I had seen it while visiting my mom's parents who lived on E. 89th street since the 1950s. Never knew anything else about it.
I should probably check on the school where my elder daughter went in Dallas when she spent her high school semester "abroad." Since she was going to high school here in Germany, she wanted to try out a school in the USA, but was terrified of enrolling in some random program that could land her with some "Christian" family in the middle of Kansas somewhere. So we went for the obvious solution. Since I still had my residence in Dallas, I tried to enroll her in the local public school nearest where my housemates still lived (and still live). I think it would have been less paperwork to enroll her in the Dalton school.
They wanted my ID, W-2, driver's license, and about five other documents where my US address was listed. I finally got it all done, and she was enrolled, but I asked them why all the mountains of paperwork. They said, please stop by when you are in the States next, and we will explain it all.
So, next time we were in the USA, we stopped by. It turns out that THIS particular public school is one of the best equipped public schools in the southern USA. Flush with unreal amounts of local tax money, it was better equipped than I could possibly imagine most private schools. They had their own planetarium for their astronomy students (!!), an incredible sports stadium, professional quality theater, offered courses in journalism and subjects I had to wait for my university to be offered. I couldn't believe it. They explained to me that parents from all over the Dallas area faked their residence info to get their kids in there illegally, and so they couldn't believe it when I showed up from Düsseldorf with a legitimate residence claim to letting my daughter in. But they did, and it cost me nothing (seemed like a better deal than a few dozen thousand dollars).
There were still a few quirks my daughter had to get used to. First, she got herself a bicycle and planned to use it to get to school and back every day from our Dallas house. People stared at her as if she were a visitor from Mars. A BICYCLE?? We don't use those things here. In Germany, you can't drive until you are 18, so everyone uses them here.
Then there was the ritual chanting every morning. She asked me what that was all about. Ritual chanting? In a PUBLIC school? What the hell was THAT all about? What did they chant? There aren't supposed to be Buddhist public schools in Dallas. She said they all got up at a pre-arranged time, and trance-like mumbled some kind of chant, and then sat down. I was stunned. I asked if she could make out what they were chanting (neither of us understand Tibetian). She said it started out with "I spread the peaches," but she couldn't make out the rest of it. I had to digest this. A whole class of Dallas school kids turn into hypnotized zombies for a minute and chant in unison something that starts with "I spread the peaches?" She said, they sure did. Oh, and they put their right hands on their chests while they did it. She had NO idea what was going on, and felt too intimidated to ask, since the rest of them all did it as a matter of course.
I finally caught on. Her English was good, but there are some words that just don't come up in the course of normal conversation when talking in English to your 16 year old daughter living in Germany. I asked if by any chance they might be saying "I pledge allegiance?" She said she didn't know. What does "pledge" mean, and what does "allegiance" mean? I explained. In Germany, since the Nazi era, exaggerated, unnecessray displays of patriotism have been frowned upon, so nothing of the sort exists here. I had totally forgotten that they still do that in American public schools, and so she was completely unprepared for it, and had NO idea was going on. As far as she was concerned, she thought she had heard them chant "I spread the peaches" every morning, and bunch of unintelligible stuff after that, after which they all came to, and resumed their lives as if nothing had happened.
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