Among the other things happening around here: we’re looking at middle schools for my younger daughter, who is in 5th grade. The way it works here, you have a range of something like twenty middle schools to choose from, you list your top seven choices, and (subject to diversity factors like language spoken at home and income) your kid is enrolled in one of those. Of course, it’s not a simple decision. Every family has their own criteria (some go by test scores alone, but if you do that, No Child Left Behind will have already have won); ours are a mix of electives, class size, school size, test scores, and a hard-to-quantify but very real sense of the vibe of the place. There are lots of websites and lists where people give their (frequently ill-written and ill-spelled) opinions about the schools, and you have to take those opinions with a grain of salt. One woman’s hidden gem is another woman’s nightmare.

It’s already a tough climb being a parent with kids in an urban public school: when we moved to San Francisco we were told by several people, “You can’t put your child in a public school,” as if to contemplate such a thing constituted abusive parenting. Since we’d heard the same damned thing in New York, and had had very positive experiences with the kids’ schools there, we weren’t buying it. You have to do your homework, ask around, visit the schools, and recognize that the high profile “only good school in town” not only isn’t the only good school in town, but may not be the best school for your child. It’s a highly personal thing: one friend has been very impressed by a school I instantly disliked; I liked the vibe of a place my husband didn’t care for at all.

Then there’s the race card. I’m a left-leaning New York City girl, and I hate to even think this is a factor, but it is. YG has spent four years at a school where she is not just in the minority, she’s a statistical anomaly: she’s the only white kid in her grade, and one of five in a school of 350. There is no public school in San Francisco where the kid won’t be in the minority, and that’s okay, but she’d like to feel a little less anomalous, and I can’t blame her for that. So along with all the other things we’re looking at, we’re looking at what the ethnic and economic mix is at the school, even though to do so makes me feel like a traitor to my own beliefs.
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Yesterday was Sunday, today is Monday. A mere twenty-four hours have passed. We are older but we are not a year older. We are one day older.

But it is 2007, six years into the new century, the new millenium, the decade. (You can’t call it the “new” decade–it’s more than half over.) As Caroline said, things are genuinely better now than they were fifty years ago.

We expected a lot from the future when I was young. We were going to have Pan Am flights to the moon. We were going to have flying cars. We were going to have jetpacks. And best of all, Robots!
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