Ivy educated teachers?

JHS
Thu, 30 May 2013 10:56:09 +0000

The standards do seem to have changed somewhat. When I was in college at one of the snobby places, any kind of conspicuous display of wealth by a wealthy kid would instantly turn him or her into a social pariah. He might have a Beemer (an old one), but that didn’t count, because the parking garage was two miles away and you rarely saw people’s cars. But throwing money around? That was a huge faux pas. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t lots of examples of simple insensitivity of the sort QuantMech described, though.

And everything is relative. When my kids went to a fancy private school, the buzz in my daughter’s class was about a boy whose parents bought him a Hummer when he got his driver’s license. People were pretty scandalized by that. (The mother said, “You know my son. I couldn’t possibly be confident he won’t run into something. I just want to make sure that when he does, he and his brother walk away from it.”) The next year, my kids were at a public magnet, where over half the kids qualified for free lunch. The school was a mile walk plus 50 minutes of two buses from our house, or a 15-minute drive. We let our daughter drive herself and her brother (and friends) to school in our 9-year-old Dodge Caravan. (There was a large parking lot that was never more than half full.) Once when I was talking about the kid with the Hummer, my daughter interrupted me: “You know, at our new school, given how few kids drive, and what the kids who drive have to do to keep their cars running, our minivan stands out as much as the Hummer. We are the kids with the Hummer.”