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I’ve been trying for the better part of a week to come up with something to build on Elizabeth Bruenig’s recent essay in The Atlantic on children and liberal democracy. It’s so well done that I’ve come up short. Instead, I’ll just commend it to all thoughtful readers.
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The Girl has received offers of admission to the honors colleges of several flagship state universities. She’s not sure how to weigh them.
Which raises a question for my wise and worldly readers who know of such things. Are the honors college programs at flagship state universities generally substantive, or are they just marketing? TG is creatively ambitious and blisteringly smart; I want her environment to both feed and challenge her. Ron Lieber’s book on colleges suggested that honors colleges were “traps” to be avoided, but he didn’t marshal much of an argument. For those who know, what do you think? (I can be reached at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com or on Twitter @deandad.)
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Of course, there’s admission, and then there’s affordability. Some schools have the decency to send the financial aid package at the same time that they send the offer of admission. (They’ve had the FAFSA, and sometimes also the CSS Profile, for a while.) Others will let weeks or months pass between the offer of admission and letting you know the numbers. As we learned through The Boy’s experience with Michigan, it’s entirely possible to get in but to get so little help that you can’t go anyway.
Next year we’ll be paying tuition for both kids. Here’s hoping the financial aid folks take that into account …
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A few weeks ago, we adopted a new dog. Penny is a shelter rescue of ambiguous age, though the vet said she’s probably 2 or 3. That seems right; she’s fully grown, but she has puppy energy and puppy awkwardness. When she gets the “zoomies,” which happens several times a day, she crashes into walls. When she’s upstairs and gets the zoomies, it sounds like a football team is practicing over my head.
We were told that she would need to “decompress,” which turns out to have been an understatement. She has bonded closely with The Wife and TG, but her fear of men (of which we were warned) is strong. The vet offered wise counsel: “When Penny looks at you, I want her to see cheese. Give her the good treats.” So I’m trying to win over a former stray in my own home. It’s … a project.
It’s worth it, though. TG likes to quote the saying that there’s no love more pure than the love between a dad and the dog he said he didn’t want. That was true with Sally. It may take a lot of cheese, but Penny and I will get there.
