Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior...

[SilentLi89]

Chinese girl I went to school with stabbed her mother to death because she was too strict.
Another Chinese kid in my grade, named Jimmy, is now clinically insane; don't know if that's due to the strictness of his parents but he himself claimed his parents were extremely strict.

I'd rather not have parents like this. It's one thing to make sure your kid does his school work etc. It's another thing to pressure a kid to the point where she wants to stab you to death.

I went to school with a Chinese kid named Jimmy, too. He took the SATs once a month for two years because he couldn't bring his Language and Writing scores above a 650 (English was his second language). Yet he scored perfect in math. And he would actually try to negotiate higher grades on assignments if he got an A-. He used to get so depressed and developed emotional issues, I felt so bad for him. There is pushing your kid to succeed (my mother was quite strict when it came to school, but I didn't want to stab her) and then there is pushing your kid off the deep end.

Also I studied in China for a short while and cheating is rampant there. Which was a huge culture shock to me. None of the Chinese students seem to be all that disturbed by it and apparently its common place, teachers even expect it. They have a different value system than the US. How could your parents not be mad if you failed a test you could have just easily cheated on? While in the US there is zero tolerance, even joke about cheating and professors are ready to throw you to the dogs, and do everything in their power to get you expelled (at least at my school).

 

[visceral_instinct]

Agreed to the central points of EF and VI - there is a middle ground: ultimately an extreme semi-Hawk strategy on this matter is doomed to fail, since not every person can be in first place.

Thank you! Ordinary, average people are IMPORTANT. We NEED supermarket workers, toilet cleaners, etc. If we all became neurologists or concert pianists the world would go to hell.

I don't want a kid, but hypothetically, if I had kids, I'd certainly be fine with them being average. So long as they got at least middle grades, passed everything, and grew steadily towards being balanced and competent people, I'd be fine. Because society is supposed to be a synergistic whole. Not a race. Not a fight to the fucking death.

 

[iceaura]

Also I studied in China for a short while and cheating is rampant there.

I once got a job as an emergency fill in math teacher because too many of the Taiwanese and Chinese grad students the college had brought in couldn't speak English nearly as well as their language proficiency test scores predicted.

The tests were given in Taiwan, and they were fairly difficult - anyone passing them honestly would have been at least minimally capable of TA work. They were not. They proficiency gap was so great the college was forced to hire temps like me.

While I was teaching, my office mate from Romania filled me in on how the extremely rigorous high school system they had imported from Russia worked there - a few bona fide genius students (like him, he did not say but exemplified with genuinely scary ability) would learn a ton of stuff, and everyone else would learn nothing from a curriculum so far over their heads - all but one of his classmates simply cheated, in every math class and on every test, to get through.

Or as a Jordanian grad student observed to me, as we were comparing testing and grading setups and the Russians were sneering at the generous "partial credit" arrangements: everyone downgrades the US system, but in the end you see all these really competent and productive US intellectuals coming out of it. Good doctors, creative engineers, impressively educated people by the thousands, appear from all over the US.

 

[chimpkin]

I doubt I'm going to have a kid, but if I do, I expect the child to make A's or B's. I don't expect AP classes-that's the child's choice as to what they want to take, athough they need to be college-ready when they graduate. But basically, I'll pay the kid for report card A's, give nothing for B's and for anything below a middle C, the kid gets to start staying in three nights a week to study until that grade is pulled up.

Extracurriculars are secondary to grades, most likely.

I don't make much, and not being a college grad these days is really rough, so my child needs to at least plan on getting a technical degree and getting grants and scholarships for same. That's not about me though, it's about them. My ego isn't going to be so bound up in that of any potential kid's that I'm pepared to make them miserable so I'll look good. But I want them to have a successful life, and I'm going to push them hard so that they do. I've seen what happens to kids who aren't disciplined-drugs, dropping out, pregnancy, jail, poverty, drug addiction, depression, misery. The whole white-trash panoply.
I don't want to bring a kid here for that. I would feel that I failed them hard if that happened.