My son will be attending Princeton University this year, and he wrote a book over the summer that he believes addresses a very important issue in the Asian-American community: many of our children perform well in Math and other quantitative fields of study but struggle in English class. Here is an excerpt from the book:
"I am a male Asian-American kid who spent a decent amount of his high school years procrastinating. My parents are both Peking University graduates who moved from mainland China as students. In 2013, I was accepted to Princeton, Yale, Columbia, UPenn, Cornell, Brown, Duke, Caltech, and many other good universities in one of the most competitive college admissions years in history.
"I wasn’t a model child by any means. I played a ton of video games (I still do), and I rarely accepted parental discipline without a fight; my parents always allowed me to argue my way out of punishments and unreasonable restrictions. Though I didn’t realize it then, my tendency to launch into sporadic debates led me to cultivate a knack for analysis and logical reasoning.
"I have consistently received A and A+ grades in my English classes throughout my high school career. Essay writing is an activity that I greatly enjoy, and a typical essay only takes a day or two for me to write. However, I do not consider myself to be a “humanities person.” I have a great passion in computer science and will be pursuing a Computer Science B.S.E. major at Princeton University this year. My purpose in writing this article is to reach out to students like me who consider themselves to be “science people.” English is without a doubt one of my most favorite academic subjects, and I believe that any self-described “math person” or “science person” can excel in English once they learn the truly wonderful world that hides beneath this discipline.
"This is the story of how I learned to enjoy English, a story that contains the tricks, tips, and secrets that I discovered as a high school humanities student."
My son's website for the book can be found here: www.proofsandmethods.com/.
Here is the link for the book on Amazon.com (by the way, you do not need a Kindle to view the book; you can read it on PC, Mac, iPhone, and Android as well): http://www.amazon.com/Proofs-Methods-Excelled-English-ebook/dp/B00EPQWLS4/ref=sr_1_1? s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377224746&sr=1-1.
I hope that this book can contribute in eliminating the stereotype of Asian-Americans as being only good at math and science. We can be good at the humanities as well!
Thank you very much.