I tutored children of rich families and learned PhD graduates help 8th grade students write papers

• I was a teacher and tutor for wealthy families who used their money to get their kids into private schools. 
• One of my tutees can discuss "A Raisin in the Sun" but doesn't understand what segregation means. 
• This is an adapted excerpt from "I Left My Homework in the Hamptons" by Blythe Grossberg.

I'll never forget my first holiday season as a teacher at a private school, when parents, mostly moms, show up on a snowy day dressed in Canada Goose coats and fur-lined boots to decorate a mammoth live evergreen with school-related ornaments, including teddy bears dressed in school sweaters. The tree, along with the Kwanzaa and Hanukkah candleholders, looks stunning.

Many of the mothers formerly worked in banking or corporate law, and they are perfectionists who now devote themselves to making the school lobby look like a Hollywood set. Every time I pass the tree, I feel a kind of electric shock of joy, like I did when I visited my Christian friends' houses growing up.

Though I'm the kind of Jew who occasionally has a Christmas tree, my squat little trees aren't decorated like this one. Passing that tree makes me feel like I can glimpse, for a few seconds at a time, what it's like to have a holiday that involves a month-long dive into everything that's beautiful and restorative, including evergreens, glitter, bows, and wrapped packages. The mothers who decorate the tree seem to have the Midas touch, turning the linoleum floors and tile walls to gold. It takes me a while to see that all that glitters isn't gold.

Private schools will accept rich kids, knowing they won't make it to senior year

Guided by parents who are polished, poised, and steel-nerved, some kids wind up at schools where they are totally overmatched, to use the educational consultants' jargon, and this becomes very apparent by middle and high school. Some private schools allegedly make a practice of accepting rich kids who they know won't make it to senior year, and, after soaking their families for the tuition and donations in the early years and giving the children very cute uniforms that give the parents bragging rights (everyone knows which outfits belong to which schools), they wash these kids out and force them to go to other, supposedly lesser schools.

However, every once in a while, I meet a kid who has somehow survived against all odds. It is usually because this kid has a phalanx of experts. People with PhDs help them write history papers in eighth grade. Columbia grad students help them write English papers. What no one does is actually make sure the kids can read. That is my domain as a learning specialist.

The children I tutor succeed academically, without actually absorbing the material

One of the children I tutor, Sophie, is an expert at mastering whatever her teachers or tutors put in front of her, even if she doesn't really understand it. Like her parents, she is a consummate game player. It is actually staggering that this child has faced a curriculum in which she had to write about the Odyssey in sixth grade and analyze the French Revolution in eighth grade, but clearly, she was buoyed by an army of experts.

She parrots back what her teachers have said about the Lorraine Hansberry play "A Raisin in the Sun" but doesn't have a clue what it means to live in a segregated community (though she largely does live in one). "I mean, Beneatha, like, has the dream, like, that she wants to live in a segregated community," she tells me, speaking about one of the main characters in Hansberry's play.

"Do you mean integrated?" I ask her. "Beneatha wants to live in an integrated community and move away from a segregated community."

"Yes, integrated. I always get that confused with segregated," she admits, looking at the texts on her phone. Anyone who lived through segregation could not forget that word, but these concepts are entirely abstract to Sophie. She does her writing and reading at several removes from the material, believing that she cannot do anything without consulting a flotilla of adults, which removes her sense of agency.

Excerpted from "I Left My Homework in the Hamptons: What I Learned Teaching the Children of the One Percent" (Hanover Square Press, August 17, 2021). Reprinted with permission from Hanover Square Press.