Say No to a Tiger Mom

I wrote this on 8/23/2013 as a Toastmasters assignment.

Good Evening, Toastmasters and Honored Guests.

Two years ago, author Amy Chua published a book called – Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It created a big debate on whether or not tiger mom is good. A tiger mom is defined by Wiki as “A mother who raises stereotypically successful children by being strict parents.  By focusing exclusively on their children's academic perfection, these mothers hope to produce children who are able to achieve better performance in academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success”

I think that a tiger mom is bad.  There are a number of reasons people shared on the internet. The most popular ones are:

1) A tiger mom micromanages kids.
2) A tiger mom kills a kid's creativity.
3) A tiger mom raises a kid who has no social skill.

Tonight, I'll add three more reasons to say No to a tiger mom.

First, Amy's parenting style is not traditional Chinese style as she and her husband claimed.  The assumption of Chinese parenting style is the tiger mom style is wrong.  Let me tell a traditional Chinese mom story.

The story was first published around 300 AD and then used in a textbook ever since then.  It was story about a well-known scholar Meng Ke's mother - Ji

Ji lived with her three-years-old son – Ke near her husband's graveyard.  Young Ke watched people in the funeral and mimicked what he saw.  Ji thought it had a bad influence on him.  So she moved to a house next to a market.   Ke watched people trading goods and bargaining on the price. He pretended that he was one of them.   Ji thought that's not good either so she moved to a house near a school. Ke became interested in school activities and Ji enrolled him in the school.

The story shows a good mom who provides a better environment to guide children's interests because the environment affects a person greatly.  A tiger mom ignores the environment. Amy even asked her daughter to practice piano without getting a bathroom break. We express our feelings through music. What kind of feeling does she want her daughter to show when she cannot get her bathroom break?

I will add my own story as a testimony.  My older son was shy when he was little. To help him overcome it, we signed him up in team sports where he can easily communicate and interact with other players, coaches, and parents. He masters his people skill without any bad feeling that Amy gave to her daughter.

Secondly, we achieve more when we are self-motivated. A tiger mom does not care about the kid's motivation. She sets up strict rules on what kids can do and cannot do. I feel that kid is treated like a prisoner.  It's the reason that Amy had to battle with her daughters.

The last reason is that success does ot equal academic excellence, musical mastery and professional success. I think that a successful person is a person who contributes to the community, works well with others, copes with the problems, and adapts changes.  A tiger mom pushes the kids as hard as she can with all means. But she did not look back at herself in the mirror.  When Amy yelled and called names on the kids, the image of yelling, mean face created greater impact on her daughters than the musical lessons because the action is louder than a word.  Amy led her daughters by a bad example.

We all want to raise successful children, but the means to reach our goal is not the tiger mom's way. I think you will agree with me that children do not need a tiger to roar at them. They need a loving heart to guide them on the right path to become the best person he or she can be. So please say No to Tiger mom.

[林凡_圣路易]

this is the another speech

Good evening, Toast Masters, and Honored Guests.
As you know from my BIOs, that I am a software engineer, worked for varies companies for past 15 years, I often wonder why software is hard to develop and what we can do to reduce the cost.
First, Software development is a long process which has six stages: planning, analyzing, designing, implementing, testing, and support. Each stage takes time and requires a different team to complete.
Second, software development needs teams. Once the business sees the need, a project plan is hatched and then teams are formed. The team includes business user group, business analyst, system architect, development team, testing team, and support team. Each team member has its own goal. The business user is to tell the business analyst his/her user stories, the feature wanted, etc. Business analyst then translates the user story into business requirements. The Development design and implement based on the business requirements. Testing test based on the user story and support based on the training guide.
Third, let us see how company structures the team. In today, lots of company structures its organization vertically. Which means the BA will sit in BA area and Developer sit in developer area. So when communication need between the team, it usually happens between 2 team members as others sit in different area. And the communication usually happens in a chain as Business user to BA, the BA to DT, the DT to QA, the QA to Support.
We cannot do anything to reduce the cost for 1 and 2, but we can do something for 3rd to reduce as there are 2 gaps in the structures
1) Communication gap. We played the telephone game as children. The last person rarely had the same message as the first person.
2) Time gap. The business see the needs to the finial software he/she see long time, it usually 6 month to years. Change is happening all the time, the user case present may not valid and new use case is added. But IT did not get react that quick enough to reduce the redesign, rework. The longer the gap for each team, the more chance the software will not meet the user’s expectation
what can we do to reduce the cost with these 2 in mind?
In 2/17/2011, 17 developers met at Snowbird, Utah, and published Manifesto for Agile Software Development, which has 4 major points
1) Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2) Working software over comprehensive documentation
3) Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4) Responding to change over following a plan
There are several practices, one is the Scrum.
Scrum is an iterative and incremental agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development. Its focus is on "a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal" as opposed to a "traditional, sequential approach". How they do it?
1) Break the complex business requirement into each workable user story, the story or task can be completed in a Sprint period. Usually 2 weeks
2) Define short team goal to work on for each Sprint based on the priory business user set
3) All team members sit at same area, so it can clarify the requirements, share the idea when possible.
4) Report the progress at daily for 15 minutes to team on what worked on yesterday, what will do today, any block on the tasks
5) Demo the working software for each sprint at the end of sprint to the user to show the working software
6) Repeat sprints to complete the requirements.

[林凡_圣路易]

this is my first icebreaker speech at the toast master club

Good evening, Toast Masters, and honored guests. Spencer gave a short bios of myself. I am going to talk little more about my family, my work, my birthplace, and my hobbies.
First, there are 4 people in my family. My husband’s name is Sammo, we married for almost 20 years now. We like to play card games with friends in our spare time. We have 2 sons. Alex is fifteen-year-old and is a freshman in high school. He loves to play baseball and plays for St Louis gamer. Allen is seven-years-old and loves to read. Alex and Allen adore each other. As an elder brother, Alex coaches Allen on baseball, soccer, basketball, and ping pong. He also coaches math and reading. He sets up an account for Allen on Khan Academy web site to assign Allen homework. We are so lucky to have an elder brother which helps his younger brother. All my other relatives are in China. My parents are in their 70s and live with my younger brother’s family. We chat on the Skype often and plan to go back to visit them this summer.

Second, I am a software engineer for about 14 years now. I enjoy my work and always want to make it better. I wrote lots of automation tools. My co-worker refers the programs I wrote as Zheng Ware. I had nickname as the SQL queen.

Third, I was born at a small town, called YaAn, in Sichuan province in China. The city is surrounded by several big mountains. One of mountain named “Sleeping Buddha”. Another one called “er-lang Mountain”. It got the name from the “er-lang” God temple nearby. It rains, or I should say drizzly almost every day, so it has nick name of the rainy city.

Last, I like to collect small items. I used to collect stamps. I started when my grandfather gave me his collection when I was about 12. I had 10 books of stamps. I also have few collections of dolls. I brought some of them to show to you. This Chinese girl doll wears traditional Chinese dress, and this Chinese couple wear traditional cloth.
I also like to practice TaiChi and Yoga. I practice Yoga as a group activity once a week. I practice TaiChi at home.