EDUCATION

WHAT THEY NEVER TOLD US

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I taught high school beginning in 1976, and except when my sons were little, I taught in private and then public schools until I almost-retired a few years ago. I am grateful forever that I fell into teaching, that I was honored to know and work with thousands of people, many of whom remain my friends. If some wondered if the hearts I sent on birthday greetings were sincere, I can say that every day tears come to my eyes when I think about my students. When they share joy I cheer; when they experience loss, I am saddened.

Most of what I recall about students is tender and delightful and cherished, but there are some incidents that still trouble me. Wednesday evening another high school teacher announced that she wanted to teach a class for future teachers with everything we were never taught in teacher training. We compared notes. 

We cannot save them all. We will make mistakes that haunt us. Students will ask questions we cannot answer and need help we are unqualified to give. Our students will die. They will die in car crashes and of drug overdoses. They will suicide. They will make horrific mistakes and never recover. 

They will test our ability to allow them to be wrong because that is how they want their world to be. It is not our right or responsibility to remake them in our image. When they seem gullible or cruel, I have to step away because it is not my place to stop them.

In a Junior Research Paper, many years ago, a student advocated for the slow death by torture of anyone convicted of a serious crime. That was how the thesis was written: People convicted of a serious crime should be slowly tortured to death. 

Hamid Debashi wrote an Op-Ed on Aljezzerra saying “What the US was doing to the world at large is what Americans now fear Trump might do to the US.”

“Liberal America is now scared that Trump will do to America what America has done to the world. It was just ‘foreign policy’ when America set up lunatic puppet dictators just like Trump to torture, maim, and murder their own people around the globe to protect its ‘national security interest’.

“It was just something ‘Daddy’ did at work. When he came home he was all good, kind, and cuddly—just like Obama. Now the Daddy is about to become a nasty, vicious, domestic abuser—like Trump.

“Trump is the poetic justice of the world. So long as America was only doing to the world at large what America now fears Trump may do to America, there was no outcry. There was consensus. The world deserved what America did to the world.”

Well. I guess the author is speaking to me. I hear him. I know that his outrage and anger are not without foundation. I have tried over the years, as gently as I could manage, to open the eye of students living in what has been a largely white and isolated Oregon community. 

Allow me to be clear. It is not my job to reinforce or alter the deeply held convictions of my students. It is a part of my job to help students understand that there are other people in the world who may not share their view. 

I asked the student with the the death-by-torture thesis for clarification: Define “slow.” At least two or three days. Define “serious crime.” Yes, the student meant the serial killer, but also the robber, mugger, and someone who holds up a bank. I took a breath and pointed out the obvious, that our Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment” and that studies suggest about 1 in 20 murder convictions are in error, AND that the paper needed to address strong opposing positions. In the end, the paper acknowledged that sometimes mistakes are made and an innocent person might be tortured to death, but “that is the price you pay for living in America.” Those words. 

The completed paper followed the assignment. It was weak in either conceding or countering the opposing view, but the student completed required research, drafted, and finished with a good grade. I did not tell the student that the paper was horrifying, though I did confide this judgement to another teacher. 

I will never forget it. 

I was raised to believe in a different America. I was raised to believe that We the People, live together to protect and serve the general Welfare not only of today but of our Posterity. 

I still believe that. It is in our Constitution. And a final word about students who make “horrible mistakes and never recover”—the truth is that most do recover. They might wander in the desert for forty years and then find themselves someplace they never thought would be theirs. They hang on and hang on, and then one day realize they are safe and happy at last. Sometimes being lost is the only way we are found.

TEACHERS AS STUDENTS

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I have not seen and never will see this film. Up the Down Staircase, a novel, was written by a lifelong teacher. Most people who write books about their incredible experience and wisdom as teachers last 1-3 years in the profession before moving on to something that pays better.

A message arrived this morning via email with the image above and the headline below:

Why Teachers Make the Worst Students
As a snarky high school teacher, here’s what I came up with: Teachers don’t make great students.

The author offers a list of reasons teachers are bad students and she is pretty much spot on that they are uninterested in educational or brain theory, have too much to do already and resent being pulled from their classroom, and generally behave like the difficult and only marginally teachable students sitting in the back of their own classrooms. She doesn’t know quite why this is true and asks for help in explaining why teachers are often so unteachable.

It’s a funny post and she uses the complaints of her own students to illustrate common teacher complaints. She’s spot on.

Me? I am generally a sit-at-the-front sort of person with an exceptional academic record. Honest. I read newspapers each day. I have a lot of books in my house, fiction and nonfiction, and I have read those books. “Metacognition” is not an annoying word I dismissed once I knew it was no longer going to appear on a test I had to pass but a concept critical to my profession. I am fascinated by brain theory and willing to stir up curriculum even though it makes more work. I like the work. It’s why I teach.

My own explanations for why some high school teachers are such terrible students:

  1. Teachers are already waaay too busy trying to keep up with classwork to take time out of their day to attend a poor presentation. Liz Oppelt was right on target with this one. This is always true and is the biggest reason for their inattention. They already have a job waiting for them and truly do have more important things to do and most would prefer to be doing those things. Unless the in-service helps make that job easier, they would prefer to be doing their job.  or perhaps . . .
  2. That one teacher would rather not be there at all. There was a teacher in my building who was smart and effective in front of students but also only pretended to grade work and was easily swayed by fellow-travelers who charmed their way through their education. Being clever was enough. Another teacher in my building lay down each day during his prep period and napped or read the newspaper or anything rather than scoring papers or preparing for a class or counseling students. Some rare teachers kept a 40-hour work week schedule. This sort of behavior is not typical among teachers, probably less common than in some other professions. I have known shopkeepers who fail to ring out the registers, health care professionals who never bother to review records, bookkeepers who ignore illogical figures. It is incredibly rare to find a lazy teacher, but this 1-in-100 teacher is texting during in-service presentations. The rare Administrator too.
  3. The presentation is a genuine waste of time. We know bad when we see it because it’s our job. Yes, some presentations are bad. Sometimes really bad. Once in a long while a mandatory presentation is entertaining and held during an in-service week when teachers are in a great mood, even though the lesson doesn’t teach much other than how to play for an hour without actually learning more than four words in Spanish. But more often it is delivered by a hired person who was never a very good teacher to begun with (and maybe that’s why they went to work for the ESD or a private company or administration, jobs that all pay much better and involve shmoozing), or they are presenting material under contract and they do not themselves understand or care about it, or they have forgotten everything they once might have known about teaching and now want to tell about how much they love skiing or about their recent divorce. Or all of the above. (Seriously, this happens.)
  4. Some teachers do not want to be taught. Some teachers are bad students because, frankly, they were never very good students to begin with. (see #2) They are still not any more curious or proactive or ambitious about their subject or teaching as a profession than they were in high school. (Again, I see this in every profession—bankers, contractors, health care providers, small business owners who merely drift through their job.) Some teachers only want to get through their day. (see #1) They are not interested in how to do their job better. If they are teachers, they don’t care about educational theory or brain science now and never were interested because they do not care how people learn and never did. They want activities to keep students busy, or they want to be entertained, which is why they liked the terrible art/Spanish lesson delivered in Spanish that required an hour to teach four words and no art. (See #3)

Some people enter teaching because they thought teaching would be easy. It isn’t. But some small minority of teachers keep no books in their homes, waste time at school, never their profession whenever they walk out the door, and are incurious. They never do the best job they could because that would require too much work.

I love teaching and I love teachers. Most often we are overworked and tired. (see #1 again). We are inattentive because we have more important concerns on our minds as we do our best to educate. Give us something to help us do a better job for our students and you will have our full attention. We are always trying to do a better job.

But seriously, we know a bad presentation when we see one.

 

 

“Weak as women’s magic”

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The spring after my mother’s death, I remained deep in grief and P.C. asked me if I had anything I did with or for my mother that I might do to continue that sense of connection. Her suggestion was wise. I began picking pussywillows for my mother when I was no more than 6. I still do.

I am a feminist deep down into my gut. I inherited my respect for women from both of my parents and from self-respect, and from my own experience that men and woman are more alike than different and equally deserving of respect as human beings.

When I began seriously reading fantasy and science fiction as a teenager and in college, I specifically looked for novels where gender was no longer the most critical fact about characters. This was the late 60s and early 70s, Ms magazine was new of the shelves and I read The Feminine Mystique. My father, a research librarian, complained about women who changed their professional name, scattering their scientific work all over the shelves.

Science fiction and fantasy offered the possibility of riveting stories involving characters interacting in a post-sexist universe. I was there for space travel or fairy princesses. I wanted a future I could live with.  I found novels with powerful men and women, with weak men and women. I found novels with characters.

When I read the line above in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, I put the book down on my lap and thought for a long time about whether I wanted to keep reading. I did. Le Guin got so many things right, I figured she was allowed to have a character speaking from his culture. And she more than repaid my patience in her later work. Further, I admired her ability to change her mind—such a rare thing—and to discuss a change of her view publicly rather than trying to cover it up.

I cannot say the same for other books. I have read or reread a great many children’s and young adult classics as well as the new hits. I worked with teenagers for a long time and wanted to know what my students were reading. I had never read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a girl, and I was shocked at what I found there.

From A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:

“Remember Joanna. Remember Joanna. Francie could never forget her. From that time on, remembering the stoning women, she hated women. She feared them for their devious ways, she mistrusted their instincts. She began to hate them for this disloyalty and their cruelty to each other. Of all the stone-throwers, not one had dared to speak a word for the girl for fear that she would be tarred with Joanna’s brush. The passing man had been the only one who spoke with kindness in his voice.”

“Most women had the one thing in common: they had great pain when they gave birth to their children. This should make a bond that held them all together; it should make them love and protect each other against the man-world. But it was not so. It seemed like their great birth pains shrank their hearts and their souls. They stuck together for only one thing: to trample on some other woman … whether it was by throwing stones or by mean gossip. It was the only kind of loyalty they seemed to have.”

“Men were different. They might hate each other but they stuck together against the world and against any woman who would ensnare one of them.”

At one point Francie and her mother discover that they can bond only over their mutual distrust of women.  I found a drunken father beloved by her daughter, and a mother who scrubbed floors on her knees and was blamed. I never felt that was fully redeemed, though she later says she will make an exception for her mother. I still find the lines quoted above misogynistic. There is the child molester, there is undeniable antisemitism. I could not understand how an Irish woman could write a book so hostile toward Catholics (she prefers the protestant Bible?) and the Irish until I researched the author. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was written by a German-American Protestant about Irish American Catholics and is heavily invested in the prejudices and bigotry of the period.

Yes, other authors are racist. The Jungle Book comes immediately to mind, but most stories in that book are not about race or even people. I had to ignore the racism in Normal McLean’s A River Runs Through It. I grieved for McLean’s remorse. I often find I must overlook bigotry of various kinds, even in books I love. Even when I was young, I noticed that while most of the human heroes in the Oz books were girls, nearly all the non-human ones were male. (The glass cat and Patchwork girl were notable exceptions.)

Lately many children’s books and YA books of the past have come under scrutiny. The Little House series, and Anne of Green Gables. I didn’t read them as a child, but sexism and racism and other forms of bigotry were common in the novels I read as a child. Today, handing books to my grandchildren, I must be more cautious. I have made mistakes and regret them deeply.

I wonder now how I would have handled the bigotry that is so clear to me had I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a child? Would I have noticed and objected or would I have accepted her judgement? I like to think I would have objected. Even though, I was as susceptible as any child to such effectively written messages about the evils and necessary inferiority of myself as a girl. I like to think I would have judged Francie was a fool to side continually with her drunken father against her mother. I like to think I would have objected t that word “ensnare”, that I would been offended at the depiction of racial and religious minorities had I read the book when I was nine yers old.

I would like to think that.

TONI MORRISON

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For many years I taught The Bluest Eye in the second term of Junior English. Chris Gilde taught The Color Purple in the senior year, another incredible novel about the black experience in the United States, and a provocative read, a beautiful read. He played jazz and introduced other cultural elements relevant to the novel.

A tall door rises up into this nothing; its hardware is heavy, secure. No bell invites your hand. So you stand there, perhaps, or move away and, later, sticking your hand in your pocket, you find a key that you know (or hope) fits the lock. Even before the tumblers fall back you know you will find what you hoped to find: a word or two that turns the “not enough” into more; the line or sentence that inserts itself into the nothing. With the right phrase, this sense becomes murky, becomes lit, differently lit. Through that door is a kind of freedom that can frighten governments, sustain others, and rid whole nations of confusion. More important, however, is that the writer who steps through that door with the language of his or her own intellect and imagination enters uncolonized territory, which she can claim as right- fully her own — for a while at least.—The Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison

I wish I could have taught Beloved in the senior year, but I never did. Instead I did my best to introduce the voices I never heard in my own k-12 education—the stories of women and and people of color, Native peoples and immigrants from around the world.

When I was allowed, I taught stories and novels and poetry from many continents. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was life-altering for me and I enjoyed teaching it. If I read it aloud, even less attentive, less skilled students were drawn in. I would have liked to teach the Indian novel Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya, but did not find an opportunity to add it to the curriculum.

The Junior year was traditionally focused on, and at first mandated to focus on U.S. literature. The novels and memoirs I tried were not always successful. Ceremony was a challenge, but A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Black Swan Green were great favorites. I taught and love still Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. My students loved that novel only if I read it aloud. Bright students generally skim more often than read and lost patience for jargon and slang if they had to read it on their own. They had more patience with Their Eyes Were Watching God. For many years students loved The Catcher in the Rye, though I never did quite love it. Ironically, The Bluest Eye was harder and painful, but it was the one novel I was likely to hear about later. Students in college often wrote their thanks for the introduction to Toni Morrison.

I taught four to six novels every year to high school students, at least a dozen short stories, newspaper articles, a month of poems in the spring, and writing, writing about everything. Students completed four to five essays in multiple drafts each term. They wrote an on-demand essay each week. We wrote fiction and memoir and poetry.

An easy class only teaches students they are weak. Demanding their best reveals how grand their best can be.

 

CHOOSING BOOKS

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Yes, you can have too many books. People who believe this is impossible? Well, that’s fine for them. I have thousands of books in my house. My husband has a thousand more of his own. I only read about seventy books a year, plus newspapers online, stories and poetry in journals and, again, online.

Sometimes I read a book I do not like. If it does not “spark joy” I do not have to keep it. I don’t have to keep it if it is one of seven copies of the same title or if I liked it somewhat but will never read it again or if I read the first chapters and felt no desire to continue reading or if have have not and never will read it for the first time.

Even so, I have thousands of books. I have more books than my 17 bookcases can hold.

How do I choose what to read?

COVER. I picked up Gregory Maquire’s Wicked and David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, both while still in hardcover, for their covers. They remain among my all-time favorite reads. I taught Black Swan Green for years. My students loved it too. There are plenty of books I have ordered online for their covers and found myself irritated because the insides did not match the promise of the outsides.

FIRST PAGE. In my hands, I read a bit. Black Swan Green had me laughing halfway down the first page. This is the safest way to choose, in my experience. I have rarely been disappointed after enjoying a five minute introductory read.

AUTHUR. Some you know you are safe. You know you will love the book because you loved the last one and the one before.

DISTRACTION. I began reading science fiction just to appease my father. Foundation is sexist and homophobic, but still . . . all through college I read SF. I chose books written by women or with a woman on the cover, so long as she was not being carried a la Conan. The Women of Wonder story collections edited by Pamela Sargent introduced me to more authors. I read SF to find a world in which my gender was not all that mattered about me.

ASSIGNMENT. I detested Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaid Singing required for a class by a wonderful instructor, but after considerable struggle, I was able to respectfully and usefully identify what bothered me in May Sarton’s novel. Sometimes people hand me exactly the right book at exactly the right moment. Things Fall Apart was probably the best book I was assigned as an undergrad. Though I never warmed to the recommended stories of Flannery O’Connor in my masters program, I assign “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and both versions of Carver’s “Beginners” and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and allow my students to judge for themselves.

RECOMMENDATION. I loved Middlemarch recommended by a former student and I’ve read it twice. Toni Morrison came to me as a friend’s recommendation. I have read and reread Patrick O’Brian’s 20-volume series. Currently I am in the middle of the seventh book. It is as good or better this time around. Aubrey and Maturan deserve a full shelf all to themselves and they have one.

CHANCE. I don’t remember how I found some of the books on my shelves, the ones that stay. I saw Dorianne Laux’s chapbook What We Carry at Powell’s turned out on the shelf and bought it after reading the title poem. I picked up Black Swan Green and Wicked for their covers.

RE-VISION. I change my mind. The first time I read Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior I gave up less than halfway through. Four years later, I picked up a different edition and loved it. It was not until I arrived at the exact page where I had previously abandoned the book that I remembered how disappointing I’d found it the first time and somehow it became brilliant in th years since. I read but failed to be particularly impressed the first time I read Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung” in Best American Short Stories. A few years later, in a class exercise involving reading short stories, a student picked it out as her favorite. It won over the entire class and more than a decade later I wrote my critical essay for my MFA on that story.

The ones that fail to stay?

  • Did I enjoy reading this book?
  • Did it teach me something?
  • Do I remember the story?
  • Will I reread it?
  • Do I know someone else who will enjoy it?

It’s always about choosing.

WELLNESS

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Early in the first episode of season 14 of Silent Witness, a hospital doctor completely loses it as he observes patients in an outdoor lounge smoking dope and cigarettes and drinking beer and soda. He knocks smokes and cans out of their hands, shrieking: “What is the point?!” They will not regain health if they continue their unhealthy behavior.

There are all sorts of magical diets and pills available for people looking to live healthier lives. In the mean time, they avoid addressing the obvious: sleep, diet, exercise, focus. Someone I know ate a restaurant salad, had an “allergic reaction,” and concluded she was responding to tiny bits of cheese she ate by mistake. Maybe it was the lettuce? About 20% of E.coli infections come from leafy greens. Most of us cannot be troubled to change our behavior unless we are offered that change as a near-magical cure for what ails us.

Sometimes we are depressed because our lives are depressing. We can’t always do anything about that. Sometimes only time will heal us—everyone is depressed when a loved one dies. Taking a pill might not help at all, though we have faith in pills.

Improved health for most of us is simpler than medication. It might come down to getting enough sleep, eating better, avoiding soft drinks and alcohol, taking regular walks, and stilling our minds.

Until there were anti-depressants and an irrational percentage of Americans making Big Pharma billions, nearly everyone with clinical depression recovered with or without treatment within a few months. Medication today has its role, but most anti-depressants need a couple of weeks or months to become effective. While we wait, we might try taking better care of ourselves. This might not be the only answer, but it is a good place to start. And for most of us, it is exactly what we need.

A minimum of eight hours of sleep a night was considered normal for at least a hundred years. That recommendation has dropped to a range of seven to ten hours, and may continue to drop in response to the amount of time we actually sleep. We want to believe our sleep patterns are “normal” and theories seem to evolve in order to support our desires. Is it natural for anyone to “need” only a few hours of sleep? Perhaps not.

A hundred years ago and more, we slept more because it was dark at night. Today we sleep less because we are on our devices with electric lighting. For a long time the belief about sleep was that it kept human beings out of trouble. Except for our intelligence, the reasoning went, we are a harmless and relatively defenseless species. We do not see well in the dark compared to most predators. Curling up someplace safe and sleeping, biologists assumed, kept us out of trouble. They were wrong.

Some medications, advancing age, and brain damage all impact sleep. But sleep does a great deal more than keep us out of trouble. Research into Daylight Savings Time revealed a connection between that one lost hour of sleep and an uptick in heart attacks. We now know that the various stages of sleep allow us to sort and save information (remember), cope with daytime concerns, repair the synapses in the brain, and heal. Lack of deep sleep contributes to dementia. Lack of REM sleep makes us fractious. Lack of sleep can lead to weight gain by making us hungrier, but also has an impact on depression, anxiety, and suicidality. “Add the above physical and mental health consequences up, and a scientifically validated link becomes easier to accept: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.” (The Guardian)

Get your sleep. Stop eating a few hours before bed. Turn off devices. Avoid caffeine and other stimulants. Make the room dark and go to sleep at a decent hour.

What we eat makes a difference too. It is amazing to me sometimes how readily people accept that sugar impacts the behavior of small children, but how resistant these same people often are to the impact of what they eat and drink on their own mental state. Sugar, too much meat, refined grains, alcohol and other drugs—all these impact mood.

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables.” advised Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He’s right about that. Though Pollan does not have the formal training to be considered an expert in nutrition, he has earned his prestige. Because I am largely vegetarian, people like to call themselves “carnivores” when we eat together. No. No, we clearly are not. Look in the mouth of a cat, research the structure of their digestive system. Cats are carnivores. Humans do not have the mouth, teeth, digestive chemistry, or other physiogomy to survive on a meat-based diet. Peoples in the far north such as the Inuit can because 98% of them have a genetic mutation allowing them to exist on fish and mammal flesh. They are genetically adapted to the cold and a meat-centered diet.  For most human beings, nothing about us is adapted to eating that way, though many of us have one of the several genetic mutations allowing us to consume milk after childhood.

Wheat has been part of the human diet for at least ten thousand years. We have been cooking foods for at least hundred thousand years. (There is no physical proof yet, but many anthropologists and evolutionary biologists believe that cooking foods, especially foods that are easier to digest such as legumes, is the reason humans became the smarter, smaller-toothed species we are today.) The wheat found today is somewhat genetically different from what our very distant ancestors consumed. The animals we consume today are also very different genetically, far removed from what our distant ancestors consumed. They are also fed and raised differently. There is nothing remotely Paleolithic about today’s beef, pork, or chicken.

Of more significance is that most of our food (not to mention our water and air) is contaminated. All foods, domesticated plants and animals, are weighted down with chemicals our ancestors could not have known. Pesticides, herbicides, and broad-spectrum poisons that were invented only in the last century. Our drinking water in major cities has trace amount of antibiotics, anti-depressants, and other chemicals as well. You already know about the lead.

Eat better. Save sugar for a rare special occasion. Avoid alcohol and refined foods, packaged foods, “foods” containing chemicals, most meats and conventionally raised food.

There is overwhelming evidence that regular exercise results in improved physical and mental health, less disease and longer life. Fifteen minutes a day could do it.

Meditation or even just sitting quietly for a few minutes each day lowers blood pressure and relieves all sorts of symptoms. The mental rest disconnects us from day-to-day stresses. Turn off social media and stop stewing over things we cannot control. “Relax!” they tell us.  We hear it all the time, and it is excellent advice.

Social interaction is healthy and so is reading a cheerful book. Maybe turn off the news, social media, the gloomy or horrific Netflix movie. Watch something funny. Read a hopeful novel (honest, it’s a proven-effective therapy), and refuse to discuss politics with your raging-reactionary uncle.

Getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, moderate exercise, and giving our emotions a clear break from day-to-day stresses and demands absolutely result in improved mental and physical health. Seriously. No doubt about this at all. Trusting that making such healthy changes also triggers hope and hope is another essential. It is likely the primary benefit of most anti-depressants. Taking that little pill each day triggers hope that we might feel better tomorrow. That impact will wear off if the problem is actually untreated mental or physical exhaustion, or if the underlying problem is grief. Everyone feels depression and reveals the symptoms of clinical depression after a beloved family member dies. Such grief mostly needs time for a cure.

SLEEP. DIET. EXERCISE. REST. TIME.

All this is hard if we are depressed. I get that. Depression means it is hard to care much about anything. It’s hard to get out of bed. But if we can care enough to take ourselves to a doctor, perhaps we can care enough to listen to soothing music or take a walk, eat a little better or have a conversation with a friend.

“Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, has written that the chemical-imbalance theory, popularized in the eighties and nineties, ‘created the perception that the long term, even life-long use of psychiatric drugs made sense as a logical step.’ But psychiatric drugs are brought to market in clinical trials that typically last less than twelve weeks. Few studies follow patients who take the medications for more than a year. Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke, who chaired the task force for the fourth edition of the DSM, in 1994, told me that the field has neglected questions about how to take patients off drugs—a practice known as ‘de-prescribing.’ He said that ‘de-prescribing requires a great deal more skill, time, commitment, and knowledge of the patient than prescribing does.’ He emphasizes what he called a ‘cruel paradox: there’s a large population on the severe end of the spectrum who really need the medicine’ and either don’t have access to treatment or avoid it because it is stigmatized in their community. At the same time, many others are ‘being overprescribed and then stay on the medications for years.’ There are almost no studies on how or when to go off psychiatric medications, a situation that has created what he calls a ‘national public-health experiment.’ ”—“Bitter Pill” The New Yorker

We have survived as a species for 200,000 years, and we’ve had anti-depressants for only the past few decades. Today, one American in five is taking medication for something no one had access to until recently. Suicide rates have been going up instead of down ever since the introduction of anti-depressants. Let that sink in.

Toward the end of the episode, Nikki is exhibiting symptoms, which a doctor diagnoses as depression: “My soul has the flu.” As it turns out, her brain is not sick nor is her chemistry out of order. Something in her life causes the problem. She experiences anxiety and sadness, and even depression as part of the normal range of emotions every human experiences in life. She does not need medication. Mostly Nikki needs some sleep, a better diet, regular exercise, some mental rest and decompression, and a little time to recover.

We all do.

 

 

LOVING JONI

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As a child I hated green olives and blue cheese. Today these two foods are among my favorites. Coffee. And napping—once resisted absolutely. Brushing my teeth. Boredom. I have changed my mind many times and about a lot of things.

Sometimes what we love and who we are seem to be at odds. There is a disconnect that might last for an instant. Perhaps for a lifetime. Sometimes that relationship between aspiration and daily life shifts and our point of view shifts with it.

Zadie Smith has written of this in an article in The Guardian, with an unfortunate title that uses the words “political correctness.” (I have been at pains to explain to students that the term “politically correct” is a pejorative.) Smith insists that change is inevitable and desirable.

“In an essay in her collection, Feel Free, she investigated one such change in herself, when she fell in love with the music of Joni Mitchell, a singer she had despised when she was a mixed-race teenager growing up on a London housing estate. ‘The reason for hating Joni Mitchell was that I didn’t listen to classical or “white” music,’ said Smith.

“ ‘Then I had an epiphany, and suddenly realised that her voice was beautiful. It’s a responsibility to be as open as you possibly can to the world as an aesthetic object.’ ”—The Guardian

Smith speaks about risking characters in her novels who are dissimilar to herself, and the risk of “collective identity.” That last is a new term to me, but Gary immediately recognized it as a term used in social psychology, also known as “referent group.” That is the term I learned.

“Polletta and Jasper defined collective identity as ‘an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connections with a broader community, category, practice, or institution.’ ”—Wikipedia

The term has changed, the existence of identity has not gone away.

Joni Mitchell is Canadian, famous, a musician, a visual artist, and very ill. She is still alive and I am deeply grateful for her music. No one in my college writing class had ever heard of her. I played “A Case of You” for them and they were unmoved, blank and staring.

Maybe later.

I knew I should have played one of the early ones they were more likely to know. Instead I played the song from Blue because I heard her debut that album in Seattle back in the day. And because although I do not like change any more than anyone, I immediately fell in love with that particular reinvention of Joni Mitchell. “Michael from Mountains” is still stunning, but I moved on to new sounds right with Joni Mitchell.

We change our minds. We reinvent ourselves, and we sometimes do this over and over as experience and people around us push us along. Such changes are not always desirable. PTSD might inspire unwarranted responses to previously harmless situations or people. But growth is a complicated thing. We might need to twist with the wind or bend around obstacles in search of the light.

We are allowed. We are allowed to be ourselves and for that self to be re-framed throughout a long life as many people, as Chicana and then Latina, as artist and then song-writer, as woman, citizen, ally, professional, parent, sister, daughter, as elder, crone, as they, and ancient. Our referent group is not stable throughout our life because we ourselves change and find connections, we shift, slide, and reform.

We are allowed.

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unAMERICAN

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

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We have been enjoying the BBC production of Victoria. At the same time, I am mystified by Americans’ obsession with royalty.

The radical Chartist Movement is featured in the current Victoria series. It is well to appreciate that what these people asked for should not sound radical to Americans. They were asking for what seems perfectly rational and reasonable today. They asked for rights we should take for granted. That anyone would dispute these demands sounds about as outdated and absurd as arguing whether women have souls. (Yes, this happened repeatedly, and even in America.)

The Chartists’ six main demands were:
• votes for all men;
• equal electoral districts;
• abolition of the requirement that Members of Parliament be property owners;
• payment for M.P.s;
• annual general elections; and.
• the secret ballot.

It’s all taken for granted today. (Payment for M.P.s would have allowed ordinary working men to run for office without starving. Wealthy men who then held these positions could afford to attend Parliament because they had no job; they were rich.) At that time, rich men had complete control beyond the Crown. This was considered right and proper because they believed a person’s position in society was ordained by God. If you were born a tenant farmer, God meant for you to work hard all your life and to do as you were told. If you were born to an aristrocratic family, you were supposed to be respected, bowed to, and to be the ones doing the telling.

This is not an American value. We’re not supposed to believe that some people matter more than others at birth. The Declaration’s insistence that “all men are created equal” was a radical departure from Old World God-ordained dogma. Americans are not supposed to believe that some people are born inherently more important or privileged  than the rest of us.

And yet, according to a recent headline, America’s favorite redhead is a British prince?

Why do we care?

It is unAmerican.

Is it a harmless fantasy? I refuse to believe that such assumption of inherited entitlement is “harmless.” Indeed this belief undermines the very ideals of every modern democratic society. Yet we cling to this pretty story, especially for girls, this notion that the story of a pretty princess, born to power matters.

The princess stories, even the more empowered princess stories are unAmerican. Why feed this propaganda to our daughters? The “princess” is a woman who, by accident of birth alone, matters more, is valued more, who possesses greater power and influence and personal importance.

Did you miss it?

That’s unAmerican.

Americans are not supposed to stand for such nonsense. We’re not supposed to believe that some people are born to rank and privilege. Our nation is founded on the belief that we are all equal at birth. Our destiny is not infinite, but neither is it defined by our birth. Someone, please, inform Disney.

True, our founders, most of them, even the ones who wrote the words, believed some people mattered more than others, and those founders had been born to superior rank and actively perpetuated their own privilege. But still . . . in theory, they recognized a better world. They recognized ideals beyond their current existence.

And in that better world they imagined, a Queen is merely a wealthy woman, poorly educated, and participating in an archaic system of privilege and posturing. Princes are mere men who have done nothing personally noteworthy other than being born.

And the “princesses” in those stories? However decorated and enlightened, however brave or capable, however dressed or redressed, whatever their race or ethnicity—they are mere girls, never even women, just pretty female children born to rank.

It is a subtle indoctrination. It is propaganda.

And that, my dears, is unAmerican.

It is fundamentally wrong.

BE WHAT WE EXPECT

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment
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The Gillette commercial announces the company’s revised motto: Instead of “The best a man can get” they urge men to be the best they can be. The response from a narrow group of men has been nearly hysterical. They accuse the commercial of everything from unrealistic to emasculating. Most people I know, including men, including men actively hostile to feminism, find the commercial empowering.

One man tweeted in response to a furious “let men be men Let boys be boys” pundit: “It’s about balance. No one is suggesting men can’t be men. It’s about being a good person as a man. Historical behavior is no longer in tune with todays equality. You can be a tough guy, a manly man but still a man with values and appropriate behavior to help guide your kids.”

What we demand from ourselves is dependent on a lot of things, including what we are told about ourselves as men and women.

Girls have been outperforming boys in school for a long time, but this somehow magically swaps around . . . not in gradeschool or high school. Not even in college where women are still doing better. But somehow, in interviews and promotions, despite decades of women outperforming men, men abruptly do better. There are plenty of explanations for this. Nature or nurture? Natural aptitude? Inherent differences? Self-confidence?

I read a historical review that insists women have always outperformed men in school going back over a hundred years. (Anecdotal evidence from my life and my family supports that.) I think we only began to worry about this in the past 30 years because of popular books like John Gray’s Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Venus and Susan Faludi’s work. The assumption from some studies is that women were not actually smarter but simply socialized to be “nicer” in school, which is not so different from the claim in this article.

My psychiatrist friend says it’s hormones.

The New York Times report points to something simpler. “The study adds to a growing body of research suggesting that boys’ underperformance is not because of anything innate to boys. Instead, it seems, it’s largely because of something external: their school environments and peer influences.”

“Girls are encouraged to be diligent, cooperative and ambitious — all things that serve them well in school. Boys are more sensitive than girls to environmental influences, according to a variety of research, and they feel pressure to be strong, tough and athletic. They get the message that doing well in school is not masculine, social scientists say. Even in peer groups that prize good grades, it’s considered uncool to seem to try hard to earn them.”

The gender gap, with girls performing ahead of their male peers, historically reverses as the children age. After more than a decade of encouraging girls to be perfect students, we discourage girls from being smart. My brother used to talk about the gender gap in math in the US and how in Japan at the time the gap was reversed. It was assumed in the US that girls were “not good at Math” and they fulfilled that expectation. In Japan, Math was assumed to be mechanical and repetitive and exactly what girls were good at, and so the girls did well in Maths. In the 80s I would sub for the Math department and there would be no girls taking higher math classes at all at SHS. It was shocking. The head of the department in those days assured me that girls were naturally weak in abstract thinking. I assured him I had been in the 99%tile when I was tested.

Despite beginning Pre-Algebra when I was 10 and Algebra the following year, no one blinked when I stopped taking math my Sophomore year of high school. I often think how differently my life might have gone if everyone had not assumed I would eventually marry and be supported by a husband.

In my experience, I see how boys and girls receive vastly different treatment and expectations. A colleague with twins treated them differently from the instant they were born, and I was shocked he failed to even notice. The girl, despite being pounds heavier at birth than her brother was handed around like a fragile jewel. The boy, despite being underweight and subjectively fragile was passed about like a sack of flour. This is about more than pink and blue blankets.

We train them young to be what we expect and want them to be. Both boys and girls do their best to satisfy our expectations.

This may be changing.

Personal relationships are indeed personal, but our existence as people, as members of human society, should guarantee a certain level of respect and absolute justice. Not everyone benefits or suffers in identical and visible ways from sexism, but I would hope we all value the right of each individual, regardless of demographics, to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. At least one study of relationships between men and women over the past 50 years suggests that our expectations are changing. The assumption used to be that the man in a heterosexual marriage must have a superior education, but a “key finding is that the relative stability of marriages between educational equals has increased. These results are consistent with a shift away from rigid gender specialization toward more flexible, egalitarian partnerships and provide an important counterpoint to claims that progress toward gender equality in heterosexual relationships has stalled.”

That should mean that we are allowed to find out our personal interests, strengths, and weaknesses instead of having them arbitrarily defined for us.

KIDS TODAY

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

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I am ill. Sick. Not sick as in vomiting, which is what that word means in England. This is not England. I have a cold. I have not been this sick in almost five years.

The last time I had my morning walk was a week ago. I have been outside the house once since last Thursday, that was to visit the Walk-In Clinic in Seaside. My lungs and ears and sinuses are clear. I have a bad cold, a fever, major congestion, and until I took the NP’s prescribed Cherratussin (generic Robutissin) Sunday night, I had not slept more than an hour or two at a time for several days. The NP told me to go home, stay home, and get some rest. She capped it. REST.

Yes, I am become an old person talking about health.

My country is not so very healthy either, but there are hopeful signs. Gillette announced their new slogan is not about the best a man can get, but the best a man can be. See it for yourself. If you judged the content of the PSA by the outraged, even hysterical responses posted by a tiny but highly vocal minority of men, you would think it was an emasculating horror. Instead, even a former student who declares himself “a harsh critic of feminism” finds it perfectly reasonable. So do I. As another man I do not even know tweeted: “It’s about balance. No one is suggesting men can’t be men. It’s about being a good person as a man. Historical behavior is no longer in tune with today’s equality. You can be a tough guy, a manly man but still a man with values and appropriate behavior to help guide your kids.”

A friend posted: “I think some object to the idea that there is even a problem that needs to be addressed, and if that isn’t privilege, I don’t know what is.”

The first really powerful statement I read of the need for men to be the change was written by a man.

Times change. I am frequently asked how students have changed since I began teaching. I suppose I most object to the assumption that teenagers have changed. Teenagers are people, just like everyone. They come from a variety of backgrounds, have suffered a variety traumas, are blessed with a variety of natural gifts and of earned ones. They are teenagers—pinched between childhood and adulthood. It is still a terrible time where individuals enjoy little power, suffer screaming hormones, and possess no clear sense of what is coming. I was not a particularly happy teenager, and like students even today, I was assured this was the best time of my life and I should be enjoying it! Dear heavens, you mean it’s all down hill from here? I knew it for a lie, and I frequently assure my students that this is probably not the best time of their life. They look relieved when I say that. They are not so different. There are few changes. They are people. Sometimes they are dense as bricks and sometimes they are scared.

They have cell phones.

At my school, the economic advantages of some are not more marked than they were 40 years ago when I first subbed for my own former Junior High School Science teacher. Perhaps the bigotry of some is more openly condemned? Perhaps they are more aware of injustice? Perhaps they are less likely to avoid coming to school because of bullying?

Perhaps not? But perhaps.

As I say, I am ill today, my ramblings are not reliable. My personal list of grievances and gripes is long, but I will not rant. We all have our disappointments.

So here is what I think about my students. My students are not snowflakes. They are not fragile flowers. They need to be more curious. They need more skepticism and less cynicism. They need critical thinking skills. Someone should convince them that not all parents or teachers or politicians are right or even their enemies. Something should matter to them more than games and sport. They should read enough news to understand it. They should have moral goals and beautiful dreams and they should work hard to see those dreams bloom.

It’s a lot to ask, but they are strong. They need the confidence that genuine accomplishment can give. They are young to have that.