Misconceptions about education and schooling held by traditional Chinese parents
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A large part of the reason I have put my autobiography online is to help students with authoritarian parents cope with their parents’ interference in their education. Previously, a person whose parents disagreed with his or her educational or career choices had the option of trying to hide them from their parents. With the Internet, this has become essentially impossible.
Because most people aren’t going to read my rather long autobiography, I have distilled what I want to say on the misconceptions held by traditional Chinese parents about education and schooling into a few important points which I will discuss below. This way, any student caught in the situation that I was in can print this out and use it to tell their parents that they are on the path to destroying his or her academic career… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Miscellaneous articles about raising gifted children, from Scientific American
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I was searching/browsing through the online archives of Scientific American while writing the previous posts, and came across some articles about raising gifted children that I thought I’d comment on, especially with respect to their relevance to my personal situation.
The article “Gifted Children: How to Bring Out Their Potential” by Christian Fischer begins:
Contrary to what many people believe, highly intelligent children are not necessarily destined for academic success. In fact, so-called gifted students may fail to do well because they are unusually smart. Ensuring that a gifted child reaches his or her potential requires an understanding of what can go wrong and how to satisfy the unusual learning requirements of extremely bright young people.
I remember that the teachers and counsellors at my gifted school warned us and our parents about this… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Being socially active is important to academic success
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Published by
davinci on
May 11, 2009 in
autobiography and personal.
Tags: authoritarian parenting, authoritarian parents, gifted children, high school, intelligence, nerds, popularity, social awkwardness, social life, social skills, Superman.
I had originally written the material in this post as a part of the ongoing series on the causes of my depression. I had taken this material out because it had made the high school section of my chronology far too long, and also because I didn’t think the details were that relevant to the theme of the series. However, as I was writing the next post in the series, which was to be about my experiences in graduate school, I realised that a lot of it didn’t make sense except in comparison with my high school experiences. I have therefore cobbled some of the material back together into this post.
I am not including this post in the ongoing series numbering primarily because it is out of chronological order, but also because I think its theme is important enough that the post should stand on its own. There is a widespread belief that intelligence and sociability are inversely correlated; gifted children are commonly stereotyped as being socially awkward and unpopular, especially in high school. I not only think that this stereotype is untrue, I think it is perniciously harmful. It is especially harmful in the case of gifted adolescents of Asian descent, who are basically hit with the double whammy of being stereotyped as socially awkward for two different reasons… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Overcoming my writer’s block, part 3: science writing in high school
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Published by
davinci on
April 9, 2009 in
academic writings, autobiography and personal.
Tags: abusive parents, authoritarian parenting, gifted children, Ph.D., physics of computation, quantum computing, research proposal, science, thesis, writing.
I have already written previously about how counterproductive authoritarian parenting is, but this is a fact that I simply cannot emphasise enough. Educators are always talking about the importance of encouraging children to read and write, but my parents have always discouraged me from both. Maybe this sounds unbelievable, but I think it is quite common among parents from certain cultural backgrounds. My parents dismissed anything that I read or wrote outside of what was required for school or a job or some other official purpose as “frivolous” and a “waste of time”.
My parents had mostly ignored my writings in elementary school, but I think this was because they had assumed that everything I wrote was “for school”. My father would occasionally pick up something I had written; he would frown or glare at me, or make some negative remarks, but at that time he did not order or pressure me to stop. I think his comments at the time were mostly directed at the school system for what he perceived to be a waste of my time for requiring me to write essays on topics he considered unimportant — or, even worse, fictional stories… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
Why children should be allowed to study whatever they want to study
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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]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
How I managed to be so successful in high school
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High school was a very difficult time for me, but I was also extremely successful during this time. My parents had arrived in Canada only two years earlier, and it would be some time before the disruptive effects of their interference with my education would become apparent. I was very fortunate that for several years in elementary school — probably the most formative years of my life — I could learn from excellent teachers without my parents continually disparaging everything they taught me. I began high school very, very far ahead of my classmates, and I had gotten that way by doing precisely the very things that my parents would discourage and attempt to prevent me from doing during high school: reading books not on the school curriculum, learning things by actually doing them, going around talking to people with an interest or expertise in a subject, and so on.
There were three interweaving strands in my high school life: academics, school-related extracurricular activities, and interests altogether outside of school… » [Expand post]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
What is holding me back
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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]« [Collapse post] [Permalink]
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]