From Business Insider:
Some of the city’s most elite private schools will soon require 4-year-olds to take a new, harder admissions test given on an iPad and designed to assess math and literacy skills.
The educational services company ERB’s Admission Assessment for Beginning Learners (AABL) will be given for the first time in October and is a significant departure from the previous, IQ-like test most New York City private schools required for the past 45 years…
The coalition cited concerns that 4-year-olds were over-preparing for the old IQ exam.
“We’re looking at things like knowing letters, numbers and shapes, knowing letter sounds, recognizing rhymes, counting, adding, subtracting and more,” she said. “For example, if the question stated ‘What is a mouse?’ and the kid answered ‘animal,’ he or she would get 1 point. If the kid said ‘a gray animal that is small, has a tail and likes to eat cheese,’ the kid would get the full 2 points,” Doruk explained.
If a child just said “animal,” the tester would reply, “Tell me more,” giving the child another chance to earn the full 2 points, Doruk said.
This is a timed test. If you cannot read analog clocks, a digital timer will be provided to you. If you are not yet familiar with the concept of time, a slightly older four-year-old will show you how many minutes are left using the “THIS MANY fingers” method. If you do not yet have sufficiently developed motor skills to hold a pencil, your answers will be dictated.
QUESTION 1:
A: I like flags
B: I don’t like flags
C: I don’t like this drawing; I want the book about the penguins.
D: [Sneezing]
QUESTION 2:
A: I’m allowed to have drawings in my room
B: I don’t like that shape
C: I pick my own shoes
D: I have a dog only I’m not allowed
QUESTION 3: Compare and contrast the nature of homosocialism in Moby Dick and Richard Wright’s Native Son.
A: The red one
B: I have eaten the paper the test question is on.
C: I saw a kitty
D: I would like to see a kitty
QUESTION 4: 
A: It was only one dollar
B: My sister she went to camp and when I’m nine I’m allowed to go to camp it’s at the Y and she gets to climb a rope course and she has six friends and I have more friends than that and I’ll get friends at camp too
C: I can count to seven but I don’t have enough fingers
D: I can count to seven and I do have enough fingers
QUESTION 5: 
A: My nose is hurty but I can’t stop scratching
B: Lily
C: Daddy is a man. Mommy is a person. Daddy is a flying away on business man. Mommy is a person.
D: Dogs don’t use money but I have I have a red truck in my house, I have a red truck I got last month
Tags: education, news, private schools, some of these are actual questions from that test you guys, testing
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Wait, I thought rich people’s kids were only allowed to play with all-natural hand-carved wooden toys and brought their lunches to kindergarten in a cloth-covered basket. Is this a West Coast/East Coast divide? A NYC/literally everywhere else in the world thing? Or is the Waldorf schtick an early-90s relic and there is only iPad now?
Are rich people’s kids being teleported to a very wealthy part of the 1700s?
Also, four-year-olds are expected to do MATH? I have very clear memories of learning addition and subtraction well into like, second and third grade. (It is possible I was behind on math, but, still.)
At least out here they’re not *expected* to do math, but it’s on the preschool buffet so the ones who are ready for it start picking it up.
West Coast/East Coast, especially the cloth-covered baskets.
Big parenting debate among our friends who are rich enough to already have children is whether each child should get their own iPad. West Coast!
Why is Lily picking the items she needs after she goes to the store, but before she puts any of them in her cart? I usually either make my list before I go to the store, or put things in my cart/basket as I pick them.
I’m so confused.
I HAVE A RED TRUCK
ALSO, in question one, why are the sails facing different directions?
And it looks like the ship is sailing backwards, given that the sails are facing us like that and we can see the stern. But I’m no sailing expert, so I guess I could be missing something there.
I am clearly not ready for kindergarten. I can’t even understand the questions, let alone answer them.
Are the same people giving this test the people opposed to head start funding?
Signs point to yes.
1. C
2. D
3. D
4. D
5. D
HOW DID I DO??? I really stressed out over the string of Ds because, like, that can’t be right? Can it? But then maybe it’s challenging me to reconsider my answers, to see if I really know the material? I definitely know that I would like to see a kitty, so I think I’m okay???? idk idk WE’LL SEE
I think the answer to #1 is a Pokéball.
shit
My magnet school did this with pre-school kids. It seemed a lot like reading tea leaves*, but with getting to decide a child’s future.
*or entrails. Whichever.**
**probably entrails.
Tell me more to receive the full two points for this article.
I tested into a different Manhattan public school than my zoned school for Kindergarten, and all I remember is having someone watch me play with blocks for like 10 minutes who then, obviously, determined I was a genius. Later that year I definitely peed on a teacher.
Let’s face it, we should be suspicious of kids that age who don’t pee on teachers.
I was denied early admission into kindergarten based on the meltdown I had in the office while waiting for my assessment. I later slapped a substitute teacher in kindergarten for “talking down to me”.
THIS.
(This is the future, you guys. Right here.)
I was a very sweet, smart kid who liked to sit in a corner and read, answer the questions correctly, please the teacher etc. etc. (i.e. the same kind of kid that most of you probably were) and I STILL bit a kid on my fifth day of kindergarten.
Correction: I bit a BOY on my fifth day of kindergarten, because we were both playing some kind of territorial boys vs. girls game and he got in my face and shook his finger at me (mere inches from my mouth). I remember the few fleeting fractions of second I when thought about what I should do, but then I gave in to my impulse and bit that finger he was waving in my face. He was shocked, the teacher was shocked, my parents were shocked, even I was kind of shocked at what I had done.
Really, though, even the “best” behaved kids are still just wild little beasts at heart
Perfect infant misandrist
Ugh, a boy bit me in preschool and I don’t remember it, but I’m retroactively ashamed I did not begin earning my misandry stripes right then and there.
My (younger) brother bit me at Christmas one year because I touched one of his presents (a toy truck). I like to remind him of this often. To my credit, I did not bite back, and I hold this over him.
I was that kind of kid (smart, sweet, obedient) and I was biting people until I was 7. For some reason I had it in my head that it was cute.
Also, the only worthwhile thing my father had ever done parenting-wise was teach me how to punch and kick at age 4. He also taught me that if I try to kick someone and they grab my leg, to pull them down with my leg and punch them in the face.
I tried this out some mornings before class with friends (“Let me show you guys something! Okay, I’m going to kick and then you…”) started in pre-K and by the grace of God (and the fact that all kung fu stereotypes aside, no one would’ve expected the small asian 4 year old girl to play-fight) I never got in trouble.
tl;dr I’ve always had violent tendencies
I also had notable violent tendencies in school that I got away with due to being the top of the class and generally polite. Once in 8th grade some boy was being an idiot and holding up work on our group project and I dragged him across the table by his ear. He told the teacher and she just sort of looked blankly at him and walked away.
I bit a boy in preschool because he was trying to push me off of this jungle gym-type thing. In my little mini-self’s eyes, this was OK because my parents had taught me that it if someone was trying to hurt me, it was all right to defend myself (obviously, kids being dumb on a playground was not exactly what they had in mind when trying to get this message across). I got in trouble. He didn’t.
Then later that year, a different boy and I were yelling at each other, and another kid ran and told the teacher that I bit the boy. (I hadn’t. The biting was a one-time thing.) The teacher must have misheard the accusation, because she called me over and said, “So-and-so says you hit such-and-such.” Being a tiny little stickler for accuracy, I said, “No, she said I BIT him.” The teacher took that as a confession, and I got in trouble again.
I was Perfect Smart Little First-Grader, and I still bit a boy when I was 6. He wouldn’t stop chasing me around the playground, even when I asked him to, and then he pulled the little fabric strip off my cloth coat. So I chomped his arm. We both got in trouble. I’m still not sorry.
When I was in elementary school we played this game called “territory” (I think) which basically just consisted of the girls designating an area of the playground as “ours” and kicking boys in the shins if they tried to come into our space.
I made a boy cry once because I kicked him so hard, and I briefly felt bad about it, but now I look back and I’m proud.
When I was in fancy preschool, I made a fort and calmly and articulately asked the other children not to enter my fort.
When they did enter, I bit them.
They let my kid into the gifted/talented program based on some test wherein, as far as his 5yo self reported it to me, he had to describe an orange. The fact that he went beyond ‘an orange fruit’ got him in.
Also preschool. What even is preschool. If you are doing math that shit is proper school.
Yep. I’m deliberately avoiding any preschool for Lyra that purports to do any sort of “academic readiness.” Is it all about play and exploring the world? Great. Do some counting of the weird things you collect outside. Talk to me about what’s happening in the game you make up. If I see one goddamn worksheet when my kid is only 3, I’m pulling her out.
It took me WAY LONGER to answer Question 2 than I would like to admit, and I’m still not sure I have the right answer.
wait there are real answers
I took these yesterday when some article about it showed up on my Facebook feed, and I never in 10,000 years would have gotten #1 if someone hadn’t told me that the second line is irrelevant. That is some cruel stuff to pull on 4-year-olds, New York elite.
I thought the second line was the options for answers? WHAT IS GOING ON.
OH I GUESS IT IS?? I don’t know, I was reading it like it was part of the question! Probably because I am not a Digital Native who grew up with an iPad surgically attached to my arm????
Holy crap that’s evil
See, I got Q2 but I cannot figure out the logic behind Q1. I mean, I see the pattern going from left to right, but I can’t see how to incorporate the second row of flags.
I was a ‘gifted’ child, but my life suddenly feels like it was all a lie.
The second row is the multiple choice options.
It’s a really confusing drawing.
Ohhhhhh.
That’s TERRIBLE.
AGREED. I was tricked by it, too.
I *also* attempted to figure it out as a two-line, 8-flag puzzle before finally figuring out that the second row was the four choices, and the pattern only covers one row.
And I only figured it out after skipping ahead to number 2.
Wait, tell me how you figured out Q2 because the only thing I’m sure of is that the answer is not “Triangle”. Also, the multiplicity of square answers suggests that one of the squares is the correct one. MULTIPLE-CHOICE HEADGAMES
So, all the rows have one each of a blank thing, a checked thing, and a half-half thing, so you know that the missing thing has to be half-half. And you know the half-half has to be blank-shaded rather than shaded-blank, because all of the other half-halves are blank-shaded and all of the checked things in the grid are also patterned identically. Thus, the leftmost square is the correct answer.
Clear as mud?
No, that does actually make sense. I got bogged down by the shapes, rather than the patterns, although the shapes also match up.
Every row (and column) has a square, circle, and oval, and every row (and column) has each of the three patterns (blank/half/quartered) represented. So the solution is the missing shape (square) and missing pattern (half, with blank on the left side). That may also have been clear as mud.
It’s like sudoku! Preschoolers love sudoku.
Oh wow I really overthought that one!
And I object to two of something constituting a pattern. We can make assumptions about what the next item in the series might be, but three different flags aren’t a pattern any more than three rolls of the dice. Who will teach my preschooler empiricism?!
Square with black on the right half, because the diagonals in one direction all have the same shape, and in the other direction they all have the same pattern. I wasn’t sure either, but if you follow through to the BI article it shows the answers.
It literally gave me a headache. I doubt I could do this stuff when I was four, but I could read–does that count for something?!?!
also, option E for all questions: I HAVE A VAGINA. DO YOU HAVE A VAGINA? VAGIIIIIIIIIINAAAAAAA.
I have only a vague memory of being tested for who knows what between kindergarten and 1st grade, but I do remember when one of my nieces got tested for her school’s gifted program at about the same age.
She wasn’t admitted to the program because she didn’t know which shape was a circle.
You totally know which shape is a circle, said my sister. What happened?
Oh I know, said my little niece, I just didn’t feel like telling the lady that.
SEEMS LEGIT.
Our school district has an “accelerated math” program starting in 5th grade, and my daughter missed being in that class by a few points, based on 4th grade testing.
She was really upset until we reminded her that “accelerated” was just code for “more homework.”
This happened to me in math, probably not a little bit because girls and math and whatever, but then I ended up majoring in math and it became clear to me that the amount of catching up I had to do was NO JOKE. And actually precluded pursuing a research career. In summary, fuck that noise. Early fluency helps a lot in math.
This!
Want more women in STEM careers? Early math fluency!
I knoooooow
*nurtures pet peeve with bite-sized pieces of bitterness*
Cheers to less homework, but that test sounds a little arbitrary. I mean, if there are limited resources and thus limited spaces for accelerated students, I guess I can understand a test for weeding even if I don’t like it. But if entrance to the accelerated class is based on aptitude, then the prior classroom performance and motivation should have some bearing in the instance of being a few points off.
It is VERY arbitrary, and emotions run high around it, especially because in a wealthy district like ours with a lot of high-earning tech parents, testing well in math has become shorthand for being smart.
We talked to her teacher, and found out that the threshold was very firm, but that there are other opportunities for moving into the accelerated program in middle school and high school.
In the meantime, she has moved on, and informs us that she’s going to be an artist or a writer, and thus only needs to know how to do basic calculations anyway. (I’m still going to make her do her algebra trig homework later.)
It sounds like you have a nice balanced and practical attitude about it, despite the unhelpfully weird environment.
I’m a word person with an editing and design job, and I use a fair amount of math. And I like it. I wish I hadn’t slouched around saying I was bad at math for some many years, because in fact I’m not, and if I had done more of it maybe I’d be quicker and sharper about it. (Sort of like what Genevieve was saying above.)
I had a lot of feelings a couple of years ago when all my creative-type friends were linking to a piece about the end of algebra, and I blogged about it, which I mention in case you need more flags in the ground you’re already holding.
I do have a practical attitude, partly because the one big difference with the long-term “accelerated” program is that you get to take Adv. Calculus senior year. I never did take Calc at all, and I’m a very successful corporate drone, so it’s not mandatory.
That being said, I’m very good at math, better than I thought I was too. Stats is my thing, but I never had the chance to take it in high school or college, learned it through osmosis. Maybe my girl will fall in love with math later and want to pursue it as a career – in which case, we’ll look into summer/ after school advancement programs.
I tested into the Gifted program in elementary school. But my teachers said I had to give up choir practice to be in the Gifted program, as they were scheduled simultaneously. No way! Singing for Mrs. Collins, who praised me and accepted me as-is, was one of the very few bright spots in my depressed, anxious, neglected childhood. I have never regretted that decision.
Good for your niece. I like who she is and who she is going to be.
That is BS that you had to choose between the Gifted program and choir. My husband is the music director at our local high school, and he’s become a Scheduling Whiz(TM) to make sure kids can take AP Calc and Orchestra or Choir. But it’s not easy, and it doesn’t always work. Ugh.
Thanks for your validation. And thanks to your husband. He is a hero. Band was my only emotional outlet as a kid. Making harmony on an instrument that required hours of hard practice gave me confidence and a safe way to deeply feel my own emotions.
It was the 1970s and gifted programs were new. Only one teacher for one period for the entire large school. The session was “extra”, meeting before the school day began. Looking back, it was probably an experiment, or demanded by a group of influential parents, or both.
I was tested sometime around 3rd grade for a gifted program and got in, but my parents said that was when they realized all that testing for kids was nonsense because the test-giver told them I wasn’t very creative. They were like, “this, about a kid who plays alone for hours, lost in her own imaginary worlds? BULL. SHIT.” I vaguely remember taking the test and hating the parts where the person told me to make something up because I was a serious kid who deeply cared about having the right answer. What do you mean, make something up?!? How will I know it’s right?!?
A friend of mine who was tested around the same time didn’t get in…because he deliberately failed the test. He was intensely shy and didn’t want to get called out of class in front of everyone to go to the special lessons. God only knows what the test-givers told his parents.
I was a kid the school administration had no idea what to do with because I was gifted in some areas (mostly languages) and had learning disabilities in others (math/science.) So I spent a quarter of my time in the Gifted program for English students (we read Tuck Everlasting) and another quarter in the resource room having the educational assistants try to explain fractions to me.
(I was also told by one especially unpleasant science teacher that I would never go to university because I didn’t do well in science or math. I’m about to graduate, and I’m honestly a little tempted to send her a card reading “HEY MRS. G, REMEMBER ME?”)
When asked what shape the circle was, my daughter said “It’s nobody’s business but ours.”
We didn’t get in to the school AND we had to wait until Children’s Aid and the police arrived.
I object to the idea that mice “like to eat cheese.” If you were a genius child, surely you’d have noticed that this is in fact a cutesy notion we teach poor children to deal with the inevitable rodent infestations in their gross hovel homes.
Don’t forget that poor children might be all too aware that what mice really like (as far as traps are concerned) is peanut butter.
HAH. “Poor children.” As if.
I have a kitty. I am not familiar with the concept of time.
Fun fact – I could read at a third grade level in kindergarten and knew all my colors and shit, but I was labeled as “too immature” to go on to the first grade and my teacher recommended holding me back.
My mom who was a first grade teacher at the time laughed in her and said, “No, you’re passing that boy who doesn’t even know the full alphabet, so you’re going to pass her, too.”
The teacher thought I was too immature because I would argue with her over instructions. She ran that room like a drill sergeant and even as a five year old I didn’t suffer fools lightly.
We had one substitute in kindergarten who had us all sit quietly while she explained the technical process behind coloring inside the lines. While line-coloring skills may have been an important hierarchy determination factor for five year olds, I distinctly remember deeply resenting her condescencion and daydreaming about going around to my classmates and organization a scribble-based protest action.
To this day I suck at coloring in the lines. I also suck at left-right* distinction and I blame both of these facts on my kindergarten teacher.
*I’m left handed but she taught the class that your right hand was the one you write with because she still believed that left handed children should be taught to write with their right hand. She was a truly awful teacher.
You color along the lines, just inside them and following the curve of the lines, first. Then you color the rest of the space in and if you go past the just-inside-the-lines border you already made, it’s still inside the real lines so it’s OK.
I was a very good girl.
I know a lefty who was forced by the nuns at his school to write with his right hand and he does so to this day – very badly. He does *everything* else with his left. I asked him why didn’t he ever switch to writing with his dominant hand. It’s been decades since he finished college. He said he tried once or twice but became so anxious he gave it up. The nuns smacked him so hard with rulers that he cannot tolerate the emotional effort, even now.
I was lucky because both my parents were left handed so they shut down any of those “you must write with your right hand” shenanigans REAL QUICK.
But, it is amazing to me how many people say, “I was left handed, but they switched me in school. Totally screwed me up.”
I cannot make heads or tails of the pattern questions, but I’m okay with going back to preschool. I miss naptime.
I hated nap time at home when I was about 4. Being the oldest of my siblings, I told my mother I was too old for naps. She replied that I could be free of the nap requirement when I was old enough to go to school. I was so excited for the first day of kindergarten. Then what did that teacher do? She dimmed the lights and told us to put our heads on our desks for … Nap Time. I obeyed, but was trembling with rage. Went home and told my mother all about it, as indignantly as any righteous child has ever done. And now, as an adult, … I miss nap time, too.
What happens if the kid closes out the test on the iPad and switches it over to something that they actually want to play with? Full marks or do they get booted out?
[For my physical prior to entering Baltimore city schools, I was told to put on headphones, listen for beeps, and to press a button whenever I heard the beep. I don’t remember hearing the beeps but I remember enthusiastically pressing the button for fun. They told my mother I was partially deaf. I was never partially deaf, I just liked buttons.]
[I did almost the exact same thing when I got my hearing tested at school in 1st grade except that I didn’t realize I was supposed to raise my hand that corresponded to the ear in which I was hearing the beep. Somehow, I figured that out for the test with the school nurse but didn’t put 2 and 2 together with the vision test and pointing in the same direction that the letters were facing. The nurse told my parents I was nearly legally blind and so they brought me to my grandfather’s friend (an ophthamologist…for full-grown adults) for a test. In the process of the exam, I was told to read the smallest row of letters that I could…so I read the “Made in Taiwan” stamp at the bottom.]
Mannnn I’m no scientist, but I feel like any kind of testing of little kids is iffy because HOW do you know if they’re not just fucking with you???
TRUE
This isn’t super relevant here, but I recently read about a clever way of weeding out the Teen Dirtbag responses from surveys of middle and high-schoolers that ask uncomfortable questions (which Teen Dirtbags are especially likely to treat as jokes). You ask them questions where you’ll know they’re fucking with you (e.g. height or weight) and then if you get a response like “9 feet tall, 800 pounds” you have good reason to throw out the rest of that person’s responses. And then (theoretically) you don’t end up with bogus statistics about 25% of teens at high school X losing their virginity at age 10 and smoking crack every weekend.
Answer: they are ALWAYS just fucking with you, on some level or another.
Is question 5 designed to weed out future liberals? Because obviously Mommy is not a person. Daddy’s business is a person, but Mommy, herself, is not.
<3
From what I can remember, my test to get into kindergarten (because I had a late birthday) consisted of me counting until the lady said stop, hopping on one foot, and skipping. There was probably more, but nothing like this. And then apparently the tester accused my mom of wanting me in school early just so she could go back to work, even though she was a stay-at-home mom.
we had to identify body parts, and I’m still annoyed they asked me where my palm was.
QUESTION 5:
E. Why did Lily go to store? Why didn’t delivery man bring food from restaurant like at our house?
Eat the rich??
When my brother & I were interviewing for a private elementary school, the headmaster asked him if he knew any poems (I think? Maybe it was out of nowhere) and he sang the following Exquisite Corpse phrase my mom had come up with once to the tune of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain”:
A Tyrolean elephant and a rubber grandmother (x3)
are banging on the piano of death!
I want to up-vote this so many times. Little kids (especially weird little kids) are hilarious.
hm yes Keats was always a favorite of mine too
Well did you get in??
Anyone interested in seeing more of this insanity should watch Nursery University. Fantastic, entertaining documentary on the ridiculous pre-school rat-race for parents and kids in Manhattan.
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/nursery_universit…
That is the *best* documentary. My sister is in early childhood education and I texted her after I watched it to tell her that she needed to go open a preschool in Manhattan, as that is clearly the way to tremendous fortune. She said no and that was probably for the best — all the staff at the preschools in the doc were clearly thinking ‘it would be really nice if these psycho parents would just go away already’.
What happens to the kids who fail? Are they are held back or do they go to less desirable schools?
Salt mines.
Makes sense.
Ah I just had time to RTFA and I see it’s for private schools.
How did you get my kid to write these answers?
D: I would like to see a kitty
“I would like to see a kitty” is my default answer in most situations.
I belong to a health-focused online forum with an automated check-in every few days, including a mood assessment for which one of the possible answers is “I would like to hug a kitten.”
I finally turned off automatic check-in; it was useless as an assessment because I never didn’t answer with “I would like to hug a kitten.”
in my preschool we learned the names of colors and that God made them and then we made leprechaun traps (God did not make leprechauns)
What are leprechaun traps?!? Boxes with a pot of gold in the middle and a flap held up by a stick and string?
ETA: OMG I GOOGLED IT AND THAT IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT THAT IS
more like several rickety constructs made from a tub of little wooden blocks that teacher divided between fifteen to twenty bloodthirsty post-toddlers. we stuffed them with lucky charms, with a little lucky charm trail. we were gonna beat the shit out of that leprechaun.
I don’t remember having to take any sort of test to get into Reception (rough UK equivalent of kindergarten) or playgroup. Perhaps standards were very lax.
Home school. Home school. Home school. Home school. Home school.
This makes me want to have babies just so I can keep them out of school.
(Apologies to all the excellent teachers up in here. I know you guys are the exception, because you’re exceptional.)
(Also, babies are gross.)
Actually, New York pre-schools are the very rare exception, and most pre-schools are lovely, and accept everyone, and have kids do fun things like play with blocks and run around outside in good weather, and teach them how to get along and respect each other.
And excellent teachers are not really the exception – there are thousands of them all over the world, dedicated to educating and supporting kids. I know this, because I’m married to one, and friends with dozens more.
So, you know, no reason to automatically assume home schooling is preferable, even if you didn’t think babies were gross.
What a great comment.
As a former preschool (now elementary school) teacher, I SALUTE THIS REPLY.
Where are the questions about sailing, rugby, and knitting? Kids these days….
I don’t remember any entrance exams for anything before college,so I don’t know if I took any, and frankly, I’m amazed at the number of y’all who remember anything before or during preschool or kindergarten at all! I have about five or six memories of school from preschool through second grade, and they are so snapshot-like that I really don’t know what was happening in any of them, except the one where my teacher showed us a newspaper picture of Amy Carter leaving the White House for the last time and the one where I got yelled at for drawing trees wrong. So maybe nothing else that happened that mattered enough to remember…
Oh man, I remember so much from ages 3/4. I have no idea why though.
Drawing trees wrong! I remember telling my kindergarten teacher that there was *another* way to make a 5 (drawing it all in one pencil-stroke, instead of drawing the bottom and then adding the line). She told me NO THERE WASN’T.
My mom recently went through a box of my art work from preschool. They would have us collage a picture together (from magazines etc) and then just write down ANYTHING we said as we described what was going on in the picture. It’s hilarious and I recommend doing it was all 3-4 year olds.
I don’t believe there was a test to get in, beyond “you’ll pay us to watch your kid? great”
I feel like these tests are a lot like language proficiency interviews from the mouse example in that a big part of what they look for is the “fullness” of your answer, and also because they are terrible for introverts.
Secret tip: I improved several proficiency levels (like, a significant amount) when I took oral interview tests over the phone after college by drinking 2 generous glasses of wine before the test.
Not sure how you can legally apply that to children though…
I remember my preschool teachers (well, “teachers”) being impressed that I knew what a semicircle was.
(It’s all been downhill from there.)
Hey! I didn’t earn my MS.Ed. in Early Childhood Special and General Education just to see quotation marks placed around my job title.
Are pediatricians “doctors?” Would you send your (hypothetical) child to a pediatric “dentist”? Preschool teachers are teachers.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be offensive. It was really more of a daycare than a preschool, is what I meant. But I also don’t know what it takes to be a daycare provider either, so I apologize for being rude.
I have a preschooler who is going to take these tests next year. I am dying a bit right now. She’s a great little kid, but this makes me freak out a little bit. She still has no idea what a rhyme is. More Dr. Seuss!
Hurrah for the British – your Manhattan schools are amateurs! My nephew had to sit an entrance exam at the age of 3. He failed and they had him resit. On what sort of planet do you take a three year old, and go ‘there’s nothing I can do with you: you are not worth the effort of education in this pre-school’? I also saw his older brother’s report, real 1950’s stuff, handwritten in schoolmaster copperplate. It said under the heading of Art: ‘poor’. He was five. And it was OK for an adult, an educated adult, presumably interested in children and learning to do that. His parents were paying for that shit. For a school that would describe a five year old’s colouring in as ‘poor’.
Did anyone else have to take the SAT when they were in third grade? I mean, I didn’t HAVE to, but my elementary school guidance counselor and my parents all thought it was a good idea. I didn’t end up skipping a grade or anything, I just remember taking it and getting an impressive score (for an 8 year old) and then being annoyed when I took it as a junior and did well-but-not-amazingly.
That is BS that you had to choose between the Gifted program and choir. My husband is the music director at our local high school, and he's become a Scheduling Whiz(TM) to make sure kids can take AP Calc and Orchestra or Choir. But it's not easy, and it doesn't always work. Ugh.