Feedback from uptown all girls for K?
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Anonymous
| Didn’t say I was misled — said the curriculum changed focus while I was there. They are now an anti-racist school with a particular focus, and that is their choice. It is not the choice many in the parent community or the alum community wanted, but the consultants they hired to do hiring didn’t seem to care. At my other child’s school, they brag about never using consultants to make hires because it’s lazy. I am leaving because I have found the program watered down, especially in history, and that the work is mainly busy work. They no longer read Jane Eyre, that was a mistake on your part, the type of thing that dwelling on seems beside the point to me. They do not read very deeply in the American canon or American history, and the Book of Genesis is in three major religions. To understand the world we are in, it’s good to have under your belt before Shakespeare, Donne or Morrison, really. I don’t consider it Western any more than I think Jesus had blue eyes. |
Anonymous
| Journey to the West is great, I agree. |
Anonymous
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Jane Eyre - sorry, my mistake, misread "James Joyce and Edgar." But James Joyce is a dead white man and... somewhat harder to read than Charlotte Bronte, so not exactly watering down.
They didn't read the American canon in those grades in 2014 either, but they did + do read it in 10th: Class X 2014: ENGLISH: American literature, novels, short stories, essays, autobiographies and poems from the Puritans through the moderns. Authors include Wharton, Hawthorne, Twain, Thoreau, Melville, Fitzgerald, Morrison and selected nine- teenth- and twentieth-century poets. 2023: ENGLISH: American literature, novels, novellas, essays, autobiographies and poems from the Puritans through the moderns. Authors include James Baldwin, Anne Bradstreet, Willa Cather, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Toni Morrison, Claudia Rankine, Phyllis Wheatley Peters and Zitkala-Sa. It feels to me like they're trying to do a better job of integrating this with their US history curriculum - yes they added DuBois and Douglass and Baldwin but they also added Franklin and Cather and Bradstreet, they're trying to make it less of a "great books" curriculum and more of an "understanding the times" curriculum, which is a perfectly sound approach and hardly "woke." |
Anonymous
| (coincidentally I went to private school in the Midwest in the late '90s and the 6 authors we read in our American literature class were Hawthorne, Twain, Thoreau, Melville, Fitzgerald, and Morrison, so... maybe a little bit of a dated approach by now?) |
Anonymous
| People should read it and decide if they think it’s a rich curriculum. They should also read the anti-racist audit the school did. I do not agree with you about the curriculum, especially the history, but I have no dog in this fight anymore, so I am glad you like it, and it works for your kid. |
Anonymous
Thanks for doing the work here. This was very helpful to me. |
Anonymous
| No problem! |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
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I will say it was actually a fantastic class, the best English teacher in the school and the best history teacher in the school (who had sort of a bromance thing going, they'd both been there forever) taught it as a double-period.
But the books often seemed disconnected from the history - if you read both Huck Finn and Moby-Dick in their entirety in a yearlong course (and read them closely enough to appreciate the masterpieces they both are) you're going to have to go by some other eras awfully quickly. So in retrospect I wish they'd picked books/readings that lined up better and filled in more detail, then offered a separate semester English course with Great American Literature We Didn't Get To In The Combined One. |
Anonymous
Unfortunately learning to read is also a dime a dozen skill here unless you have a kid who self-taught really, really young. Hope it’s also Hunter for you so you can be done with this mess, but if it’s not, 4/5 year olds don’t usually have accomplishments. Focus on what makes your kid tick, the questions they raise, their engagement with the world and how that speaks to who they are (at 4/5 years old haha). Have anecdotes that don’t just tell them who your child is, they show them. Know the schools and how they align with your family and values. And thank you. I’ve been through this process so now we’re in the pool of the connected, which is supposed to be a much easier gauntlet to run 
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Anonymous
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My guess is that they themselves worried about the same thing, but they had developed the course over a long period of time, made some mistakes, some corrections honed the craft. It probably kept them up at night what wasn’t in the course, and they probably argued about it until one of them retired. In the end, they
gave you a class that you remembered still to this day, taught you how much more there was to know and how much deeper you could dive if you wanted to. I also went to a school with those kinds of teachers who deeply loved both the material and the students and I am grateful to them to this day. It opened my eyes to how big and deep the world was and also made me a kinder, more generous and happier person. If you teach a book like Roll of Thunder for 40 years, it becomes a part of you, gets into your cells, and when you give it to others, it (and you) lives on long after you are gone. What a lovely gift to the world. I am glad you have it. quote=Anonymous]I will say it was actually a fantastic class, the best English teacher in the school and the best history teacher in the school (who had sort of a bromance thing going, they'd both been there forever) taught it as a double-period. But the books often seemed disconnected from the history - if you read both Huck Finn and Moby-Dick in their entirety in a yearlong course (and read them closely enough to appreciate the masterpieces they both are) you're going to have to go by some other eras awfully quickly. So in retrospect I wish they'd picked books/readings that lined up better and filled in more detail, then offered a separate semester English course with Great American Literature We Didn't Get To In The Combined One. |
Anonymous
| I have to say that parents discussing the English curriculum is a deep, knowledgeable way is exactly what attracts me to Brearley. Keeping my fingers crossed for DD. |
Anonymous
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I am the one with the patience to get the person telling me I am racist, lack humility and nickle dime my details to get them to remember a very well loved English class.
I am that parent — the one who cares enough about books and the girls themselves to not just accept what the school tells me, who complains about taking out books by Great Black authors and foundational texts of Civilization. If you want this conversation, don’t expect to have it with parents at brearley. They care too much about keeping up with the other parents, too much about not putting a toe over the line, to making sure their kid is in the right enrichment class or invited to the party to sit around reading a book. Those that aren’t are too scared of the school to have this conversation where someone might hear it. I am leaving because I am so unhappy with the way they are teaching literature and so tired of trying to fight for the kind education I thought I was getting. I would have this conversation all day every day if I at all thought it wouldn’t end with me being screamed at or my kid being picked on for not falling into line. If they knew I was having this conversation, daring to besmirch its reputation, they would expel my family. They wrote the contacts so they can do it. They have done it to elementary school students families whose parents dared to say such things in parent meetings. Yes, this type of rhetoric gets you flagged. Part of the reason we won’t be revealing to my daughter’s so called friends is because we know she will be bullied for not “being smart enough” and not as good as them. These are her friends. They are spoiled, overindulged not as bright as they have been told they are ill-informed not very nice girls but also the best she could do. Years and years of watching these once bright little girls — ugh, spare yourself. I would like to send my kid to the Brearley you have in your head (I once had it, too). I’ll let you know if I find it. One place it is not is on 83rd and East End. |
Anonymous
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He is either too cowardly to have it in person or too smart — he knows it would upset the school the things I written and doesn’t want the stink of disagreement on him.
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Anonymous
| Honestly your experience is a great argument for eschewing private schools - which are to varying degrees all like this - altogether and going public instead; nobody policing parent speech there, and outside of a small handful of elementary schools they're not chock-full of spoiled mean kids. |