20% of my kids' public school here in california are Asian.
Here is an observation I noted last week when volunteering in his third grade class. They were doing worksheets about money (which I complained about in an earlier post- they are in THIRD GRADE!). Anyway... There are 4 Asian kids in his class- 2 Vietnamese, 2 Chinese (plus a Korean boy who just dropped out of the sky from Korea- he spokes no English yet so I'm not including him here).
2 kids were born here and 2 were raised here since babies.
They were all 4 excellent at math (2 girls, 2 boys). However, they had to do problem sets that required intuitive thought- they had to come up with the least number of coin combinations to make, say, 91 cents. 2 did not understand the directions and freaked out even though I explained it and even did two of the problems for them. The other two couldn't get it- they all could add up to 91 cents using 91 pennies or something like that, but they couldn't think of 3 quarters, 1 dime, a nickel, and a penny.
The other, non-Asian students did.
I thought that was so fascinating- they are not from the same countries, etc.
The Asian kids I know do lots and lots of extra homework, Kumon, etc. There are few Asians in our cub scout pack, none in the musicals my kids do, 100% asian with our piano concerts... It's pretty typical; I guess it works for them.
Last edited by jack'smom; 09/16/11 04:26 PM.
