"What does that say about me as a person?"

Counterintuitively in today's college-obsessed environment, we have been trying to get Graham to think about college a little bit more. Specifically, where he might want to go and what getting into there that might entail in terms of grades, scores, and level of effort. Our thinking has been that, for our rather brainiacal, quiet boy, getting into a good college will be a good place both to find peers with whom he can have fun and forge good relationships and also go from there into something he will enjoy later in life.

This year he decided to take the super-hard math and it has been a bit of a struggle for him (i.e. he's getting Bs), but he made the decision to take the class because his friends were doing it, and we had to respect the social motivation of the decision. For a kid on the spectrum in particular, wanting to be with friends is a good thing.

So at dinner and also for spring break, we've been trying to nudge him into gear in learning more about a range of colleges, because with some early Bs the path to a Yale has gotten steeper. The other night mom mentioned that Kate's boy went to Earlham and maybe he should look at that, and he got a little defensive. Eventually the conversation wended its way around to "Well, dad went to Yale and Natalie is at Yale and mom went to Michigan then Yale and everybody else went to Duke or Michigan, so what will it say about me as a person if I don't go to a top-ranked school."

I'm glad we have gotten to this point and he has stated his fear, because we need to make sure he knows that it will say nothing about him as a person if he doesn't, but it will reflect poorly on us as people and particularly as parents if we allow him to persist in this thinking. I need to tell him about David, with whom I'm on a board, a most remarkable guy who went to App State. Or Hugh, who started at App State then went to UNC and kicks much ass. Or Matt from my PhD program, who went to Florida State. And how well the Honors college at Athens has treated our family friend Margaret... About how I used to be on the board of the local Yale Club but decided it's a waste of time because I'd rather be in the community and meet random UNC people and people from wherever than prioritize hanging with a bunch of people with sticks up their ass about competing with Harvard.

And that what does say a lot about Graham as a person and (I hope) about us as parents is how polite he is to people and how he tries hard to help the 8th grade Karen student he's tutoring.