I think that the preschool/kindergarden that I attended influenced me more than my elementary and middle schools. I always kind of took it for granted, but I’m grateful for having the experience of going to that preschool.</p>
<p>Back to the topic of cuthroat preschools…I think up to some point preschools do have a certain influence, but if someone is a hardworker/go-getter, it really wouldn’t matter what preschool they go to, because they would find success regardless of the circumstances. Think they’ll make an SAT for kindergarden and preschools??? They’ll be stressed before they even hit puberty.</p>
<p>“They’ll be stressed before they even hit puberty.”</p>
<p>They already are.</p>
<p>I guess this means CC needs to start a Preschool Forum.</p>
<p>They’ll probably need to add financial aid section for the preschool forum.</p>
<p>My friend’s daughter was rejected from the 92nd Street Y many years ago because of “poor testing.” She was admitted to Dalton as a legacy and is now happily preparing for her sophomore year at Cornell.</p>
<p>wow this is insane! Omg! College prep in nursery school…im a teenager but came across this! OmG…ok i have to admit i went to a hard to get into nursery school but not that hard i went to waldorf school on long Island…for a yr then a special ed school for preschool and then was eventually transfered to public school for k-9th grade and now im a 10th grader and im unhappy at a tiny private school for speds on Long Island</p>
<p>What are speds?</p>
<p>Re ‘speds’ - courtesy of Google…</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sped[/url]”>Urban Dictionary: Sped;