Tuesday, April 23, 2013
While having dinner with a family who lives in Manhattan, the parents told me about their daughter’s saga of testing for kindergarten admission into New York’s notoriously selective Hunter Elementary School. The parents are two of the brightest people I know, and their four-year-old daughter is fluent in at least three languages so far (Mandarin, French, and English). Her test results placed her in the impressive 98th percentile. And yet, she hadn’t made it past the first round; only kids who scored in the 99th percentile and above advanced. My friends took it in good stride, shrugging off the results. “I look on the bright side,” said Jennifer. “At least she scored in the 98th percentile! I just wasn’t willing…
Read More
Saturday, August 11, 2012
(This article originally appeared on Christianity Today‘s This is Our City website.) When I was 6 and my dad had been hired by the U.S. government to work as an economist, one of the first things he and my mom did after we moved was to call the few fellow Korean immigrants they knew in the D.C. area. “Where are the good schools?” they interrogated. When they ran out of people to call, they called their friends’ friends and asked the same question. It took no time to build a list of acceptable school districts, a list that concurrently created the boundaries for where we would consider living. If a city was not on that list, it did not matter how affordable…
Read More
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Our family had reached a breaking point: my eldest son was in first grade and was tired all the time from a combination of school, music, sports, church, and lessons in Mandarin on Sundays. The reason he was taking Mandarin wasn’t to honor our family heritage (we are not Chinese-American), but because of a random phrase that his piano teacher had uttered in passing when he was five: “The children in my studio who go to Chinese school are the best ones at memorizing music as well,” she said. “Something about learning all those characters must strengthen their brains.” That was enough to send me into a flurry of Mandarin-mania, and within six months, my son was learning all about…
Read More
Friday, June 24, 2011
Safety. We parents crave it for our children and our families; we search for neighborhoods that are considered “safe,” we try to keep our children away from dangerous objects or scenarios, and we purchase all manner of gadgets and gear in order to ensure that our kids won’t fall down stairs or pinch their little fingers or electrocute themselves. This is what it means to be a good parent, right? As Christian parents, especially, why would we ever choose to do anything that could endanger the lives, health, or well-being of our children? Kirsten Strand, a Chicagoland mother of two boys found herself pondering this very question one day when her then-2nd grade son came home and announced, “I can’t…
Read More
Friday, January 21, 2011
I’m a little late to the party, but this is the first of two separate posts I’ve written about the whole “Tiger Mom”controversy: I was in a celebratory mood. Not an hour before, I’d walked across the stage at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C., welcomed the piece of paper declaring my new standing as a high school graduate, and thrown up my mortarboard with joy, flinging away four years of late nights, stressful exams, endless cram sessions, more than a few heartaches, and everything else that went along with attending a competitive public high school in the suburbs of our Nation’s Capital. I was still feeling giddy at dinner with my family at a posh steakhouse when my father revealed what he…
Read More
Let’s Connect
By PDGACO payday loans