Return to base school from TJ

[Anonymous]

I went to a TJ-like school somewhere else and about 20 percent of the class left during the four years. The workload can be really crushing, and at the time the school had zero patience for those who weren't 100 percent in it. It's a real and normal phenomenon at schools like this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was bound to happen when they started admitting students based on race instead of academic talent

Oh Lordt!

DD is friends with two kids that got into TJ last year. Both struggled. One is returning to base. The other is hanging on, because his older brother also went and the expectations on him are to also follow in his footsteps. Both kids are Asian.

We also have a family friend whose son got into TJ the year before, who considered returning to base. The kid is brilliant, and the academics, while challenging, were not a problem. He had a difficult time adapting to the schedule and his new peer group. Kid is South Asian.

this is total BS story, from an anti-asian racist!

Ironically, you’re the racist here since you’re implying that the people who withdrew from TJ had to be a race other than Asian, or that Asian students don’t withdraw from TJ. The latter would be especially surprising as the school is majority Asian, so by the numbers one would expect at least some Asian students would withdraw.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I went to a TJ-like school somewhere else and about 20 percent of the class left during the four years. The workload can be really crushing, and at the time the school had zero patience for those who weren't 100 percent in it. It's a real and normal phenomenon at schools like this.

would happen at any competitive school, not just TJ, where academically under-prepared students get admitted and are required to satisfy a rigorous curriculum

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, if your student knows they want to move on I would not wait. I have seen those that want to hang on and try 10th grade always have a worse outcome than those leaving after 9th grade. TJ only gets harder as you go up.

Thank you. We have decided to make the switch now. If there is one take away from our experience, it is don't accept TJ offer unless your student is really really good at Math. TJ Math courses move at a faster pace, and it is a constant struggle to recover once child falls behind. Sure there were teachers ready to help, their bigsib program, after school review sessions, etc., but any of these take away time from other courses which demand their own dedicated focus. Having solid study methods is necessary, as students have to develop their own study guides and rarely given.

I notice a lot of TJ parents here on this forum are hostile to each other, but I have not yet met a single TJ parent or student in-person or communicated directly who hasn't been kind and helpful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was bound to happen when they started admitting students based on race instead of academic talent

I’m glad we have you to thank for inventing water.

"UC Berkeley researchers have designed an extreme-weather proven, hand-held device that can extract and convert water molecules from the air into drinkable water using only ambient sunlight as its energy source, a study published in Nature Water today shows."

https://data.berkeley.edu/news/hand-held-water-harvester-powered-sunlight-could-combat-water-scarcity

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was bound to happen when they started admitting students based on race instead of academic talent

Oh Lordt!

DD is friends with two kids that got into TJ last year. Both struggled. One is returning to base. The other is hanging on, because his older brother also went and the expectations on him are to also follow in his footsteps. Both kids are Asian.

We also have a family friend whose son got into TJ the year before, who considered returning to base. The kid is brilliant, and the academics, while challenging, were not a problem. He had a difficult time adapting to the schedule and his new peer group. Kid is South Asian.

Mt friend's daughter struggled at TJ but decided to stay and was rejected by Virginia Tech etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, if your student knows they want to move on I would not wait. I have seen those that want to hang on and try 10th grade always have a worse outcome than those leaving after 9th grade. TJ only gets harder as you go up.

Thank you. We have decided to make the switch now. If there is one take away from our experience, it is don't accept TJ offer unless your student is really really good at Math. TJ Math courses move at a faster pace, and it is a constant struggle to recover once child falls behind. Sure there were teachers ready to help, their bigsib program, after school review sessions, etc., but any of these take away time from other courses which demand their own dedicated focus. Having solid study methods is necessary, as students have to develop their own study guides and rarely given.

I notice a lot of TJ parents here on this forum are hostile to each other, but I have not yet met a single TJ parent or student in-person or communicated directly who hasn't been kind and helpful.

I wish your daughter the best and I also think that after 9th grade is the ideal time to decide to stay or to return.

Not everyone who posts here are TJ parents. Those that I've met over the 6 years we've been at the school have understood, have been supportive and are empathetic about the challenges every student goes through at TJ.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was bound to happen when they started admitting students based on race instead of academic talent

Oh Lordt!

DD is friends with two kids that got into TJ last year. Both struggled. One is returning to base. The other is hanging on, because his older brother also went and the expectations on him are to also follow in his footsteps. Both kids are Asian.

We also have a family friend whose son got into TJ the year before, who considered returning to base. The kid is brilliant, and the academics, while challenging, were not a problem. He had a difficult time adapting to the schedule and his new peer group. Kid is South Asian.

this is total BS story, from an anti-asian racist!

That's hilarious. I'm also South Asian.

I don't entirely discount that some of these kids might have been under prepared, BTW. Kid 2 in my story above, the one who has decided to stay on, got into TJ over a different kid my daughter knows. Those two kids are friends, and even the kid who got in says that the other kid is a better student than he is, and should've been the one to be admitted (Everyone involved is Asian, so race is not a factor here).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was bound to happen when they started admitting students based on race instead of academic talent

This happened under the old system as well. Kids decided that TJ wasn’t for them. It could be because of the distance or the work load or the pper group or they wanted to be with their friends at the the base school. Kids left TJ before and are leaving TJ now. Unless we are seeing a large increase in the number of kids leaving TJ you can’t say that this was bound to happen because, well, it happened in the past.

It went from one or two to a dozen so it's only about ten kids but percentagewise the number has gone up quite a bit.

The bigger issue is that the admissions process is not really a good filter. They are admitting a relatively random cross section of students that have an A average at their middle school. This leads to ironicly bad results like a black student that invents a new way to treat skin cancer not getting accepted to tjhsst. https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/virginia-teen-develops-cancer-treatment-soap-wins-national-science-prize/

It's like picking your basketball team based on an essay about how much you like basketball.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This was bound to happen when they started admitting students based on race instead of academic talent

Oh Lordt!

DD is friends with two kids that got into TJ last year. Both struggled. One is returning to base. The other is hanging on, because his older brother also went and the expectations on him are to also follow in his footsteps. Both kids are Asian.

We also have a family friend whose son got into TJ the year before, who considered returning to base. The kid is brilliant, and the academics, while challenging, were not a problem. He had a difficult time adapting to the schedule and his new peer group. Kid is South Asian.

this is total BS story, from an anti-asian racist!

Ironically, you’re the racist here since you’re implying that the people who withdrew from TJ had to be a race other than Asian, or that Asian students don’t withdraw from TJ. The latter would be especially surprising as the school is majority Asian, so by the numbers one would expect at least some Asian students would withdraw.

TJ is mostly asian (even after the anti-merit changes to the admissions process) mostly because the new system is random and the applicant pool is still mostly asian so a rnadom selection of the applicant pool would still be mostly asian. So the people who drop out are going to have a lot of asians in the mix. The new system excluded a black student that invented a new way to treat skin cancer because it was not merit based. https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-news/virginia-teen-develops-cancer-treatment-soap-wins-national-science-prize/

[Anonymous]

It would have been nice if TJ had sampler online courses for 8th graders to explore if this is the sort of thing they wanted for entire high school, and then decide on applying there. Now the offer is in, but unsure whether to go ahead with freshman, and if it gets overwhelming, go through the hassles of returning to base school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I notice a lot of TJ parents here on this forum are hostile to each other, but I have not yet met a single TJ parent or student in-person or communicated directly who hasn't been kind and helpful.

Some people think tjhsst should be a meritocracy, other people think that the way we measure merit is racist.

I think the new admissions process is bad for the institution. The last time we had a process like this, the school became dumber (as measured by sat scores), whiter and richer. The new process took care of the wealth bias in holistic admissions with the 1.5% carveout.

Ultimately, they want to appropriate the reputation of a school that built its reputation and resources on meritocracy and give it to a random selection of kids that are reasonably bright but more racially diverse. In the end the reputation will wither and maybe that's OK because most of the base schools in the area are pretty good and the really bright kid going to a crappy school still has a way out. Perhaps it won't be the #1 high school in america but it will stilll be a very good high school, at least as good as the best base school in fairfax.

So we lower the ceiling but raise the floor. Some see this as mediocrity, others see it as equity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It would have been nice if TJ had sampler online courses for 8th graders to explore if this is the sort of thing they wanted for entire high school, and then decide on applying there. Now the offer is in, but unsure whether to go ahead with freshman, and if it gets overwhelming, go through the hassles of returning to base school.

There is really no way to tell. The selection process is effectively a random selection from the application pool. Even the 200 "merit" admissions are being admitted on an essay exam that doesn't really test anything except maybe writing ability (which, to be fair is extremely difficult to develop but has a high correlation to wealth and parental ses).

I went to a school like this in nyc called stuyvesant and it was humbling. I went from being a very big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a pond full of whales. It also made college a lot easier than it was for most people. I always had the option to transfer back at the end of any semester to my base high school but the thought never entered my mind. I might have been able to graduate my base hs with a near perfect gpa but then the humbling would have happened in college and as important as high school performance is, it is your college gpa that determines where you go to graduate school and a good graduate school degree is worth more than the difference between UVA undergrad and yale undergrad, at least in my opinion.


The objective is to realize your lifetime potential and I think it is probably worth it to at least try tjhsst, unless you have changed your mind about tjhsst entirely or your child was just humoring you by taking the test and absolutely doesn't6 want to go.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It would have been nice if TJ had sampler online courses for 8th graders to explore if this is the sort of thing they wanted for entire high school, and then decide on applying there. Now the offer is in, but unsure whether to go ahead with freshman, and if it gets overwhelming, go through the hassles of returning to base school.

There is really no way to tell. The selection process is effectively a random selection from the application pool. Even the 200 "merit" admissions are being admitted on an essay exam that doesn't really test anything except maybe writing ability (which, to be fair is extremely difficult to develop but has a high correlation to wealth and parental ses).

I went to a school like this in nyc called stuyvesant and it was humbling. I went from being a very big fish in a small pond to being a small fish in a pond full of whales. It also made college a lot easier than it was for most people. I always had the option to transfer back at the end of any semester to my base high school but the thought never entered my mind. I might have been able to graduate my base hs with a near perfect gpa but then the humbling would have happened in college and as important as high school performance is, it is your college gpa that determines where you go to graduate school and a good graduate school degree is worth more than the difference between UVA undergrad and yale undergrad, at least in my opinion.


The objective is to realize your lifetime potential and I think it is probably worth it to at least try tjhsst, unless you have changed your mind about tjhsst entirely or your child was just humoring you by taking the test and absolutely doesn't6 want to go.

Well said. Dont go to TJ if the only objective is perfect GPA and college admissions, go there to get the unique high school experience to learn along with the best and explore one's full potential.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to a TJ-like school somewhere else and about 20 percent of the class left during the four years. The workload can be really crushing, and at the time the school had zero patience for those who weren't 100 percent in it. It's a real and normal phenomenon at schools like this.

would happen at any competitive school, not just TJ, where academically under-prepared students get admitted and are required to satisfy a rigorous curriculum

Isn't that being addressed with remedial classes that were instituted along with admissions change?