THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 59
chel, who worked as a deputy to Simons
for many years. Simons held staff meet-
ings that stretched into the evening, and
he assigned his students piles of home-
work. When he described the course of
study to the admissions director at the
Ethical Culture Fieldston School, she
said, “Gary, if by the end of the first sum-
mer there are four or five kids still stand-
ing, pin a badge on each one of them
and quit while you’re ahead.”
I
was accepted by Prep in the spring
of 1996, at the age of eleven, and my
life has, in many ways, ordered itself
around this early and somewhat arbi-
trary triumph: when I was a kid, I did
well on a test.
I was a soft and oversensitive only
child, afraid of failure. During my first
week of classes, I would sit at home, in
my makeshift study at the dining-room
table, holding my head in my hands, over-
awed by the amount of work I was being
asked to do. The kids I met at Prep were
bright and hyperverbal; even the osten-
sibly cool among them had an obvious
nerdiness that they had stopped hiding
now that they were away from their nor-
mal schools. Rounds of Magic: The Gath-
ering, a role-playing card game, turned
gladiatorial at lunch; Tamagotchis—small
electronic Japanese toys on which you’d
tend to a digital creature—were passed
around like samizdat pamphlets. We were
a hundred or so of a kind, all humming
with the seductive feeling of having been
called out from a crowd. Grouped into
small units of about ten, and placed under
the charge of high-school-age and col-
lege-age advisers who’d gone through the
program before us, we quickly developed
fellow-feeling. What we had most in
common were noodgy, hard-driving par-
ents, the type of people who’d push their
children to attend supplemental school-
ing for a year and a half.
Some of my new friends had horror
stories about their schools. They talked
about walking through metal detectors
and sitting through fights in classrooms
where there were more than thirty or
forty students. That wasn’t my experi-
ence. I’d been attending a Catholic boys’
school in Harlem, where all the students
were black or Latino, except for one white
kid named Alex, who always looked be-
wildered. We wore slacks and ties and
memorized the names of the books of
the Bible. I had to write weekly essays
for a class called Literature, Speech, and
Writing and recite them aloud. The sweet,
stern woman who taught the class judged
our performances, on composition and
delivery, and gave chocolate to those who
did best. When I was in trouble—I was
often in trouble—I’d have to stay after
school and write some bland penitential
sentence a hundred times, until my wrist
was sore and the meat of my hand was
numb. This was called JUG, for Justice
Under God.
At Prep, the only G whose justice we
feared was Gary. On many Friday after-
noons, at lunch, in the Trinity cafeteria,
Simons would stand before us, his mus-
tache hiding his mouth, and rattle off a
fresh list of kids who had left or been
dropped from the program, because they
couldn’t keep up. Even more powerful
than the fear of dismissal was a kind of
wonder at our exotically well-resourced
surroundings. Trinity’s science labs had
smooth tables and deep sinks, Bunsen
burners and goggles, powerful micro-
scopes we used to scrutinize slides of our
own cells. There was an Olympic-size
pool in the basement and turf on the
fenced-in roof, both open to us at recess.
We were being prepared academically,
but we were also being made to under-
stand anew what a school could be.
Our instructors gave us a foretaste of
the eccentric and informal adults we
would meet at the prep schools where
we would later be placed. I studied Latin
with a wisecracking Englishman who
made constant, morbid fun of Caecilius,
the Pompeian nobleman who was our
textbook’s protagonist. (“Caecilius est in
horto,” we’d recite. “And now,” the teacher
would say, pantomiming horror at an ex-
ploding volcano, “Caecilius mortuus est.”)
The literature curriculum moved swiftly
through lighter fare, such as Conrad
Richter’s “The Light in the Forest” and
Maia Wojciechowska’s “Shadow of a
Bull,” to potentially age-inappropriate
stuff, like Richard Wright’s “Black Boy.”
I read the latter under the close attention
of kids in their second Prep summer,
who told us younger ones the pages where
we could find the hanging of a kitten
and loose bits of racial-sexual reverie.
If you were having trouble in class,
you were supposed to ask for a meeting
with a teacher. For no reason I can de-
termine, apart from my mother over my
shoulder in the dining room—some-
times she’d sit at the computer and tran-
scribe my essays as I spoke them aloud,
like a prepubescent Milton—I learned
to love the program, and made it through.
Two decades later, on a July afternoon,
I visited Trinity again, where a new batch
of Prep kids was missing out on a lovely
day. Bluish light streamed into the class-
rooms as if to tease the suckers within.
The typical Prep contingent has about a
hundred and twenty-five students. They
are bused from all over the city to wher-
ever Prep’s courses are being held—usu-
ally Trinity—and divided into classes ac-
cording to math aptitude. Every first-year
kid takes a period of literature, a period
of intensive writing instruction, a period
of history, a period of laboratory science,
and one or two periods of math. Most
also take Latin. I peeked in on a sec-
ond-summer literature class, where stu-
dents were talking about Odysseus and
his lonely though by no means solitary
ramble around the ancient world’s myth-
ical-physical map. The teacher wanted
to know what the students thought about
his character—what it meant when he
asked for and accepted help, and whether
his virtues in any way mitigated his ob-
vious, trip-extending flaws. Kids piped
up one by one, each adding to the class’s
group portrait of the wave-tossed, home-
sick man. I recognized the approach:
Prep’s teachers often use literature to teach
something akin to ethics, and to illus-
trate the values that might be useful in
succeeding at, say, a challenging new
school. Elsewhere, in a long-standing
Prep class called Problems and Issues in
Modern American Society, students dis-
cussed the carceral state and its effects
on black communities.
I saw love and care reflected by each
detail in the room: the bright back-
packs, the pressed clothes, the manners
and the syntax that had been hammered
into place by parents anxious about
how their children might be seen in the
world. (My mother hunted slang and
unconjugated verbs as if they were big
game.) Like the parents in Brownsville,
they had noticed something amiss in
the system that was supposed to stew-
ard their kids, and they had made a bid
for control. I knew how radically these
efforts might change one’s life: my wife
and most of my best friends are Prep
alums; much of what I have that is good
