This is my response to what has happened in this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/26/nyregion/reforms-to-ease-students-stress-divide-a-new-jersey-school-district.html

Before I start, don’t expect that I am going to say “more schoolwork” because I am Asian.

I live in a community where most people are white and there is a very, very small percentage of Asian-American residents. It, perhaps, may not be a coincidence that most of my friends are Asian-American, but certainly my community has a different environment than this of the New Jersey school district. I think the NJ school district here could be most similar to nearby Plano ISD or even Allen ISD, where Asian-Americans constitute a sizable minority whose posterity command academic excellence in schools. But what’s different in McKinney is that, although ethnic¹ traditions may play a part in those families that command academic excellence in our schools, the divide is not ethnic, rather it is more based on individual families’ values. Some whites and some Asian-Americans alike will push their children for more schoolwork, while other whites and other Asian-Americans will push their children to enjoy high school and don’t emphasize academic excellence as much.

It would be fair to consider me as a high achiever. My blog has many examples of my academic achievements, so I won’t list them here. One would expect me to perhaps say more schoolwork is good. However, that’s actually not what I want. I actually want a break.

I learn a lot and am under a lot of stress at times in the school year. There have been days where I come home from school at 3:00pm and work until 11:00pm nonstop just on schoolwork. That was not acceptable and didn’t really help me learn anything; I was extremely stressed and I think that the negatives definitely outweighed the positives. So why haven’t I stopped?

I’m in the GT program at my school, where the culture is super-competitive because all the smartest kids of the school are in a tightly-knit community that pressures and promotes increased academic excellence. This is where grades matter, and letting down the guard a bit isn’t acceptable. In other classes, students make friends and don’t have nearly as much stress as GT kids do. I don’t stop this cycle of stress at school because, unlike the pressure-absent environments of other classes, the environment of GT classes reward intelligence and hard work. Good grades is something that is the norm in the classroom and it pushes fellow students to work harder. If a student tried to ditch their stress, they would be pressured by the other well-performing students to do even better. It’s simply impractical to ditch the pressures of school as a GT student.

And what would my family say? My parents are typical brain drain immigrants that have worked so hard to get to the US. I have always been quite adept at schoolwork. There is certainly a pressure for me to do well and to continue doing so until the end of university. Cry. My parents don’t use belts to whip me if I get poor grades. Me, myself, and I alone keep myself in check and combined with the GT pressure, my familial piety act as another pressure. I don’t have the stable foundation that most white families have. Thirty years ago, nobody in our family had even came to the United States! Now that we’ve finally been able to settle down comfortably, I don’t want to mess that up for my parents. I want to create a legacy in the US as well for my posterity and family.

I just don’t want to work for success in such a stressful manner.

Some say school is about endurance instead of intelligence. I’d say that’s very true.

It’s just not fair.

But then again, why do we have class ranks? It’s not fair!

Well, how would we separate the exceptional from the mediocre? Mediocre don’t make the next drug to treat cancer. The exceptional do.

We have to keep this innate unfairness, but make it less painful please.

Reduce our stress and schoolwork, please. You’re trying to kill us, school system. This comes from a second-generation Asian-American student with high marks in school that pushes himself to do better and more importantly, wants to learn. My knowledge won’t help me in the grave.

Footnotes

1. not racial; this is a very important difference because ethnicity is one’s culture, while race is one’s biological origins. Clearly, skin color does not influence how people act; culture does.

Since the old test is going to die in a month anyway and I’m not really trying to advertise any SAT prep services anyway (lol) I’ll just cut to the chase:

Guessing is good if you can eliminate at least one answer choice from each question.

Which in most cases is very easy. The probability will work in your favor. (Don’t randomly guess answers, that won’t help!) Don’t let the -¼ point deduction scare you: it doesn’t make that big of a difference. Obviously, the new SAT will probably promote guessing because no points are deducted for incorrect answers, but if you are forced to take the old SAT for a specific reason, this should help.

My previous score was a 1940, and I found out from my detailed Score Report that the Collage Bored gives out that I had skipped many questions! I took a practice CR section the night before my next SAT and decided that it was in my best interests to guess. So the next day, I bubbled in every question. Sure enough, I got a 2210 afterwards!

Well, good luck, it helped me so much!

I am writing this in the beginning of August, 2015. That’s the time when students go: “Hmm, I need to do my summer homework.” And that’s the time I reflect on the previous school year, as well as this summer.

After I got my AP exam scores, I felt very accomplished. But wait, what about class rank? I was very anxious to find out how well I did compared to my peers. In the 2014-2015 school year (FYI, freshman year for me), I had tried quite a lot. But to be honest, I did not push myself over the limit. I knew if I did push myself over the limit, I would fail. I did homework for about 1-2 hours a day, on average, unless I had notes or a project to complete. Then I watched Netflix or browsed the internet, checked up on my company to make sure it didn’t go bankrupt or anything. Dinner, pre-bed preparations (like showering), and off to bed to sleep, only to wake up at 6:30am to go to school. Fun.

So I felt I deserved a high class rank and AP exams, for my persistence in this endless, hopeless cycle which adults call the educational system. The persistence itself is what pushes me to perform at 90%. And that 10% difference has caused some scores to be not as great as they could’ve been. But so far, I have been extremely lucky not to screw up big time. In addition, taking two AP courses and getting A’s in them have helped me propel myself rank-wise.

When I found out how to get my class rank in the middle of the summer, I remembered my rule: if it’s too high, I become a target. If it’s too low, my reputation is ruined. And guess what, there is no middle ground or “perfect balance” for me. Yes, it’s because I am a second-generation Chinese American who isn’t going to give up on the dream that my parents began. Failure is not an option.

I sent the email to the faculty member at my school who gives out class rank on a Thursday night. Since the school worked from Monday-Thursday every week in the summer, I would have to wait 4 painful, grueling days for my class rank. It killed me to wait. But I was in New York City for my summer vacation, and I tried to let time pass.

It passed quickly. Monday morning at around 9:04am, I think, my phone made the Gmail buzz, to which I have became quite acquainted.

Slide to open. Finger on the home button. The phone unlocks. Gmail loads. The message appears. Heart beats at 2,000mph.

Hi Jeffrey!

WOW What an Awesome year you had academically!  Enjoy the remainder of your summer and we will see you soon!

Rank:  4 out of 712

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong, I was shocked and yet, at the same time, excited.

“Hooray, I tried hard enough and I got a really high rank!”

Then reality came back.

“Oh crap, I’m too high. I’m a target.”

After the vacation and a few weeks, I did do some more homework. Getting started on summer work was actually the hardest part, but completing it isn’t too bad.

I actually was offered a job that paid $10 an hour. It made use of my Minecraft experiences. Being a tech guy, I was overqualified for the job. But since I haven’t really worked face-to-face with others before (before, it was all through the internet on MyWikis!), I gladly accepted the job. It gave me experience with teaching kids. It let me dive into the insight of a younger generation, one which is not accustomed to dial-up speeds, Mojang accounts, or even Windows XP. (smh) It made more than MyWikis anyway.

I have made a few hundred dollars for all my work there. Not bad, considering the times are shorter than school and I still had time to do my summer work after work. And of course, let’s not forget the Netflix I can watch afterwards!

But then I think how close the beginning of school is, and it scares me.

“Have I even done enough summer work? Do I need to work quicker? I NEED TO LEARN THIS CONCEPT NOW. No, MASTER IT.”

And then you get to the actual thoughts of starting school again.

“Great, another year of stress begins.”

I’m trying to soak up as much summer is left as I can. Wish me luck. Because right now, thinking about school starting again is giving me the most stress, and it’s not helping me calm down.

The school year of 2014-2015 was my first year of high school and of course my freshman year. Being new to high school, programs like Advanced Placement (AP) are usually out of reach for a first-year high school student, not to mention the increased rigor brought to once mundane courses like English and History. As a GT student in my school, I take Humanities 1, or basically the hardest English and World Geography classes for 9th graders. They were quite grueling, and piled on with my other AP classes, I felt it would be a recipe for disaster.

Taking AP Biology and AP Computer Science A … as a freshman?!

Initially, I chose to take two AP courses at my school, AP Biology and AP Computer Science A. In May 2014, when I was only an eighth grader, my soon-to-be AP Biology teacher introduced us to the curriculum at my school and explained what was needed to prepare for the upcoming semesters. In addition, there would be a comprehensive summer assignment we had to complete. The same month, I emailed my soon-to-be AP Computer Science teacher if I could skip Pre-AP Computer Science and take AP Computer Science, a class which usually serves as a second-year computer science course. However, I had already known a few programming languages and I felt going through Pre-AP would be a waste of my time. Along with my closest friends, who happened to be passionate in computer science and programming as well, we emailed the teacher and she responded with a “yes!” We were excited, but it was time to prepare.

After a two-month vacation, I arrived back home in August to find that I was severely behind on my AP Biology summer work. I spent every waking day completing every single summer assignment, and by the time I had tested the first unit, I obtained an extremely high test score, due to my studying, the teacher’s generous grading curves, and a friend of mine who provided necessary data for the summer assignment. In addition, I read some of the AP Computer Science summer assignment, which was actually never enforced and basically useless, and practiced object-oriented programming principles using the programming language which I was already familiar with, PHP. By the time I got to class, with the help of my friends, I was able to quickly catch up on the principles of Java necessary for mastery of AP Computer Science.

Signing up for the AP Chinese Language and Culture exam … without taking the class

This year also happened to be the year the Chinese foreign language program was rebooted, and as such, a Chinese teacher arrived at Boyd. I have been able to fluently speak Mandarin Chinese since I was a child, and although my English skills have greatly surpassed those of my Chinese skills, my Chinese is definitely good enough to have a comfortable conversation with native Mandarin speakers. Nonetheless, I chose to take French, because as my French teacher says, “taking Chinese would be like taking ESL as my second language.” Consequently, I didn’t meet the Chinese teacher in my normal daily schedule. When my classmates who took Chinese said “we’re starting a Chinese Club, you should come join!,” I met the teacher and spoke my fluent Mandarin. She recommended me to take the AP Chinese exam that year. Although I was not in any Chinese class, I decided to keep the recommendation in the back of my mind.

In McKinney, not many Chinese people who actually speak Mandarin are around. Nonetheless, I happened to meet a Mandarin speaking native of Tianjin, China in my AP Computer Science class. He told me to take the AP Chinese exam as well, saying “it’s really easy, with your level of Chinese comprehension, you’ll get a 5.” He then cited the fact that he had also taken the exam the previous year and felt it was easy.

The combination of the Chinese teacher and a taker of the AP Chinese exam led me to sign up for the AP Chinese exam along with the expected registration of my two other exams that were associated with the classes I took,

How did I survive my AP courses?

Although I had not taken any computer science class before, AP Computer Science was relatively easy. Coupled with the fact that my friends took the class with me, help was always at my disposal, and my help was always at their disposal as well. There was no homework in the class, and when it came time to learn concepts, I just learned them easily. The labs that we completed in the class helped us unite elements of Java and establish their practical uses.

AP Biology was, however, a completely different beast, but one that was still manageable. Along with homework that made life quite saturnine, the tests given in class were filled with concepts that were not properly linked together in preparation for the AP Biology exam, not to mention the class test questions were hard. The good news is that curves ranging from 15 to 25 points were applied on every test, and my test score was always above a 90 after the curve. It wasn’t ideal, but I worked with what I had.

Which course was most useful?

I am deeply passionate about the practical applications and possible things that one could make from computer science. However, when it comes to learning something, I am a jack of all trades, and the concepts taught in AP Biology allowed me to understand all the concepts of life. Everywhere I went, I applied my knowledge learned in AP Biology and I understood how something worked. It might have been a result of intense homework assignments, but it gave me new knowledge and understanding of life as we knew it. I think AP Biology was the most useful course I took in my freshman year. That might be because AP Computer Science was pretty simple and added to my already vast knowledge of programming, but I think learning something new makes something interesting.

Reflecting on my AP scores

Although the AP Biology exam was tough, I was not pleased to receive only a 4, but I’ll accept that over a worse score. (Yes, I am a stereotypical Asian who feels the highest score is always the goal, and anything less is a disappointment and a failure.) Only 6% of students obtained a 5 on the exam. I bet I was in the 7% who was stuck in the upper 4 range. To be fair, I studied intensely the weekend before the exam (also known as cramming), which made me more confident I would receive a 5. Unfortunately, although I did not receive a 5, I was still good enough to be well qualified for the course. This would be the worst AP score I received out of my three AP exam scores.

Interestingly enough, my time management for the multiple choice section of the AP Computer Science A exam was terrible, and coupled with difficult multiple-choice questions, I felt I did not do so well on that section. However, I had much better time management on the free-response section, and it was pretty easy. I am almost certain the free-response section allowed me to achieve the 5 score for which I was hoping.

Finally, but definitely not least, is my AP Chinese Language and Culture exam. Ok, it might have required the least preparation, considering I natively speak Mandarin Chinese, but I nonetheless picked up a book and reviewed the type of questions it asked. This is definitely the most unique test I have ever taken. First, nobody else took it with me. Only my history teacher accompanied me as a proctor. The exam is actually administered on a computer, and because my Pinyin input skills are great, that was not an issue in the exam. In fact, the multiple choice and writing sections were quite easy. However, the AP Chinese exam also expects you to listen to a question and then immediately begin responding with a relevant response for 20 seconds. Not only is this harder than real-life conversations, this was by far the hardest part of the exam. I think 5 seconds should be given in between the question recording being played and the recording of the response. But I digress. Even the “cultural question” to me was hard. I had to explain the interesting characteristics of the Chinese character system, or something similar. Thank goodness for Chinese school, which taught me all I needed to know. Nonetheless, I obtained a 5 score, just like the 65% of students who took the exam this year with me. The hardest part of the exam was the ability to answer the questions as they asked, and this was something for which I did adequately prepare, making me very happy.

In conclusion, this was an exciting year for my AP classes. I even did something unique that nobody else in my school did this year. Although next year is harder, I’m looking forward to my unique experiences.