A Slacker Route to Ivy-Covered Halls

It came, and it was a thin letter, though I’d heard that only bad news arrived that way. A college had seen fit to enroll my oldest, my son, and the joy and relief wrapped up in one envelope-ripping moment capped months of marathon nagging and sleepless nights.

Not that he had suffered. He had slept well the last seven months, while I gnawed on my fingernails and fretted at 3 a.m.

There’s nothing like spending a year listening to the other mothers exchange laughs about the interviewers at Princeton when your teenager just signed himself out of second-semester trigonometry to be an aide in the jewelry class. While other 12th-graders were toiling over their application essays, mine was downloading cat pratfalls from collegehumor.com. College visits? Ours were drive-by affairs aimed at ensuring that the cafeteria was open all night and the dorms were no more than a bagel’s throw away.

My son’s no-worries post-high school strategy shouldn’t have surprised me. He has always done things his own way. He was the kid who got a shameful “unsatisfactory” in kindergarten art for refusing to put the paintbrushes back in their proper slots. The one who told a schoolyard monitor that he hoped she had a good lawyer. The only seventh-grader I’ve known to get suspended for three days for writing a pointedly accurate, satirical tribute to his math teacher. If it weren’t for the exorbitant SAT tutor we ordered him to meet with last summer, he’d be thumbing through the course catalog for ITT Tech right about now.

At first, of course, he displayed the same level of enthusiasm for the tutoring sessions that he reserves for healthful, vegetable-rich meals. But then it hit him. The prep course wasn’t about algebra or world history or the great books. It was about loopholes and shortcuts, tricks and secret codes.

He became a devotee. He did all the at-home exercises. He smugly studied the flashcards, confident that the cool tutor from UC Santa Barbara was telling him the truth when he said these words were bound to be on the test.

I wish I could tell you that none of it worked, that the SAT is best mastered by students who do all their homework and read Russian novels in their spare time. But that would be a lie, because my son’s SAT scores soared.

Then, browbeaten by me, he concocted a respectable college essay about unexpected heroes. He amassed his resume, dutifully noting his successful tenure as a “sandwich artist” at Subway, a Civil Air Patrol squadron leader, and president and founder of the aviation club at his school -- a club formed mostly to raise funds to buy aviator sunglasses for each of the members.

OK, so he’s not a pressured overachiever, scrambling to collect Advanced Placement credits and scholarships from the Kiwanis Club. He’s always gotten way more Bs than A’s and been happy with that. But a college admissions officer must have smiled at his reference to sandwich artistry, overlooked the D-plus in chemistry and noted that, hey, the kid sure sizzled through that SAT.

So what shall we think about my son and the legions of the less than perfect? That outsmarting the SAT is not a sign of lack of intelligence. And that the world needs a few people to put the paintbrushes into the wrong slots and grin behind aviator shades.

Betsy Bates Freed is a medical journalist in Santa Barbara.