Posted on 05/30/2016 3:54:06 AM PDT by Cronos
..About 70 of the 285 final round competitors in this year's bee had South Asian names.
Apart from winning the last nine spelling bees in the US, Indian-American children have also won the last five National Geographic Bees ,which tests the geographic knowledge of millions of American children. From 2005, the winning rate of Indian-origin children in these two competitions has been well over 80%.
But what explains this extraordinary success by a group that makes up less than one percent of America's school-age population?
...In academic competitions, especially those focused on math or science, Indian-American youngsters do very well - nowhere near as spectacularly as in the spelling and geography bees, but at five to 20 times the rate of their population size.
These competitions include the Siemens Science Competition, Intel Science Talent Search, Mathcounts, and US Presidential, Rhodes, Truman, Churchill, and Marshall Scholarships.
But in other fields like music and athletics, Indian-Americans either barely hold their own or are non-existent at the top level.
..For example, in the 2013 All-National Honor Ensemble, 45% of the musicians in orchestra and 13% in the band were Asian-Americans, but just 2 and 1%, respectively, were Indian-American.
In athletics and team sports, Indian-Americans actively participate in high school but are virtually absent at college level and in professional sports.
No one of Indian origin (with a very minor Indo-Canadian exception) has ever played in any professional sports league: American football, baseball, basketball, or ice hockey.
There is also no one in the lists of emerging talent, for example, the top 100 high school prospects in baseball.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Go to any public library: the faces will be the different than from India and Southeast Asia, and will be browsing worthless Internet sites.
The same reasons that Asians thrive in the very same schools that Blacks fail enmass in.
I can’t go into details, because that would be racist and politically-incorrect, doncha know.
You can submit cultural comment with no fear of being racist
I think it's "sour grapes" to discount these Spelling and Geography Bees because they do what all competitions do: concentrate on higher and rarer levels of mastery of a body of specialized knowledge.
Culture, culture, culture.
They probably learned to spell using phonics.
The Pittsburgh Pirates signed a couple of Indian pitchers. Rinku Singh is still in the organization.
The have the same cultural and genetic advantages as other nearby Asian counties, with the added advantage of being fluent in English, as it, along with Hindi, is their official language.
Early successes made achievement in this area a source of national pride, which enhanced the appeal among the nation’s youth to diligently pursue that skill, exponentially increasing the numbers of young people advancing their talents and thus likewise increasing the odds that the eventual world champion would come from their country repeatedly.
I suspect the four kids who took up this offer ended up being better citizens at the end of the day.
Not much success at the Olympics, either. Nine gold medals total—eight golds for men’s field hockey (last in 1980), and only one individual gold—2008 in shooting.
u r both right. He’s Indo-Fijian, from Fuji.
The winning words seemed to change in the nineties. Prior to then, the words were words that we hear and use on occasion: milieu, psoriasis. The nineties and later were much more obscure: viviseplucher.
As I typed the words on my iPhone, autocorrect gave me the correct options for the first two words but had nothing for the last one: it was far too obscure.
+1
They still teach Phoenix?
Phonix. Dang auto correct
| Yes, it absolutely is the culture that makes the difference. Now my wife being from Japan, I got to see how she raised my daughter (in America). Lots of training -- how to properly wash yourself in the bath, how to fold clothes properly. There is a proper way to do just about anything. When I lived in Boston, we could take my daughter to a Saturday morning language school where Japanese nationals would send their kids when they were living in America. (700 kids were in the program.) Rather like Jewish kids studying Hebrew. Learning a second language is apparently great training too. In terms of the culture of Japan, there are so many things that inculcate the right mindset from a young age.
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I disagree. Spelling requires the intelligence to see a word and then have your brain remember it. Memorizing words for a spelling test tomorrow requires little. Remembering it a month or even a year later, that is intelligence.
Few, very few, but there are priorities such as parents getting to relive the glories of their lost youth (real or imagined) through the activities of their children.
“It’s true — no Americans of Indian origin in sports at all...”
Pretty much the case, but it goes MUCH, MUCH, deeper than that.
For starters, with very few exceptions, it’s much more the parents than the kids who are responsible for the success of the kids. Of course it doesn’t ‘look’ that way because the parents aren’t the ones winning the competitions, it’s the kids. But consider the following:
1) Divorce is very rare in that culture - So if you’re an Indian kid, you’ll have two parents to deal with and they won’t be competing against each other for your affection. In other words, the kids are where kids should be in pecking order of a functional family, at the bottom.
2) Often the wife doesn’t work - although I don’t have the numbers, I strongly suspect that Indian parents value their kids’ futures more than their boats. That means that there are much fewer latch-key kids. The kids are tracked and watched.
3) Continuing on the above, several Indian families that I knew had Tiger-Mom like rules that basically meant that the only times the kids were with other, non-Indian, kids, was either at school or under direct parental supervision. No overnight sleepovers, and even no “going to Mike’s house” after school. After school, straight home. Seems as if Indian parents, like many other Asian parents, understand just how rotten our culture is, and they want to protect their children from it.
4) Education OUTSIDE our school system - Again, Indians (and other Asians) seem to know MUCH BETTER than American parents that our educational system is so compromised that it now exists to HOLD BACK kids, particularly white boys. That is why Kumon, Sylvan, and numerous private (and community) after-school learning centers exist. While Indians will send their kids to public schools (or mainstream private schools, if they can afford it), the know that the ONLY WAY to truly provide for the education of their kids is by doing it outside of this ‘system’, because ‘the system’ is hopelessly broken. That’s also the model that I’ve used, and my kids were years ahead of their peers and are doing just fine now...it works, and public schools made it much easier for my kids by pulling down the competition level so low that it’s a joke.
5) Priorities - Again it’s the parents, and I guess math comes naturally to them, but not so quickly to Americans. I told my kids that while anyone in this country can make it big time, from any background, it’s all a probability game. The extremes being a doctor versus a professional basketball player. If you get the education and pass the exams, you will get a job being a doctor (unless you’re a slub) - and if you get into medical school, you will probably go all the way. In basketball, even if you make it to the college level, you still have only a 2% (or so) chance of making it to the NBA - there simply is a lot more colleges than NBA teams. So if you set your hopes on being a doctor and make it through the preliminary gates, there’s a good chance you will wind up being a doctor - but if you set your hopes on being a basketball player, and make it through the preliminary gates, the odds are still against you, big time. That’s an extreme comparison - but for Indian parents, it’s more often like going to college to be an Art History major, versus an engineer...clear choice for them. But American parents seem to be hands-off, which is why their 30 year olds are still living in the basement, rather than raising their 4 kids in a successful marriage.
As to the kids themselves, who knows. It’s difficult to measure intelligence when parents already educate their kids at such early ages and, even if you can, it’s even more difficult to compare intelligence between races, due to politics...so who knows.
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