Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not all South Asian or East Asian immigrants to US are MC or UMC.

And not tiger parents are Asian.
Still the phenomenon exists.
Tiger parents come to good school districts in droves and[b] disrupt them.[/b] It’s about the numbers, the concentration of ppl with a different philosophy.
Not about their ethnicity or race or class.

This is a load of BS. There is something inherently wrong if a school cannot accommodate high achievers. The Tiger Parents are not kidnapping other people's children and making them study hard. I think people are upset because their children were getting easy A's and all of a sudden they are being graded in a curve.

A good school district should welcome Tiger parents and students. MCPS is not thriving when instead of Tiger parents they are getting more and more of ESOL, FARMS and low performing kids.

A good school district will expand opportunities. If you had spelling bees before, include Geography, Biology, Science, Literature Bees, Cinema Bee, Sports Bee, Pop Music Bee too,

If you had school newspaper before, include school comic strip. If you had a Green Recycling Team before, include a Butterfly Garden club, a Blue Bird Trail team There is so much a school district can do to include parents and businesses and create more and more opportunities for all caliber of students.

After a point though, parents have to be inconvenienced and make the sacrifice of their time and resources to support their children. Sorry, that is what good human parenting is about.

Yes I am upset when one culture (that you chose) suddenly is overcome by another.
I am upset when it happens to schools suddenly flooded by low income high needs kids, too.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:“White parents were accustomed to having their kids shine at everything without working hard. Then, people came along who worked harder and won everything. Rather than developing a work ethic and investing more time into activities, the white parents complain about Asians prepping and "ruining their children's childhood" with too much school. This sentiment is very obvious if you read the AAP forum. There is a huge cultural divide at play, since Asian families are more impressed by work ethic while white ones are more impressed by natural aptitude. ”

White mom here. Yes you are right. I want my kids to have a childhood that does not feel like drill school. I also am not a fan of travel sports teams for most kids as they seem ridiculous over investment of time/money vs enjoying playing the sport for fun.

I do not want to be in an atmosphere where my kid needs to drill for hours to keep up with the top vs doing a normal amount of work and letting aptitude help them along.

I do not think those other parents are bad parents. I just do not want that environment for my kids. We picked a more “normal” (for America) school zone and are happy with the non-extreme level of competitiveness.

NP here. I agree with you. But, you don't have the right to enforce your standards and your choices on other families. If you want a more relaxed atmosphere, then you should be fine if your child is tracked out of the advanced classes. The advanced classses would be for those children who are advanced. There is room for the advanced classes, the good ahead/at grade level the average and the remedial level. If your atmosphere where children enjoy more of their childhood means that your child is tracked out of the advanced classes, then that is your choice. Those families who want to give their children more tutoring and more educational workouts are no different from the families that want their children to excel at music or sports. There are families who spend a lot of time and money on music instruction to ensure their child makes it into music competitions. There are those who spend time and money on trainers and gym memberships and facilities so that their child can be an advanced skater or track star or football star or gymnastics star.

If you are going to restrict outside training and tutoring in the academics, then you better be prepared to do the same for athletics and artistic training and tutoring. And while I agree that you shouldn't force children into this stressful training and tutoring, I don't agree that you should restrict other families from making those choices. And if that means that your naturally gifted but untutored child falls into the good but not advanced classes, so be it.

What gets me is that the families complaining are ones who have smart or naturally gifted children who they feel entitled to be at the top and in the best classes, and they feel that the top classes and most advanced classes should be defined by their children, not defined by other children who are more educated than theirs.

I am not talking about banning those families from supplementing. But the school should not expect - and set advanced class requirements - to align with kids needing to do ridiculous amounts of cramming. Homework yes, studying of course. But not extra schooling at home to the point the kids have a double shift. If that means the kids who are also “home schooling” or study centering on top of the school day are board,well they can stop spending every blessed hour studying or they can go private.

I also strongly agree with a PP above who said that the parents who dislike the shift in school environment have every right to complain. Now that said,again I am the PO that kept this I mind when house hunting and I a happy with where on the spectrum our schools fall in terms of competitiveness vs kids getting to be kids.

Anonymous wrote:
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Aiden taking the normal math sequence in school. It’s not a race.

My oldest did enter kindergarten reading chapter books. They did not skip her into 4th grade reading.

Anonymous wrote:
Aiden is not highly gifted in math. He’s doing algebra with dad in 5th grade—not advanced calculus.

School can not operate this way because too many parents will want to rush their kids through math. The kids who are rushed through will suffer. It affects the school and the teachers who have to teach these kids later and find out they have been rushed through. Hopefully it doesn’t affect the actual level of instruction for other kids but I think we can all imagining how it might.

It’s not about comparisons. Surely you understand quicker or earlier does not equal smarter. I think parents like you are the ones who have an obsession with being the best. Aiden is the best because he was skipped into algebra I in 6th grade? That’s validation for parents who need that sort of thing. It’s a way for Aiden to be the best without him actually being the best.

Aiden doesn’t look as advanced when he’s with his peers in 7th grade Algebra I. He may still shine in that class, or other kids may outshine him in that class because the have a deeper understanding. Even if he’s taking the next year’s math class with a tutor those same-aged, non-tutored kids may outshine him in his school class and I think that’s a source of anxiety for his parents. Much better to just keep pushing ahead... get the skip and rest on those laurels.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Aiden taking the normal math sequence in school. It’s not a race.

My oldest did enter kindergarten reading chapter books. They did not skip her into 4th grade reading.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think there is anything wrong with supplementing your child’s education. That is your right.

But a child, or rather their parent, should not be rewarded with special treatment by pushing their kid ahead in the standard curriculum.

Let Aiden study algebra in 5th grade with daddy. But he will not study algebra I in school until 7th grade—along with the other bright kids who had supplementation or not.

No ifs ands or buts.

This argument that because you’ve tutored a child ahead of the curriculum she is deserving of more advanced work needs to die.

But why do you care what the school does with Aiden? How does it hurt your child at all if Aiden is allowed to take Algebra early? Why isn't it a better model to try to teach kids where they are, rather than having they waste their time at school? What if Aiden is actually highly gifted in math and not just the product of tutoring? Do you also feel that all kids in Kindergarten should have to sit through letter sounds and BOB books even if they're already independently reading chapter books, because that would be an equivalent case of rewarding kids with special treatment for having parents who read to them and taught them to read?

Admit it. You don't want other kids to be pushed ahead because you feel like it makes your kid look worse in comparison. You're still clinging to the notion that your child deserves to be the best.

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think there is anything wrong with supplementing your child’s education. That is your right.

But a child, or rather their parent, should not be rewarded with special treatment by pushing their kid ahead in the standard curriculum.

Let Aiden study algebra in 5th grade with daddy. But he will not study algebra I in school until 7th grade—along with the other bright kids who had supplementation or not.

No ifs ands or buts.

This argument that because you’ve tutored a child ahead of the curriculum she is deserving of more advanced work needs to die.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I take OP’s point that tying things to race or culture is not necessary. A school can say that they are taking steps to help children avoid stress without indicting Asian-American families in the same statement. The phrase “tiger mom” is so loaded and easily avoided.

I can also understand that a school does see shifting norms, for whatever reasons, and find challenges in responding to those. But schools used to deal with different challenges like seniors having legal access to beer and students taking smoke breaks. Then came cultural shifts like elite athletes coming in fatigued from early morning practice or travel teams. There will always be things happening in the world outside of school that schools need to respond to. I wish administrators had greater emotional intelligence and knew what was out of their control.

In much the same way that varsity sports aren’t for everyone, the spelling or geography bees won’t be appropriate for everyone either. Perhaps the solution isn’t trying to exert more control over others but to create more opportunities for fun competition, akin to JV and club sports. It stinks that we guard these opportunities as if they’re limited resources instead of expanding the opportunities (unless perhaps the point is to sneer at and detract from those we fear may be more talented than ourselves).

NP - Yes, it is unnecessary to tie comments to race, but let's be serious. The comment about immigrants coming from a different system of education is true. It is well documented that many kids suffer from the intense pressure of the educational systems in China, Japan and South Korea (and we could argue about the ultimate educational outcomes of those systems as well.) Parents move here and want to re-create the system that they had at home, and which we as a country have consciously avoided. Those immigrant parents have every right to choose their children's extracurriculars, and to advocate for changes in public school, but the existing population has every right to resist those changes as well. That isn't white privilege (and those resisting may not even be white, they may be second generation Asians, etc.); that is making another judgment about what is valuable for childhood. Not everything is about race.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This must be somewhere in western Fairfax County. That’s where credentialism is is carried to its most bizarre extremes, both by school obsessed Asians and school obsessed whites.

Right? What is with labeling children by degrees of "giftedness"? That is insane and dehumanizing.

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think there is anything wrong with supplementing your child’s education. That is your right.

But a child, or rather their parent, should not be rewarded with special treatment by pushing their kid ahead in the standard curriculum.

Let Aiden study algebra in 5th grade with daddy. But he will not study algebra I in school until 7th grade—along with the other bright kids who had supplementation or not.

No ifs ands or buts.

This argument that because you’ve tutored a child ahead of the curriculum she is deserving of more advanced work needs to die.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Slightly off-topic, but I find it hilarious that “equity” in school systems is now this HUGE nation-wide thing, just now when Asians are dominating. Like, no one really cared during the many decades when whites were at the top. Now they’re not so all of a sudden they have to take away the meritocracies and replace them with “equity”

Whites are good students too.
FYI!

Anonymous wrote:Slightly off-topic, but I find it hilarious that “equity” in school systems is now this HUGE nation-wide thing, just now when Asians are dominating. Like, no one really cared during the many decades when whites were at the top. Now they’re not so all of a sudden they have to take away the meritocracies and replace them with “equity”

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Not all South Asian or East Asian immigrants to US are MC or UMC.

And not tiger parents are Asian.
Still the phenomenon exists.
Tiger parents come to good school districts in droves and[b] disrupt them.[/b] It’s about the numbers, the concentration of ppl with a different philosophy.
Not about their ethnicity or race or class.

This is a load of BS. There is something inherently wrong if a school cannot accommodate high achievers. The Tiger Parents are not kidnapping other people's children and making them study hard. I think people are upset because their children were getting easy A's and all of a sudden they are being graded in a curve.

A good school district should welcome Tiger parents and students. MCPS is not thriving when instead of Tiger parents they are getting more and more of ESOL, FARMS and low performing kids.

A good school district will expand opportunities. If you had spelling bees before, include Geography, Biology, Science, Literature Bees, Cinema Bee, Sports Bee, Pop Music Bee too,

If you had school newspaper before, include school comic strip. If you had a Green Recycling Team before, include a Butterfly Garden club, a Blue Bird Trail team There is so much a school district can do to include parents and businesses and create more and more opportunities for all caliber of students.

After a point though, parents have to be inconvenienced and make the sacrifice of their time and resources to support their children. Sorry, that is what good human parenting is about.