Review of Blythe Grossberg’s I left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the One Percent
(Part 1 of 3)
Blythe Grossberg’s excellently titled I left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the One Percent is an insider account of her many years working in the private school system and tutoring wealthy children in New York City. If you missed the book, it’s likely because it was published in 2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, when most parents were either afraid of, or angry at, their child’s school, while trying to stay healthy and safe amid the swirl of vaccines, masking, and misinformation.
Let me first say that, while I don’t know Grossberg personally, she used to be a learning specialist (after my time) at the middle and high school I attended in New York City. Over the past five years, I have taught as a substitute at the school, and, though she and I have never met, we have both been tutoring the same general clientele for almost two decades. Grossberg has published extensively about learning differences, and she holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a doctorate in organizational psychology from Rutgers.
Grossberg trains a quasi-anthropological eye on what psychologist Dr. Paul L. Hokemeyer, of the Yale School of Public Health, calls a “cultural tribe”; that is, she offers an ethnography of teenage one-percent-ers (and their parents) in their natural habitats: Park Avenue penthouses, squash courts, expensive private schools, luxury cars, and, yes, beach houses in the Hamptons.
Her book consists of almost 300 pages of vignettes depicting overly entitled students, parents behaving badly, and ruminations on income inequality, punctuated by Grossberg’s exasperation with the excesses of the private school world. It’s a tell-all about wealthy families that most everyone would abhor: parents, either absent from their children’s lives, or overly demanding of them, academically and athletically; throwing money at every problem; and lying to the school about the family’s home life. Some children do drugs instead of homework, or they melt under the intensity of parental expectations. Grossberg is seen by parents either as the hero who helps their kid succeed (or at least insulates him from the supposed consequences of not succeeding), or the villain who has not safeguarded the child from the shame of a B+.
By day she helps students with learning differences, while fending off upset parents. She also “shoots the bull” with students in need of an attentive adult, and fills out paperwork to secure students extra time on their ACT or SAT tests. (Completing such bureaucratic paperwork is a process she detests. She indicates that applying for extra time has become a silly and expensive game, inherently unfair to those from disadvantaged backgrounds who can’t pay upwards of $6,000 for a neuropsychological evaluation that might demonstrate a clinical need for testing accommodations.) By night she works with students from other private schools, tutoring them in writing, helping them with their college essays, and preparing them for standardized tests.
Grossberg empathizes with her students, and she wants what’s best for them—beyond the A-level grade with which everyone else is preoccupied. She listens to them attentively, and she uses the book to tell their stories of teenage anxiety and mental health, topics that are important and central to so many discussions about high school and higher education.
However, Grossberg’s approach is disorganized. She intersperses anecdotes and subway ruminations with psychological studies or extended literary comparisons to The Great Gatsby.
There are some worthy ideas that I will address below and in subsequent newsletters, but they are drowned out, and a lopsided picture emerges. In elevating the stories of the worst families, Grossberg is surely skewing reality and making the mistake of imagining that the self-selecting affluent families (probably the one percent of the one percent) that hire her are representative of the larger population as a whole. The sense of crisis she creates may make for a good TV show, but I don’t think her stories implicate as many families as she thinks.
I wasn’t shocked to read about the goings-on of the rich and terrible. After all, our media is saturated with “real housewives” who are paid a lot of money to behave in reprehensible ways. A breathless New York Post review of the book recounts the horrors of a mother who rewrote her child’s essay about Romeo and Juliet as an example of the “sordid world” of New York’s one percent. But this example of “pushy cluelessness” doesn’t really land as offensively as the Post might think[1].
The NYC parents Grossberg describes are hardly the tribe’s norm, and her broad strokes obscure a more nuanced picture. Many wealthy children in private schools are hard-working and curious. They care a lot about their grades—sometimes too much—and they take their work and responsibilities seriously. These children have been guided by responsible parents who are trying to teach their kids to live with discipline and to be accountable for themselves. As a tutor, I’ve had the opportunity to witness the inner workings of many different families and have even been given a seat at the dinner table. I’m happy that some see me as part of the family, someone who understands the intensity of the private-school world and who has the child’s best interest at heart. These families—some of whom I worked with, sibling after sibling, for more than eight years—are kind and generous.
For most of her book, Grossberg seems baffled that opulence and luxury actually exist, and she seems bizarrely hyper-attuned to the haute couture of the children and the expensive décor of their homes. In the first chapter alone, she references brand labels over twenty times. I get it. In these posh apartments, I know that it can be difficult not to feel part of the décor: an expensive, Ivy-League-educated accessory. But I find that the best response to such wealth is simply to ignore it and to continue to do the work for which one has been hired.
Some of her most useful take-downs are of the standardized testing industry, analysis of which has been revealed to be inequitable to under-resourced students and predictive of little when it comes to future success. Students nowadays spend many months, if not years, prepping for these tests—on top of their competitive athletics and rigorous course loads—which leads to many months of tutoring. It used to be that juniors and seniors took the SAT once or twice; now, it is common for private school students to take advantage of what is called “superscoring.” They can select the best math and verbal scores from each test sitting to make a composite score that adds up to more than any single test’s results. They therefore take the SAT or ACT many times until they finally get the score they want. Such is the pursuit of perfection (read: the Ivy League).
Grossberg also pokes holes in the college admissions system that asks for a student’s “authentic” voice and then looks the other way when rich families hire tutors to help them write their essays—and the children get accepted. (Full disclosure: like Grossberg, I also work with students on the college application process.)
I appreciate Grossberg’s critical eye on NYC’s private-school tutoring world and the conclusions from her years of experience. Her topic overlaps with the topic of this newsletter in key ways, but I don’t think her gossip angle, while it might sell books, will help change the behavior of students, parents, or institutions. On the very last page, she admits that, anxious and defeated, she is leaving New York City for good. I left My Homework is, ultimately, her farewell to a milieu she clearly dislikes, a final salvo, and a threnody all in one.
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/08/10/inside-the-sordid-world-of-tutoring-kids-of-nycs-1-percent/
As a former private school parent myself (my son graduated from Avenues in 2020), I've gotten a glimpse into that world. Of course it's important to remember that not all families of such schools are in the 1% (mine certainly isn't), and not all students come to school in designer clothes. Like all stereotypes, that one is also problematic. However, it's clearly a highly competitive and meritocratic world, and the concern about college admission seems to begin surprisingly early. The kids feel this pressure acutely and often face serious challenges as a result. It's a tremendous irony that students receiving some of the most expensive education in the United States often struggle tremendously in these environments. Many of the kids in these schools are actually really hurting,. So, even though the title of Grossberg's book is certainly clever, it's also rather disrespectful to the students themselves. It's not the fault of these young people that their parents have vacation homes. The way I see it, children of affluence have the opportunity to grow up to make a huge difference in the world,
partly BECAUSE of their privilege. So, those of us supporting them have a chance to help them go on to become the leaders we'll need in the years to come. I agree, it's best to ignore the fancy homes and clothes, and just focus on the important job of helping young minds develop to their highest potential.
Thanks for this review - it sounds like the juicy gossip we crave and relate to but probably doesn't contribute much overall. Ditto on introducing me to the word "threnody" :)