Today on this first day of Spring (also Coco's b-day...HAPPY B-Day!), I find myself somewhat exhausted from completing the latest big Admission and Marketing project. In addition to teaching, being chief lice checker, office extra girl, Suzy-makes-a-lotta-name tags, and my various other strangely titled positions, I am also the Assistant Director of Admission and Marketing. This means I spend a lot of time talking to perspective families, helping out with school tours, repping my digs at Independent school fairs, plugging inquiries into the database, and so much more.
As I grew up attending public school a lot of this process is somewhat foreign to me. Not only do perspective families visit our school multiple times for the grill and schmooze...which is that special balance of asking smart questions, but also sucking up and trying to be on best behavior...but the kids also come and visit. There are two Saturdays devoted to screening of perspective Kindergarten applicants and those in upper grades show up for a half day during regular school time. It was interesting, hanging out with the pre-K kids and evaluating everything from whether or not they knew how to grip a pencil to if they might be insane. The child ranking and background checking and long, long conversations, all culminated in a list of the students we'll be offering spots to for the 2009/10 academic year.
In the meantime, I have been working on this whole dating thing. Like the admissions process at my school, I have been collecting a pool of candidates for the position of "my man" and the interviews have begun. Unlike my school I haven't yet come up with a standardized process and I'm beginning to think that I should. So here is my first shot:
Expectations/ Pre-requestites:
Candidates applying for this position should be male, heterosexual, brown-black (anywhere on the spectrum is good), single, honest, attractive, spiritual, employed, intelligent, well read, and in general about something. Preference will be given to feminist and social justices minded men or applicants who demonstrate kindness, empathy, and a good sense of humor, or have any special talents like knowing how to do math well, fix or build things, speak languages besides (meaning in addition to) English, cook, and/or give good massages.
Then there could be a whole written application. And each date would be an interview where candidates would be evaluated on various categories from whether or not they offered to pay to check to if the conversation was interesting.
I mean really isn't that kind of what we do anyway. We have this idea in mind of what we want. Then we meet these people and try to match them up with what we have in our head and when inevitably, they aren't exactly what we thought we wanted, we try to decide if we can work it out anyway. But I guess that's the hard part. It's all a gamble. As in the admissions process, sometimes you make offers and then the family chooses to go elsewhere. Or if the family decides to say yes, there is still no real guarantee that their child isn't the unibomber waiting to happen, no matter if they had high test scores and good reviews from their preschool. The hardest part in both dating and admissions is the waiting. First you're waiting to see if there is mutual agreement, and then you're waiting to see if the person lives up to the potential you first saw in him.
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