No, very often the parents do not see that the kid wants to do well, or that he is actually doing well.
When I was in 10th grade, my school offered this extracurricular on “study methods”. Every single student who got signed up for it followed the same pattern: we were students who according to our teachers had good grades, whose grades were not dependent on our direct environment (we could be used as “filler” for bad groups without our grades going down), but whose parents were never satisfied. This includes people whose lowest grades were 8s (on a 10 scale). Any of us had grades good enough to get into any school in the country, but our parents were not satisfied. We were not perfect, therefore we were not good enough. The monthly rants involved calling us lazy, bad at organization, pointing out that our attention to detail wasn’t enough, our presentation skills weren’t good enough, our… nothing was good enough.
One of the techniques included in the course was speed reading. We were all speed readers already… :smack: The teacher didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. We succeeded, but we succeeded despite our parents. If it had been for mine, I would never have become an engineer or gone on to grad school, because they didn’t believe I had what it took (I was in the top 1% for my engineering school).
Sorry. As we have discussed, yes, some parents are jerks. That sounds pretty darn jerkish.
Mr. Nylock - you say elitism, I say mindset/culture built around a gold rush that also dents the universe: Silicon Valley. There are enough stories of success on such an historic - literally, these folks will be discussed in History - scale that a culture has built up around the process of “panning for gold” in the hopes that your kids is one of the few. My reduction is harsh - there is huge economic opportunity at many levels, with a few moonshots. Having a STEM education has become the mantra. This is a huge opportunity to be “part of the future” and all signs point to the train speeding up.
How freakin’ seductive is that? And if the culture is bending that way, the “influence-able middle” will move that way, too. I grew up in Silicon Valley - I got an opportunity to move away and chose to because I could see the intensity playing out. Weird to say that Westchester NY is less intense.
The hyper-competitive message does run counter to the class stasis story we’ve been told now for years: you’ll live and die in the class you were born into unless you really, really screw it up by getting hooked on drugs or running off to join the circus. And even then you’ll be cushioned, as evident with success stories that go “I took a year off and sat on a mountain in Bhutan, then came back and founded this company.” Or how profession class parents can support their kids while they take career-track, unpaid internships that are just to demonstrate that “yes, you’re our kind of person.”
I see a lot of this in the South, in its own way: middle class kids go down to Central America to do missionary work. Working class kids who need a revenue source go to Afghanistan. The former organize sing-alongs and community gardens, and get management jobs when they return. The latter get a pat on the back and exchange their cammo for blue Wal-Mart vests.
I believe there will always be those seduced by the proverbial “gold” and there will always be those that say “all that glitters is not gold”; the balance between the two is what keeps humanity as a whole reasonably sane IMHO.
Yes - Capitalism’s engine is the stress between Haves and Have Nots.
Does that mean that this situation is just the latest manifestation? With Gold Rushes, it is the adults who jump in and push themselves. This feels more like an “immigrant’s story” - where different ethnic groups leave and come to America and the parents push the kids to achieve for themselves and their family.
But in this case, it seems like all, even non-immigrant parents in this area are acting this way - and it is not clear that the kids being pushed have any of the “toughness” that might have been brought on while struggling in their home country or getting established here.
My dad was the son of immigrants and he did some incredibly hard work to help the family and put himself through college. I was raised in Silicon Valley in a typical 70’s suburban U.S. sort of way - if I was thrown into the same set of pressures my dad encountered as a teenager, I can’t imagine how I would’ve handled it.
Nailed it. When UC San Diego is considered a safety school, you have a problem. I live in Orange County and we see some of the same. You are either Stanford or UCLA, or you are the rest.
So our schools ends up catering to the top 1%, plus special programs for the bottom 10%, and if you are in the middle - well, think about Cal State or Community College. The perception is not a continuum, but rather a peak and a sheer wall with shit down at the bottom.
It gets worse, though. I see kids with 4.2 GPAs who can’t get into the top of the UCs, and won’t take UC Riverside or UC Merced because of the negative stigma. They would rather go to community college, and try again than end up at second tier UC school.
So when a kid blows one semester of one class - they can NEVER take the peak (in their eyes). They are a failure. I have worked with a few of these kids and helped them. but suicide is always an option once a cluster starts. We get one a year at our local school, but it is kept very quiet. I assume that is to prevent clusters.
I see these values as separate from any particular economic system and also distinct from the results of immigration.
People have certain values which they adhere to in various degrees - for whatever reason. It is my belief that certain external factors can exacerbate these innate or otherwise tendencies but they would always be there to a greater or lesser extent in any given population.
Any lengthy or serious discussion of this would probably be getting off subject though.
I don’t know - the Claremont colleges (certainly Harvey Mudd and Pomona, which I just saw shown as the two most expensive colleges in the U.S.), USC, Occidental and CalTech are all pretty darn prestigious. I know so many kids out here in the Northeast checking out Pomona, Oxy is where Obama attended for a couple of years, and CalTech is the MIT of the West.
I spend a lot of time talking with my son about keeping his definition of success as broad as possible. So many kids obsess about that one Moonshot school that they and/or their parents have defined as the only thing that matters.
That brings back some interesting memories from middle school(1984-1987). I went to a public middle school in, what was at the time, a middle/upper-middle class suburb of Houston with a huge Asian immigrant community.
I remember there was a lot of resentment among American parents and students against the whole Tiger Mom/insane work ethic. Essentially there was a feeling that it wasn’t somehow fair to compare their children who did extra-curriculars other than orchestra, and who actually you know, had friends and did stuff outside, against these Asian kids whose parents basically forced them to do schoolwork and only schoolwork, and to require such excellence, that in order to be competitive, they’d have to drop extracurriculars, etc… and make straight As as well.
Our school was something like 20% Asian, and yet the white, hispanic and black students dominated the extracurriculars. We had maybe one black football player out of two 7th grade and two 8th grade teams, and no Asian track people that I recall.
And interestingly enough, I remember one particular Chinese kid (“Eugene”) who literally broke down crying in class one day when he got a B on an exam. He wasn’t exactly socially adept or anything, but it wouldn’t have occurred to any of us to literally fall apart because we made a B.
I can totally see the setup for the Silicon Valley situation in my middle school experience, although our area of town wasn’t a destination for highly educated and competitive people. I imagine if it had been, something very similar might have happened there. As it ended up, developers built too many apartments, the rents went down, and a really criminal, low-rent crowd moved in, and the homeowners bailed en-masse to points further west and southwest. Now that part of town is celebrated in rap songs and the HPD blotter.
A “cram culture” may have been/still be championed within some immigrant and ethnic cultures, but the point is that it is increasingly established as a cultural norm at schools.
Helping your kids maintain a school/life balance is a huge parental responsibility - which itself has to be balanced with ensuring they are challenged appropriately to grow and show the ability to handle real life. This stuff is hard.
At least in my experience, it wasn’t a “cram culture”, as much as it was a total focus on academic performance. I mean, these kids did very little in the way of extracurriculars or even playing/hanging around with other middle-school aged kids because they were re-reading the chapter, or re-doing their homework math problems, or stuff like that.
That’s why the white parents were so bent out of shape; it seemed like stacking the deck in a sense. The feeling was that the kid with a 3.6 and who was a cheerleader and a basketball player and a track runner shouldn’t be penalized versus the kid with a 4.0 who did nothing else.
And I still agree; if every kid is totally focused academically, it doesn’t leave any room for anything but academic focus. The right solution is probably to make the college admissions process less focused on academics and more on extracurriculars and leadership type things. That’s not to say that it should disregard academics, but that it probably ought to favor the kid with a 3.7 and a host of extracurriculars over the kid with a 4.2 and nothing else, all else (test scores) being equal.
But to do that, you have to get rid of asinine schemes like the Texas top 10% rule, which basically sets students from non academically-oriented high schools (i.e. low-income students) up to fail, and sets up ridiculous competition in more academically oriented schools.
Not sure what to say. Colleges certainly look for a well-rounded kid, so being active in sports, community service, music, etc. is held up alongside academics. Just focusing on top academics really isn’t similar to what these Silicon Valley kids are experiencing. That is expected, but starting on your soccer team, winning Model UN or a Science Competition, being a lead person in Band or Theater and engaging your Community are all part of the picture these days.