screw the title I'm going to sleep
And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.
You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”
“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/education/01girls.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
http://news.asiaone.com.sg/st/st_20070401_106306.html
(okay it turns out that I didn't reference the second article at all in my post, and it's not quite related. but it's worth a read)
links koped from mr koh's blog. the first one especially is interesting.
so yes, as we found out last year, the competitive americans are just about as competitive as any of us, or even more so.
I wonder if it's because of the article's slant, but the competitive culture in the nytimes feature seems to be much more close-knit than that in hc. I mean, we have pockets of people continually doing stuff, but they're pretty much dispersed through the population. I wonder if it's different in rj; it does seem different in hchp though, or so it appears. I would kind of prefer the close-knit type; I find it difficult to push myself all the time without these reminders and reference points.. and people who empathise with you.
Ah well. It's not very polite to talk about ambition in public, is it? Too many touchy things are associated with it.
a few culture comments.. you know how american and british accents are generally better liked compared to the.. local ones, shall we say. My dad used to go on about how this was due to the post-colonial inferiority complex (he didn't use those words, but yeah), but I think a good deal of it is due to a more tangible factor - that the americans/british have a better social communication culture than we do. You know how American accents (generalising here) sound more confident, relaxed, and emphatic than ours; it's hard not to associate the same traits with the people who speak that way, and I think it's because they actually are more [socially] confident, [socially] relaxed, etc etc. Of course there's some variation but I think that average social confidence level is much higher. As to the reason behind this.. *shrug* not sure. Agree / disagree?
the other one is a little more banal. well.. it would seem not wearing uniforms to school naturally promotes a better dress sense. I suppose this was one of the reasons why they introduced the uniform system in the first place; but it takes out a lot of fun la.
oh and despite all that ambition.. the girls seem to have pretty banal final goals. "Own a dog. Be a bridesmaid. Vote for president. Write a really good poem. Never get divorced."? But perhaps it's not, as I said (and as mentioned by one of them in the video interview), polite to talk about the big things in public.
You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”
“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/01/education/01girls.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
http://news.asiaone.com.sg/st/st_20070401_106306.html
(okay it turns out that I didn't reference the second article at all in my post, and it's not quite related. but it's worth a read)
links koped from mr koh's blog. the first one especially is interesting.
so yes, as we found out last year, the competitive americans are just about as competitive as any of us, or even more so.
I wonder if it's because of the article's slant, but the competitive culture in the nytimes feature seems to be much more close-knit than that in hc. I mean, we have pockets of people continually doing stuff, but they're pretty much dispersed through the population. I wonder if it's different in rj; it does seem different in hchp though, or so it appears. I would kind of prefer the close-knit type; I find it difficult to push myself all the time without these reminders and reference points.. and people who empathise with you.
Ah well. It's not very polite to talk about ambition in public, is it? Too many touchy things are associated with it.
a few culture comments.. you know how american and british accents are generally better liked compared to the.. local ones, shall we say. My dad used to go on about how this was due to the post-colonial inferiority complex (he didn't use those words, but yeah), but I think a good deal of it is due to a more tangible factor - that the americans/british have a better social communication culture than we do. You know how American accents (generalising here) sound more confident, relaxed, and emphatic than ours; it's hard not to associate the same traits with the people who speak that way, and I think it's because they actually are more [socially] confident, [socially] relaxed, etc etc. Of course there's some variation but I think that average social confidence level is much higher. As to the reason behind this.. *shrug* not sure. Agree / disagree?
the other one is a little more banal. well.. it would seem not wearing uniforms to school naturally promotes a better dress sense. I suppose this was one of the reasons why they introduced the uniform system in the first place; but it takes out a lot of fun la.
oh and despite all that ambition.. the girls seem to have pretty banal final goals. "Own a dog. Be a bridesmaid. Vote for president. Write a really good poem. Never get divorced."? But perhaps it's not, as I said (and as mentioned by one of them in the video interview), polite to talk about the big things in public.