January 2011
13 posts
“If what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger, then… what kills you will make you weaker?”
—Also, all medicine is poison taken in suitably small amounts that they (usually) don’t kill you. But what about pain and other suffering? What do you think you get out of that, physically and emotionally?
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ZOMG this website is safe for work but not safe for web designers. Ugh.
“To suffer and persevere is supposed to build character.”
—Kimchi Mamas: Guest Post: Raising Your Asian American Teen
“The parent depicted in Amy Chua’s WSJ excerpt (apparently just a provocative excerpt intended to drive sales of the book; see Christine Lu’s answer) is the parental equivalent of a demanding, yet incompetent executive or manager. Such people understand that high standards and pushing your employees (or children) are necessary, but are totally at a loss about how to do it without breaking down human morale in the process. Such methods lead to short-term performance gains but no long-term success. I’ve known managers like this, who excoriate and belittle their underlings in an attempt to “motivate” them, and their people will certainly move forward, but always only to avoid further punishment. However, it never results in long-term greatness. Treating children in the same way has similar results.”
—
It’s management, and there are so many terrible managers around that totally screw with your morale and esteem in trying to brute-force you into compliance with their goals. That’s to say, making them look good.
There’s a lot of trauma in the rest of that Quora thread.
I can’t remember what I wanted to post about. Maybe it was the weather. I’m terribly tired so I can’t go through a month of my tumblr dashboard to find things to queue. This tumblog has been rather quiet. It helps not to feel when the environment is like that. Why is an iPod nano mysteriously resurrecting deleted voice memos? Why is there sometimes precipitation without thunder and lightning? Sound like thunder. Move like lightning. The new Live Messenger and the Real Names (TM) for nicknames thing is slowly taking over my contact list. It’s really awkward and the online management thing is worse. Today I was sitting in a MacDonald’s and I was wondering why there was a little MT subscript to the left and below the Golden Arches. Then I realised I was on the other side of the window. My socks are still wet. I’m not sure whether I want to do Computer Engineering or Computer Science or Information Systems or Communications and Media or whatever else. Conundrum. Tick tock, tick tock, the mouse ran up the clock. People with faked, unnatural accents and who aren’t autistic. Apparently I’m now CPR/AED trained and certified, all in the space of 2.5 hours. When will all the annoying deductions begin? Why are there so few cats there? I’ve seen all of one kitten. Maybe it won’t get to mate and it will be the end of its line. My eyes are closing. I remember Shanghai. Lijiang. Taipei. Bled. Windermere. Brown hair? Toys? Pink elephants. Macaroni and vegetables and ham and mixed vegetables. No chicken for him except for processed and smushed like nuggets. Warm water. 1.5 degrees Celsius.
4 calendar weeks (luckily or unluckily the equivalent of three work weeks) down, 13 more to go!
“Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough. That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child. The Chinese parent believes that their child will be strong enough to take the shaming and to improve from it”
—Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior - WSJ.com
“ONE Sydney school produced three students who achieved the perfect score in the International Baccalaureate, outperforming the entire United States, which produced just one top scoring student.”
—
International Baccalaureate | 3 students score perfect 45 | IB
Extremely misguided article from The Sydney Morning Herald. It makes the following quote from the same article quite suspect:
Mr Valentine said he was aware of at least 26 Australian students who were yesterday notified they had received scores of 45.
If half the 45s were from ACS(I) and the other half from Australia… What happened to Argentina then? Hmm..
