Following up on my post about getting your kid into preschool, reader bensitzer tipped me off to an upcoming documentary about the equivalent madness in NYC. You can see the trailer here.
Los Angeles
Getting your kid into preschool
If you live in Los Angeles and have offspring — or if you’re visibly pregnant — most conversations with other parents will probably involve preschool. Even if you don’t have kids, you’ll find yourself on the periphery of these conversations shortly after turning 30. And annoyed.
It’s not just a mom thing here. Most of the screenwriters I know, I know because they have young kids in preschool. The fathers of my daughter’s classmates wrote most of last summer’s blockbusters.
And it’s not just an age thing: I have lunch every month with Dick Zanuck, 74, who has produced 40+ movies and run a studio. What do we talk about? Getting his grandkids into preschool.
At least for LA, preschool is the new college.
Yes, it’s absurd. I poked fun at it in a deleted scene from The Nines (which you can find on the DVD). But it’s the reality. Even if your kids are going to go to public elementary school, you still need to find a private preschool. So here’s my advice.
Buy The Whitney Guide
. It’s a listing of most or all of the preschools in Los Angeles, with standardized criteria and philosophy statements. You won’t pick a school because of this book, but you’ll be able to narrow your choices and decide which criteria are important. And you’ll have a clear idea about the costs, so you can tailor your list appropriately.
Talk to a lot of parents. Strike up conversations at the playground, the car wash, or any place you find parents with kids. Ask all your neighbors. You want recommendations about good schools, but more importantly, you want parents who can recommend you to a school. Kids don’t have SATs. A preschool is really admitting the parents, not the kid. Most preschools have an interview, but recommendations from current parents help a lot.
Talk to people who talk to parents. Some of our most helpful advice came from the woman who ran the weekly kids’ gym. Pre-preschool classes like gym, music and swimming are run by people who interface with thousands of kids and parents over the years. They know the scoop.
Visit preschools while they’re running. If you have a two-year old, you’ll be overwhelmed to see how swarming a bunch of three- and four-year olds can be. But what you’re looking for is some order in this chaos. For each class, the teacher and teacher’s assistant should feel like they’re on top of it. The kids should be having fun.
Different is good. We’re the only two-dad family at our school. That’s not why we got in, but it didn’t hurt. If there’s something unique about your situation — your wife is an astronaut, your husband is blind — don’t minimize it. Most schools are looking to become less homogenous, and something distinctive will help them remember you.
Have a safety school. Like college, there’s a chance you may not get into the preschool you want. In many cases, siblings of current students have first priority, so there may not be room for new families. That’s why it’s important to apply to at least one school you feel pretty certain you can get into.
Aren’t all preschools basically the same? I mean, they’re mostly just singing songs about sharing and gluing things to paper. The reason to pick one school versus another is how comfortable you feel letting these people take daily custody of your kid. You want a place that shares your basic values and priorities — and will pick other parents you can stand to be around.
That’s one part of the puzzle I didn’t anticipate when we were first looking at schools. When your kid is in preschool, you see these parents constantly: at birthday parties, at fundraisers, at playdates and parking lots. So you really hope they’re not annoying. It’s another reason you want to spend a lot of time talking to parents when picking a school — to get a sense what kinds of families go there.
And finally, despite everything I’ve said above, you need to remember that where your kid goes to preschool will not make or break her life. In fact, it’s possible to change schools if the first one doesn’t work out.
Los Angeles myths
This article by Eric Morris in today’s Freakonomics blog addresses some common myths and assumptions about Los Angeles that I often see brought up by writers who say they could never live here:
Exactly one of the following statements about transportation in Los Angeles is indisputably true. Two are (at best) half-truths, and the rest are flat-out myths. Can you figure out which of the following is accurate?
Los Angeles’s air is choked with smog.
Los Angeles has developed in a low-density, sprawling pattern.
Angelenos spend more time stuck in traffic than any other drivers in the nation.
Thanks to the great distances between far-flung destinations, and perhaps to Angelenos’ famed “love affair” with the car, Angelenos drive considerably more miles than most Americans.
Los Angeles is dominated by an overbuilt freeway system that promotes autodependence.
Los Angeles’s mass transit system is underdeveloped and inadequate.
He hasn’t provided the answers (yet), but here are my opinions and guesses, without any Googling or other fact-finding missions:
False. Talking with friends who grew up here, the air quality was apparently horrible up through the mid-1980s, with “smog alert” days common. But thanks to nation-leading emissions standards, it’s improved dramatically. The air is cleaner than what I grew up with in Boulder, Colorado.
Half-true. Los Angeles is huge — and that’s not counting all the smaller cities that cling to it. But you’re not required to go everywhere — most of what you want is quite close. I drive less than 5000 miles per year. And while the city is not as high-density as New York City, it’s a lot denser than most people realize. Most of the new construction you see in the city is now “urban in-fill,” which increases the density.
Likely true, because it’s the only claim that could be “indisputable.”
False. Commutes in Los Angeles aren’t particularly long; they can just take a long time. I predict Los Angelenos drive significantly less than motorists in, say, Denver.
False. A lot of loaded words here — “dominated,” “overbuilt,” “autodependence” — none of which are defined.1 Los Angeles has a lot of freeways. At two in the morning, it’s amazing how quickly you can get from point A to point B. Most other times, I avoid them.
Half-true. “Underdeveloped” and “inadequate” feel like subjective measurements, so you need something to compare them against. In my experience, New York, Washington D.C., London and Tokyo have better mass transit systems, making it much easier to get where you need to go. But compared to most U.S. cities, I suspect Los Angeles has significantly higher usage of public transportation.
- Though I like the term “autodependence,” which sounds like a reflexive psychological condition. ↩
The Visitor
On Wednesday morning, we came into the kitchen to find an orange slice on the stove and a tomato that seemed to have exploded. This was obviously troubling.
My initial thought was that one of us had sleepwalked, and acted out some rage issue against fruit. I realize this is a strange explanation to reach for first — maybe I’m the culprit! — but it may explain why I’m a screenwriter.
The much more reasonable instinct would be to assume we had some sort of visitor. A mouse, a rat, a squirrel. Or possibly a raccoon — our housesitter had mentioned seeing one over the holiday. We set a peanut butter-baited mousetrap on the counter, and sure enough, at 4:50 a.m. Thursday I heard it snap. There was no critter under the bar, however.
I know through friends that a raccoon has to be handled differently than a mere mouse or rat, so I was determined to figure out which kind of varmint we had. I set my MacBook’s built-in camera to shoot one frame of video per second, and left the lights dimmed in the kitchen. I also re-baited the trap, this time with hummus.
This morning, I came downstairs and saw with disappointment that the trap hadn’t popped. But scrubbing through the video, I got my answer.
Fans of The Nines may recognize the kitchen, and the accuracy of Margaret’s “they live in the palm trees” line.
UPDATE: Conventional rat trap worked. It snapped four minutes after leaving the room. Cleanup was bloodless, but still more unsettling than I anticipated. Rat Guy comes Monday to figure out how it got in.
FURTHER UPDATE: Here.