School life, between the linesBy Admissions Diary
School stories, admissions adventures, and the things parents talk about on the way home.
School portraits · Carpinteria, California
On a California boarding school's spring family weekend, students showed their parents what assembly looks like. The announcements had a runway.
School portraits · New York City
Students at New York's public arts high school learned to put on an exhibition the professional way, with a checklist. Meanwhile the department needed paper towels.
School portraits · Atherton, California
Families compare academics, arts and commute times. In 2021 one Atherton sophomore added a column nobody else had: hives.
School life · Alabama, Maryland and North Carolina
Three school-age borrowers returned their library books decades late. Two of them did the arithmetic on the fines. One of them brought a joke.
School life · Maine and Massachusetts
A Maine middle school buried a capsule in 1986 and forgot where. A newspaper declared the mystery solved, a year before the dig.
Parent life · Virginia, Texas and California
In 2019 an Arlington crossing guard held up a joke request at his post for a week. Sixty families took it literally.
School portraits · New York City
A bilingual school in Manhattan put eighteen children through a French diploma exam, then offered the same preparation to the adults. The adults had further to go.
School portraits · New York City
The Rampage, the student paper at an Upper East Side school, reviews whatever the building does next. In November 2024 the building made a new noise.
School portraits · Brooklyn
Two sisters greet students at two Brooklyn Friends buildings a few blocks apart. When one was out for a week, the parents of the preschoolers all had the same report.
The admissions files · American country schools
In the nineteenth century, rural teachers often "boarded round," living a week at a time with their pupils' families. The memoirs remember cold rooms, hot arguments and jealous children.
The admissions files · Early kindergarten classrooms
Froebel's original kindergarten activities included building frames with pointed sticks and soaked dried peas. An 1898 guide gives the schedule: twelve hours of soaking. We tried it on a weekend.
The admissions files · New York City
Fannie Griscom Parsons started a children's farm on Manhattan's West Side, four feet by eight per child. The rules were printed in the Parks Department's annual report, and the first rule was about the tag.
