The prep school assigned him 2500 pages of summer reading: Angela’s Ashes, Fahrenheit 451, Last Days of Summer, A Raisin in the Sun, Angels & Demons, Guns, Germs & Steel, Book of Genesis, 1st 12 books of The Odyssey. He read every page, enjoyed (nearly) every page (I would never have put this list together for him or any other boy), and, on our trip home to see my folks, asked to go to Barnes and Noble to buy books. This is a new behavior.

The school also sent out a warm and friendly letter from the freshman cross country coach inviting every student to come out for cross country in the two weeks before school started. Joining the team would be a good way to make new friends, the coach said; nobody would be cut, and it was fine for the boys to quit if it didn’t work out for them.

When our son saw the letter, he said, “Do I have to do this?”

“No,” I said.

Then he read the letter. That night he told his dad, “I’m going to go out for cross country. It will be a good way to make new friends.”

He is the slowest kid in the group and within a couple of days wanted to quit. We said he couldn’t quit because the coach had told them on the first day that they needed to make a two-week commitment. Then they could leave. His dad explained to him that his job, at this point, is simply to get better at running, not to be the fastest kid or even to be the second-to-slowest kid.

The next day he ran a mile and a half without stopping and went to a local Subway with his new friends from the team. That night he told his dad he wanted to go running the next morning. Which the two of them did. His dad has been trying to get him to run for years without success. The school accomplished this feat with one letter and 3 days of cross country coaching.

Our son has yet to set foot inside a classroom at the new school, and already he’s turning into a reader and a runner.

Another parent told me, “The school specializes in boys.” It does.

Our extremely well funded public school is now completely feminized. Nearly every administrator is female; most of the teachers are young, unmarried women in their 20s. If our son had enrolled in his public high school he would have spent the summer reading an Oprah book narrated by a wife whose husband is a pill.

I read the USA Today article while we were in IL and found it supremely irritating. Lise Eliot appears to have no concept what our public schools are like now.

They are not boy friendly.