On the SHSAT and Gratitude

On the SHSAT and Gratitude

If you are an 8th grader in the New York City public school system, chances are you are feeling something about the coming of March 1st.

As a person who stresses easily and hates deadlines, let’s just say I’m not excited. You see, March 1st is the deadline for high school applications. If you’ve grown up in a suburban school system, or any other school system at all, you probably just went to the High School that everyone in the grade before you did- your path was set. 

But, in New York City, there are so many options that you have to apply to

the school you want to go to. It’s a blessing and a curse: you get to go to the school that fits you (if you get in) but you also have to spend time building applications, taking tests, and just overall stressing out. 

It would take me days to explain the NYC public school system’s nuanced admissions policies, controversies, and forms. For my story, you only need to know that there are two categories of NYC public high schools. 

One, the mainstream schools that each have their own application rules. Some are screened (meaning they look at your grades, ask you to write an essay, or do some other thing to evaluate you) or lotteries (meaning you are picked out of a hat to be admitted), but you apply to all of them by ranking your favorites and sending in your ranking. 

The second category is a group of eight specialized high schools. These are schools for high-performing academic kids. You get into these schools by taking what’s called the SHSAT, a test of 114 questions that determine if you get into your favorite of the specialized high schools or not.

Now that the boring explaining is over, let’s get back to how this connects to me, starting in seventh grade. 

In the middle of seventh grade, we began thinking about the SHSAT. Most of my classmates were starting to enroll in preparatory classes or study groups. My parents wanted to start prepping me early, as a year or two prior, there had been a similar admissions test that I didn’t properly prep for (and I didn’t get in).

My parents decided that I would take a class in Chinatown on Saturdays that was supposed to prepare me for the SHSAT. I would be doing it with my friend, and it would enrich my learning, even if I didn’t get into any of the specialized high schools or decided I didn’t want to go to one. 

So, I showed up the first day, and it was horrible. I was placed into a classroom and given a pop quiz on my first day (I had enrolled in the course later than the other students, so they were already well along in learning some skills). I hated that feeling of helplessness. I truly couldn’t do anything to score well on that quiz, I just didn’t know the topic. I didn’t score well (of course), and as it was highly unusual for me to score anything that low, I loathed the class even more. 

The next few classes passed smoothly, and I stopped caring about my scores and started complaining about the homework that was taking hours out of my week. It became a routine: go to class, complain about class, do homework, complain about homework. There was something rewarding about being able to complain about the class. It felt like payback for feeling like I didn’t get an early start to my prep.

After going to the class for months, the pandemic started to creep its way into our lives. I started arguing that we should stop taking the class because of Covid-19, even though I believed that the virus was just something that would blow over, this would hopefully allow me to miss a month of classes.

Then, we pulled out of my regular school and the weekend class, stopping everything at once. 

It’s been almost a year since I stopped taking the class, and now I wish I could go back to it. It’s weird how something that I used to hate is now something that I long for.

The class now sounds like the perfect, normal, social gathering (note how all of those words have now become rare in our daily lives). I got to sit around for four hours eating candy and snacks, listening to math that I couldn’t yet comprehend, only taking in the information somewhat (Currently, regular school has covered a lot of those concepts, and it makes a lot more sense to me now. Learning some of the math was like an “aha!” moment because I had seen the computations but didn’t really understand it until now). Then, when it was done, I got to get boba tea and egg waffles. So, pretty great. 

For this post, there isn’t a fix, like adding extra melted chocolate to brownies or starting to make more exciting things for dinner, but instead a lesson. I can’t tell my past self to be more grateful, but maybe I can be more grateful today. It’s easy to say that I’ve missed the parties and eating out, but there are things, like this class, that I never would have expected I would miss. There’s no telling what the world is going to throw at you, and while the pandemic has been horrible for so many reasons, it has taught me to appreciate everything that I have, even if I think I don’t like it, because in a year I may be longing for it.

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Dora