Tag Archive for 'autobiography'

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Overcoming my writer’s block, part 2: elementary school, ESL, and fiction

Published by davinci on April 8, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

When I first arrived in Canada at the age of eight, I had to take an ESL class at school. Because there were so few students in the class, the ESL instructor acted essentially as a private tutor to each of us in turn. Ironically, because I was given so many more reading and writing assignments than my Canadian-born classmates, my facility with English soon overtook theirs. Within a year, my writing was so good that my teacher told my grandparents at the parent-teacher interview that I should be published. When I explained this to my grandmother, who didn’t speak English herself, she was very pleased; but she never acted on it, nor would my grandparents have known how. But imagine — a year ago I was obliged to take an ESL class, and now I had become so skilled that my teacher thought I should be a professional author! It was an enormous boost to my confidence and a huge incentive to keep on writing.

I think there were two factors that made my writings so popular with my teachers and classmates… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 3: science writing in high school
  2. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 4: high school and being editor-in-chief
  3. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 5: writing about open notebook science in high school
  4. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 1: overview
  5. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 6: communications technologies and their effects on global politics
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Overcoming my writer’s block, part 1: overview

Published by davinci on April 7, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I have again been unable to write for a long time. The task that I had set before myself, of writing an autobiography from birth up to the present to explicate the causes of my depression, was just too big. After writing several large chunks and attempting to arrange the pieces in some sensible order, I finally had to put everything aside — temporarily — out of frustration.

I have returned to the project with the aim of proceeding in smaller steps, by dividing up my writing into themes. The first theme that I will tackle is the problem of my writer’s block, which I have already mentioned. It might seem strange and self-contradictory that I should be writing about having a writer’s block — but the fact is that I have been unable to write anything else. I am therefore going to confront this writer’s block directly by forcing myself to write whatever I have to about it.

I used to be a very prolific writer… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 3: science writing in high school
  2. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 4: high school and being editor-in-chief
  3. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 2: elementary school, ESL, and fiction
  4. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 6: communications technologies and their effects on global politics
  5. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 5: writing about open notebook science in high school
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Why children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study

Published by davinci on February 4, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

An experience that I think must be common to a lot of the children of authoritarian parents is to have their extracurricular interests disparaged, and to be told that anything that isn’t on the school curriculum is not worth studying. I know this is very common among Asian parents, and it’s just one more manifestation of the inherently anti-science attitude that is present in traditional Asian beliefs about raising children.

My parents’ rationale for attacking me for spending time studying subjects not on the school curriculum was, according to them, so that I would be more “focused in school”. This is just so wrong on so many levels… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
  2. How I managed to be so successful in high school
  3. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 1: overview
  4. Being socially active is important to academic success
  5. Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
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What is holding me back

Published by davinci on January 28, 2009 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

This project of writing out my autobiography is taking a lot longer even to get started than I thought it would. I had intended to post something months ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, even after I had written a considerable amount of material. The writing process itself took a long time, because I had to re-live the experiences that I was writing about, and some of these have been extremely painful.

There are several things holding me back from posting what I have written, the primary one being that I suffer from a pathological perfectionism — I cannot bear to let anyone else know about a project that I’m working on until after it has been completed, for fear that someone would deliberately act to sabotage and derail my efforts. I was not always like this; in fact, once upon a time, I used to drag everyone I knew, and even many people whom I didn’t, into anything that I was involved with. The reason for this drastic change in my behaviour will become crystal clear as I tell my story… » [Expand post] [Permalink]

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Gifted program in Mississauga

Published by davinci on November 21, 2008 in autobiography and personal. 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
  2. Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
  3. The causes of my depression, part 4: the Mentorship Program
  4. Perimeter Scholars International — Master’s program in Theoretical Physics
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Childhood in Hong Kong and Whitby

Published by davinci on November 20, 2008 in autobiography and personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

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Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children

Published by davinci on November 15, 2008 in autobiography and personal. 19 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

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[1].

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
  2. Gifted program in Mississauga
  3. Why and for whom am I writing this?
  4. Why children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study
  5. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 6: communications technologies and their effects on global politics
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Why and for whom am I writing this?

Published by davinci on November 14, 2008 in autobiography and personal. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , , .

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] [Permalink]

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. Authoritarian parenting and its harmful effects on gifted children
  2. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 3: science writing in high school
  3. Writing my Ph.D. Research Proposal live
  4. Overcoming my writer’s block, part 5: writing about open notebook science in high school
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