Wanna Be bet his future on a belief that he didn’t need to get an education because he was going to be drafted into Major League Baseball (MLB) and earn millions.
My brother Richard’s (1935 – 1999) oldest daughter (from his second marriage) graduated from high school engaged to another student that had signed a contract to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The weekend after he signed the contract, he threw a wild party to celebrate. A fight broke out and he was hit in the head with a baseball bat and lost his ability to pitch. The contract was cancelled and no money changed hands.
Depressed, he fell into booze and drugs along with my niece, and the marriage fell apart.
I don’t know if Wanna Be’s dream came true but most don’t.
I recently read that an average of 40,000 young people flood Hollywood annually dreaming of being the next super star to eventually win an Academy Award.
However, less than one percent lands a role on TV or in film let alone super-star status.
The tragedy is that Wanna Be wasn’t alone. Too many of the students I taught saw no reason to work in school since they had been convinced by a parent boosting the child’s self-esteem that if the child dreamed it, that dream would come true, which is another absurd example of the damage caused by the Self-Esteem movement.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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I don’t recall this student’s name so I’ll call him “Wanna Be”, and he was convinced he was going to be a big league pitcher. He often disrupted the class by announcing that baseball scouts were already watching him and his future was guaranteed.
Wanna Be saw no reason to read the assignments, study for tests, or do homework and he failed both semesters.
In the mornings before first period, I’d often run into Wanna Be before he had his liquid-sugar breakfast and he was a friendly guy—nothing like the surely, moody monster that walked into my fifth period after lunch with a 64 ounce Coke in hand.
The sugar he consumed at lunch often resulted in glazed eyes, a slack jaw, slurred speech and a serious change in behavior.
Liquid Sugar is Toxic
The student snack bar, which was more of a fast food outlet that served mostly French fries, pizza slices, nachos smothered in cheese and hamburgers, sold 64 ounce Cokes for less than a dollar.
Near the end of my teaching career, the high school also had soda machines installed in the hallways to make money for the school district. The vender split the profits.
One morning, I ran into the truck driver stocking the machines and asked how many sodas the students drank. I recall that he said he stocked an average of 2,000 cases a week in the machines at Nogales and a case held 24 Cokes—that’s 48,000 Cokes a week at one high school. The high school had about 3,000 students. You do the math.
To be fair, the machines also sold water but most of the students hooked on this liquid candyhated water and had no qualms saying how horrible water tasted.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
When I decided to write this post about one of the students I taught at Nogales High School in La Puente, California, I thought of The Natural, a baseball movie starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, and Glenn Close, where an average baseball player comes out of seemingly nowhere to become a legendary player with almost divine talent.
This is what Hollywood does best—the stuff dreams are made of.
Then I Googled “baseball movies” and discovered a Site listing almost 200 from A to Z (there wasn’t one for “Z”, but “Y” had Yankees West and The Yankles.
If you love baseball as many Americans do, you may want to visit Boston Baseball.com.
I even searched for “Baseball Movies” on YouTube, which resulted in more than five-hundred thousand hits, and I was sucked into watching a few clips.
I could have watched baseball videos for hours on YouTube. I suspect entire movies are there ten minutes at a time.
However, that wasn’t what I wanted to write about.
I wanted to write about one student of the thousands I taught. He was in one of my ninth grade English classes.
He hated water as many Americans do, and often started school with a liquid breakfast followed by a liquid lunch and a bag of greasy French fries. Then he arrived at his English class—my fifth period.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Larry Summers cites in his debate with Amy Chua that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard emphasizing what those “two” achieved without a university education.
While Gates was building Microsoft and Zuckerberg Facebook, do you believe these two billionaires spent ten hours a day doing what the average American child (raised by SAPs such as Summers) does to enjoy the first quarter of his or her life?
Summers doesn’t mention that Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on the planet, attended the Wharton Business school at the University of Pennsylvania for two years then transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Working part time, he managed to graduate in only three years.
Summers doesn’t mention that it is common that the top one percent of executives with annual incomes of $500,000 or more often have Ivy league educations from universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
“Asian countries value education more than other countries.”
Summers doesn’t mention that the top 15% of the upper-middle class are highly educated and often have graduate degrees while earning a high 5-figure annual income commonly above $100,000.
To be specific, the median personal income for a high school drop out in the US with less than a 9th grade education is $17,422, and with some college that medium income jumps to $31,054, while a person with a professional university degree earns an annual medium income of $82,473. Source: Wiki Academic Models (this source was citing US Census data).
It’s okay if Summers and his fellow SAPs let their children and teens have fun the first eighteen years of life, but don’t forget, the average life span in the US is 78.3 years.
What are those children going to do for enjoyment while working to earn a living the next 60.3 years as an adult?
Most children raised by Tiger Moms such as Amy Chua shouldn’t have to worry. Those children (as adults) will probably be in the top 15% of income earners and enjoy life much more than those earning less than $18 thousand annually.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
I’m sure that Amy Chua had no idea she was about to light a Baby Boomer fuse that would explode when she wrote her essay published in The Wall Street Journal about Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.
In 2000, Paul Begala, a political strategist for President Bill Clinton, wrote in Esquire, “The Baby Boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self aggrandizing generation in American history.”
Begala was right.
Starting in the 1960s, the Boomers also gave birth to the narcissistic, self-esteem generation.
When Amy Chua’s memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother went on sale, my wife and I went to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a copy. It took us more than a week to read the book. My wife went first.
However, the morning that Chua’s memoir went on sale, dozens of one-star reviews appeared on Amazon.com condemning the book before anyone had time to read it.
Later, Amazon.com deleted many of these critical reviews that were bitter, caustic, personal attacks on Chua’s parenting methods and had nothing to say of the memoir. It was obvious that most if not all of those early one-star reviews were based on the essay in The Wall Street Journal.
Nancy (not her real name), who works for Barnes and Noble (where we bought a copy of the memoir), told us of an experience she had substitute teaching in a girls P.E. Class. She said there were about 150 girls. Half were Asian and half were Caucasian. When Nancy told them to sit and read or do what they wanted, the Asians took out books and studied. The Caucasians started to text, do makeup and gossip.
Studies show that the “average” American Boomer parent talks to his or her children less than five minutes a day and more than 80% never attend a parent-teacher conference. Boomer parents are so self-absorbed with other interests that TV, the Internet, video games and other teens become substitute parents to their children.
However, when most Chinese mothers (or Asian American) come together, their conversations focus on their children and education, which explains why studies show Asian-American students have the lowest incidence of STDs, teen pregnancy, illegal drug and alcohol use and the highest GPAs, graduation rates from high school and highest ratio of college attendance.
What do you think the “average” Caucasian Boomer mothers talk about when they get together?
A close friend of mine, who isn’t Chinese, read Amy Chua’s essay and many of the comments attacking Chua for her tough stance as a mother. He said it is obvious that Chinese mothers love their children and American mothers don’t because love means sacrifice.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).
His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves
Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).
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Less than 100 years ago, children were the property of parents and could be sold into a form of slavery called servitude. Children of the poor often ended in factories and coalmines as young as five years old and labored twelve-hour days six days a week. Then in 1938, the child labor law was passed and the pendulum swung the other way 180 degrees until today, we see incidents such as these taking place in American classrooms.
I knew an eighth grade English teacher that was knocked out by a student. The student ended with five days of suspension then was transferred to my English class where she walked in tardy one day and lifted a leg to fart in my face in front of about 34 students before sitting down. I never met the parents.
Between 1999 and 2000, 135,000 teachers were physically attacked by a student and over 300,000 elementary and secondary school teachers were threatened with injury in the United States. Source: Lib.Umn.edu
American teachers are not alone.
The Guardian in the UK reported, “A quarter of school staff have suffered violence at the hands of a student and a third have been confronted by aggressive parents.”
What’s needed is to swing the pendulum back half way and return to dunce caps and stools in the classroom corner, corporal punishment and fines or even jail time for parents and/or students of all ages.
Of course, we could swing the pendulum back to the 17th century when some of the American colonies had laws on the books that allowed the courts to execute children that did not change unacceptable, rebellious behavior by a certain age.
Maybe we should include the parents of those children too.
However, instead of the situation improving, President Obama wants to take away job security for public school teachers and no one in Washington D.C. mentions the parents or the students when academic performance is not improving.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Job security is perilous for teachers in America, and it’s growing worse.
A teacher is suspended for rattling a table to gain the students attention or pins a note about unacceptable classroom behavior to a child’s sweater because the mother hasn’t responded to earlier notes.
In both cases, the students were not paying attention in class or were misbehaving. The teachers were just doing his or her job.
For rattling a table, one girl ran from the room and dialed 911 to complain to the police and they came to the school. The school district put the teacher on leave. We may never know who the student was since the law protects children younger than 18.
In Florida, an angry mother complains and another teacher is put on leave. The reason was that the teacher stapled a note to the student’s sweater. The teacher wasn’t sure if the notes she was sending home were getting through since the child’s poor behavior in class hadn’t changed. Source: neatorama
The mother felt the teacher embarrassed her son on purpose. The wrong person got in trouble. The mother should have spend a month in jail for the trouble she caused.
I see no problem with embarrassing students and parents too when student behavior disrupts the learning enivronment. The classroom is where teaching and learning is supposed to take place. When a child’s behavior or academic progress is poor and parents are not doing their job, the next step should be to embarrass the child in front of his or her peers and have the parents spend 24 hours in jail.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to iLook China, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
When it comes to combating tagging and graffiti, Michael Howardis an individual who had an idea to counter the blight with art. He said, “I figured if you address the root cause — that kids need to be creative, have their self-esteem nurtured and a safe place to express themselves and channel their energies into something positive that benefits the community — then you could reduce graffiti.”
At the time Howard had this idea, he was a teacher at the Juvenile Hall school in Orange County. While there, he launched Operation Clean Slate(OCS).
I may have read of this before but was reminded of OCS in the April 2011, Costco Connection.
The inspiration for creating Operation Clean Slate came to Howard while driving to Los Angeles. He’d seen graffiti many times, but this time he saw a way to deal with it.
I salute Howard for his dedication and effort. However, I disagree with the often misused term of self-esteem. The self-esteem movement, which started in the US in the 1960s was misguided from the start. Children do not need help nurturing a false sense of self-esteem.
Youth need positive choices to help guide them in other directions and this is what Howard offered. I doubt if he reached many gang bangers (children and teens that belong to gangs) that spend their nights marking territory with gang signs, but I’m sure he did appeal to the creative energy of taggers.
Street gangs are primitive and often dangerous tribes that exist in the barrios and ghettos of America. Most of these street gangs deal in drugs and violence. Some have been known to initiate young recruits by having them shoot and possibly kill someone (often strangers to the gang bangers) during a drive by.
Most youth that join gangs have no choice due to the pressure in the barrio or ghetto. Only determined loving parents involved in a child’s life stand a chance to keep their children out of these gangs.
I taught in a gang-infested area of La Puente and West Covina from most of 1975 to 2005.
Parents that live in the barrios and ghettos where these street gangs exist may consider contacting individuals such as Howard to see if he can help keep their children off the streets and away from gangs. Positive activities such as Operation Clean Slate are one way to do this—not wasting time building a false sense of self-esteem in a child that often leads to narcissismas an adult.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine
& Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Graffiti is a blight on America and may be found in Europe and other nations too. Driving down urban freeways and highways in the US, drivers often see graffiti on billboards and freeway signs.
The cost to paint out graffiti at the high school where I taught until 2005 was about $10,000 a year. I often arrived soon after the gates were unlocked about 6:00 AM. My first class was usually 8:00.
The national cost is much higher than that ten grand one school district spent to keep one of its campuses graffiti free.
As one example demonstrates, the city of Los Angeles spent $3.7 million dollars to paint over, “Just one of the MTA’s tags — its initials painted 57 feet high and a quarter-mile-long on the Los Angeles River concrete embankment.… The maneuver underscores authorities’ exasperation with a subculture that prizes prolific defacement of public property, including buses, street signs and freeway overpasses, and costs taxpayers millions to remove.” Source: KRQE.com
At Nogales High School in La Puente, California where I taught for sixteen of the thirty years I was a public school teacher in the US, after the daytime-custodians arrived to set up the campus before students arrived (putting out trash cans and inspecting the buildings for damage), one custodian climbed into an electric-powered flat-bed cart and spent an hour or so driving along the covered walkways around campus with paint the color of the school sitting on the flat bed ready for use. Every morning, he would discover gang signs and graffiti on the lockers, doors and walls and cover them with fresh paint.
Metro Tagger Assassins (MTA)
After our daughter started high school, we joined her each morning on the one-mile walk to school and part of the walk was behind a super market, which was often covered with tagging.
Tagging is different from gang signs. Tagging is the signature of a graffiti artist or a crew of taggers attempting to become immortal and/or infamous by marking up as many buildings and walls as possible.
Some of this tagging is creative and artistic in nature but most is an eyesore.
A few of these misguided youths have fallen from freeway overpasses where they cling to chain link fences like cockroaches climbing a wall. These urban cockroaches hang above the traffic spraying their unique tag and some fall to be hit by traffic sometimes killing drivers and passengers in cars and trucks.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Parents are the primary key to a child’s future success and development. One example is a neighbor couple that raised two children—a son and a daughter both over 30 today and college graduates.
I understand the son has a Ph.D. in alternative energy and the daughter a BA in design from a university in Hawaii. The son has had no problem finding jobs that pay well. He even bought a home at a time when many Americans are losing theirs.
Recently, the mother and I talked about the parenting debate that was sparked by an essay in The Wall Street Journal. It was obvious that she wasn’t an “average” American parent but she wasn’t a Tiger Mother either.
It seems this neighbor mother told her son she felt as if Amy Chua, the Tiger Mother, had attacked her in The Wall Street Journal essay, but the son with the Ph.D. explained what Chua wrote wasn’t meant to be a criticism of all American parents.
Later, the mother sent me an e-mail saying, “The style of parenting I like involves appropriate choices and consequences.
“The child gets to chose between walking or riding to school but not between going to school or not, between doing homework after school or after dinner—not whether or not to do it.
“If the child refuses to wear a coat on a cold day then they get cold and next time they wear a coat (natural consequences).”
A CBS News Report says the average American teen sends 17,000 text messages a month.
The mother still couldn’t bring herself to read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua’s memoir. She said it would make her angry.
However, I am angry, but at a different sort of parent—the ones that followed the “Pied Piper of Self Esteem” in the 1960s making my job as a teacher more difficult for much of my teaching carrier (1975 – 2005).
A fellow teacher and friend still in the classroom says it’s worse now than when I left in 2005. He spends so much time documenting contacts with the “average” American parent he doesn’t have time to correct and record grades.
He had to hire a retired teacher to correct for him at $25 an hour.
Studies show the “average” American parent talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day while the “average” American child spends about 10 hours a day watching TV, social networking on Facebook, playing video games or sending text messages on mobile phones.
Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D. described a different parenting model, “On average, Asian parents use more discipline and insist upon hard work more than Western parents. And on average, their kids do better.”
Dr. Twenge writing in Psychology Today said, “Asian Americans have the lowest self-esteem of any ethnic group in the U.S., but achieve the best academic performance (and, among adults, the lowest unemployment rate).”
“Oh, well, everyone does it!” However, does that make it right?
If the “average” Asian-American parent represents strict parenting and the soft, obsessive self-esteem parent represent the “average” American, what do we call parents between the two, which might describe my neighbor?
After all, “average” does not mean everyone. Average is a “norm” or the largest represented group in a population, which still leaves plenty of room for millions of horrible parents that beat their children and sexually molest them.
Child Help.org says, “(American) children are suffering from a hidden epidemic of child abuse and neglect.… Ninety percent of child sexual abuse victims know the perpetrator in some way; 68% are abused by family members.”
Did you know there are almost a million teens or children that belong to violent street gangs in the US? LA is the street-gang capital of America with 100,000.
Most of the gang bangers I taught earned FAILING grades and a thousand phone calls couldn’t change that.
Does “Parenting with Choices and Natural Consequences” describe the middle ground between the soft, self-esteem “norm” and the “average” Asian-American Tiger Parent?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 