I try not to gripe, but I’ve sensed substantial disconnect from students during the last two weeks. The sad irony is that we’re just beginning to cover all the interesting readings that I promised when we were slogging through early American literature. So, to quote Heathers, what’s your damage? Feel free to post a response if you see a category that needs to be added.
Loading ...While teaching Kate Chopin’s masterpiece, The Awakening, to my English classes this semester, Kate Bolick’s cover story for the November 2011 edition of The Atlantic keeps coming to mind. Bolick’s narrative is witty and engaging. Here are some of the statistics she throws our way:
In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. We’re also marrying less—with a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29 percent of my Gen X cohort was married; among today’s Millennials that figure has dropped to 22 percent. (Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those ages 18 to 29 had already tied the knot.) These numbers reflect major attitudinal shifts. According to the Pew Research Center, a full 44 percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete.
Today 40 percent of children are born to single mothers. This isn’t to say all of these women preferred that route, but the fact that so many upper-middle-class women are choosing to travel it—and that gays and lesbians (married or single) and older women are also having children, via adoption or in vitro fertilization—has helped shrink the stigma against single motherhood. Even as single motherhood is no longer a disgrace, motherhood itself is no longer compulsory. Since 1976, the percentage of women in their early 40s who have not given birth has nearly doubled. A childless single woman of a certain age is no longer automatically perceived as a barren spinster.
Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.
As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma.
No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce.
I apologize for quoting at such length–that’s not supposed to happen in a blog!–but Ms. Bolick’s research suggests the potential for staggering shifts in the ways men and women relate to each other over the course of the next generation, not to mention marked differences between the ways women in urban America (should they be adequately represented by Ms. Bolick’s piece) and rural America (as made manifest by the women I know in Mississippi) think about their relationships with men.
But my curiousity today is more literary in nature. Will The Awakening, and books like it, have much substance for generations of young women who grow up believing that they are in every way the equals of their male peers? Can you imagine the lack of patience they would have for Edna’s coming into being? She doesn’t need to kill herself–she needs a lawyer! So what? She’s not happy with her marriage. She just needs to move out and let Leonce deal with the kids if he loves them so much. She is tired of society’s demands on her time? Who cares? I’ve always done what I wanted, and my parents have encouraged me. All this business about behaving like a lady? That’s for the birds. Besides, my cousin made her debut in the delta, and let me tell you, that party was hardly about acting like a lady.
Or so some new readers of The Awakening might claim. Obviously, it is not necessarily true that the advancement of women within their chosen professions will mean that those women abandon the social models offered by the cult of ladyhood. Yet it does seem that as those models become less cherished, not to mention less pervasive, some of the twentieth-century’s most beloved women in fiction–Edna, Blanche DuBois, and Scarlet O’Hara among them–will fade into the footnotes of dusty academic tomes. I suppose I must conclude that it will be worth it, but I’ll miss them.
It’s that time of year again, sports fans: the rec season starts up for my kids next week. For the last couple of years, our family has recorded a cd of music intended to pump up the boys during the drive to the soccer fields. Here’s what we had on last year’s cd:
Let’s Get it Started/The Black Eyed Peas + Dynamite/Taio Cruz + Tick Tick Tick Boom/The Hives + DMZ/Dash Rip Rock + Crunk (radio edit, of course)/The Ying Yang Twins + All Star/Smashmouth + Unbelievable/EMF + Tonight’s Gonna Be a Good Night/The Black Eyed Peas + Band of 1000 Dances/Wilson Picket
I haven’t had much time to catch up on contemporary tunes, and I fear if I give creative control of this year’s cd over to my wife, my sons will end up listening to lots of Katy Perry and Lady Gaga on the way to their games, and I’m not so sure they’ll arrive in appropriately pumped up fashion. Suggestions?
The lives of three MSMS faculty members are IN YOUR HANDS! Ms. Barham (the Fine & Performing Arts), Dr. MacNeill (the Sciences) and Mrs. Pierce (the Humanities) have been stranded on a desolate island with only a one-person life raft for escape to civilization. Which faculty member should survive for the sake of humanity?
Click on the link to the raft debate above. Read the directions. In coming weeks, students will have a chance to take over the debate. I’ll choose representatives for each discipline based on the strength of student comments, which I look forward to reading. I also look forward to moderating your comments—which is to say, if your argument is flawed, I’ll certainly let you know, if your peers don’t do so first. Enjoy!
Dear Herr Klinsmann,
Wie gehts! Congratulations on being named the Head Coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team. Every soccer fan in America wants your style and enthusiasm to improve the team. We have waited a long time to see soccer in America played like it is the “beautiful game,” and we suspect that your hiring is a step in that direction.
Your recent statement that you want pick-up games to become a more important part of soccer culture in America was music to my ears. No other sport avails itself so readily to impromptu games. The cruel irony of soccer in this country is that it has been dominated by well-meaning and highly structured type-A personalities—yes, those lovely soccer moms of the upper middle class—for the last two decades. They have the time to helicopter over their little ones while the ball gets kicked to and fro in U6. Later, of course, these same parents have the time and financial means to send their kids to the Olympic Development Program in each state, and to make sure they are placed on the right select team, surrounded by all the right kids and all the best families.
That isn’t soccer so much as it is money and politics.
Obviously, these people have come up with “winning” formulas. There were very few surprises at any age group during last week’s National Cup in Boise, Idaho. Check the names of the gold medal teams and you’ll see the same California and New Jersey suburbs that get represented year in and year out.
But I submit to you that you’ll find much better athletes outside of those suburbs. Please, Herr Klinsmann, look in the inner cities—better still, look in rural areas of the Sun Belt—because that’s where America’s best young athletes live. Take half of the money you planned to spend in Seattle or on Atlanta’s perimeter and spend it in Mississippi or in the agricultural areas of Florida. Develop after school programs that reward kids for finishing their homework by giving them time to play pick-up soccer on the grass we grow so abundantly here. We have the athletes. We lack the investment in the infrastructure of the sport.
The town where I live has hundreds of kids from families too poor to afford cable, much less an Xbox. Our unemployment rate has hovered near twenty percent since the meat packing plant moved to Mexico five years ago. The largest current employers, other than the government, of course, use temp agencies as often as they can in order to reduce the amount of benefits they must pay to employees. Yet this town has also produced state championships in (American) football for the last two years, and the high school coach has to turn kids away from the varsity squad every year.
Why not encourage them to play soccer instead? Why not, Herr Klinsmann, divert money from established development programs and academies in the suburbs to make that happen? Those development programs and academies haven’t been producing the kind of talent needed to win the Gold Cup—much less advance past the round of 16 in the World Cup—and for a nation of 300 million that’s rather sad.
I suspect that American players don’t acquire the same grace in motion that their counterparts worldwide have because doing so would require the kind of freedom of expression allowed in the pick-up games you long to see them play—we certainly agree on that much. I am certain that our current American players are not the best athletes in the country. If you want to find better athletes, look away from the suburbs.
In the latest issue of Discover—a magazine devoted, allegedly, to “Science, Technology and the Future”—Kristin Ohlson purports that “[n]euroscience offers new ways to approach. . .moral questions, allowing logic to triumph over deep-rooted instinct.” Her article chronicles some of the work performed in the Harvard Moral Cognition Lab, where scientists have done their best to isolate the part of the brain most active when subjects are presented with heinous moral dilemmas: what would you do if you saw an unmanned hot dog cart barreling toward bicycle racers? If you and other villagers were hiding from soldiers, and your baby began to cry?
I am not sure that logic can “triumph” in either of these circumstances. First, one can use logic to defend an array of choices made in the above queries. How can logic lose? The article’s greater crime is that its tone derides the use of emotion when reaching difficult conclusions. Ohlson claims that when “the sirens of our emotions are sounding in unproductive ways, we can crank up the reasoning parts of our brain to make sound decisions.” Her “logic” appears sketchy at best. If we could simply shut off our emotions, I suspect we would never marry for love, or curse, or commit some sin or another. We see how well rationalism worked out for Benjamin Franklin, whose experiment in moral perfection was a beautiful failure.
As a member of the Mississippi Humanities Council, I am occasionally called upon to define the humanities, or to justify their place in the curriculum, or validate their line in a budget. When we help people understand themselves and others and to place their lives in the larger context of the human condition, we’re generally dealing with the study of humanities. It is, perhaps, impossible to quantify how important it is for people to understand themselves, or to legitimize how much taxpayers should spend on the humanities. Yet Ohlson’s article reminds me of another crucial function humanists provide: bullshit detectors for bad science.
Sometimes Learning is a Matter of Life & Death
Lori Gottleib’s cover story for the July/August issue of The Atlantic, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” dives into the shallow waters of teacups—that is, young people whose incredible fragility derives from the belief that their self-esteem need not be tethered to real accomplishments.
Gottleib’s story isn’t news to teachers, who have long reckoned with the distances between students’ estimates of their own worth and their actual achievements. My own dealings with teacups are typical. An anecdote: a few years ago, a bright, attractive, moderately spoiled young woman wept bitterly in class because she made a 3/5 on a quiz.
Yes, a quiz. One of dozens given over the course of the semester. Any conscientious student—and even a few gifted slackers—should have no trouble rebounding from a low quiz score. But this young woman had been so accustomed to receiving encouragement and full credit for all effort expended that she felt shattered, maybe even betrayed, that a teacher could return a quiz with red ink and a low score. I can only imagine how she reacted to earning a B+ on her first essay—a reaction that, thankfully, she saved for her dorm room. To her credit, she soon learned how hard she had work in order to make the scores she craved. The bar was higher than her comfort zone had previously allowed, but she worked hard, gave up social time and perhaps a little sleep, and she made an A. I’m very proud of her.
However, I’m reduced to rank speculation regarding how she and her teacup kindred have been allowed to mistake self-esteem for objective accomplishment. I suspect that we can lay some blame at the door of the educational establishment. Schools of education around the country spend too much time on pedagogy and too little time requiring future teachers to master content, which leads to many teachers rewarding process and effort over product. This result pleases parents, too. They’re happy because their kids earn high marks, however meaningless those marks might be.
An emphasis on happiness might be at fault as well. Parents, understandably, want their kids to be happy. Yet they forget that we pervert happiness when we make it a goal rather than some by-product of the goal itself. Happiness won’t cure cancer, but we’ll be well within our rights to be happy once we have cured it.
Finally, I wonder if the fear of competition has something to do with the shaky foundations of the cult of self-esteem. The thrill of victory, by definition must be paid for by somebody else’s defeat. However, those who suffer a loss and decide that the taste is too bitter—that the chance to win simply isn’t worth the risk of losing—don’t fully fathom the allure of any game. The only thing worse than that, potentially, is to promote a win-at-all-costs mentality, which is actually another way to worship the false god of self-esteem.
The United States lost the CONCACAF Gold Cup tonight because it couldn’t hold a 2-0 lead. Mexico’s team was simply better. After gift-wrapping the Americans’ second goal, Mexico played with passion and confidence, and moved the ball wherever they pleased, scoring four unanswered goals.
I’ve announced to my sons that they have a patriotic duty to play better soccer. No pressure or anything, right? The image above is from cnnsi.com. I’m thinking of putting a copy of it on the fridge, which might inspire more practice and less grousing for junk food.
Scarier than Social Media?
Last month, at a party for one of Jack’s friends: a sunny fall day, a rented jumper humming with activity in the back yard, parents speaking with each other in the distracted way we do while trying to keep an eye on our kids, too. One of the mothers spoke with the father of the birthday boy—a single dad, hard-working, doing his best to atone for a decade of indulgences—in a way that seemed surprisingly familiar. “Know each other long,” I asked her later, while we prepared plates of hot dogs for our kids.
“Shoot yes,” she said as she placed chips and grapes on her daughter’s plate. “He and I went to Sunday school together, school together, same neighborhood growing up. I suppose we saw each other almost every day of our lives until college.”
She went to college, graduated, worked for a while and married; he dropped out, moved away, started working construction and living hard. She has reaped wisely the rewards of a conventional life; prodigal years have etched themselves into the sad lines of his face. Yet when he and his son moved back to West Point, he found himself able to renew friendships quickly. I found myself wondering, briefly, what happened to the people with whom I attended high school. There are two sets of friends: one from Alexandria Senior High, the other from LSMSA. I doubt I would recognize many of the former by name or face—I certainly don’t have any facebook friend requests from them.
So I have no idea what life would be like if I returned to the place where my parents still live. I catch whiffs about their goings-on from my parents from time to time. I suspect that most of them stayed in Alexandria. I also suspect that I have as much in common with them now as I did twenty-five years ago, which isn’t much. Which makes me wonder two things: what is it I am missing, and why don’t I write letters or facebook to see what they’re up to?
I’ll probably never know what I’m missing, as I doubt that I will return to Louisiana to live. I sometimes wonder what my own children will experience. Will they go to college, see a little of the world, decide that a small Mississippi town is best after all? On one hand, I want them to want more than that, want them to play professional sports or cure cancer or win a Pulitzer Prize—none of which is likely to happen in West Point. On the other, of course, I am as selfish for the kernels of attention they offer as a dragon is of its hoard, and I am becoming more and more provincial with age. I get nervous driving in traffic. I have no idea why anyone would want to live within fifty miles of Atlanta. Traveling in Europe, once a heartfelt aspiration, now means less than taking my kids on a field trip or a soccer game. “I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” Thoreau said.
Why not use social networking to see what ? Raw skepticism, perhaps, or innate curmudgeonliness. Anyone who does facebook can get pulled into the undertow of nostalgia, can reconnect with people who have changed so much during the last twenty years that the ties that bind them are frayed with sweetness and false remembrance. I’m not sure why those who live in the present bother with facebook in the first place. My idea of social networking involves real face time: a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, something to eat, a handshake at the end of our time together.
Think there’s too much garbage on television? Don’t inhale too deeply—next season won’t be much different. Perry Winkel, our Hollywood insider, sent this dispatch describing pilots being cast for next fall.
Hairy Pooter and the Chamber Pot of Secrets. TBS. Hairy, Ron Greasely, and Hermione Flanger leave the banquet hall at Hawgfarz feeling bloated, and spend the next two episodes asking the airy spirits of the castle why. They don’t know much, but it turns out that the fat lady in the Sniffindor portrait—who’s getting svelter by the day—provides a crucial clue. It turns out that Lord Merdemor has convinced the house elves to slip exlaxia herb into all sweets served. The herb causes not only noisy disburthenment, but also the attrition of magical powers. Our heroic trio must gird their loins and summon all their intestinal fortitude to enter the Chamber Pot of Secrets, where the Sword of the Blue Flame helps them dispel the villain.
Funk Factor. Nickelodeon. The cameras roll as sets of siblings—nine-year-old Tom and six-year-old Jack in the premier—are given the power to decide when they bathe, brush their teeth, wash their hands, and clean up after themselves. The answer, of course, is practically never. Watch as they happily bait hooks, then dip their hands in pond water for sanitary purposes before digging into a picnic lunch of beanie weenies and saltines. Count how many dogs sleep in their beds. And see how happy they are.
I Really Am Smarter than a Fifth Grader. GSN. Bright but overconfident kids cry as they get pummeled into intellectual pudding by sixth graders who are even smarter. The show is hosted by Jeff Fosnowski, a former semi-pro hockey player caught cheating off a nerd in middle school. He can’t answer the questions either, but has a gift for making fifth graders feel stupid, self-conscious and ugly, especially those with braces or glasses.
CSI: Alabama. CBS. Television’s favorite crime stoppers discover that the south is its own country, separated from the rest of us by the strange misuses of a common language. Imagine their surprise when they discover that they enjoy being in places that lack cell phone coverage! The pilot ends with detectives apprehending a football fan trying to rob Bear Bryant’s tomb to collect DNA samples to clone. The next episode opens with a twist: the judge is a Bama fan who extols the grave robber for his forward thinking.
36 Hours. Fox. Donald Sutherland starts in this slow-moving thriller about a septuagenarian who returns to the secret service after the decimation of his 401(k). He can’t move fast enough to catch a bullet for the commander-in-chief—in fact, he has trouble moving at all—but he pieces together clues faster than Angela Lansbury on a double latte. Unfortunately, he forgets conclusions almost as quickly as he draws them. He gets the job done. It just takes a little longer.
The Spin Factory. Fox News. This is the news show that promises fair and balanced coverage by inviting guests from all shades of the political spectrum to share their takes on current events. Each guest gets eight seconds of air time before the host shouts over them to make snide comments. Those who refuse to agree with him before the end of the segment are derided as socialists and not invited back.
America’s Most Violent Home Videos. WGN. Mixed martial arts fights aren’t violent or realistic enough for you? Tune into America’s Most Violent Home Videos. Watch soccer moms pull each others’ hair out after fighting over a missed offside call. Then there’s the clip of an obese woman beating the hell out of her emaciated drunk boyfriend—first in front of her children, then as the police drive by! And don’t forget everyone’s favorite: cat fight in the cafeteria!
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