For those of you not acquainted with Newton, let me give you an introduction. It's a rich suburb of Boston. Very rich. The public schools rival any of the many private prep schools in New England. My parents attended a good friend's grandson's bar mitzvah there last weekend. (They sat at the gentile table with the Catholic grandparents who felt obliged to go out and buy new clothes so as not to appear as "country bumpkins" at the event. Neighbors of my parents, they too live in a Boston suburb, but one with a median household income of only $70K, not $86K like Newton. Whatever.) Anyway, the event easily outstripped my sister's Westchester County wedding, just in hired staff and accoutrement alone. There's easily a cottage industry for Bar Mitzvah's that involves arcade games, make your own tee shirts, dj's with dance instructors and so much more. (The chaos and massive number of 13 year olds was too much for my father, who has sworn off Mitzvahs forever.)
So that's Newton. Massive displays of wealth aside ~ it's also the home of Chestnut Hill and Boston College. They have their very own Bloomingdale's and a good chunk of the Boston Marathon route, including Heart Break Hill.
Anyway, since the article's publication, Judith Warner, author of "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety", has written about it in her NYT blog. I've linked to that blog entry and quoted it a bit below.
I read her blog entry and loved what she had to say.
I realized pretty early on that I was never going to be my older sister, so there was no point in killing myself trying. I had my moments ~ like when a math teacher told me I wasn't "cut out" to get an A in calculus (I showed him!) or when I received an honors in English at the Advanced Studies Program we both attended, with the same English teacher, even!
...I do think that figuring out at 18 – and not at 28 or 38 or 48, when the stakes are so much higher – that achievement for achievement’s sake is basically a zero-sum game is a very good thing. That is, if they have the eyes to see it.
To me, the greatest achievements were the ones where I made my sister proud of me. My parents were sparse with praise, but my sister knew exactly what my world was like, when she said she was proud, I was elated.
A lot of success early in life can be a real liability — if you buy into it. Brass rings keep getting suspended higher and higher as you grow older. And when you grab them, they have a way of turning into dust in your hands.
I learned early in high school that it was best with a new teacher to submit sub par work for the first few assignments, that way you were guaranteed to show improvement. It was good for the teacher's ego and it spared me the "not working to your potential" comments I hated so much. Who were they to tell me what my potential was? But how is it that at 15 I was working the system? That I knew my own sub par was more than good enough for the beginning of the semester and no one ever caught on?
College was a new story. For the first time, it was hard. I actually had to work. But I realized something very early on ~ as other students jockeyed for favor and made a point of getting face time with the professors and sweated their GPAs and their chances of getting into the top medical schools and law schools ~ for me it didn't matter. Let them squabble. Let them make fools of themselves. My GPA was not that important to me. I could live a very happy life with a diploma and a 3.0.
So, I made friends, I learned, I enjoyed my classes and I stayed out of the insanity. And I had the occasional laugh at the expense of those who were so hung up on their GPAs that they actually would chase down professors to get an A- raised. To me that didn't even seem ethical.
When I remember college, I remember friends and places, the situations I got myself into with my new found freedom. I remember the professors who inspired me and made me think. I remember the late nights, the conversations, the first time I fell in love. I remember the losses, the friend who died, my own realizations about life and other people. I remember growing up. I remember learning much more outside the classroom than inside. I guess it's not until graduate school that it really becomes about the academics.
“The best and brightest” is a concept that really ought to be retired in favor of the good.
That's one thing that I had going for me. My grandmother, who didn't live to see me graduate from college, did instill in me the importance of being a good person above anything else. It was her influence that allowed me to not need to be one of the great achievers.
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