A Class Apart

Enter Stuyvesant High, one of the most extraordinary schools in America, a place where the brainiacs prevail and jocks are embarrassed to admit they play on the woeful football team. Academic competition is so intense that students say they can have only two of these three things: good grades, a social life, or sleep. About one in four Stuyvesant students gains admission to the Ivy League. And the school's alumni include several Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, and luminaries in the arts, business, and public service. A Class Apart follows the lives of Stuyvesant's remarkable students, such as Romeo, the football team captain who teaches himself calculus and strives to make it into Harvard; Jane, a world-weary poet at seventeen, battling the demon of drug addiction; Milo, a ten-year-old prodigy trying to fit in among high-school students who are literally twice his size; Mariya, a first-generation American beginning to resist parental pressure for ever-higher grades so that she can enjoy her sophomore year. And then there is the faculty, such as math chairman Mr. Jaye, who is determined not to let bureaucratic red tape stop him from helping his teachers. He even finds a job for a depressed math genius who lacks a college degree but possesses the gift of teaching. This is the story of the American dream, a New York City school that inspires immigrants to come to these shores so that their children can attend Stuyvesant in the first step to a better life. It's also the controversial story of elitism in education. Stuyvesant is a public school, but children must pass a rigorous entrance exam to get in. Only about 3 percent do so, which, Stuyvesant students and faculty point out, makes admission to their high school tougher than to Harvard. On the eve of the hundredth anniversary of Stuyvesant's first graduating class, reporter Alec Klein, an alumnus, was given unfettered access to the school and the students and faculty who inhabit it. What emerges is a book filled with stunning, raw, and heartrending personalities, whose stories are hilarious, sad, and powerfully moving. .

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Title of ebook: A Class Apart
ISBN: 9781416545538
parent-ISBN: 9780743299442
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 08-2007
Released online for download: 08-21-2007
Author of eBook: Klein, Alec

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A Class Apart

Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools

Elemental Gods

-- desktop graffiti, Stuyvesant High School

CHAPTER ONE

Romeo

It's 7:38 a.m., and an old man boxes a phantom on Grand Street, jabbing and slicing the crisp air with his withered fists, the first ambition of the day. The rest of the morning awakens in slow motion on this unforgiving stretch of asphalt on the Lower East Side, a hardscrabble neighborhood on the edge of Chinatown in Manhattan. The Grand Spa down the block isn't open yet. Nor is the next-door Liquor & Wines. Nor Chester Fried Chicken across the street. All that can be traced on this gray February morning is the wisp of breath billowing like wordless cartoon bubbles from anonymous pedestrians as they trudge to work, huddled against the coming snowstorm.

And then from out of a nondescript red brick high-rise, Romeo emerges. Like the old man, he looks ready to wage combat against the day. That's the message conveyed in his baggy black Sean John jacket and baggy black Sean John jeans and black scarf and blac ... read full excerpt from: A Class Apart ebook

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