Kids waited anxiously outside unfamiliar buildings in unfamiliar neighborhoods in the cold, in a queue that started 90-minutes before the 7:30am arrival time.
Kids have sat through the SHSAT.
Kids survived the auditions and call back/look-agains at LaGuardia, Frank Sinatra, Talent Unlimited, Professional Performing Arts, Art & Design, Brooklyn High School of the Arts, Edward R. Murrow, etc.
Kids suffered through the assessment tests at places like Bard High School/Early College and Bard HSEC II, NEST+M.
Kids made it through the individual or small group interviews.
Kids wrote new essays (what has been your most challenging moment in your 13 years of sheltered, over-scheduled, helicoptered life on this planet?), sent their best old schoolwork, forwarded recommendations from their 6th and 7th grade teachers.
Kids and parents tracked package shipping numbers to confirm the delivery of "portfolios".
Kids expressed interest/skill in sports/science research/playing the oboe, bassoon, viola, sousaphone or some other attractive unusual underpopulated area of talent.
Kids jumped through the hoops, swung on trapezes, juggled chain saws, talked through dummies while drinking water, stood with each foot on the backs of two elephants and rode around the ring while overworked, underpaid, jaded, self-important strangers watched impassively and made notes that are neither accurate nor relevant yet will affect the next ten years of the kids' lives.
And parents had no control except to choose which 12 tortures through which to put their pre-teen children.
It's thrilling, it's exciting, it's interesting, it's important, it's a learning experience at a young age.
It's bull.
Other than scoring well–enough on the SHSAT, a fairly objective series of trick questions (read carefully!) and math problems of which no ordinary 8th grader has been exposed, how does one pick 25-60 promising artists out of 5,000 candidates? How can there only be 25-60 excellent dancers who've been dancing since they were three years old? Of all the flute players in NYC public schools, only five can play a high–E-flat clearly? Sing to match notes played on a piano?
Seventh-grade averages help narrow down the selection process (unless the 7th grade teachers decide this is the year to get tough and score hard to make everyone work harder), as do statewide ESL and math test scores, except everyone seems to score a "3" — a 625 gets in but a 623 does not?
Okay, use the absence and lateness records as ways to weed out the disaffected. Of course, there's no excuse for insomnia, 5 hours of homework until midnight, bad luck, bad transportation, bad home life or a contagious baby brother who takes his infected little fingers out of his mouth/nose/diaper to touch the remote control/door knobs/refrigerator/video game controller/older sibling's homework. Every week.
And then, after those filters, it's all up to the algorithms of a computer who takes into account children's ranking on the application, school's ranking of the candidates, and balances geography, middle school, race, sex ratios…
So a computer does it in the end.
It's all so arbitrary.
Parents and children list the schools that they can hold their nose in order to attend for four years, submit applications, and pray.
I pray everyone is happy with the outcomes.
In the meantime, until February or March, enjoy the last winter spent at your current middle school, for most of your classmates will be going to high schools spread across the City next year.
