The admissions files / 2020–2021
Kindergarten admissions would like you to look busy
First get your child interested in the video call. Then try very hard to look as though you aren’t.
One New York parent recalled that when preschool moved online in March 2020, their son would run out of the room or hide under the desk at the mention of joining his class on Zoom. I find this difficult to argue with. He had discovered the leave-meeting button, and it was his entire body.
The difficulty was that kindergarten admissions would be happening on a screen too. His family worked through twenty-five to thirty practice calls, with an elaborate incentive: a gift he had wanted for months, supposedly making its way from Australia to New York. They drew a route on a world map. Each completed call earned a sticker and moved the imaginary delivery along. Then something rather lovely happened. He grew more excited about completing the map and learning about the places on it. The present had acquired competition from its own shipping arrangements.
The actual appointment was the Thinking & Engagement assessment, a single video assessment whose results went to participating schools, introduced for the 2020–21 admissions season. And here the helpful grown-up met a small complication. The instructions required an adult to stay for technical support, greet the assessor, then put on headphones and occupy themselves with something else. A video was fine. Watching the child was not. After all the work of making this encounter possible, you were to develop an absorbing interest in another screen.
The following season’s guidance even placed the adult behind and to one side, visible to the assessor. Helping with a task could invalidate the assessment, with no second attempt. Your presence was required. Your contribution was not.
I imagine a parent choosing the least interesting video available. Nothing with a plot. Certainly nothing anyone might ask about afterward. Headphones on, eyes forward, doing an extremely convincing impression of a person with better things to think about. If the connection failed, at least there would be something useful to do.