Reply to Va. committee passes bill banning admissions discrimination

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If you are a very good athlete with a cooperative attitude, you'll play. Sports do vary as to tge degree of subjectivity but again if you are really good you will play. I was a 4:07 miler in high school in the 70's and never worried about making any team. I ran shorter events as well which were largely dominated by black athletes and frankly athletes from all over the globe, and  knew of no Division 1 school that recruited me for scholarships  cared about my race. Be good enough ia racket and results will obtain.

My kid went to TJ and went on to graduate from Princeton in three years. I came from a poor dumb jock single mother background and wouldn't have ever thought of test prep or anything like it. My focus was just as with athletics - support your kid and instill them with confidence and let them succeed or fail.  One problem with TJ - and no one likes to talk about it - is that it is not a place to go if you struggle to get in. It won't just be difficult and trying, but results will not be that great. This is not addressed to any racial group but to all students. I am not sure some parents quite get this. And it applies to colleges, too. Go to a place that is suitable for your skills and prep level - the enterprise of getting into reach schools is a racket. I saw this in undergrad days - my school was the only top 10 school on the east of the Mississippi which gave athletic scholarships, and the offspring of millionaires who bought their way in did not prosper. I thought the chase for prestige very limiting.. TJ`s historical math profiency is daunting- my kid took calcium in 9th grade and was far from alone. The county can dilute the curriculum but you will still have a cadre of high achievers which pressurizes everyone. Achievement is not a zero sum game - certain groups do better than others. The East African athletes I competed against were just beginning to dominate, and not at my expense. They were simply better. And as a generalization they were great students as they knew the value of an American athletic scholarship. [/quote]

Agree with this perspective.  Unfortunately, those who prep tell their kids they are smart and the testing process does a poor job of identifying those who are actually smart.  What ends up happening is that there are a lot of kids at TJ that probably wouldn't have gotten in without the prep.  As an aside, I don't think a "dumb" kid will get in with prep.

When my son went there, i was fully expecting to see a lot of those preppers fail.  It was my son who suffered in 9th grade. He was not used to the rigor of a MS like Rachel Carson, the competitive environment and the extra work those kids were accustomed to during their prep years. Not many of them dropped out.  I think the prep discipline helped them continue to do well for the rest of their time at TJ.

This leads me to conclude that most of the kids that do make it through prep into TJ are those on the borderline - Smart, but not geniuses.  I don't think anything else can explain their success at TJ and later on in college.   Unlike in sports, there is not a single medal winner at the end of the day, so everyone who makes it through the grind has a successful outcome. [/quote]

Yup it's telling that some anecdotes from TJ are extremely long hours and some are it's nothing out of the ordinary

The long hours folks are from the smart and work hard group, those folks should not really be at TJ but they are willing to put in the work.  There are plenty of folks in FCPS that could make it at TJ if they worked 2,3,4 hours plus a day on STEM.

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