Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's rude. Just as it's rude to ask little kids other personal things like what their parents do or things like that.

What is rude about asking a kid what his/her parent(s) does (do)? Is a 7th grader "little"? I ask my kid's friends what their parents do - nothing rude asking what mom/dad does.

What is the relevance of such information unless asked in the context of a specific subject?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's rude. Just as it's rude to ask little kids other personal things like what their parents do or things like that.

What is rude about asking a kid what his/her parent(s) does (do)? Is a 7th grader "little"? I ask my kid's friends what their parents do - nothing rude asking what mom/dad does.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, really? Our open house no one really had any questions beyond "how often is pe" etc. What kind of questions were people asking?

The kinds of questions many parents were asking were about tests like SOL, IOWA for algebra placement, etc. and about how to get practice tests and how much tutoring their kids should have. These parents were deadly serious, and from countries that approach education this way, so it's a big cultural difference. I found it grim, but it wasn't like they weren't nice people.

I think the key element is not AAP, but rather the seriousness that the some cultures place on education. They typically come from a society which is very resource constrained, so if your child is not at the top of any given metric, they will lose significant opportunities, and will never catch up -- as the home countries do not have the resources to spend on every kid. So, "failure" to achieve AAP, TJ, pass advanced on the SOL's, 1600 SAT's, etc means a bad career.

As someone who is born and raised in this country, but in a family that values education, I know that, what matters is what you learn and how you retain it. College? People do very well from a variety of schools. While MIT does help get the first job out of college, there are definitely people, 10 years out, from MIT that are working for Virginia Tech Graduates. I think I will go rub that fact into to my MIT employee.

-- a Hokie from the mid 80's....doing quite well for myself (so is the MIT graduate, FWIW).

NP here. PP, the bold is an excellent summary of what lies behind much of the parental pressure to "succeed" and tick off all the boxes of school-related perfection, among certain cultural groups. And you did it without an ounce of judgment or snark about it. That is rare, maybe unique, here on DCUM. Thank you.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, really? Our open house no one really had any questions beyond "how often is pe" etc. What kind of questions were people asking?

The kinds of questions many parents were asking were about tests like SOL, IOWA for algebra placement, etc. and about how to get practice tests and how much tutoring their kids should have. These parents were deadly serious, and from countries that approach education this way, so it's a big cultural difference. I found it grim, but it wasn't like they weren't nice people.

I think the key element is not AAP, but rather the seriousness that the some cultures place on education. They typically come from a society which is very resource constrained, so if your child is not at the top of any given metric, they will lose significant opportunities, and will never catch up -- as the home countries do not have the resources to spend on every kid. So, "failure" to achieve AAP, TJ, pass advanced on the SOL's, 1600 SAT's, etc means a bad career.

As someone who is born and raised in this country, but in a family that values education, I know that, what matters is what you learn and how you retain it. College? People do very well from a variety of schools. While MIT does help get the first job out of college, there are definitely people, 10 years out, from MIT that are working for Virginia Tech Graduates. I think I will go rub that fact into to my MIT employee.

-- a Hokie from the mid 80's....doing quite well for myself (so is the MIT graduate, FWIW).

NP here. PP, the bold is an excellent summary of what lies behind much of the parental pressure to "succeed" and tick off all the boxes of school-related perfection, among certain cultural groups. And you did it without an ounce of judgment or snark about it. That is rare, maybe unique, here on DCUM. Thank you.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, really? Our open house no one really had any questions beyond "how often is pe" etc. What kind of questions were people asking?

The kinds of questions many parents were asking were about tests like SOL, IOWA for algebra placement, etc. and about how to get practice tests and how much tutoring their kids should have. These parents were deadly serious, and from countries that approach education this way, so it's a big cultural difference. I found it grim, but it wasn't like they weren't nice people.

I think the key element is not AAP, but rather the seriousness that the some cultures place on education. They typically come from a society which is very resource constrained, so if your child is not at the top of any given metric, they will lose significant opportunities, and will never catch up -- as the home countries do not have the resources to spend on every kid. So, "failure" to achieve AAP, TJ, pass advanced on the SOL's, 1600 SAT's, etc means a bad career.

As someone who is born and raised in this country, but in a family that values education, I know that, what matters is what you learn and how you retain it. College? People do very well from a variety of schools. While MIT does help get the first job out of college, there are definitely people, 10 years out, from MIT that are working for Virginia Tech Graduates. I think I will go rub that fact into to my MIT employee.

-- a Hokie from the mid 80's....doing quite well for myself (so is the MIT graduate, FWIW).

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow, really? Our open house no one really had any questions beyond "how often is pe" etc. What kind of questions were people asking?

The kinds of questions many parents were asking were about tests like SOL, IOWA for algebra placement, etc. and about how to get practice tests and how much tutoring their kids should have. These parents were deadly serious, and from countries that approach education this way, so it's a big cultural difference. I found it grim, but it wasn't like they weren't nice people.

Anonymous wrote:Wow, really? Our open house no one really had any questions beyond "how often is pe" etc. What kind of questions were people asking?

Anonymous wrote:News Flash: There are jerk parents everywhere. AAP, General Ed, Soccer Field, PTA, Non-PTA, Swim Team, Chess Club, Cheer Team you know name it! Find some nice people to be friends with and stop generalizing AAP parents!

Anonymous wrote:I have 3 children-my youngest just started AAP, the others didn't qualify for AAP. I went to an open house with the teacher a few days ago and I really haven't never experienced another open house full of such rude parents and grilling the teacher like it was a press conference. Been to plenty of open houses but never seen one like. It only seemed like a few parents like this and most seemed reasonable but I was still shocked.

Anonymous wrote:The rudeness of the parents speaks to your neighborhood more than to AAP parents in general. I've had multiple kids in AAP, and the parents have been perfectly nice.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Volunteers, anywhere, aren't/can't be held to much of a professional standard. She should probably to reported to the OM headquarters though ...

Unfortunately the segregation of AAP students means there will always exist @sshole parents.

Indeed. Easy to spot, because they are the ones on DCUM reserecting 3 year old threads about how much they hate AAP parents. On the second day of the school year. So already off to a great start. It takes a special kind of b@tchy person to search through 3 years of threads, and not be this angry on the second day of school.

The responses seem to show a lot hostility, but given the number of parents (a very vocal but not insubstantial minority) I have seen who can't have a conversation about children without first blurting out their kid is AAP, it makes me avoid mentioning that my kid was AAP. But then again we let our DS decide if he wanted to be at an AAP school, a significant number of his friends were non-AAP, I once had an AAP parent ask why I didn't have my son play with the AAP kids (my son refused to play with his son because the boy always told the non-AAP kids he was AAP). I think an earlier poster is correct, there are a few AAP parents that are complete jerks, if you are an AAP parent and don't recognize that you probably are one, because all of AAP parents I knew that were not jerks could tell you which ones were and understood how bad of an impression they gave for the rest of us. But one thing I can tell you is that running around telling everyone including your child how much better they are than everyone else will likely make your kid a jerk as well, that was my observation at least. And the OP yes back in 2014 saw the same things I saw. Parents who were so pathetic that they would criticize another child for not being AAP because they might be on a OM team with their super intelligent AAP kid. I saw they exact same behavior at my son's AAP school. I was the OM coordinator, guess whose kid did not make it on to a team? I was not going to give a coach a parent like that to deal with. That same parent was infamous for doing their child's projects for them (really not good for OM), clearly because their brilliant AAP child was unable to do the level of work the mother thought they were capable of. And if you needed to know who the super jerk parents were at our school you just had to go to a school event and see what crowd she hung out with. There were even other Jerk parents that distanced themselves from that crowd. So while the original post made some generalizations, those of us that are not Jerk AAP parents are probably able to sympathize. If one parent making a statement that clearly has some validity makes you that insecure that you need to attack, you may be one of the Jerks. There were times that I wondered if allowing my DS to choose to go to an AAP school was the right thing to do, but when I saw that he could tell which kids were jerks and he made friends with the kids he liked (AAP or not) and he did not judge people based on whether they were AAP I always felt better about the decision. But I always hated seeing parents behave similar to what the OP saw. Actually I am glad this thread resurfaced, it reminds me how glad I am that my son turned down TJ, because when I hang out with the TJ parents I see some of them are jerks as well.

Ah, but at least they do not capitalize Jerks and, better still, use paragraphs.