making a diptych in Lightroom 4

I used this video to help me learn to make a diptych in Lightroom 4. I also enjoyed an Adobe TV video that discussed the aesthetics of pairing images in diptychs.

Photos taken at Uniacke Estate, July 2012.

What new skills have you learned this week?

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

I just finished this book - you may have heard about it a couple of years ago. It's about a first generation American-Chinese mother who wouldn't allow her two daughters to have free time or go to friends' houses. She forced them to practice music (piano for the elder, violin for the younger) for several hours every day and demanded their excellence in every academic subject.

Her book is somewhat tongue in cheek - and hilarious if you read it that way. But it also makes some valid (and scary) distinctions between Chinese and Western parenting (grand generalizations though they are). Western parents make an conscious choice to allow kids to choose their activities - even if it means Facebook and spending time at the mall. Chinese parents make all the choices for their children and demand compliance. This is why so many Asian children are so accomplished, Chua argues. She speculates that teenagers of both types hate their parents. And she also implies that adults of both types love their parents. So she is proud of her parenting style.

A lot of my students have parents like her, at least to some extent. They are driven by their parents' desires and they make academic gains because their parents ensure that they do. I can really tell the difference between those children and those whose parents acquiesce to their kids' wishes.

The real question is which is the right way (or better way) to parent? And how do you decide which is right? (Fortunately for me, I am only pondering in a theoretical way. Many of my friends and acquaintances are making these decisions every day.) What about you and your family?

Guernsey Island

I recently read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows. It's a novel set in London and on Guernsey Island just after World War Two. I didn't know before that Guernsey (in the English Channel) was occupied by the Germans during the war; they were hoping to use it as a stepping stone to occupying the UK. Children were sent away from Guernsey for their safety to live in the British countryside.

This was a brilliant novel, written as a series of letters to and from a young writer in London. She makes friends with the members of a literary society on Guernsey and eventually visits them.

I bought this book at the Oxfam shop in Central HK and I think it came from Costco in Canada - see the bilingual sticker.