Ronnie Li is a gifted writer who achieved high honors in his AP English class despite having Tourette's syndrome. He wrote numerous high-quality poems, songs, essays and memoirs. His most powerful work was "Born Without Wings", a memoir detailing his struggles with Tourette's and its appearance after his mother's death. Ronnie is one of the teacher's most talented students ever and helped his classmates by sharing class materials online. The teacher believes Ronnie will achieve extraordinary success due to his talents and perseverance in overcoming difficulties with Tourette's syndrome.

1. Great Neck South High School
341 Lakeville Road, Great Neck, NY 11020
(516) 441-4844 dweinstein@greatneck.k12.ny.us
Recommendation for: Ronnie Li, Great Neck South High School
Written by: Daniel Weinstein. English Department, Great Neck South High School
He’s Got It, but It Doesn’t Have Him
I wish I could write this recommendation for Ronnie Li without mentioning Tourette’s. (Too late
already, eh?) I wish I could just emphasize his skills at writing, scores on tests, love of language,
desire for learning, and ability to lead. I wish I could only comment on his rap-singing, video-
making, and website-designing; his creativity, perseverance, humility, and charity. But that
pesky neurological dysfunction just keeps cropping up in my mind and on this paper.
Ronnie was a student in my AP Language & Rhetoric class and he distinguished himself in a
myriad of ways: a 5 on the AP test; a 99 average in the class; a slew of memorable high-intellect,
positivity-infused rap-videos; and a bunch of essays and poems that are so darn good I use them
as samples with this year’s classes. He accomplished so much – have I mentioned the
autobiography he wrote? – that he has earned a spot in the rarified air of my personal golden
circle: the very best and most amazing students I’ve ever taught.
Ronnie is one of the most gifted writers I’ve worked with during my 15-year career, although it
slights him to emphasize his gifts over his work ethic. He uncovered his talent and augmented it
to nth degree through hundreds of hours of reading, studying, and practicing writing. Yet, he is
even more humble than he is talented. When I asked him about his favorite pieces from among
the 50 poems, songs, essays, memoirs, mind maps, and drawings he did for the class, his answer
was a piece I rejected! “The very first poem I submitted to you was the most important,” he said.
“That rejection taught me that poetry must take effort, achieve purpose, and have meaning. That
poem harbored none of those traits and it was a tremendously important lesson for me that
inspired me to work even harder.”
A few months into the class it became apparent to me and to his classmates that Ronnie is a
special talent. By December, we had all been conditioned to ask him to give an answer, to ask
him for an opinion, to ask him to read a sample of writing. The tipping point was when I played
his hip-hop song “Climbing Up” for the class. The song is a complexity of rhyme schemes and
rhetorical devices with a bold message: “I may have Tourette’s, but it doesn’t have me.”
This theme would come to embody some of Ronnie’s most powerful creative writing, including
Born Without Wings, a multi-chapter memoir that details his earliest struggles with Tourette’s
and its heartbreaking appearance after his mother passed away. The contrast between the
difficulties he faced as a child and the incredible intellect, academic skills, and human relations

2. he possesses as an adolescent is remarkable, to say the least. “Born Without Wings is the first
time I’ve ever dared to confront Tourette’s Syndrome fearlessly,” he said. “It has the most
intimate, personal secrets that I have ever wanted to share.” That autobiography is professional-
quality writing that could be a seminal book in the overcoming-difficulties-to-be-amazing genre
of memoirs. It’s a brilliant piece of writing for two reasons:
1) The story is bittersweet and inspiring; painful and enlightening.
2) The writing techniques are über-sophisticated.
Ronnie’s sentence structures, vocabulary, and punctuation devices are of the highest order
because he enjoys studying Latin and he experiments with every writing strategy his English
teachers have introduced him to. “Before AP English, I thought anaphora, antistrophe, and
antithesis were only used by Caesar and Cicero,” he said. “The emphasis your class placed on
sentence variety made it a pleasure to discover that I could use these techniques in my writing.
Since my love for language still intensifies with every word I write, these lessons become more
ingrained in my mind every day.”
I regularly keep my recommendations to one page, but Ronnie Li is a special person and this is a
special recommendation. My final memory of our year together reveals much about his
tremendous character, charity, and concern for others. My final test of the year was culled from
30 handouts of creative writing lessons. Predictably, Ronnie had all the material while many of
his classmates scrambled to find them. So, what did he do? He scanned them all into his
computer, created an on-line database of them, and used Facebook to invite everyone to
download the handouts they needed. It was purely selfless: Ronnie already had all the handouts
himself! I checked his Facebook page that night and it was filled with comments like “You’re a
lifesaver, Ron!” and “Thank you! Thank you!”
I could easily give you another two pages of anecdotes about this exceptional young man. He has
earned this effusive recommendation and a spot in any college in the country. He would deserve
them even if he didn’t have to overcome these difficulties: the hundred tics an hour, the
misdiagnoses, the experimental medications, the stares, the comments, the prejudices, and the
self-doubt. And the fact that he has dealt with all that and still molded himself into Mr.
Superstudent/Mr. Ultranice/Mr. Wonderwriter is going to catapult him to extraordinary successes
and accomplishments.