Almost there

Last January, I began casually beginning to supplement the 11-year-old girl's math skills. A few months later I took a look at the Independent School Entrance Exam and freaked. The math was really hard and some of the formatting of the questions was meant to seriously trick test-takers. In one 40-problem section, I got 6 wrong--some stupid errors, some misreading, and some because of the format.

At that point I started seriously working with her. I decided to tackle ratios, because that seemed to be the hardest, most frequent kind of question. We spent a month or two ripping into problem after problem. When we were done, she could do them every bit as well as I could, and sometimes better. Yay! We went on to other things like formulas of lines and probability.

Then came the fall and the start of the application season and the bringing in of a test-prep tutor. We're applying to 4 schools, which means 4 applications, 2 parent-only open houses, 2 student-only open houses, 2 parent-and-student open houses, 4 interview/tour days (all during school days), 4 thank you cards for the interviews, 16 different recommendation forms to give to the school and teachers, 4 transcript release forms, several months of meeting with the tutor, and finally, one ISEE exam to take. Only that last one and the last thank you card remains to be completed.

The ISEE is on Saturday. Afterwards we're going over to the nearby Burger King to get her a promised Icee.

It will be a big relief to get all of this over and done with. The ISEE scores come back pretty quickly. The schools send their acceptance notices March 23rd. Fingers crossed. We don't know where we want her to go next year, but we want to have the luxury of choosing for ourselves.

(With all of this, I pity one of her classmates; she's applying to 8 schools, with 8 applications, 8 parent open houses, 8 student open houses, 8 interviews, 1 billion recommendation forms...)