The Neurotic Parent

People often ask what it takes to play club soccer.  For kids, it's speed, agility and fortitude.  And for their parents, it's a willingness to spend eleven years driving 4-8 hours every weekend.  

These drives involve finding your way to places you've never visited, but have heard mentioned on the news when there are gang killings or extreme weather.  And the games are usually scheduled for 7 AM and 5 PM, leaving you with six hours to kill in cities with few offerings besides a Denny's, a Walmart, and if you are lucky, a video arcade. 

Club soccer, of course, is not the only interest that prevent kids – and their parents – from having a life.   There are other sports, like volleyball, which means spending weekends in the Comfort Inn in Reno.  There are also dance competitons, horse shows and chess tournaments - all of which require giving up all of your free time for the majority of your parenting years. 

Until recently, the Law of Inconvenient Youth Logistics ensured that if your child became interested in an activity, it would not be available at a normal hour within a twenty mile radius of your place of residence.  But now, thankfully, more and more students are pursuing a challenging extracurricular that can be practiced right in their own homes, often for as long as six hours a day, seven days a week.  And it is an activity that teaches the importance of individual accomplishment, rather than the clichéd lessons of teamwork.

That activity is Facebook.

I didn't appreciate the enormous skillset necessary for Facebook until I joined several weeks ago.  Even an absolute beginner needs talents in Computer Science, Graphic Arts, Photography, Creative Writing and "Sending Good Karma". 

Unlike sports or other popular extracurriculars, Facebook requires no uniforms, costumes or equipment.  It is cheap, convenient and injury free.  (The Neurotic Parent Institute has not heard of anyone getting hurt, other than by suicide.) 

And the networking potential is so immense that Facebookers might not ever need to go to college.  They can have thousands of friends who will invite them places, and even get them jobs, without ever having to speak to them or see them.  They can even become famous, like one of Brown'16's older sisters, who now qualifies as an "Internet It Girl" with 1243 friends and thousands of adoring posts on her wall.

But Facebook is an activity that is only appropriate for the most focused and driven kids.  It is impossible to just dabble – three hours a day is the bare minimum required for the child who chooses this as his or her passion. 

So give away the cleats and sell the horse.  This is the activity you want your kids to excel at.  And it is essential that your kids start when they are young – Although I like to consider myself reasonably computer literate, I still cannot figure out when it's my turn at Scrabulous. 

I normally am very fond of the wonderful innovations that engineers have brought into our lives.  On college tours, when I hear about the opportunities for students entering engineering programs, I can only dare to imagine how the future will be enhanced.  And I am particularly grateful to the creators of Wii Fit, (who surely attended top colleges), because my husband has now lost 27 pounds, sweating with his avatar in front of our television.

But tonight I have two major beefs with engineers.  First, let it be known that whoever invented the Hands-free Cell Phone Headset must have attended a lower-tier engineering school.  Ever since the new California law went into effect on July 1st, I haven’t been able to understand anything that anyone says while talking on their mobile phone.  People driving on Sunset Boulevard sound like they’re standing on top of Mount Everest during an electrical storm.  In fact, even though phones now do all sorts of amazing things like take photos, play music and search Wikipedia, the ability to actually have a non-echoey conversation is a distant memory.  Makes me miss the days of cords and busy signals, because at least then we had decent reception.  I had thought that Call Waiting was the most annoying invention in recent telephone history, but that honor now goes to Blue Tooth.

My second issue with modern engineering is Typepad’s new Compose Editor.  I just wrote a lengthy (for me) post about replacing my creams and gels in the CVS Pharmacy in Cooperstown.  But when I saved it, it disappeared. 

This makes me consider the potential pitfalls of the Common App, which is submitted online.  What if a student spends 50 hours filling in an application (that won’t be my son – just an example), then goes to save it…and it disappears?  Or how about if an applicant clicks the send button and the application never goes where it’s supposed to?  Can we really trust quirky cyberspace, with viruses and porn floating around, to instantly deliver a student’s application to the right college?  It’s conceivable that your child’s Common App could end up in the Admission Department’s spam file.  Or saved on the desktops of users of non-secure servers everywhere.  Or permanently deleted.

It’s enough to make you long for the days of registered mail.

I know that many of you are waiting to hear about our drive-through visit to Oberlin without CJ, as well as reflections on all those baseball games.

But I have heard from so many readers about the the ever-evolving SAT, that I feel obligated to devote a post to it.

First, a new study has shown that the new, almost-four hour SAT with the added Writing Section does not predict college succes.  However, it has given lots of business to tutors who claim they can teach a 16-year old to write a decent essay in 25 minutes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/education/18sat.html

But the major news is that the folks at College Board have decided that students will no longer be required to send in all their lousy SAT scores to colleges.   Soon, as in the case of the kinder, gentler ACTs, test takers can choose to share only the scores they like.  This means that many kids will spend their entire high school career taking and retaking the SAT, until they are satisfied with their scores. 

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sat21-2008jun21,0,1318580.story

Sadly for CJ, this new policy does not go into effect until March 2009, about a week after he finds out where he’s going to college.  But this opens up all sorts of possibilities for our younger son.  He can start taking the SAT in ninth grade, and sign up for it up to seven times a year.  By the time he’s a senior, he could have as many as 24 separate SAT attempts from which to choose.  This could get tedious and expensive (tutoring can cost over $350+ a week).  

But given the chance to take the test multiple times without the colleges finding out about the times he’s bombed, he should end up with an excellent score.  Unfortunately, so will everyone else who can afford it.