Here's an article from Cornell University saying that Asian-American students with a lot of family pressure to excel suffer from depression and suicide at higher rates than other students: http://chinspirations.com/mhsourcepage/ ... udents.pdf

And an article by an Asian-American student talking about the Cornell article:
http://chinspirations.com/mhsourcepage/ ... he-parents

You might not be able to get your family to read these articles. But if they did, maybe they would stop and think about what all this pressure is doing to you. The pressure does tend to turn children into adults with successful careers, but it's not good for their mental health. I know some adult men born in India that lived with a lot of pressure to excel as kids, and they have successful careers but they're unpleasant, emotionally insecure people. They're obsessed with being #1; they show off inappropriately trying to impress people; they're angry a lot for no real reason, and consumed with jealousy if someone else does better than them or gets a recognition that they think should have been given to them. They think other people (including their family members) are inferior to them and should be bowing down at their feet to worship their greatness, and they feel cheated when people don't do this. Whatever happens with your situation, I hope you manage to hang on to your sanity and can be a happy, well-rounded person later on in life.

Well, when my pets are happy then I am too or when I get good grades.Hehe and on the internet!
Finally this is the first time someone understood me.Oh and asian parents put a lot of pressure on their kids..


PS I was actually thinking of suicide at school because I was really depress but I was like nahh because I wanted more experience with my own pets. Well I got over it and still I don't like my tutor for other reasons.

I'm glad you're feeling better now! And if you ever start having suicidal thoughts on an ongoing basis, then please please please talk to someone who can help you find a better solution to your problems. Do you think your family would listen if you told them how much the situation upset you? Do you know an adult that your family respects who could talk to them on your behalf? Like maybe a teacher. They might be more willing to listen to a respected adult who thinks they need to ease up a little.

Back to the freedom versus studying issue. If you can think of a plan that would give everybody some of what they want, you might be able to negotiate a compromise that would satisfy your parents and make you happier. If the tutor is teaching you things that you can't learn anywhere else then you're probably stuck with him/her. But if it's material that you could learn by taking the initiative and using self-study and personal research, you could accomplish several things at the same time. Like impressing your parents with how responsible you are and inspiring them to give you a little more freedom, teaching yourself some really good habits, and getting rid of the unlovable tutor.

That
" Do well in school then you're doing a favor for yourself and pets" somewhere really helped me during class whenever I say that to myself I stare straight at the board.

PS I can't find any adults except my friend Tiffany she's in 7th grade.

Pets and the internet have something in common - they're lively and interactive! Maybe the best thing you can do is to use your imagination to try and make the educational stuff more lively and interactive. Just about any word problem in math can be converted to a problem about budgies or anything else that interests you. "It's 850 miles from Chicago to Boston. If a budgie leaves Chicago at 2 PM flying toward Boston at 60 miles an hour and another budgie leaves Boston at 4 PM flying toward Chicago at 45 miles an hour, what time will they meet?" Now that's more fun than a question about trains, isn't it? Plain number problems can have a little twist put on them too - instead of calculating the length of the hypotenuse of a triangle, you can calculate the number of budgies that could perch on it. Everyone will wonder why you're laughing while you do your math homework.

Other subjects can't be converted into budgie talk that easily, but there's more scope for personalizing it in a serious way: if there's some aspect of the lesson that particularly interests you, you can get on the internet and learn more about it. If there's nothing that interests you, you can get a little silly with it and think about things like "how would history be different if Genghis Khan had had a pet budgie?" It might help you remember all the trouble he stirred up because he didn't have a budgie to entertain him.

Are there any particular subjects that your family wants you to focus on, or is it just lots and lots of everything?

Oooh that sounds fun! Umm my parents expect me to get good grades on every subject.

Families that push their kids to excel usually want them to be perfect at everything, but a lot of times they have a specific career in mind so they're more focused on certain subjects. Wanting the kid to become a medical doctor is the most common one.

Figuring out what field to go into is tricky. Kids don't have enough experience and knowledge to do a good job of it by themselves, and it's really helpful to have a sympathetic adult who understands the realities of life to provide some guidance. Your interests will develop and change over time too, so something that looks really good to you right now might not seem so great several years from now. Sometimes the stuff that you hate right now turns out to be interesting later on. So it really is a good idea to learn about everything (including stuff that's not 'educational') so you'll be ready for anything later on.

It might help to think about the educational subjects in a more exciting way. I know from personal experience how dull and pointless school can seem when you're going through it, like some kind of slavery that adults have forced on kids. But in the end, it gives you a broad knowledge base that helps you understand the world and gives you the power to pursue any subject that interests you. And a lot of it is actually pretty exciting (although it can be hard to see that when it's being shoved down your throat lol). When you have a good understanding of all this stuff, your mind can go into interesting areas that you wouldn't have been able to think about otherwise. Science tells us why the universe exists and why it's the way that it is. History is the story of how human society grew into what it is now. English is all about communicating clearly and getting the most out of what we read. Math is fun for people who like to solve puzzles (I do) and it's useful in the real world. It's really easy to insert budgies into it too.

I hope the long lecture didn't bore you lol. Your family is trying to do what's best for you whether we think their methods are perfect or not. I can tell that you're smart, and if you can get the school work to fit better with your natural curiosity it will help you out a lot.

I know they're trying to do what's best for me but they like need to try to do it in a way that no one will be like depressed.
Today we were doing that fraction and decimal on a number line and instead of thinking number I put numbers of budgies hehe much more fun except when Stephanie's in the way because she sits next to me and when we turn she's in front of me.BTW She's really annoying gah I had to smack her a few times urgh couldn't help it no matter how many times try to ignore and I also told the teacher to switch spot and it's be a few months and still...nothing..
Right now I want to work with animals like a vet or at least at a pet shop.
So I need to know: math,science, umm that's all I got.

PS Subjects that I hate: ELA,Social Studies,History, and Writing.

Subjects that are okay: Math and science and a tiny bit of ELA

Maybe you need to remind the teacher that you want to change to a different seat. If that doesn't work then at least it's just a few weeks until the end of the school year. In the meantime you can imagine all those fractional budgies flying at Stephanie and pooping on her head when she gets in your way.

Some other options for working with animals include zookeeper and other zoo jobs, biologist, animal groomer and animal trainer. There's also veterinary technician (vet's assistant) if you want to work with a vet but decide that you'd rather not actually be one yourself. There are also conservation-related jobs where you might or might not work directly with animals but would be helping to insure their survival, and park ranger type jobs where you wouldn't work with animals directly but would have lots of opportunity to observe them and to teach visitors about them.

All these jobs have advantages and disadvantages. It'll be years before you have to make a final decision, so there's plenty of time to figure out what you really want from your job. Some things to consider are how interesting the work is to you, how hard you'll have to work, how much money this type of job pays, how hard or easy it is to find a job or change jobs, and whether there's some specific place that you'd have to live to do this job.

Some of these jobs (like vet, zookeeper, and biologist) require a college degree which means several years of intense study, especially in biology-related subjects. Many vets own their own business, and if you want to go that route it would be best to take some classes related to business management too. I'm a tax preparer and some of my clients are veterinarians. When the economy is good they make a rather amazing amount of money, especially if they have a 24-hour emergency clinic (I like to say "there's gold in them thar pets"). But when the economy is bad their business goes down a lot because so many of their customers lose their jobs and don't have money to go to the vet. Another disadvantage of the vet job is that sometimes you'll have to put animals to sleep, and sometimes people want their pets put down for bad reasons (like they just don't want to be bothered with it any more). So if you take a vet job you'll have to be tough enough to deal with stuff like that.

With jobs like biologist and zookeeper, there's usually a lot of competition for jobs because so many people want to do this kind of work. It might be hard to find a job and the pay probably won't be all that great. Zookeepers take care of exotic animals of course. There's an assortment of different jobs available for biologists, including some where you go out and observe animals in the wild to learn more about them. I volunteer with people who do research on bird populations by catching and banding wild birds. I've held hundreds of hummingbirds in my hand, and I recently started volunteering with passerine banders too. Just this morning I held some very cool birds in my hand, including a cardinal, a western tanager, and a yellow-breasted chat. These aren't my pictures, but you get the idea:

Western tanager:


Chat


Which brings up another point: you can always do something else for your job, and do bird and animal stuff in your spare time. Breeding pet birds is very satisfying, but if you do it right it isn't profitable enough to make a living off of it and many hobby breeders actually lose money.

Here's the website for a bird bander who's close to San Jose: http://www.sfbbo.org/volunteer/index.php This might be a fun thing to do during the summer if you can talk your family into it (and if you can get up early enough to be on the spot before sunrise lol. There's a price to pay for playing with wild birds!) I think you could handle the Predator Patroller job. They don't say anything about age limits so I don't know whether they would actually let you help or not. But if you look at the Activities section, they do have some special events coming up during the summer, and maybe you could at least visit one of these. Tell your family it will stimulate your interest in science lol.

Getting back on track: The animal jobs that don't require a college degree will usually pay less than the ones that do, and some (like working in a pet store) will probably pay minimum wage. With any job where you work directly with animals, you're going to get attacked by the animals sometimes. I'm sort-of friends with a vet tech, and she always has scratches and other minor injuries on her hands and arms. Somebody mentioned an incident where a large macaw bit her on the lip, and this sort of thing is so typical of her life that she couldn't even remember it. If you want to work with animals you'll need to get over your fear of budgie bites, because you'll be dealing with scarier things than that!

When it comes to "subjects I hate in school", it's not practical to insert budgies into absolutely everything (although you could insert Batman or Godzilla to liven things up if you get tired of using budgies). But you might be able to use your imagination in other ways to help these subects seem more relevant to you. With history stuff, you could imagine what it would have been like to live in that time period and witness the events. Or imagine visiting the area today to see where it all happened. Looking at pictures can be a lot more interesting than reading words on a page, so you can google the subject and look at the image gallery results to get some good visuals. With some subjects, you might be able to personalize it by thinking about what you would want to show if you were making a movie or museum display about it. Or any other creative way you can think of to make it seem more interesting or more related to your life.

Usually the subjects we hate the most are the ones that we're worst at - that's how I operate, anyway. So instead of thinking "Argh! I hate this" it might help to think "how can I do this better". Nothing too dramatic, just little tweaks here and there, but over time it might add up to big improvements that make you feel happier and more confident about the whole subject. Writing is very important if you plan to go to college - you'll be expected to write lots of papers there about subjects that you'd rather not write about, so you'll need good writing skills.

If you google "study habits" along with a word like good, best, or effective, you'll find lots of suggestions. I looked at a few of them, and some of them sound good and others don't. Everyone has their own learning style, and if you spend a few minutes looking at it you might find something that's useful for you. And it will make your family happy! The most common suggestion is to not study for too long at a time - study for a while then take a short break to move around and/or do something fun, then study some more. That sounds like a budgie break to me.