<p>OWM and others, thanks for helping kids whose parents can’t’ help in the college application process. I am amazed at how much work and critical judgment this process requires and given ambitious kids’ ambitious schedules, how hard it would be to amass the information, do the work, and make intelligent decisions. In our case, ShawD goes to an elite private HS with college counselors who are supposed to run the process without parents (it’s half boarding school so they have to be able to do this). So, they are much better resourced than a typical public HS. Even there, if ShawD had followed their process, she wouldn’t have come up with either of the two schools she’s applying to and would have applied along with almost all of her classmates to their standard list of schools just below the Tier 1 schools (all the good small NE LACs plus a few others in MN, OH, etc.). </p>
<p>And, aniger, thank you for helping at Ronald McDonald house. It does put this silliness in perspective. When ShawWife was pregnant with ShawSon, we lived in NY and people my wife barely knew came up to her and wanted to make sure she recognized the importance of registering then unborn ShawSon at the right pre-school, because otherwise his fate would be negatively sealed. We moved back to Cambridge and when ShawSon was 4, found our friends/acquaintances in a panic because if he didn’t get in to the right private school, again, his fate would be sealed and these folks acted as if their lives would be failures if their kids didn’t get in. That got me to me to the exurbs. </p>
<p>We just feel very fortunate to be where we are. ShawSon was so dyslexic that after the several exhausting years it took for him to learn to read, the page would get blurry after 20 minutes (still does, in fact) and he’d be exhausted and in fourth grade, hand copying a paragraph took an hour and gave him a headache that wiped him out for the rest of the day. Although he was obviously incredibly smart, I didn’t know how he’d survive school. This required constant parental work (and more). ShawD was nearly legally blind for a few years in elementary/middle school and it took tons of work to figure out the original diagnosis of a genetically caused, degenerative disease with no cure was not correct, to get another diagnosis, and then to get treatment that worked. ShawWife broke down in tears when ShawD passed the eye test for her driver’s permit (although ShawD’s vision is very good now, she has backed away from taking the driver’s test because the stress of driving causes her to have tunnel vision and things seem to be popping up at her while she’s driving, so we ain’t completely out of the woods yet). Although she has a high IQ, she couldn’t translate that into equivalent performance, although remarkably, she got into the best and probably hardest to get into middle school in the Boston area without much in the way of vision. I didn’t know what kinds of schools either of our kids would be going to. So, I’m very thankful that things are mostly good and that the worst thing we face at the moment is that ShawSon is exhausted from all the reading/writing at an elite college and ShawD is doing well academically and having fun dancing at her high school and is on the right track toward a good college. Without patting ourselves on the back, our kids probably wouldn’t be in the places they are without well-educated parents who are willing to read everything, challenge anything if needed, and negotiate with school personnel, doctors, etc. So, my heart goes out to the kids who don’t have those parents and greatly respect the work that some of you are doing helping those kids. Kudos.</p>