Gifted program in Mississauga
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Published by
davinci on
November 21, 2008 in
autobiography and personal.
Tags: autobiography, Catholic school, communications technologies, computer science, culture shock, elementary school, gifted children, logic, Mississauga, physics, raising gifted children, reading, Richard Feynman, the Bible.
In Mississauga, we were enrolled in a gifted program at a Catholic elementary school, because our mother is a Roman Catholic. They had a pretty nice library there, and because the school was Catholic, there were lots of books on Latin, Greek, Roman history, and Catholicism, and I became interested in those subjects.
I had actually been reading the Bible in English since my arrival in Canada. My grandparents were given a copy when they were sworn in as citizens. Since they couldn’t read it, they said I could have it, and I used to read it every day. In grade five, the Gideons came to our public school — in fact, into our classroom with the teacher’s permission — and gave each of the students a pocket edition of the New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs, with a red leathery cover. I used to carry it everywhere and read it whenever I had the chance. Nowadays that sort of blatant proselytism of immigrants and children would probably not be allowed inside a public institution. But I don’t think that I was ever harmed by it — in fact, quite the opposite. By studying the Bibles, I not only learned about Protestantism and other sects of Christianity, but also vastly improved my vocabulary, became familiar with archaic and other literary forms of English, and began to think about problems of translation between languages. So I don’t think the Bible should be kept out of public classrooms, as some people do — it is one of the most important documents in Western civilisation, regardless of one’s beliefs about it, and one can learn a lot from it… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Childhood in Hong Kong and Whitby
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Published by
davinci on
November 20, 2008 in
autobiography and personal.
Tags: authoritarian parenting, autobiography, bullies, bully, bullying, childhood, gifted children, immigration, Megatron, punishment, Transformers.
Over the next several posts, I will write about my life in (more or less) chronological order to uncover the origins of my current inability to do any work. Many interesting things have happened during my life which have no direct relevance to my current predicament, so I will skip over them. I will try to stick mostly to incidents which demonstrate why authoritarian parenting is such torture for a gifted child — and there are a plethora of them! I will also mention some incidents which illustrate how gifted children are misunderstood by others or misunderstanding the world.
The first thing that had an impact on my academic attitude that I can remember happened when I was just beginning school. In Hong Kong, report cards came not only with grades, but with a rank. Initially, I thought that the higher the number, the better… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
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In the fields of clinical and developmental psychology, Baumrind’s parenting typology is used to classify different styles of parenting. The typology has two orthogonal dimensions, responsiveness (or warmth) and demandingness (or control), resulting in a scheme with three styles of parenting, authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive, with the fourth combination corresponding to neglect or non-parenting.
Authoritarian parenting is the style of parenting associated with low responsiveness and high demandingness. It is characterised by the assertion of power on the part of the parent and withdrawal of affection and support to coerce obedience in the child. In other words, it is centred around punishment rather than the nourishment of the child’s internal incentives to motivate behaviour. This style of parenting is prevalent in Asian societies, and less common in the West. Its harmful effects are well-documented: … » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Why and for whom am I writing this?
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I started this blog to record my thoughts as a scientist. And while the next several posts have nothing directly to do with scientific research, they are about the experiences of somebody who has struggled to become a scientist — namely, myself. There are plenty of blogs already where scientists write about their research or scientific ideas, or give expression to their social, political, or philosophical views. But I haven’t really run across too many where a scientist talks about really personal problems which he or she has had to deal with while trying to create a career in science. This gives the impression that all the successful scientists (the blogging ones, anyway) have personal lives which are in tiptop shape.
This may or may not actually be true, but it has the effect of creating a vicious cycle… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Mixing personal and academic blogging
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I have been agonizing over the past little while about how much of my personal life to expose on this blog. I have decided that there would be no limits — that I would simply write about whatever was on my mind.
I have, of course, considered all of the usual reasons for not divulging too much personal information online: “What about your future employers?”, “You’d be telling complete strangers about your life,” and so on. I don’t mind at all if a potential employer finds out how I got to where I am today. This blog will allow me to paint a more complete picture about my background and skills than a résumé or CV ever could. And as for telling complete strangers about my life, I intermittently have the odd experience (as I’m sure many people do) of meeting people who think they know something about me — but what they think they know turns out to be wrong, or a misunderstanding or exaggeration of something that is true. So it’s nice to have a place where I can straighten out the facts.
It has been suggested to me that I should have two blogs, one for personal matters and another for academic ones. I don’t think that could ever work… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]