What gives ?
“Dot”?
I have silly friends that call Indians dotheads. I try to set them straight but they continue to call them that just to get a rise out of me.
The short answer is that South and East Asian immigrants often bring with them a strong work ethic and sense of family. These immigrants often push their offspring to be high achievers in academic endeavours, including spelling bees, forcing them to spend an inordinate amount of time studying and practicing to come out on top. Whether the kid wants to or not is irrelevant.
It’s the same dynamic as those parents who push their children into activities like sports, acting and beauty pageants - they want their kid to succeed so that they can bask in the reflected glory. I always feel sorry for those kids.
And if the “dot” in the title is short for “dothead” (as I’m hoping it isn’t), knock it off.
One thing I have noticed as a teacher is that recent immigrants (from where ever) often don’t really understand the system and so make choices that seem odd.
What I mean is this: parents with a background in the American education system often have a pretty specific idea of what they think “success” looks like for their child–and it’s often modeled off of their own educational experience: unless they were spelling bee champs themselves, it’s not a huge priority. For many American-raised parents, the point of school activities is two fold 1) create certain types of experiences the parent remembers as fundamental to the development of their own personality and 2) get into a certain type of college (IME, either one exactly like the one they went to or one that is one tier higher). They push their kids towards a variety of activities designed to 1) be memorable and 2) look good for colleges (and they know that variety is more important here than excellence.)
Parents who are not familiar with the American Education system (which is weird, admittedly) see this huge array of various things your kid can do (from Scouts to Pee-wee football to Spelling Bees) and have no idea why this stuff even exists, and why it’s so tangled into the school system. Many of them simply ignore it, and never get their kids involved in these sorts of activities because they decide they are superfluous. Others, and this is where I think spelling bee champs come in, decide that if this stuff exists, success must mean being the best–and so they push the living hell out of kids to win spelling bees, or be validictorian, or graduate high school at 14. If your ultimate goal is a high-paying job, this is actually a high-risk, low-yield strategy, but I think it comes from the intuitive idea that if their is a game, the point must be to win it. The fact that that is not true takes a generation or so to figure out.
Oh !
I am from India and did not realise the term was offensive . In this very board a U.S poster of indian origin once wrote that he/she sometimes tells friends that he/she is Indian adding “dot not feathers” to distingish between them and native americans.
Indian immigrant would have been a better term to use in my post :smack:
According to an episode of Robot Chicken, “Indian (dot)” is a way of distinguishing from “Indian (feather).”
Still seems borderline offensive, but I’m guessing the OP is going to use the “look at my username” defense, which will, according to an episode of Seinfeld, wind up making us all anti-dentites.
That’s timing, y’all.
The username was not lost on me, hence my original confusion.
The American Indians are usually called Native Americans these days, if only to avoid such confusion (and also because it’s a complete misnomer, of course).
Excellent post !
In my experience with other education systems (the Chinese education system and the French system as implemented in west Africa) there is a much bigger emphasis on rote memorization. In other systems the teacher acts as the ultimate authority, and students are expected to memorize information. Learning is quite systematic.
The American system, on the other hand, emphasizes processing information. We view teachers as guides. We value being able to find information and analyze it more than having information memorized. We figure it is more important to have the skills to find the information we need rather than having a bunch of stuff memorized.
This is a huge part of why other countries are so much better at math than us. Our system is more conducive to non-linear thinking. If there were studies comparing our abilities to, say, write an essay analyzing the themes of a work of literature, I’m almost certain America would come out on top.
So spelling bees are going to be more popular among people who value rote memorization in education. And people from this educational background are going to have techniques and persistence that people from an American educational background simply don’t have.
I think the cultural stuff referred to by Manda JO gets to the nub of things. Indian education owes a lot to British rule, which tended towards rote learning as a teaching method.
I’d also suggest that Indian immigrants will often have English as a (fluent) second language (or as a first language with a fluent second “indian” language). Bilingual kids in general tend to do better academically - learning two languages from birth (especially totally separate ones like english and e.g. marathi) will tend to give you better facility with English as she is spoke and wrote, which is ideal for spelling bees etc.
Next you’re going to say they should have their own schools.
But they . . . oh, never mind.
The successful spelling-bee competitors sadden me. Often missing is work/life balance. The kids are starved of daylight and other endeavors that are rewarding, just to get to the ‘top’ of ‘something’ abstract.
I lived in a neighborhood with a Indian family across the street, and saw the Indian boy grow up like this: One day, when he was four, and I got a glimpse of him. The next time I saw him, he was 19 years old. And I used to cut their lawn, fix things around the house and see their house daily as it was right across the street.
Big deal. He was the math champion. He is doing great in college, but if he winds up like his sisters (brilliant academically and now graduates), his soft skills (or lack of) will keep his career opps limited. They are misfits and other, less brilliant students are living lives they should envy.
Balance matters. For whatever reasons, many Indians don’t understand American culture enough to grasp the concept that social skills and work/life balance matter. They learn the hard way. And a few work for, and report to, me.
That was me.
indian is actually Indian, for the record.
I agree that this happens, but I’d be careful about assuming it is what is happening in any particular case: some parents push kids too hard, but some kids are born with a bone-deep competitive streak and a deep and abiding passion. Recently, I congratulated a parent on her daughter’s award in a dance competition. She shook her head at me and said “honestly, I wish she’d break an ankle so she’d learn how to slow down”. What do you do with a kid like that? Denying them the chance to strive as hard as they want to is doomed to failure–they won’t be balanced, they’ll be bitter.
On the other hand, I’ve seen very good kids also snap because Mama wants perfection in everything, all the time.
Indian-kid-in-the-West here. The spelling bee champs (I was one, though on a smaller scale) are definitely the product of their parents’ behavior. They’re not being pushed into competition, though; they’re being pushed to excel. If there was a tradition of kids standing out on the street spelling difficult words for passers-by, they’d do just as well as that.
This is the second time I’ve seen Indian (dot) used here this week. For what it’s worth, I’ve always used Asian Indian to distinguish that ethnic group from American Indians.
Yes, and Tim Whatley was actually Jewish*. And a dentist. 
*Converted