I am, actually, grateful to the author, and for the insights she gave me. Reading her essay definitely put some Chinese iron into my Western spine, and though I eventually apologized to my daughter for failing to acknowledge, right off the bat, all those tough classes last semester in which she had done phenomenally well, and for expressing my disappointment at the others too vigorously, I have also vowed that she will clamp down on those three subjects in which she is "underperforming". Her father and I are unanimous in this.

But Chinese methods, I think, do still need some scrutiny. My daughter Rosie is mildly dyslexic, a learning difficulty that means she automatically reads words backward. By the time the psychiatrist diagnosed her, in second grade, she was lagging far behind her classmates. For years I forced her to spell words in the bathtub with foam letters, to do worksheets, to subdivide words into sounds and take practice tests. My criticism and forced rehearsing was redundant, it turns out - inside, she was all ready to punish herself, and I was only prolonging her misery and shattering her confidence. Eventually, and totally out of character, she even stopped loving school. She lost her sparkle. She started to suffer from constant stomachaches and broke down in tears almost every day. At last we heard about a reading program where students spent four hours every day in a small room under a supervisor with a specialization in dyslexia, drilling in letters and sight words. It sounded awful, but Rosie insisted on it. She loved books and stories. She wanted to read.