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<p>Ooooooo, and in one photograph of the Chua family, there’s a dead plant in the room!!! And in another one, a daughter looks kinda fat!!! And in another one, they have 2 long-haired dogs that leave disgusting hair all over the place and smell bad!!!</p>
<p>You are kidding, right?</p>
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<p>And the coup de grace: she’s written a book called “Bad Mother”. Worse yet, she stated that she loved her husband more than her children. Better call out social services! ;)</p>
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<p>Totally confused by this. Are you comparing Amy Chua to Sarah Palin?</p>
<p>I loved Ayelet Waldman’s piece. She famously wrote in a NY Times column that she loves her husband (the writer Michael Chabon) more than her four children; she got a lot of pushback for that. </p>
<p>I completely agree with her (even if it was tongue-in-cheek on her part) when she says she allowed her kids to “Participate in any extracurricular activity they wanted, so long as I was never required to drive farther than 10 minutes to get them there, or to sit on a field in a folding chair in anything but the balmiest weather for any longer than 60 minutes.” I read it over the phone to my D, who laughed in recognition.</p>
<p>ETA: x-posted with SlitheyTove!</p>
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<p>I laughed at that too. It was a great line. And no, it wasn’t meant to be taken literally, as in a 14-minute commute to the ballet studio put it off limits @@. But it did reflect a mentality that I like – that the whole family needs to be taken into consideration. And frankly there was a certain level that I wouldn’t have gone past in order for my kids to participate in EC’s, even if it meant “wasting their talents.”</p>
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<p>Hmmm, a relative is now attending one of the HYP schools. I do not recall her ever playing piano or violin. But she did play sports with full support from the family. The sports did result in an athletic scholarship. The parents do not seem to have anything like the micromanaging slave driver mentality that Chua appears to exhibit, although they set high expectations and standards for academics.</p>
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This is bogus. I took one practice test the week before my SAT and scored 2320. I’m sure plenty of other people here have similar stories.</p>
<p>Right. It seems that there isn’t a lot of creative thinking going on here, because it’s not very difficult to comprehend that it’s easily possible to set high expectations / standards for academics, while not engaging in the over-the-top Chua methods.</p>
<p>Anyway, if you try your best and give things a decent shot, sometimes that’s … enough. It’s not necessary to be #1 all the time. I used to live that way, and it was incredibly freeing when a personal crisis forced me to reevaluate everything in my life and realize that it was really ok if I wasn’t the equivalent of the valedictorian in everything I touched.</p>
<p>Here’s my question - do Asians who come here and get told by Americans that “hey, there are plenty of great colleges - HYPSM are undoubtedly great, but there’s a long list, and it’s not as though you’re destined for McDonald’s if you don’t go to HYPSM” simply … not believe the speaker?</p>
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<p>Yes, we do. D scored over 2300 (one and done) with no tutor, class, yelling from mom, or anything other than doing a few practice tests on her own from the CB book. She actually enjoys those sorts of tests (as do I - yes, we’re weird.) With S, we could have done Amy Chua-style parenting and he still wouldn’t have gotten that kind of score; he’s a totally different kid, with different strengths from his sister, and we wouldn’t have dreamed of trying to fit him into her mold. What would have been the point?</p>
<p>“loves husband more than kids” vs “won’t trade kids for the world” - that might lead to different parenting methods.</p>
<p>Very interesting comment, PG
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<p>What exactly is your definition of “Americans”? Are you suggesting Asian americans are not americans? Or that certain group of american has a better value than other groups of americans? So the “better group” of american can tell the other group what is right and what is wrong?</p>
<p>It is actually very American to ONLY recognize the very top of the filed. All the major sports only give prize to only #1. In the rest of the world, many are given to the 2nd and the 3rd etc.</p>
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<p>The vast majority of the high school classmates at my urban public magnet high school were far too poor to take test prep courses…especially ones like kaplan. Few of the top SAT scorers at my high school took prep courses or practiced heavily…especially those in the top 20% of my graduating class…which had many non-Asian-Americans among them…including quite a few URMs. Notable considering my high school already had a slight Asian-American majority at the time. In fact, the effortlessness with which most of the top 20% kids scored high on the SATs was quite intimidating at the time. </p>
<p>If anything, most of the test preppers were average/mediocre kids from well-off families who ended up graduating within the bottom 60%. If I had the money at the time, I’d probably be one of them. Then again, the high school I went to was such that in the early '90s…scoring below 1350(school average at the time) often got one labeled as a “■■■■■■” by many of the top kids who were part of the popular/nerdiest crowd. </p>
<p>As for your Harvard/MIT comment, several high school classmates who attended Harvard remembered a transfer student from MIT who had a major meltdown in their expository writing class because the rigor and expectations were much higher than what she had at MIT. I also know of several Harvard STEM students who did trek down to MIT to take advantage of their science/engineering courses. Heck, I know of some Wellesley students who did the same, especially a CS major in particular who didn’t feel it was overwhelming.</p>
<p>No, I didn’t mean to imply that Asian-Americans were not Americans. Bad phrasing on my part. Let me rephrase … Asians who come to this country and are told by those already here that …</p>
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<p>That’s not an either / or.</p>
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What are you talking about?</p>
<p>I suppose the poster is talking about things like the SuperBowl or World Series.</p>
<p>^ In which case he is simply not correct, at least not in baseball. Both leagues award trophies for winners in the League Championship Series.</p>
<p>As long as you’ve taken Algebra 2 before taking the SAT, and have been an avid reader, it’s quite possible to score high on the SAT with just that as background preparation. It’s true that high scores don’t usually come from spending hours watching TV or playing video games. Both my kids always worked very hard on their schoolwork. But we did not impose any draconian rules, they didn’t need tutoring or enrichment classes, or SAT prep other than one 7-session, $100 community education class for SAT math and they both scored high enough to get in top 10 schools. We did insist they work up to their ability, and that they make academics a priority.</p>
<p>My second was stubborn and rebellious, but bright. In her middle school years there was a lot of conflict over homework and studying. We knew we couldn’t be her motivating force indefinitely, so we tried everything we could think of to get her motivate herself, including yelling and taking away privileges. But we worried that our homelife was becoming like a war zone and we also didn’t want to be abusive. Finally, my husband and I just said “Well, if she doesn’t care about her grades, then she can attend community college or get a job after high school.” And we backed off.</p>
<p>In America, we believe in the right of the individual to self-determination. No one should be slave or a puppet of another person. That includes our kids. We should care for them, teach them, discipline them when needed, and guide them to the best of our ability. But despotic control and cruel manipulation are wrong.</p>
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<p>The Ivies don’t have athletic scholarships. All aid is need-based. She was probably a recruited athlete and got need-based aid.</p>
<p>S is another who scored over 2300 in one sitting without ever taking a prep class or doing any studying.</p>
<p>Re MIT/Wellesley cross registration, when I was at Wellesley, several decades ago, the MIT students who signed up for English classes at W often dropped out when they realized a) how much work the class was going to be, and b) that they were probably going to get a C. Not only did we not have grade inflation–the average grade was a C–but we were not allowed to drop classes after the first week. And if there hadn’t been any assignments yet, your transcript said “dropped failing”! It was incredibly punitive, IMHO, and for no good reason. The MIT students could play by MIT rules. At the time, my observation, based on classes MIT friends were taking, was that the MIT humanities classes were a bit of a joke. I understand that they have beefed up those programs since then</p>
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<p>Mine have never had a private tutor in any subject. They did do standardized-type prep of the type described above (classes offered by local community college) and scored high enough to get into top schools as well, but the very point is that there are higher scoring kids (and higher GPA kids) who got rejected from these schools because colleges here are not just looking for the highest-scoring kids they can find. Why this lesson seems to be so difficult for some to understand …</p>