I Have A Secret

I'm kind of in love with the First Family. I love how the president is going off to town hall type meetings and meeting with people, even going to places and meeting people who didn't vote for him. I love Michelle Obama going around to D.C. public schools and talking about her own high school experience. I love President Obama utilizing his army of supporters in order to garner more support for his legislation. I love his somewhat understated wit. I love his constant speeches, even though I do worry about the whole "over saturated" aspect of the whole thing. And I absolutely adore that there is going to be an organic White House garden on the South Lawn with 55 different kinds of vegetables, and even some bee hives for honey. And unlike Jimmy Carter donning a sweater in order to convey to the American people that it might be in all of our best interests to get a little colder during the winter months instead of spending money on fuel, the Obamas actually make caring look cool. And that's what we need; yes, we need solutions to the complex problems of the day. But having people who are earnestly, actively out there, trying to make the world better and doing it themselves? People who are gardening and talking and generally engaged and intelligent? That is beyond awesome. 

Groups, Not Individuals

Last night, I watched Nick News with Linda Ellerbee, because I have yet to accept the fact that at 23 I should be watching a different type of news program. But Nick News is both informative and comforting, like a warm old blanket that is just perfect to be snuggled against. And Linda Ellerbee has been and continues to be one of the best kids' show hosts I've ever seen, in that she respects her audience and values their intelligence. She seems genuinely interested in kids and their opinions, while at the same time presenting a story without seeming to downplay their ability to understand the matter at hand.

Last night's episode was about schools, and separate ones for girls and boys. The first schools shown were ones that had all boys' classes and all girls' classes; and right away, my antenna went up. It isn't just because I wouldn't have enjoyed the girls' classes, what with the emphasis on group work, but because gender essentialism is at its heart a rudimentary theory that refuses to take into account how society shapes the individual. I'm not fully a nurture advocate. I don't subscribe to the idea of a tabula rasa state. If nothing else, my sisters would have rid me of that notion right quick. But I do believe that our interactions within our society can modify our behaviors, and can influence the way we respond to and react with the world - and from incredibly young ages. From the moment girls and boys leave the womb, we as a society gender them. As the study "Maternal behaviour and perceived sex of infant" tells us, how we react to an infant is determined by what we presume to be the gender of the infant. In the experiment above, a group of mothers interacted with "Beth", and another group of mothers interacted with "Adam". The babies were described differently, and given different toys to play with depending on their gender. But "Beth" and "Adam" were really the same infant; those in the study projected their own beliefs about gender and babies onto "Beth-Adam". So too do the teachers highlighted by Nick News react to the students based on their own assumptions about gender. The social studies teacher claimed that he would find himself slipping into "Dad-mode" (paraphrased) while interacting with the girl class, but "Drill Sergeant" when interacting with the boys. That is a behavior that emerged based on what this teacher saw, and how his own perceptions of the situation influenced the situation. He became gentler with the girls, because that is what we are culturally indoctrinated to do. He became more authoritative with the boys, for the same reason. This reasoning - that girls are more docile, more temperate, more emotional, and more eager to please while boys are rambunctious and rowdy and disruptive - is based at least in part upon our social narrative. And it crops up in the darnedest places, like an article about presidents' children and why so many have been girls, theorizing:

"Campaigning and raising sons are mutually exclusive. Campaigning requires lots of travel, enormous amounts of time in the public eye and months and months of sitting down quietly and listening to the same guy talking while wearing your good clothes... ...It's torture on adults, let alone children. But it's worse for boys. Try this experiment: next month ask your son to be on his best behavior in front of other people, from now until November 2009... ..."Boys are generally more competitive, risk-taking and defiant, which makes them less manageable," says Meg Meeker M.D., author of Boys Should Be Boys and Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters... ...The Obama campaign was noted for its discipline, its rigor, and its self control: three things most young boys are not noted for. Of course, Obama didn't take Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, everywhere he campaigned. But long fatherly absences make the boys even more likely to be unhelpful. "If dad's away on the campaign trail a lot, [boys'] tendencies towards defiance and impulsivity are exacerbated," says Meeks."

This is the kind of attitude that is reflected in the separate classes with separate teaching styles for the two genders. But let's look at this logically, starting with the idea that campaigning and raising sons are mutually exclusive. Duh. You know what else is mutually exclusive? Campaigning and raising daughters. Because campaigning is a long ass job, and it sucks up a lot of time and energy; it requires the campaigner to be away from home for huge swaths of time. Without being home, and without having time to devote to the kids, a person cannot parent. Thus, the idea that it is only in the case of boys that parenting and campaigning is mutually exclusive jut isn't realistic. As is asking a child to be on his or her best behavior in front of other people through an entire year. It isn't going to happen. There will be a meltdown at some point; and the younger the child, the sooner that meltdown will probably happen. Because kids - boys and girls - aren't going to be able to do that, to sublimate their own desires and own responses in front of other people for an entire year. And parental absence won't do any child any favors, because feeling like you've been abandoned and your daddy isn't there to do all those things he did before is going to create a less than ideal situation no matter what gender the child is.

But there's this: boys may be more defiant and more impulsive and more rowdy on places like campaign trails and classrooms because there is already the expectation in place that they will be. This is not an attitude they encounter only on campaign trails and classrooms, but at home and in public as well. "Boys will be boys", and so boys are socialized into a certain role. We as a society expect boys to be rowdy, so we see them as rowdy. Kind of like how if you get a red car, you are more likely to notice the red cars on the road to the point where it appears that red cars are suddenly more prevalent; but in reality, we are just attuned to red cars and so are seeing more of them. We become drill sergeants, and in some cases we become more permissive. And because we have this idea in our head of how boys behave, evidence to the contrary - like moments of sweetness or calmness or emotionality - are either swept under the rug or we correct that behavior with the likes of "boys don't cry". Same thing with girls. I have no doubt that some girls are naturally passive creatures. But if boys are rowdy and girls are sweetly attentive - if boys prefer to compete and girls prefer to work cooperatively - then when a girl is rowdy or a boy likes group projects, they are deviating from the norm. They are more likely to be subject to negative reinforcement; and their behavior and their personalities do not threaten the overall meme of "boys=this" and "girls=that". That is the problem with the essentialist argument in a nutshell; it is concerned with demographics and not individuals. And these types of classrooms only reinforce the notion that girls are from Venus while boys are from Mars; they indoctrinate kids with the idea that boys and girls are so incredibly different that they are almost foreign to one another; that girls and boys really and truly can never understand each other.

There are other public schools experimenting with the all boys and all girls system. And in situations where the teaching styles are not tempered by gender but by student or class, I have less of a problem. There have been studies done, and the studies concluded that sometimes same-sex schools are better and sometimes mixed schools work better; but that seems to be because of the already existing quality of the school itself. A prestigious all girls school is going to be better than a mediocre mixed school. But the issue still remains, as one girl forced into an all girl class said, that the world is not gender divided. Girls and boys both need to learn how to interact in "work" environments; and schools, along with teaching academic subjects, also facilitate social learning. We learn how to stand interacting with people we don't like, we learn how to work with people of differing viewpoints, and we (hopefully) learn how to work through embarrassment over doing things like reading poetry in class in front of a group of people who may contain a crush-worthy subject. Because that's life.

Depression and Quizzes

My chances of becoming depressed in the next 12 months is 4.633%. How do I know that? I took this handy-dandy depression quiz!

Aside from now feeling pretty damn good that I beat out the Europeans, whose average chance of becoming depressed in the next 12 months is apparently 7.73%, I also had an odd moment when I went to pick out my country. It wasn't there. I can't remember the last time I went to choose the United States from a drop down list and had it not be there, and usually right at the top and out of alphabetical order (which alternately annoys me and makes me happy, depending on the OCDness of my mood and how much patience I have to scroll through a list of country names). It was kind of surreal. And that lead me to thinking about how having your country at the top of a list when it clearly should be nearer to the bottom or even having your country on a list at all is a weird sort of privilege. It says something about the width and breadth and scope of your country, its significance not only in its own mind but in the world. No wonder most Americans have an America-centric view of the world. Not only are we more isolated than many other countries, sharing our border with only two other countries, but we also don't have to even normally see the other countries' names on a drop down list.

I suppose another problem with many Americans' knowledge of the world may come from our educational system as well, and that is probably more to blame than any drop down box. After all, the maps in my high school still had "Zaire" instead of the "Democratic Republic of Congo". We had an industrious student who cared enough to cross out Zaire with a sharpie and try to squeeze in the entire Democratic Republic of Congo name - a valiant but nonetheless fruitless effort that accidentally led to an unfortunate invasion of Tanzania and Zambia - but the fact remained that apparently Africa's tumultuous political climate did not warrant the school board springing for some new maps. I'm sure mine was not the only school in which this occurred. And I'm certain my old high school is not the only high school using text books from 8 years ago (and I know this because my sisters, who are 8 years behind me in schooling, still get books with the names of me and some of my classmates inscribed on the inner book cover along with their relative condition when we got them).

I had come to the strange and paranoid conclusion that the lack of a truly great educational system was all part of a vast right-wing conspiracy, stemming partially from the fact that my hair dresser was appalled by the bailout bill because it stunk of socialism without recognizing how the history of the United States is littered with examples of socialist-esque programs, like social security. It is easy to manipulate a population when they have very little understanding of the past. But I've come to a much kinder, but at the same time more depressing, view: we're all just complacent in a broken system.

An Addendum

Yesterday's post of "Where The Girls Are" missed out on including this video, because I just found it today. But I think it highlights some of the issues with why girls don't find math and hard sciences appealing, especially with Dr. Bonnie Bassler saying, "Women scientists have to achieve two and a half times what their male counterparts have to achieve to have the same credibility". 

I think women feel that sense of diminishment of their work and achievements and abilities in math and hard sciences without it having to always be overtly stated.

Where The Girls Are

Little under a week ago, I wrote about Danica McKellar's new book, Kiss My Math. A friend of mine wrote something that contained several ideas I want to address. And so, after asking permission (unlike the last time), here is the first of probably about three blogs stemming from that one comment -thus ensuring that she never comments again and making me very sad indeed.

 "I've both seen and read that women are more likely to go into the helping professions like teaching and nursing because as a whole they prefer to work with people, not stuck working on abstract concepts. I do agree that it's empowering to know math well enough to function and use it at work and in daily life without relying on technology, but there's a reason why engineering programs are mainly made up of men, and it's not because girls nowadays are discouraged from becoming engineers. It's just that that life often just isn't that appealing."

So says my friend. It is the constant debate of nature versus nurture, of whether behavior is borne in a vacuum. I disagree profoundly with the idea that girls "naturally" prefer to work with people, naturally gravitate toward careers like teachers and social workers and children's librarians. I very much think it is about how we, as a society, codify behaviors and how we, as a society, react to girls versus how we react to boys. Girls are, from the onset, more likely to be the one who is indoctrinated with the idea that they are the caregivers. Girls are advertised playsets with washers and dryers:

And they are the ones who are given dolls to care for and hug and hold. Women are the people responsible for putting supper on the table, and studies still continue to show that after all of this time, after many groups are declaring equality reached and feminism as having done its job so could it please just go away now, household chores are still incredibly inequitable; and parents, according to a 2006 study, are more likely to give girls more chores than boys -and are more likely to pay boys for the chores they are assigned.

Boys are hit with crap as well, as William Wants A Doll tells us:

Boys don't want to play with dolls, unless they're called "action figures", as we all know. And a few years ago, I read a Newsweek "My Turn" where a mother (who grew up watching Free to Be You and Me -and William's longing for a doll) got her sons dolls and saw them use them as projectiles and swords, and concluded in part that little boys are just engineered differently than little girls. But that doesn't take into account the pervasive normative culture that surrounds us; it doesn't take into account what we come into contact with every day of our lives as boys and as girls. Commercials show dads as being imbeciles in the kitchen, and show moms at home there. Teachers and preschools and television and interactions with other children's parents also help create a culture of gender normative behavior. And although the most enlightened of parents may want to create a gender neutral environment, unconscious reactions to children -talking more to girl babies, reacting more gently to girl babies, and being more active with boy babies- helps explain in part why girls start talking before boys and why boys start walking before girls.

Women and men may not be overtly pulled away from certain fields and pushed toward other fields (and I somewhat disagree with that as well, but I'll concede that it is nowhere near as bad as it once was), but there are still societal factors at work that make women a more likely candidate for a kindergarden teacher than a man. Anecdote: I didn't have a male teacher until seventh grade. And I don't think it is primarily because men naturally don't want to work with small children; I think it is because men who want to spend their days with small children are looked at with suspicion and are seen as being threatening. Not always, but often enough for the guy who was thinking about becoming an elementary school special education teacher to feel like he wouldn't succeed there, and years later joined the military instead (why, yes, I do know someone this happened to!).

Meanwhile, women are also the ones who are called most often for childcare. My father was often more available to pick me up than my mother, but whenever the nurse went to call someone I always had to remind her to call my father first. It was a constant battle, and one that is pervasive. Women are taught, through interactions with society, that their primary objective in life is to be centered around the family. Women are consistently interacted with as members of the caregiving community. For that reason, no one turns a head when I play with a child I've just become acquainted with in a park; but if a guy my same age were to do so, there would be questions asked.

There is a reason why girls have often felt they did not belong in math classes and science classes; and while I am ambivalent about Danica McKellar's technique, I admire what she is trying to do in attempting to change the message from "girls are good at caring for others" and "girls are good at languages and history" to "girls are good at math, can succeed in math, and can be fulfilled by math". I don't think every girl ever will suddenly want to become a mathematician or will want to work in a chemistry lab and be the next Marie Curie. But I also strongly believe that the reasons girls don't find abstract work as appealing has less to do with how girls naturally are and has more to do with how society views girls. I don't know enough about the subject to state definitively that there are no distinctly "girl" traits and no distinctly "boy" traits -and I suffer from a fair amount of liberal guilt that I was attracted to literature and made my home there instead of math and the hard sciences- but I absolutely do not believe that it accounts for as much as we constantly hear it does from baby books to magazines.

I will end with this: in the 1800s, it was important to teach boys to read and write, but it was only important to teach girls to read. In 1892, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a short story detailing how women were considered too delicate to be able to read or write for any length of time. My point? Women are always and forever being given what is seen as the lesser sphere of influence in western society and thought. It is embedded in the very fabric of how we think, and how we interact with others. I'm guilty of it as much as anyone else. But the argument about what is appealing and what isn't appealing for women in math and hard science seems very similar to language used at every other point in history when the intention was to prove that the woman who wanted out, who wanted to write or hold a job outside the home (if one happened to be white and middle class) was really just the odd one out. That only Betty Friedan suffered The Feminine Mystique.

Pregnant Teens

A controversy of the past week has been that a Gloucester, Mass. high school has 17 pregnant girls this year. This is four times the amount the school had last year, and a rather large number. It should be a controversy in and of itself; except a great deal of attention has been paid to the superintendent of the school district's claims that the girls made a pact to get pregnant instead of acknowledging the fact that the nation as a whole has experienced a 3% rise in teen pregnancies. The waters became muddied and the information convoluted when the superintendent's statements were contradicted by the mayor of the town.

Why anyone would make claims about a group of girls getting pregnant on purpose is fairly simple to figure out: if the pregnancies happened independently of one another and with no real purpose, then the dialogue would focus on things like the failure of abstinence only education (or, God forbid, parental interaction with children). However, if the girls deviously and purposely were intending to get pregnant, then the dialogue becomes once again the trite and overly repeated version of "kids today". The focus is removed from the programs and societal mores and it simply becomes about this group of girls with a hankering for changing diapers.

But the mayor's "outing" of the superintendent's lies (and a 164 page report) put the focus back where it should be: abstinence only education programs just don't work. Perhaps they did, once upon a time, work. I doubt it though. There have always been homes for unwed mothers, girls who would disappear to "Europe" or their grandparents for about 9 months and then come back, and there have always been people like Bobby Darin -who discovered late in life that his older sister was in fact his mother. In Puritan societies, that beacon of moral propriety, many girls got married during their pregnancy. And the term "shot-gun wedding" isn't a part of our verbal lexicon because girls and boys weren't having sex.

And why should they work? Especially now, we as a society focus on sexuality. We demand it. We embrace it. Teens see sex everywhere, see their bodies as marketable commodities to be advertised and used. So, for that matter, do the rest of us. Television, movies, magazines, etc. tell teens that sex is good and sex is great and that with sex comes power -power to buy, power to sell, power to get their way- and we expect them to listen to a teacher (or nurse) who tells them "Don't"? Who shows them pictures of genital warts and tells them that sex ALWAYS leads to pregnancy and that they had best save themselves for marriage because virginity is something to be treasured (if they discuss any of it at all beyond the initial "no")? Abstinence only programs are out of touch, and were probably always out of touch, because they do not take into account (a) the world outside of the classroom, and (b) students' own sexual desires.

I don't want 15 year olds having sex; I certainly don't want them getting pregnant. But I do think that when schools (and parents, and government, and society) refuse to acknowledge that these feelings are real and powerful and that 15 year olds think they know everything, we are bound to have more 15 year olds having sex and more 15 year olds getting pregnant. Teenagers aren't stupid, even if they behave stupidly when not given all of the information. Sex and drugs are things we have to, as a society, have serious and complex discussions about. We have to look to the route of the reasons for why kids want to try them and how we can convince them not to. Telling them "no" doesn't cut it. Establishing a dialogue with them, teaching them about emotional maturity in sexual matters, showing them how to properly use a condom (and dispelling myths about Mountain Dew or jacuzzis), and all the while emphasizing why it is better to wait while listening to and respecting them and the validity of their opinions and emotions and reasons is the better way.

We can simply sit our children down as parents at the age of 5 (or as soon as they ask) and tell them where babies come from, in graphic detail and with books. We can start discussing these things at a young age, and be active parents. We can limit their exposure to shows like One Tree Hill or Gossip Girl. We can read Judy Blume books with them. We can dress our kids in age appropriate clothing instead of high heels for babies. And we also need to accept the fact that teenagers have sex; teenagers had sex when we were in school, when our parents were in school, and more than probably when their parents were in school. We should remember that fact, and then think about how a lack of knowledge about contraception doesn't limit sexual activity. It just limits safe sexual activity.

School Sports

My sisters, being weirdly participatory for my family, insisted on going to the state championship game for our high school's baseball team. Though the game was about an hour away, much of our town filled much of the stadium. And when our team won (the first state championship game attended since 1985; first won since about 1970), the stadium exploded. The team jumped with obvious jubilee, and they got a parade for their accomplishment as soon as they arrived back in town. The firehouse message board proudly proclaimed them to be 2008 State Champs.

All of this led me to think about school sports programs in general, and sports programs in my town specifically. We take such pride in their accomplishments, award them praise and devotion and caravan across the state when gas prices are on average $4.27 a gallon to support them. And yet, due to the economic downturn the nation is experiencing at the moment, the first thing my town wants to cut from its budget is school sports. Well, the second thing. The first thing is always trash pick up, because that has continually been the one threat that will get a budget passed in my sleepy little town. Especially when it is pointed out that eliminating sanitation from the town budget doesn't eliminate the cost; it simply shifts the cost directly to the tax payer. But now, sports are on the chopping block.

I was never one to participate in sports. Getting sweaty and grimy wasn't exactly something that made me ecstatic. And I very much preferred to spend my afternoons and weekends away from school and school-related events. But that doesn't mean that I don't recognize the use of school sports, or that I don't deplore the idea that we should cut back on the school sports program.

Forget that "student athletes report healthier eating habits, increased parental support, and decreased anxiety and depression". Forget that "participating in sports is associated with higher levels of self-esteem and motivation, overall psychological well-being, and better body image for girls". Forget that school sports can help students, especially in younger grades, develop skills like cooperation and dedication. Forget that in today's scholastic competition, grades alone are not enough for students to be accepted into the top colleges, and sports are a way for many to diversify their application and exemplify some of the qualities they possess that universities are looking for. Forget scholarship options for the select elite of student athletes, people who may very well not have been able to attend college otherwise.

Even if we disregard all of those factors, school sports are still incredibly important. Why? Because we are a nation of ever-increasing obesity, and child obesity is on the rise. And 30-45 minutes every other day (or every day for one semester out of the year) in gym class isn't going to cut it. Sports programs are linked to students "maintaining a healthy exercise program". And in America today, we need to encourage and support anything that does. We need to encourage student interest in running and jumping and generally being active. We need to put more money into a myriad of sports; we need to not only support those sports that garner money for the school system but also intramural sports. We need this outlet to be as readily available as it can be for our students. Because in many cases, the habits children form in elementary school and middle school and high school are the habits they take with them throughout life. Teach a student to love books, and they will become life-long readers. Introduce a child to a sport that engages them and intrigues them, and we will have done one more thing in the war against obesity. Active children, children who are encouraged in their activeness, are more likely to turn into active adults. Let's give these children that chance.