tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-58279685886434157872024-03-18T22:49:14.498-05:00Balancing JanePhD student. Educator. Mother. Wife. Feminist. This blog aims to shine light on how these roles (and others) intertwine.Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.comBlogger853125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-87551045411327800722021-02-06T09:38:00.008-06:002021-02-06T09:43:50.808-06:00"Tetrising": Facing My Addiction to Busy <p>I do this thing. Sometimes I completely lose sight of myself as a human being with limits to things like how many hours I can reasonably stay awake or how often I might need to eat or the fact that I may benefit from just chilling out for a few hours. </p><p>I don't do this thing <i>all </i>the time, but I do this thing repeatedly. In fact, it's on a pretty predictable cycle at this point. </p><p>I call it "tetrising," and I think it's time I face it down. </p><p><br /></p><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ffa400;">What is Tetrising?</span> </h1><div>"Tetrising" is my term for the state of mind I get into when I get satisfaction — delight even — from cramming as many things I can into a short window of time. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBphLb6P28g7TQyg6c6fU6b7UgIA2lsko7LUkL7b9UzlIl3C700LRImwMG_V3-a_QufU2aHSTUIz3-PvWxDYZ1rWEc9_zHp1IdJVRGUm0DAekcVI9jqoH_graezXI7xaikYYwozcBDllE/s2048/a-p-o-l-l-o-4k5tTFhTaLY-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="an hourglass with white sand falling" border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1365" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBphLb6P28g7TQyg6c6fU6b7UgIA2lsko7LUkL7b9UzlIl3C700LRImwMG_V3-a_QufU2aHSTUIz3-PvWxDYZ1rWEc9_zHp1IdJVRGUm0DAekcVI9jqoH_graezXI7xaikYYwozcBDllE/w213-h320/a-p-o-l-l-o-4k5tTFhTaLY-unsplash.jpg" width="213" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Why, yes, I <i>can</i> write your last-minute blog post within 12 hours (I've got a ghostwriting gig). Yes, I <i>can</i> lead a book discussion <i>and</i> create the written materials for it. Yes, I <i>can</i> teach another class. Yes, I <i>can</i> make five meals to last us through the week and also clean the bathroom that's been neglected because of all the other "yes I can's" I said earlier. </div><div><br /></div><div>I <i>can</i> do all those things, but when I'm tetrising, I do not stop to ask myself if I <i>should</i>, and I never, ever stop to ask myself if I <i>want</i> to do them. </div><div><br /></div><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ffa400;">So You're a Pushover, Then?</span></h1><div>Before you start thinking you've got me figured out, that I'm clearly someone who has no boundaries, a people-pleaser who just can't say no, I have to stop you. That's not it. </div><div><br /></div><div>I <i>do</i> have a tendency to stay stuck in commitments long after they're probably good for me out of a sense of "must see it through," but <a href="https://stlouis.momcollective.com/health-and-wellness/i-dont-need-help-saying-no-i-need-to-say-yes-with-limits/" target="_blank">that's a different topic</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Tetrising isn't even about the other people asking me to do things, and most of the requests are perfectly reasonable — even kind, considerate, and meaningful — on their own. This is not a case of people taking advantage of me or me not being able to say "no." </div><div><br /></div><div>It's that I truly get a rush from making it all fit and getting it all done. There's a certain addiction to filling up my schedule until it should be impossible and then getting it all done anyway. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's like only having a single line left on Tetris and getting that much-needed long piece to flip and land just right. The relief of watching it all clear is euphoric, and I seek out that rush of endorphins. </div><div><br /></div><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ffa400;">Why Don't You Stop Doing That?</span></h1><div>I've vowed to stop tetrising in the past. </div><div><br /></div><div>As much as I love the rush, I know that it has negative impacts. During the height of the window in which I've packed in <i>way</i> too many things, I'm irritated and grumpy, and I have people I love who don't deserve to deal with me at my worst when my worst was brought out by my own bad decisions. </div><div><br /></div><div>It also seems boundless. Sometimes I think I'm trying to find the limit. How much is too much? At what point will I not be able to get it done? Sometimes I tell myself that once I find the limit, it will stop — this is all just about seeking knowledge, understanding my own abilities. </div><div><br /></div><div>But that's not really true, either. I carefully take on tasks that I know, deep down inside, will get completed. I will never find the limit. </div><div><br /></div><div>Especially right now — when I'm self-employed and we've been almost completely locked down because of the pandemic and everything happens from home — it can be really hard to see the boundaries between work, home, play, school, rest, fun, etc. It all blurs, and blurry worlds allow for a lot more tetrising. </div><div><br /></div><div>I have no boss or job description that defines what is "enough" work. I have no shift between settings that tells me when I've left a work space and gone into a different one. I have no break in day-to-day activities that provides much needed definition. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCIzcfj2WXhrXeXd8EUjavZHhZaI9BK_m1dyU5KHl7WTmwSdSs4hIzUaysqqk5GN7iidVCs2fx7ml64vM_OuOp3kFHNHBavs7RrRYCkfOgorqkcr5l46THD74uTjf-V3GA3fDlokk0ufg/s2048/hello-i-m-nik-lWIM6FXIfnI-unsplash.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="handheld game consoled with a Tetris game cartridge" border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1371" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCIzcfj2WXhrXeXd8EUjavZHhZaI9BK_m1dyU5KHl7WTmwSdSs4hIzUaysqqk5GN7iidVCs2fx7ml64vM_OuOp3kFHNHBavs7RrRYCkfOgorqkcr5l46THD74uTjf-V3GA3fDlokk0ufg/w214-h320/hello-i-m-nik-lWIM6FXIfnI-unsplash.jpg" width="214" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>The question for whether or not something went on the calendar became simply "Can I physically complete this task or not?" That's no way to live. </div><div><br /></div><h1 style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: #ffa400;">What are You Going to Do About It?</span></h1><div>I was talking to my counselor about this, finally. I had it on my list to bring up for at least four sessions (and we only meet every 6 weeks or so, so it was a long time), but I knew that if I said out loud what I was doing to myself, I would have to stop doing it, and I didn't want to lose my rush. </div><div><br /></div><div>She helped me come up with a plan that works with who I am. I got to make some guidelines about what was or was not an acceptable task to accept. </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWfm_J_EvF4LtXNskHy1HRc_zN-rgzzc8Yk-Yqs3tj5dntuxT2pzgiJFlb9pS0_Amq7fuR5Mv55LgtBHPbDv5pkq0XHKpzlCUyZRXFXCNS5nXKnEQY4vH2c18OnliKmuc2iIGmKWJq378/s2048/IMG_9824.HEIC" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Image of five scheduling rules taped to the side of a computer monitor" border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWfm_J_EvF4LtXNskHy1HRc_zN-rgzzc8Yk-Yqs3tj5dntuxT2pzgiJFlb9pS0_Amq7fuR5Mv55LgtBHPbDv5pkq0XHKpzlCUyZRXFXCNS5nXKnEQY4vH2c18OnliKmuc2iIGmKWJq378/w240-h320/IMG_9824.HEIC" width="240" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>They're now taped to the side of my computer monitor, right where I have to click to open up my Google calendar when I'm scheduling something new. </div><div><br /></div><div>It made me so uncomfortable to make these guidelines. I could hear my inner voice: <i>but what if. . .? couldn't we sometimes make an exception for . . .? that might mean saying no to . . .? </i></div><div><br /></div><div>But I stayed firm. These are reasonable expectations, and I — the real person who has to actually complete all those tasks to make the tetrising happen — deserve them. </div>Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-61280288672246889892019-04-04T22:26:00.000-05:002019-04-04T22:26:22.692-05:00I Guess I'm Post-Ac Now?As you all (all five of you still reading this blog that I update like four times a year now. HI!) already know, I was <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2017/12/reflections-on-losing-your-dream-job.html" target="_blank">laid off</a> from my full-time professorship almost exactly a year ago. As I've been trying to put my life back together, I <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2019/02/on-expectations-falling-short-being.html" target="_blank">kind of lost it</a>—it being my sense of purpose, focus, and overall identity.<br />
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While I have been managing to keep it all together in a superficial sense (by, like, you know doing the things I have to do every day to keep my bills paid and my kids fed and whatnot), I haven't felt like myself for a long time now.<br />
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About two months ago, I started seeing a counselor (a thing I should have done earlier, but I was still reeling from my <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2016/04/i-broke-up-with-my-therapist-over.html" target="_blank">previous bad experience</a>). Today, I think our session led to a bit of a breakthrough on just where my current struggles are rooted.<br />
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See, I have <i>always</i> had a plan. I went straight from being valedictorian of my high school class with my "most likely to succeed" title worn like a suit of armor into a B.A. into my M.A. and then finishing my Ph.D. while working full-time in an academic career that had clearly delineated steps. I was climbing the staircase well. I was ticking off the boxes and knew exactly when I would be up for associate professor and exactly when I would be up for full professor. I knew exactly what I was going to do in between to ensure that I would attain each of those titles.<br />
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It's not just the long-term track of academia that fit me so well, though. Every <i>day</i> was planned out in advance. I created the document that ensured it at the start of every semester when I made a syllabus that had each class period mapped out. I knew when I would be grading papers. I knew when they would be due back to students. I knew what topics I would cover on each day. I knew when I would hold office hours.<br />
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Sure, there were always little changes that needed to be made to adjust for life. A snow day could throw things off kilter for a week. A sick day could push back the paper due date. But, for the most part, I always knew where I needed to be, and I was always there. In my daily life, my monthly life, my yearly life, I could see the sign posts plotted out—distant but solidly visible—for literally the rest of my professional life. <br />
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This is where it's important to stop and tell you a quick story.<br />
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Once, my husband and I were chatting, and I was looking over my big, beautiful planner. I sighed happily and said something like, "Looking at this planner is the one thing that can make me feel calm when it's all going crazy." <br /><br />He was shocked, "Really?! My planner does nothing but stress me out!" <br /><br />It was a clear, foundational difference in the way we viewed the world. He looks at a planner and sees endless tasks to accomplish and time slipping away. I look at a planner and see order and undeniable proof that it can all get done and will therefore all be okay.<br />
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Planning is part of who I am as a person. It's as natural to me as breathing and (so it turns out) perhaps as essential.<br />
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I was dealing with grief over the loss of my career. I was dealing with anger over the way that it ended. I was dealing with panic over my sudden financial uncertainty. Sometimes I still get flashes of those things. <br /><br />But they are not what has me here, a year later, spinning in circles and seeking therapy. Those things all make sense to me, and I have the comfort in knowing they will all—in one way or another—run their course and fade.<br />
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What is not fading, though, is the sense of being untethered. Adrift. Unstructured. Unplanned.<br />
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In fact, that sense recently got a lot worse when I decided to give up my adjunct professor position. This was without a doubt the most logical choice in terms of financial benefit, time constraints, and potential for professional growth. It was, by all accounts and months of obsessively considering the options, the <i>right</i> choice.<br />
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But it was also the ripping down of the only remaining pillars of external structure in my world. When they were gone, I felt immediate freedom. I could now spend my time doing exactly what I wanted.<br />
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Then I took a good, hard look at that freedom. It went on forever. Into the horizon. With no sign posts to tell me what to do tomorrow or next month or two years from now.<br />
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This, ultimately, is what being post-ac means to me. It means freedom so vast it is paralyzing. It means staring out across the barren landscape and picturing all of the structures I could erect there but still craving a bit of the comfort of an ivory tower that's nowhere to be seen. Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-45645998445407156572019-02-04T21:22:00.001-06:002019-02-04T21:22:46.453-06:00On Expectations (Falling Short, Being Kind, and Recognizing Reality) My goodness. I am out of shape. And not taking care of myself. And it's been going on way too long. <br /><br />I've been trying to figure out how to write this post without it sounding like 1) I am asking for a pity party or 2) I am making a list of excuses. <br /><br />The latter is easier to deal with. I don't have anything to excuse. I don't owe anyone my fitness or even my health. I don't need to explain my own choices to anyone except myself, and I know that and believe it.<br />
<br />As for the pity party, I'm really not trying to do that, either. First of all, the time for pity (if it was warranted) has passed. Secondly, I don't think what I am about to write makes me pitiful. I'm sharing it not because I'd like pity but because I suspect I'm not alone in the (potentially fatal) flaw of not being honest with myself about what's really going on, and without an honest accounting of the realities around us, how are we supposed to make any real progress?<br />
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So, here's the thing. There was a point where I was pretty fit. (I was never thin, but this isn't about that.) There was a point (not even that long ago), when I was routinely running 10k, lifting weights multiple times a week, playing roller derby, and regularly getting 15,000 steps a day without even really trying. I didn't get winded climbing two flights of stairs, and I didn't have trouble getting up off the floor after sitting down to read a book with my daughter.<br />
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I was, looking back on it, taking care of myself pretty well. I drank water, ate vegetables, and generally did the things I was supposed to do to take care of this one body I get.<br />
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Somewhere along the way, I stopped doing that. I stopped running. I stopped eating well. I stopped lifting weights. I stopped even walking with much regularity or intention. And I started doing some other things. I started panting at the top of stairs, struggling to get up off the floor, and generally feeling like I wasn't treating myself very kindly.<br />
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So, today, I stopped and really tried to figure out what happened. That's when I came to a realization. Here's a simplified timeline of what I recognized: <br />
<ul>
<li><b>June 2014- </b>I broke my ankle and had to have surgery to put it back together. I wasn't even allowed to bear weight until August. It took a lot of physical therapy and struggle to be able to flex my ankle and rebuild my muscles, and I wasn't truly back to full physical function for almost a year. All the while, I was writing a dissertation. </li>
<li><b>June 2015- </b>I got pregnant. Still writing a dissertation. </li>
<li><b>July 2015</b>- I miscarried that pregnancy. And dissertations don't write themselves. </li>
<li><b>August 2015- </b>I got pregnant again.<b> </b>I was put on exercise restrictions due to some minor complications. But those restrictions didn't extend to dissertation writing. </li>
<li><b>November 2015- </b>I successfully defended my dissertation. </li>
<li><b>May 2016- </b>I had a baby. Then I started experiencing symptoms of post-partum depression and anxiety. I had daily panic attacks for most of the summer that eventually spaced out to weekly, then monthly, then occasionally. </li>
<li><b>August 2017- </b>I bought a house. (This becomes important in a moment). </li>
<li><b>September 2017</b>- I found out I might get laid off from the position I had been in for six years and had planned to do the rest of my life: my full-time, "continuing status" (basically tenured) community college professor position . . . and I had just bought a house. </li>
<li><b>December 2017</b>- I found out I was <i>definitely</i> getting laid off. </li>
<li><b>January-May 2018</b>- I had to teach my final semester, knowing I was losing my job and with it the only professional identity I had ever had or wanted. It destroyed me. </li>
<li><b>May 2018-present</b>- I have been trying to pick up the pieces of my sense of self, make up for my lost income through a scramble of freelance and adjunct work, and generally find out who I am on the other side of it all. </li>
</ul>
Today, for the first time, I thought about all of those realities in succession. I recognized that what started as physical impairments that greatly altered the way I used my body (the ankle break, the pregnancies) cascaded into mental and emotional turmoil (the PPAD, the identity crisis) and that it became a chicken and an egg of what would need to come back first to help me recover the other. <br /><br />Would regaining physical fitness help me become emotionally clear or would I need emotional clarity before I could get physically fit? <br /><br />I imagined what I would say to a friend who came to me worried about her lack of fitness and self-care if she was failing to recognize the series of events that had led her to that place. Then I tried to tell those things to myself, and that's how I ended up writing this post.<br />
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Look, I know that it hurt no one but myself to stop working out at the moments that I most needed to be strong. I know that continuing bad habits (or continuing to ignore good ones) did nothing but dig me a deeper hole to climb back out of. I know that doing things like eating well and exercising more would likely have improved the state of mind I was in throughout many of those events.<br />
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But I also know that I am human, and I am trying, and that? That was a lot.<br />
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Intellectually knowing what the best choices are doesn't equate to having the emotional resources to make them, and I've been bereft. I haven't had the tools to do the work even when I knew what work needed to be done. It didn't matter how many times I looked at the blueprint.<br />
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Is it better now? I want to say yes, but the truth is, I can't really be sure. I know that it's easier to keep a habit than to make one. I know that the almost four years that have passed since I was last where I wanted to be, health-wise, have represented a physical aging that I can't undo, a collective impact that won't be erased.<br />
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All I can do is start where I am, and I think that starting where I am with the full recognition of where I've been is probably the best chance I've had in a long time.<br />
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If you are falling short of your own expectations (in whatever it might be) and you need a prod to take stock of where you've been and be kind to yourself because of it, I hope this can be it. Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-11619654279605839512018-11-19T23:02:00.000-06:002018-11-19T23:02:38.036-06:00Self-Help Pushback (Because These Were Not Written for Moms Like Me)My work as a freelance writer often takes me down interesting research rabbit holes. Lately, I've been spending a lot of time reading and listening to some of the top self-help books in the fields of productivity, motivation, and time management.<br />
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This genre has always fascinated me, and even before I took on this particular project, I was a frequent listener of the podcast <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/simplify/id1255922966?mt=2" target="_blank">Simplify</a>, which interviews different authors of books about how to live your life better and then pulls out some of the key ideas. (My favorite was <a href="https://www.blinkist.com/magazine/posts/simplify-productivity-david-allen" target="_blank">this one</a> with David Allen, and I really did get some great tips from him!) </div>
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I think the reason I am so interested in the self-help genre is that it does so much more than just give advice. It also highlights our collective values and assumptions about what success looks like. Because no matter how much an individual self-help book might couch itself as edgy or subversive, at their core, these books operate on a very normative definition of success, and it's typically one built on accumulating wealth, minimizing the amount of effort put into the daily tasks of employment, and getting to pursue individual activities of pleasure. </div>
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I'm not knocking any of those things. (In fact, I'd take those. Who's got some to spare?) But I am kind of side eyeing the entire self-help genre at the moment. </div>
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After getting eyeballs deep into dozens of self-help adages and "systems," I'm feeling pretty left out. See, the advice from these gurus tends to pivot in a pretty small circle around a stable pillar of accepted truths. Sure, different experts might dress it up in different flavors to make it more palatable to a particular audience, but, all in all, the advice stays about the same. </div>
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And none of it is applicable to my life right now. </div>
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If I said that to any of these gurus, I know what they'd say. "You're making excuses." "You're keeping yourself stuck." "That's your faulty life script trying to keep you from reaching your potential." They'd tell me to believe in what I can achieve and push through those boundaries.<br />
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That sounds motivational and all, and I know why they have to say that, but it doesn't change the fact that most of their advice has very little to do with the life that I live, and it's not because I don't want (or deserve!) riches, leisure time, and world travel.</div>
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It's because my time is not my own, and <i>self</i>-help too often ignores that a lot of us are carrying the emotional, physical, and logistical labor of more than one self. </div>
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Let's take a closer look at what I mean. </div>
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Advice Pillar #1: Do Not Multitask </u></span></b><br />
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<b>Where You've Heard It: </b>Everywhere. (<a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/201103/technology-myth-multitasking" target="_blank">No</a>, really. It's <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/299029" target="_blank">everywhere</a>. Like, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/ilyapozin/2015/01/07/theres-no-such-thing-as-multitasking/#60d45d6a2225" target="_blank">everywhere</a>.)</div>
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<b>The Basic Scoop: </b>Ambitious people often have a lot of responsibilities. Naturally, they want to find a way to tackle these responsibilities more effectively. They'll turn to multitasking to try to maximize their time, but psychology shows that multitasking doesn't actually exist. We may <i>feel </i>like we're doing more than one thing at a time, but what we're really doing is rapidly shifting our attention from task to task, and the end result is a scattered brain, a lack of focus, poorer work, and no time savings.</div>
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<b>Why It Doesn't Apply to Me: </b>No, I'm not going to argue that my brain defies psychological realities. I'm absolutely sure that my attempts to grade papers while watching <i>Gilmore Girls</i> and responding to messages in my Facebook chat group are bad ideas that make me do all three of those things more poorly than I would if I just picked one and did it until it was done.<br />
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But what I am going to tell you is that I multitask every single day, and I do it well. Because here's the thing about all of those self-help gurus' demonization of multitasking: they're assuming that all of the tasks you do require your mental focus. Guess what? I do a lot of shit every day that requires no or virtually no thinking, and I do a lot of tasks that are partially automated. </div>
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If I put in a load of laundry before I sit down to grade a batch of papers, then by the time I am ready for a break, it will be time to put the clothes in the dryer. Then I can return to the papers and finish them up. When I'm done, the clothes are ready to fold. I can fold them while watching <i>Parks and Rec</i> for the fiftieth time, which is a necessary unwinding after grading all those papers. </div>
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If I didn't put the laundry in until after I finished the papers, though, my whole day is going to get wrecked. This automated task can easily be happening while I am doing something else, but it requires conscious multitasking on my part to get done. </div>
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Some other things I multitask throughout the day? I braid my daughter's hair while we talk about the book we're reading together for her homeschool literature class. I listen to podcasts while I clean the counters in the kitchen. I feed the cats while my son's oatmeal is heating up in the microwave. </div>
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The advice to stop multitasking annoys me because it ignores the fact that not all tasks are intellectually equal tasks, but that doesn't make them any less necessary or any less difficult to fit into my day. </div>
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Advice Pillar #2: Take Control of Your Mornings</span></u></b><br />
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<b>Where You've Heard It: </b><a href="https://halelrod.com/6-minute-miracle-morning/" target="_blank">Hal Elrod</a>'s <i>Morning Miracle </i>and <i>Morning Miracle Millionaires</i>; <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-ferriss-morning-routine-2017-1" target="_blank">Tim Ferriss</a>; articles like <a href="https://www.inc.com/bryan-adams/6-celebrity-morning-rituals-to-help-you-kick-ass.html" target="_blank">this one</a></div>
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<b>The Basic Scoop: </b>The specifics of the system might vary from source to source, but the general idea is that taking control of your morning sets up your whole day. The advice that I've read usually tells you to do some combination of meditation, exercise, eating a healthy breakfast, and goal setting while avoiding social media, email, and really any distractions from the outside world. </div>
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The idea is that by being able to intentionally take charge of your time in the morning, you set the tone for the day as a whole, and you can choose where you put your energy throughout the day instead of careening from crisis to crisis without any say in what you do next. </div>
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<b>Why It Doesn't Apply to Me: </b>I really do believe this is great advice. I think that if I could take the first forty-five minutes of each day and exercise, meditate, and set my goals for the day, I would definitely get more done and feel better doing it, so I'm not actually criticizing this advice. If you can do this, you should do this, but I can't do this. </div>
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Again, this isn't because I'm making excuses. It's not that I'm refusing to get up forty-five minutes earlier to make it happen. It's that I literally cannot do it.<br />
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Several experts tell me to make my bed first thing in the morning. I can't do that because, if I get up early enough to do all these other things, there are still people sleeping in it. Yes. People. Plural. My husband is probably still in bed for one. There's also a real good chance that my toddler has climbed in there at some point in the night, too. If I make my bed, they're waking up, and if the toddler is up, I can kiss that quiet meditation goodbye. </div>
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In fact, I can probably just kiss that quiet meditation goodbye anyway. I can creep out of my bed as quietly as possible and maybe even manage to get out of the room and go somewhere else to try to meditate, but my absence will be felt. Kids have more than five senses, and the ability to tell that mom is getting close to peace is one of them. </div>
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Even if everything went perfectly well, my morning isn't just about me. These "morning rituals" all seem to assume that the only person I am responsible for getting focused, meditated, and happy is myself. That is not the case. That is never the case. The cats are going to meow at me incessantly until I feed them. Then the dog is going to need to go outside. The kids need to eat. There are boots to find and coats to zip and diapers to change and spills to clean up. </div>
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My mornings are not my own, and the only way to make them my own is through out and out neglect of the living beings who depend on me each day, and I can't do that because their mornings are important, too. (And, completely selfishly, if their mornings go badly, my day is going badly, too. I don't want to clean dog poop off the floor because I didn't let the dog out. I don't want to deal with a toddler who didn't get to eat breakfast. These things are important.) </div>
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Advice Pillar #3: Work Uninterrupted </span></u></b><br />
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<b>Where You've Heard It: </b>Francesco Cirillo's <a href="https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique" target="_blank">Pomodoro Technique</a>; <a href="http://calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/17/bonus-post-how-the-worlds-most-famous-computer-scientist-checks-e-mail-only-once-every-three-months/" target="_blank">Donald Knuth</a> (who refuses to answer email and suggests working in "batch mode"); <a href="https://www.inc.com/robert-glazer/tim-ferriss-says-you-should-say-no-more-often-heres-why-it-works.html" target="_blank">Tim Ferriss</a> (again); articles like <a href="https://medium.com/the-mission/4-strategies-to-produce-deep-meaningful-work-d9aafc3d32e3" target="_blank">this one</a> </div>
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<b>The Basic Scoop: </b>Say no to distractions like meetings or email. (In the extreme forms, some of these experts have literally stopped accepting requests for their time and deleted their email addresses to make themselves unreachable). The Medium article linked above even starts out by describing focused work as a "monastic" lifestyle of "near-total seclusion." The idea is that you should say no to the calls on your attention so that you can put your attention where you really want and need it to be focused. </div>
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The Pomodoro Technique does this through setting a timer for 25 minutes before taking a 5-minute break. After four rounds of this, you get a 30-minute break. I downloaded a Pomodoro Technique app, and the default goal is to do 12 separate rounds. That's 5 hours of focused work with just short breaks in between each set. </div>
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<b>Why It Doesn't Apply to Me: </b>Again, I'm not actually criticizing the heart of this advice. I use the Pomodoro Technique whenever I am alone and have a project to focus on. It works. You should give it a try. </div>
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But if these experts are right that seclusion is necessary for success, then success will just stay out of my reach for at least the next 16 years or so. Parents don't get much seclusion. I know I'm not saying anything groundbreaking here. After all, Virginia Woolf knew the importance of a room of one's own quite some time ago. </div>
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Maybe this is why this kind of focus is called "monastic." And people who are able to dedicate themselves to that kind of seclusion for the sake of reflection and purpose-seeking are certainly laudable. But I do think it's interesting that monks are known for their seclusion while nuns are known for their service to others (through teaching and nursing and being present in communities). </div>
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The advice to say "no" more often is good advice that I am working on taking myself, but if I have to be secluded to win this game, I don't get to play. There are, as I've explored at length above, too many other living beings who I am beholden to for that to happen. I can't say "no" to these responsibilities. I can't tell my kids, "Sorry. Mommy deleted her email account. You don't get to request bedtime stories tonight because that's not serving my greater purpose." </div>
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Also, can we just talk for a moment about the hidden supports making these success stories possible? Professor Knuth (the one who refused to take email) had his secretary printing out emails for him so that he could respond to them by hand at his leisure. So it wasn't that the task wasn't getting done. It was that it wasn't getting done <i>by him</i>. Similarly, Tim Ferriss has a whole section in his famous book <i>The Four-Hour Workweek</i> about finding your hourly value and then outsourcing tasks that cost less than that value. Again, this means that <i>someone else</i> is picking up all that labor. You didn't eliminate the labor by saying no to things that didn't matter. You shifted the labor onto someone else's shoulders. You got your own success by making someone else's success (if this is the definition of success we're using) further away. </div>
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Conclusion </u></b></span><br />
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At the end of the day, I will probably keep dipping my toe into this genre because I do find it interesting and sometimes helpful and engaging. More and more, though, I am feeling excluded from not just the advice, but the conversation. I can't find myself in these discussions, and I don't think it's because I have written myself off from success. I don't think it's because there isn't advice that could help me and the people like me. I just think that no one is talking to us. </div>
Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-57592255376944541982018-10-13T13:31:00.001-05:002018-10-13T13:33:05.569-05:00The Leaves that Won’t be Made: Hard Truths of “Having it All”<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">“The cost of maintaining these defenses come out of the tree’s meager savings that were intended for happier uses: each drop of </span>sap<span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> was a seed that didn’t happen; each thorn a leaf that wouldn’t be made” (Jahren 28). </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">These lines come from the book <i>Lab Girl </i>by Hope Jahren, and the author is here reflecting on a tree familiar to her in childhood. These words really stuck with me in an unexpected way. I wasn’t reading the book for personal inspiration. I was reading it to assess its viability as a high school composition spine. The relationship between myself and the text was expected to be professional. I didn’t expect to find a personal connection to this ill-fated tree (which would be unceremoniously chopped down shortly after this passage). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But this passage clicked with me. Jahren, a botanist and passionate researcher frames the life acts of trees as choices—even “mistakes.” She repeatedly reminds us—through the perspective of a tree—that mortality makes us fragile and thriving is statistically rare—rare enough that even a scientist could be forgiven for seeing it as miraculous. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In this particular quote, Jahren touches upon the finite nature of our resources. In the tree’s case, this is the energy created and stored as sugar that fuels all of the tree’s actions. But the reserves are not limitless, and so, influenced by the environmental factors pressing upon it and the millennia of programmed code coursing through its genes, the tree makes choices about how to use that energy. As Jahren makes perfectly clear, each action taken is the choice to <i>not </i>take another action. It is a zero-sum game—for the tree full of limited sugar but also for me and probably also for you. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“I can make more money, but I can’t make more time.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I remember saying this to an equally frazzled friend as I explained the mental gymnastics I had done to justify outsourcing some overwhelming household chore. Unlike the tree, my primary concerns are not daily survival. I take it for granted that I will have food to eat, water to drink, and shelter from the elements. The tree and I are not so different in these needs, but the privilege of collective successes and ingenuity has brought me a measure of security that allows me to ignore that similarity. Barring unexpected medical or environmental crisis, I am typically not made conscious of my very real mortality and the work that goes into delaying its inevitable conclusion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Instead, I spend my energy on the task of seeking fulfillment and purpose beyond those biological needs, and the finite resource that underpins all my choices is not stored sugar, but time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Every choice I make—every book I read to my child, every freelance gig I accept, every dinner I prepare, every class I teach, every television show I watch—is as much a choice made as a dozen, a hundred, a thousand other choices <i>not </i>made with that same slot of time. Wrapped up in those moments is the ghost of all the things that could have been done with that time that are now eliminated as options. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">After all, there is only so much time. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Later in <i>Lab Girl</i>, Jahren discusses a Hawaiian monkeypod tree, boasting a huge gorgeous canopy filled with flowers and captured by tourists in photo albums and coffee table books. Jahren makes this observation: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“From the tourists’ perspective, this tree has achieved its perfect form: they do not see a tree that is less than it might have been . . . If [it] were to be cut down, we could count the knots and see the buried scars of the hundreds of branches that it has lost during the last century of its life. But as of today the tree stands, and while it is standing, we see only the branches that did grow and do not miss the ones that were lost” (79). </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Are we trees forced to constantly examine the limbs that did not make it? Instead of wearing our scars until we are whole again, are we doomed to constantly prod them like the gaping hole of a lost tooth? Maybe trees, too, feel these losses, invisible to the passersby, these possible-but-not-quite realities. Should we take a cue from them and hide the gaps by growing a thicker exterior, forever pretending we are whole when we are really not? Really cannot be? Really can only ever hope that the final set of choices and lost branches balances out to a kind of survival we accept?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’ve been wondering some version of this a lot, lately. I even wrote about wondering if I was wasting my Ph.D. by giving in to the call on my attention as a mother for my local <a href="https://stlouis.citymomsblog.com/parenthood/parenting-career-crossroads-am-i-wasting-my-ph-d/" target="_blank">City Moms Blog</a>. What branches am I losing? Will I notice them when they’re gone?</span></div>
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Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-34613046447068538372018-07-08T14:37:00.000-05:002018-07-08T14:37:27.825-05:00Success at What Cost? (Reflections on Disagreeable People and the 4-Hour Workweek)My family went to watch the big Independence Day fireworks display downtown this weekend, and after a week-long heat advisory, we were granted a reprieve in the form of breezy mid-70s weather on Saturday evening.<br />
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The place was <i>packed</i>, and when we arrived an hour and a half before sunset, most of the hillside was already packed with picnic blankets and lawn chairs as people staked out their prime viewing spot.<br />
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We found a good spot and tried to keep our two kids entertained while we waited for the sun to set and the show to start. As the first bursts of light filled the sky, I heard a voice behind me firmly say, "Sir! You need to <i>sit down</i>! People have been waiting here for <i>hours</i> to see, and you are in the way. Put your butt on the ground like everyone else!"<br />
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I turned to see a woman approaching a man who was standing in the middle of the seated crowd, cell phone in hand, taking pictures of the fireworks. He sighed loudly and walked up two rows (now parallel with me) and continued standing. The people behind him muttered and yelled "sit down!" He didn't move until someone approached him from behind, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked him to move. At that point, he moved up two more rows and slightly to the left and continued to stand.<br />
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The man in front of me could no longer see, and his wife went and again asked the man to move. He moved all the way over in the same row, still standing, and there he stayed the rest of the show, most certainly blocking the view of many people who had waited for hours. He obviously knew he was in the way, and he was the <i>only</i> person standing on the hillside as far as the eye could see. He didn't argue or fight with anyone who confronted him, but he didn't let their displeasure have any impact on his actions, either.<br />
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I'm sure he got a couple of pretty pictures of the fireworks.<br />
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Should We Be Agreeable?</h3>
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I was recently listening to Malcolm Gladwell's podcast <i>Revisionist History </i>(which I love and highly recommend). One of his recent episodes gives his "<a href="http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/27-malcolm-gladwell-s-12-rules-for-life" target="_blank">12 Rules for Life</a>," which is really only one rule (and I'm about to spoil it, FYI.) His one rule for life is to "pull the goalie," by which he means to do the thing that makes the most logical sense even if it upsets social norms and causes social discomfort. </div>
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Gladwell admits this is a challenge for him, but he looks up to people who do not have this struggle. He identifies them as having a low score on the <a href="https://www.psychologistworld.com/personality/agreeableness-personality-trait" target="_blank">"agreeableness" spectrum</a>, a psychology term that measures how much people care about upholding social norms. </div>
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Gladwell spends much of the episode exploring how an ability to set aside social expectations can help us make better decisions because, often, social expectations run counter to the smartest, most effective thing to do. </div>
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He speaks of disagreeable people with a kind of awe, as if they have a superpower he would like to possess. How <i>freeing</i> it would be to not care what people think of you and simply act in the way that gets you the best results. What kind of achievements could you reach if you had that kind of free reign? </div>
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Success Without Scruples</h3>
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Gladwell's thought experiments on agreeableness are interesting and worth considering. After all, social pressure (especially for women, who are socially conditioned to be demure and accommodating) can cause people to miss great opportunities or not receive credit for their work. </div>
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But Gladwell leans a little too hard into the power of disagreeable people because he doesn't follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion. If you maximize your own success without any regard for social consequences, you can end up in a kind of sociopathic hedonism that is destructive and horrifying. </div>
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I got a chance to see this kind of roadmap for success firsthand when I picked up a copy of <i>The 4-Hour Workweek</i> on a whim. See, I've been reading and listening to productivity experts because I think that they're an interesting window into our cultural values (a topic for another day). Timothy Ferriss' best selling book promises in its subtitle to let you "escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich." </div>
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I have only thumbed through the book so far, but what I have seen left me absolutely shaken. This is a <i>best selling</i> book. Ferriss gets referenced everywhere and has followers and fans who promote his methods to success. This is a cultural touchstone of sorts. </div>
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How does Ferriss provide access to this elusive life of luxury? Well, he is certainly promoting disagreeable qualities. His book's premise is that you should trick, swindle, lie, and exploit your way to leisure. </div>
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The book is ambitious in scope and covers a wide range of topics, but the theme that seems to underly them all is that you put yourself first and any social consequences of your actions out of your mind completely. </div>
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For example, Ferriss recommends creating false contact profiles for your fledgling business to make it appear to have multiple departments when it's really just you and you alone. He also recommends outsourcing as many of your daily tasks as possible to underpaid laborers without any concern for how his exploitation might factor into their own living and working conditions. He talks about examining rules for loopholes and proudly boasts about winning a Chinese kickboxing competition by dehydrating himself to weigh in three weight classes under his actual weight and then winning by technical knockout by simply exploiting a rule about falls to make his aim knocking his opponent over rather than actually learning the sport. </div>
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The Relativity of Ethics</h3>
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Ferriss' methods are the logical conclusion of Gladwell's well-meaning advice, and my firework-watching friend is a prime example of this mentality in action. </div>
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The thing is, these "tricks" and "advantages" only work as long as you, the person using them, are surrounded by people with more scruples, stronger moral compasses, and more shame. If <i>everyone</i> decides to weigh in three weight classes under their actual weight by dehydrating themselves, then it's not an advantage anymore. It's just a stupid sport where everyone tries to knock each other over instead of displaying any actual skill. If <i>everyone</i> decides to stand while watching the fireworks, only the people in the front row (or those born unusually tall) will get to enjoy the show.</div>
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Our sociopolitical systems operate with the underlying assumption that most people will adhere to a general set of ethics most of the time. Obviously, a lot of those assumptions are falling apart in today's society. Trump's crass, abusive, and vulgar comments from the position of President are often held up as the source of this ethical unmooring. As much as I am appalled by his actions and words, though, I am beginning to see that he is a symptom, not the cause. </div>
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Our definitions of success and our worship of capitalism and individualism have created this landscape, and it will take an intentional, meaningful, and probably painful reflection on our humanity and collective values to counteract the results. </div>
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I just hope we don't have to get all the way to everyone standing up at the fireworks before we start doing that work. </div>
Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-63729035005099257392018-04-12T21:26:00.000-05:002018-04-12T21:26:03.546-05:00What Happens to a Community Disrupted? (The Rise and Fall of Blogging) I started this blog almost exactly eight years ago (April 19, 2010). I was a graduate student who was a few months pregnant with my first child, and I was terrified because everywhere I looked there were articles and people telling me that there was no way to balance a professional career and the demands of motherhood without sacrificing the quality of one or both beyond repair. I blogged anonymously. It was truly just a diary at first, but then I made <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2010/07/feminist-mothers-hopes-to-mother.html" target="_blank">this post</a> about my feminist hopes to mother a feminist. It was written as a response to blue milk, one of my favorite "mommy bloggers" at the time. She had <a href="https://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2007/10/29/what-does-a-feminist-mother-look-like/" target="_blank">posted</a> (more than two years before I responded) a list of ten questions about feminist motherhood.<br />
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That post ended up getting me clicked into an amazing group of women who were all blogging about the things I was thinking about. We started connecting, blogged on each other's pages, left comments on each other's posts, and generally became a community. Then we kept going with our lives, and eventually that community (or at least the tiny corner of it I was inhabiting) drifted apart, sometimes gently prodded by the natural current of the ocean of daily motherhood, sometimes violently disrupted by the stormy period of tragedies like divorce and child loss.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_MJiu9559zA3Shpcp9OMVu59Tf3rA052-_7W3Up166oTDHUhDycFFXf8f9zlN1fNimPpPKO2G7BrAduIw5ceJoxHTSblxfcH09m0uUnhlMPS8tEOyZeHwhIO_yrKbZc2dNd95g3L8cR4/s1600/_javarts_-596847-unsplash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1281" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_MJiu9559zA3Shpcp9OMVu59Tf3rA052-_7W3Up166oTDHUhDycFFXf8f9zlN1fNimPpPKO2G7BrAduIw5ceJoxHTSblxfcH09m0uUnhlMPS8tEOyZeHwhIO_yrKbZc2dNd95g3L8cR4/s320/_javarts_-596847-unsplash.jpg" width="256" /></a></div>
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<b><u>"Old-Fashioned Sense of Community"</u></b><br />
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I literally teared up remembering this long-ago community while I was reading Emily Matchar's book <i>Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity</i> the other day. Matchar penned this book in 2013, which is right around the time that I was at peak "mommy blogger." I was attending blogging conferences, knew my Klout score, tweeted with all the right hashtags, felt connected to the big discussions in this particular niche.<br />
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Matchar writes about finding "lifestyle blogs" and feeling connected to a world full of decorators and cooks who opened up a door to domesticity that challenged its anti-feminist reputation and gave young Millennial women like me the chance to embrace the domesticity that was naturally becoming a part of our lives as young homemakers, wives, and mothers without feeling like sellouts who were turning our backs on our mother's hard work to gain equal rights. Blogs, Matchar explains, were a key part of this transformation:<br />
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Homemaker 2.0 blogs have become online versions of the knitting circles and quilting bees of preindustrial America, which were themselves created to stave off the loneliness and isolation of pioneer life. Online, women swap skills, tips, and recipes; give advice; offer emotional support. Women whom Technorati defines as 'mom bloggers' are significantly more likely than other bloggers to post comments, to link to other blogs, and to say they enjoy interacting with readers and other bloggers. In our supposedly isolated <i>Bowling Alone</i> culture, blogs have created a frankly old-fashioned sense of community. </blockquote>
In 2013, I have to tell you, that felt completely right. It felt like we had found a way to build a community without the bounds of geography. We were able to connect with other mothers who were going through exactly what we were going through, and we were able to feel valuable and meaningful as part of this group.<br />
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I don't know that I can say the same thing in 2018. It's not just that my daughter got older (though that definitely <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2015/05/the-shelf-life-of-mommy-blogger.html" target="_blank">does take a toll</a> on the "mommy blogging"). After all, my son is the same age my daughter was at this blogging peak. I also don't think the community is gone. Mothers need that connection and space to lean on one another as much as they ever have, and there are still plenty of spaces online that fill that void, but I know that I have never been able to recreate the blogging magic that I felt five years ago.<br />
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<b><u>What Happened?</u></b><br />
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Google Reader was discontinued in June of 2013. Did Google just have its finger on the pulse of the reality and jump just ahead of the crash, or did it steer the ship into the iceberg? I don't know the answer to that.<br /><br />At the time, Google was hoping to make Google+ a thing that could truly compete with Facebook, and (as we can all see with our perfectly honed hindsight) that didn't happen. Instead, Facebook's "groups" feature is now the place that seems to get most of the activity that I used to see in blog comments.<br />
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Whatever the case, I know that I personally never found a way to keep up with blogs the way I did with Google Reader, and I made a concerted effort to find a comparable replacement. I imagine there were plenty of people who just didn't find it worth the effort. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/how-the-like-button-ruined-the-internet/519795/" target="_blank">This Atlantic piece</a> sings the praises of Google Reader and explains that since its demise, content creators have started to focus more on creating a single piece that generates "likes" rather than creating a bundled sense of identity in a blog that acts as a cohesive whole.<br />
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That also rings true to me. I remember a time when I made silly, short posts that were just bursts of thoughts. We posted "Wordless Wednesday" posts that were just pictures from our day. I wasn't worried about making every piece stand on its own because, for my readers (who were my friends, not my "customers" or "leads"), they didn't stand on their own.<br /><br />Sure, a single piece could end up getting shared widely in unexpected ways, and that was sometimes fun (or, just as often, terrifying. I remember the shudder that went down my spine every time Reddit showed up in my traffic referrals), but I didn't think about individual posts the way that I do now.<br />
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<b><u>Kids These Days and Their Newfangled FaceGramSnaps</u></b><br />
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Maybe I'm just old. Maybe the technology of my yesteryear just has a nostalgic feel for me, and it's no different than my parents keeping reel-to-reel movies in the basement for decades.<br />
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But I'm 32. And this was five years ago. So if I am just "old," then the pace of these changes has ramped up considerably from previous generations. And I don't seem to be alone in trying to figure out this technology change/midlife crisis/growing pains/what is happening mess. Take a look at <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/style/should-i-join-what-would-virginia-woolf-do-facebook-group.html" target="_blank">this post from the New York Times</a> about the previously "secret" Facebook group for women over 40 that took on a life of its own and is now the center of the creator's book and website.<br />
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<b><u>Where Does a Community Go?</u></b><br />
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I don't know the answers to these questions. I'm not even really sure what questions I am asking, but I know that the change in the platform has not changed the need in the people who create the communities in the first place. We come together because we have a genuine need to find people who understand and to make us feel connected and heard. The messy tangle of giant corporations selling our data to advertisers, our own entrepreneurial desires to make a living through our writing and creations, and the inevitable mess that a group devolves into once it hits a certain number of participants will continue to complicate this attempt to find and keep a community.<br />
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What do you think? Are you still mourning Google Reader? Have you found a community to call your own? Do you fondly remember the blogs of yesteryear? Will you answer these questions somewhere I will never see them?<br />
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<br />Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-78362384409270147842018-03-12T22:10:00.000-05:002018-03-12T22:10:36.215-05:00The New Pro-Choice Movement: What is Betsy DeVos Talking About?By now, you've probably seen at least portions of Betsy DeVos' mostly incoherent, completely embarrassing <i>60 Minutes</i> interview in which she seemed to be utterly unprepared for hard-hitting questions like "what is a school?" <div>
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In fact, the whole thing could have just been deleted scenes from this parody video and made perfect sense. </div>
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Despite all the incoherent rambling, there is a theme that can be pulled out from a close look at the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/12/betsy-devoss-botched-60-minutes-interview-annotated/?utm_term=.e1412d23b251" target="_blank">transcripts</a>, and I'd like to take a moment to try to figure out what's going on here. </div>
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DeVos doesn't seem to be able to answer any questions about her plans to improve schools, her understanding of what problems schools face, or what exactly her job is, but there is one topic that she speaks about with more clarity than others: she's pro-choice. </div>
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No, no. Not <i>that</i> kind of pro-choice. She's pro <i>school </i>choice. Let's take a look at her own words to try to get some idea of what that might mean to her. </div>
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Here are some parts that really stood out to me. </div>
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"we should be funding and investing in students, not in school — school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems." </blockquote>
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"I hesitate to talk about all schools in general because schools are made up of individual students attending them." </blockquote>
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In response to questions about anti-discriminatory practices to keep minority students from being disciplined more harshly than their white counterparts: "Arguably, all of these issues or all of this issue comes down to individual kids." </blockquote>
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When asked if a false rape accusation and a sexual assault are the same: "I don't know. I don't know. But I'm committed to a process that's fair for everyone involved."</blockquote>
Okay. The woman is a horrendous speaker who can't keep a sentence straight to save her life, but setting that aside, there are some themes that have come up again and again. She promotes "choice," which is her shorthand way of pointing to a voucher system, one where public school dollars are allowed to be used in other ways. Not all school choice advocates believe in the same things, however. As <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/22/what-school-choice-means-in-the-era-of-trump-and-devos/?utm_term=.4eeb334ca016" target="_blank">this article explains</a>:<br />
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"The choice movement is not monolithic; all choice supporters don’t support all forms of choice and all do not have the same motivations behind their advocacy. Choice critics are not monolithic; some, for example, accept some charter schools but not other forms of choice. A key fissure is between the free-market believers who want very little regulation — who are mostly libertarians and Republicans, including DeVos — and those who believe in heavier regulation and more accountability, and tend to prefer charters over vouchers. The latter includes some Republicans and many Democrats, including former president Barack Obama."</blockquote>
DeVos' brand of "choice," as evidence by her excessive use of the term "individual" during her rambling, is one that demonizes public institutions. The narrative is that public school teachers are lazy, overprotected by unions, and committed to an outdated system rather than individual student success. As <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-war-on-public-schools/537903/" target="_blank">this piece from <i>The Atlantic </i>explores</a>, though, throwing our hands up on public education is a dangerous way to try to "fix" our educational problems:<br />
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"Our public-education system is about much more than personal achievement; it is about preparing people to work together to advance not just themselves but society. Unfortunately, the current debate’s focus on individual rights and choices has distracted many politicians and policy makers from a key stakeholder: our nation as a whole. As a result, a cynicism has taken root that suggests there is no hope for public education. This is demonstrably false. It’s also dangerous."</blockquote>
I'm a homeschooling mom whose public schools did not meet her child's needs, so you might think that I would be invested in DeVos' notion of "choice." Sure, being able to reallocate my tax dollars into building my private home library might sound nice, but what's the point in educating my daughter if there isn't a world worth sending her into?<br />
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Public schools are at a moment of transformative crisis. And here I mean crisis in the original Greek sense. A krisis was a turning point, a moment of decision. Our public schools are trying to face a very difficult challenge of meeting the needs of an unknowable future while simultaneously battling a war on many fronts for their very existence.<br />
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I wrote recently about <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2018/02/diverging-paths-in-education-someone.html" target="_blank">diverging paths in education</a>, how elite members of society are opting for schools that look very, very different from our public schools. I wrote then that this is a troubling sign for me. While private education has always had more resources than public education, the drive to turn private education into a completely different philosophical endeavor seems especially sinister as we sit at the cusp of a technological revolution that is likely to disrupt entire economies and possibly even what it means to be human.<br />
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When DeVos talks about individuals and turns her back on "institutions," on "systems," what she is really saying is that those who already have the means should climb while those who do not should be damned to fall not to the lowest rung of the ladder but off the ladder entirely.<br />
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And this woman is <i>the head</i> of our educational system. This would be like the person running the hospital saying that she doesn't believe in allowing greedy doctors to operate in an institution of healthcare and that we should instead shut it down and be allowed to individually spend that money stocking our own medicine cabinets. All you could afford was a band aid and some cough drops? Too bad. Hope you stay healthy.<br />
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Individuals matter. They matter a lot. But systems exist because humanity is more than the sum of its parts. We have become the species that we are not as a series of individuals operating in successive boxes but because we overlap, learn from, and grow with one another. That requires institutions and shared knowledge. That requires intermingled value systems that, yes, are messy and sometimes undergo painful transformations.<br />
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I believe we are at that moment now, and it is that vulnerability that has allowed someone as patently unqualified as DeVos to sit at such an important position at such an important time.<br />
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No matter how disenchanted you may be with public schools, no matter how alluring the siren call of "individual choice" may sound, please remember that we are all in this together. There can be no winning the game if the board is thrown in a dumpster fire.Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-44509802281716491462018-02-12T18:42:00.002-06:002018-02-12T18:42:46.682-06:00Diverging Paths in Education: Someone Else's School (Part 2)I recently wrote about the <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2018/02/converging-trends-in-education-is-it.html" target="_blank">converging trends in education</a> that make it seem increasingly likely that we're on the edge of a major shift in educational philosophy. I want to jump off from that point to look at how all those trends converging together to make a change seem to be leading to two divergent paths becoming visible.<br />
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As many public schools seem to be doubling down on standardization (especially using technology tools to get lots of standardized data on students), those who have access to elite private education seem to be moving in not just a different direction, but one that is diametrically opposed to these trends.<br />
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Consider some of these trends:<br />
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<li><b>Reading Levels- </b>Many public school kids are being told that they can't read anything outside of "their level." Schools use standardized tests to determine a child's "Lexile level" and then force children to read only within that narrow band. This is despite the fact that "Lexile levels" <a href="http://www.unleashingreaders.com/?p=8891" target="_blank">aren't particularly good</a> at gauging the appropriateness of content and that evidence shows <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reading-minds/201702/three-myths-about-reading-levels" target="_blank">reading both below and above reading levels</a> is important for developing solid reading habits.<br /> </li>
<li><b>iPads Replace Teaching- </b>Many public schools are also turning to online, standardized curriculum like Moby Max to provide "individual" instruction. This Louisiana school boasts about its <a href="https://thejournal.com/Articles/2017/01/11/Louisiana-School-District-Boosts-Student-Learning-and-Cuts-Costs-Using-MobyMax-Curricula.aspx" target="_blank">lower costs and higher standardized test scores</a> as a result of switching to a Moby Max curriculum. Moby Max itself brags that the site is <a href="http://press.mobymax.com/mobymax-in-active-use-in-73-of-k-8-schools-in-u.s" target="_blank">in use in 73% of public K-8 schools</a>. Anecdotally, I can tell you that my daughter was enrolled in a "hands-on, project-based" public charter school that handed her an iPad (often with Moby Max on the other side) multiple times a day, even during "sensory breaks," which she got to combat her ADHD symptoms. Yes, they handed my hyperactive daughter a screen during the time she was supposed to be getting rid of excess energy so she could focus on learning. Even at the college level, automation is becoming a common trend with companies like <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/19/pearson-partners-ivy-tech-self-paced-online-gen-ed-courses" target="_blank">Pearson offering instructor-less general education classes</a>. </li>
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<li><b>Class Size</b>- Public schools are under pressure to do more with less money, and that means larger classes. For elementary schools, the <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s_007.asp" target="_blank">US average</a> is 21 students per teacher, with some states getting over 30. We get report after report about how <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/21/well/family/why-kids-shouldnt-sit-still-in-class.html" target="_blank">sitting still isn't conducive to learning</a>, but what is a teacher who is responsible for 30 elementary-aged kids supposed to do? </li>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkuC9Jmn3QfyQngrB9yqoWvUt4xe7TDyURt3Eel5GO3NatZ46B07n5Hk0TSMc1MwJqJcdJfQ2-D4AJlPOUOzYBsA7D88MUY7KKEu8T5dDRS38g1q8joTKLxLBMp75oEL4XwUfc7B7i1is/s1600/jens-lelie-15662.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1072" data-original-width="1600" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkuC9Jmn3QfyQngrB9yqoWvUt4xe7TDyURt3Eel5GO3NatZ46B07n5Hk0TSMc1MwJqJcdJfQ2-D4AJlPOUOzYBsA7D88MUY7KKEu8T5dDRS38g1q8joTKLxLBMp75oEL4XwUfc7B7i1is/s320/jens-lelie-15662.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Meanwhile, let's take a closer look at how the other half* (*<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jack-jennings/proportion-of-us-students_b_2950948.html" target="_blank">way less than half</a>) lives:</div>
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<li><b>Class Size</b>- Private school class sizes are <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_2009324_t2a_08.asp" target="_blank">significantly smaller </a>than public school. The US average is 18 students per teacher, with some individual types of private education averaging as few as 14. </li>
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<li><b>Technology Limits</b>- While public school kids are getting an iPad shoved in their faces even during their "sensory breaks," many among the elite are opting for tech-free or tech-limited educations for their own children. A <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/screen-time-limits-bill-gates-steve-jobs-red-flag-2017-10" target="_blank"><i>Business Insider</i> article</a> recently headlined the fact that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both raised their own children with strict technology limits. Many of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/dec/02/schools-that-ban-tablets-traditional-education-silicon-valley-london" target="_blank">parents working in Silicon Valley</a> have chosen a Waldorf school for their own children, a philosophy that avoids technology use in the classroom. Elon Musk said that schools were teaching "to the tools" rather than teaching how to solve problems, so he <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-creates-a-grade-school-2015-5" target="_blank">started his own school</a> for his kids.</li>
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<li><b>Freedom for Some</b>- Other experiments with educational freedom are popping up. The Sudbury model is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/no-teachers-no-class-no-homework-would-you-send-your-kids-here/265354/" target="_blank">a democratic experiment</a> where there are no teachers or grades and students get to participate in creating the rules through democratic vote. Then there are a growing number of people like me, people who are <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/03/homeschooling-without-god/475953/" target="_blank">homeschooling for non-religious reasons</a>. Most of us are doing so because we couldn't find affordable educational settings that met our children's needs. Still, homeschooling is a position of privilege, and it's one that many people cannot afford (literally) to undertake. </li>
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The trend is clear. While public schools get more and more standardized, churning out cookie cutter educational outcomes that allow students to score well on multiple choice tests while struggling to think outside the box, private schools are focusing on curricular choices that privilege creative thinking and creation, problem solving and freedom. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDsay1GVoIf3EqiCxGyhYknlVLM2SXgcyQAc2qYfjOIkv9ZQ_1f4qgKpi0qS7RBixvi4DZY4IJVkAO9tEAS4Er7BADvcMCIfSJFdoeRAPsDxcdKk7ce6U7qEt6_YcCYqIdebrOxN7Rrgc/s1600/jehyun-sung-477894.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1028" data-original-width="1600" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDsay1GVoIf3EqiCxGyhYknlVLM2SXgcyQAc2qYfjOIkv9ZQ_1f4qgKpi0qS7RBixvi4DZY4IJVkAO9tEAS4Er7BADvcMCIfSJFdoeRAPsDxcdKk7ce6U7qEt6_YcCYqIdebrOxN7Rrgc/s320/jehyun-sung-477894.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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I cannot help but think that the timing of this divergence is telling. Most experts think that automation will take up to 800 million jobs in the next 10-15 years. Among <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/26/jobs-future-automation-robots-skills-creative-health" target="_blank">the most vulnerable jobs</a> are those that are the most standardized. The safest jobs are those that require the very skills that the elite are seeking out for their children's educations: creativity, human interaction, and problem solving. </div>
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There have always been deep inequities in private and public schools, and these have at times been codified in our educational practices. However, since the 1960's or so, we have at least paid lip service to the idea that education should be equal and fair, that everyone deserved the best education available. While we have never been able to deliver on that promise, I fear we aren't even going to try to deliver on it in the future. The trends don't look good. </div>
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<span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;">Photos: </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/u0vgcIOQG08?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; transition: color 0.2s ease-in-out, opacity 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Jens Lelie</a><span style="color: #111111;">, </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/xdEeLyK4iBo?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; transition: color 0.2s ease-in-out, opacity 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Jehyun Sung</a><span style="color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, San Francisco, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, Segoe UI, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;"> </span></span></div>
Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-38034345933666128182018-02-06T14:38:00.000-06:002018-03-04T18:47:05.444-06:00The Adventures of a Planner (Why I Can't Get My Life Together)<a href="https://www.bloglovin.com/blog/3960918/?claim=kxz2p4wqfgg">Follow my blog with Bloglovin</a>
Perhaps it is a side effect of my anxiety and the tendency to project multiple possible intersecting outcomes into the future, but I am a really organized person, and nothing brings me calm like looking at my multi-colored electronic Google calendar.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLpqPG1j0A_aWedcG0H6KlowwjBtNM5jyeVZkuG21FFLOtWXu_LUpAtX9FZOMnfTvBCHnzPOoZPHMLexKMMJJtzIOIbYk-TXHjY83w_rsovj6twY_nSpFnSiM95-xR-u-d7Wzj4ou0sD8/s1600/GraciousIdleBlackbear-size_restricted.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="231" data-original-width="500" height="147" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLpqPG1j0A_aWedcG0H6KlowwjBtNM5jyeVZkuG21FFLOtWXu_LUpAtX9FZOMnfTvBCHnzPOoZPHMLexKMMJJtzIOIbYk-TXHjY83w_rsovj6twY_nSpFnSiM95-xR-u-d7Wzj4ou0sD8/s320/GraciousIdleBlackbear-size_restricted.gif" width="320" /></a></div>
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It makes sense, then, that when I was plunged into insurmountable uncertainty by abruptly losing a job I thought I would have the rest of my life the first thing I wanted was a really complicated planner to fill up with goals that could be methodically crossed off. There's a very thin line between the illusion of having control over your life and actually having control over your life, and I planned to walk right down the center of it. </div>
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After reading some reviews, I headed over to Plum Planner (this isn't a review or an affiliate post. As you'll see in a moment, I haven't even used the thing, so I can in no way speak to its quality or impact on my life). I spent some time clicking through the plethora of options to customize it to my exact specifications. </div>
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Even that customization was a little traumatizing. What categories do I want? Who knows? I have no idea what my life will look like. Will I be working at one place with some kind of stable schedule, or am I going to be hopping from freelance gig to freelance gig with no sense of what day it is? </div>
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Eventually, I picked some key categories I knew I would need to address each day and left a couple of them vague. I hit "Submit" and was told that I would have my shiny new planner by the second week of January, perfectly timed to start with going back to teach for my final semester. Filling out all those neat little boxes would be a welcome distraction from the pain, anger, and frustration that a semester spent as a "dead woman walking" would bring me. </div>
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I got the shipment confirmation and clicked to track delivery. All was looking good. It made it to St. Louis (where I live). It should be there any moment. Then the tracking started doing something weird. It was being bounced around from post office to post office in the city. I couldn't figure out what was happening until I looked closer. I had, in my bleary-eyed-haven't-slept-might-be-having-a-breakdown-cause-I-just-got-fired state typed in the correct street number but my old street name in the shipping information. </div>
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I tried everything. I called all the post offices where it had been. I emailed the seller. I placed a hold on the package. I secretly hoped it would show up at my old address even though the number was wrong. I waited and waited and waited.<br />
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About two weeks after it was supposed to have arrived, the shipment activity said it had been returned to the sender, so I contacted them, paid for shipping again, and waited some more. </div>
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My planner vanished. Talk about a metaphor for your plans not going the way you thought they would. Somewhere between leaving St. Louis and arriving back at Plum Planner, the package fell off the face of the earth. I emailed them again, and they, obviously seeing the desperation behind my words, took pity on me and reprinted the entire thing and shipped it again. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFfLigU1jAOg_nE-TDdqFSQ9lgLCgNADr66hBqlqB3MFe_uzcByn2irFi4IV6LhLS6rXCtLNetHdzZI8dh1aAOdbQGyOTUqGRBgxvZx7JfAOWDDkg7wq5SkQzlMFvunfDUATpW1aycOvc/s1600/IMG_3341.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFfLigU1jAOg_nE-TDdqFSQ9lgLCgNADr66hBqlqB3MFe_uzcByn2irFi4IV6LhLS6rXCtLNetHdzZI8dh1aAOdbQGyOTUqGRBgxvZx7JfAOWDDkg7wq5SkQzlMFvunfDUATpW1aycOvc/s200/IMG_3341.jpg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfevMS4J8Yemc4IZpXHCCo2ejrvLAOpLCk_d3mhtlPgSY5O_6A8G1f61U6r23IcCFhaQVSvB-evqMq8G6kwetr4FfrDXVfhyphenhyphenrykegloeDNnooyhN5AgiUnut_ItwxFF3Aogv3eCIugAso/s1600/IMG_3340.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfevMS4J8Yemc4IZpXHCCo2ejrvLAOpLCk_d3mhtlPgSY5O_6A8G1f61U6r23IcCFhaQVSvB-evqMq8G6kwetr4FfrDXVfhyphenhyphenrykegloeDNnooyhN5AgiUnut_ItwxFF3Aogv3eCIugAso/s200/IMG_3340.jpg" width="150" /></a>Well, ladies and gents, after several mis-deliveries, wrong turns, and lost ways, it's here.</div>
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Will this be the turning point? Will this be the moment when my attempts to juggle homeschooling, teaching, and launching a burgeoning freelance career come together in one beautiful tangle of ink, hopes, and best laid plans?<br />
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I don't really believe that a planner is the answer to all my problems, but I do think that the patience I was forced into finding as it was delayed over and over again was a nice little reminder that I don't necessarily have to get my whole life back together in a single day.<br />
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It will come . . . eventually, and maybe to the wrong place a few times. </div>
Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-27368827414880255072018-02-03T15:07:00.003-06:002018-02-03T15:12:27.765-06:00Converging Trends in Education: Is It All Coming Together Now? <div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I’ve been thinking a lot about the history and the future of education. I feel like I’m sitting at a particularly strong vantage point as a parent who has chosen homeschooling because of the limitations I faced in the traditional education options set before me and as a community college faculty member whose full-time position as a professor just got eliminated in what is clearly a move to change the fundamental nature of the school’s purpose. Add to this the fact that my expertise is in studying the historical trajectory of education through the lens of rhetoric, and I feel like I have a pretty good sense of how this particular stew of factors starts to come together.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">This is going to be a two-part post. In Part 1, I will examine some trends that I see converging together at this historical point in American education. Part 2 will discuss the way that education is likely to diverge into separate paths as a result of this convergence.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Here are the different trends that I see coming together at this particular moment:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<li class="li3"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>On-the-job training</b>: Many companies have decided to supplement or (in growing numbers) circumvent traditional certification and degree requirements by bringing their training in-house. Employees like these options because it takes the guesswork out of trying to get the skills necessary for a future, hypothetical job, and employers like the option because it allows them to make sure their workers have the exact skills necessary to meet their needs.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></li>
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<li class="li3"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>Online education demand increases: </b>Traditional education is being displaced by online options. Even in traditional classrooms, online work is often being used as a supplement (or sometimes substitute) for face-to-face instruction. In the name of individualization, producing easily analyzed standard results, and increasing the number of students who can be reached, everything from elementary school classrooms to alternative online high schools to graduate courses has seen an increased demand for online options.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></li>
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<li class="li3"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><b>A distrust in higher education</b>: Some of this is political. There’s a growing sense of distrust for expertise in general as the Age of Information has brought us the ability to find answers to complex questions in seconds instead of decades. Some of it is economic. As the cost of college increases and the number of jobs available for the degrees sought declines, people just don’t see college as worth the investment. Together, these influences have resulted in a general skepticism about the value of higher education.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></li>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The point that brings all of these converging trends together into a holistic pattern is technology, especially automation. Existing automation and advancing technology has made on-the-job training possible, increased the development of and access to online courses, and been responsible for the rise of a gig economy that further deepens the distrust of education as a wise investment.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">With the promise/threat of automation looming in something between the immediate and quasi-near future, education has been placed in a precarious position.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Education is necessarily future-focused. Education (from pre-school to graduate school) makes promises about preparing students for what the future holds. While no one has ever been 100% sure about what exactly the future would look like, we are facing an unprecedented sense of uncertainty. All the way back in 2011, <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/college-and-business-will-never-be-the-same-2011-2" target="_blank">Business Insider</a> was considering the ways that a college degree was outdated in the face of an uncertain future workplace. Now, seven years later, those warnings feel even more relevant. Training for a specific technical career over the span of four or five years feels futile. Who knows if the career is even going to exist? And if it does, what guarantees are there that what you learned four years ago will still be relevant?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">It’s a tough time to be in charge of organizing, planning, and marketing education. I can understand why administrators are in a panic, and I don’t envy their position. However, too many of them are responding in <i>exactly the wrong way</i>. Many have decided to focus on the juiciest career options through specialization and hyper-focused “pathways” to specific careers. Just like the dog chasing the tantalizing mechanical rabbit, they’re never going to catch up. Those specific career needs will always remain <i>just </i>out of reach, and in the meantime, companies are finding their own way to meet their actual needs, making education look less and less relevant for those fields every day.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Pearson recently <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brinker-international-and-pearson-partner-to-offer-no-cost-education-to-chilis-and-maggianos-employees-300585847.html" target="_blank">announced a partnership</a> with Brinker International (the owner of restaurants like Chili’s and Maggiano’s) to offer no-cost education options for employees who work at least 24 hours a week. On-the-job training is <a href="https://industrytoday.com/article/how-on-the-job-training-can-help-close-manufacturing-skills-gap/" target="_blank">being heralded</a> as a savior for the manufacturing industry, which has struggled to match skills with need. While manufacturing already has a very low education demand (with <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dont-blame-a-skills-gap-for-lack-of-hiring-in-manufacturing/" target="_blank">80% of production workers</a> holding neither an Associate’s nor Bachelor’s degree), we can expect this trend to make traditional education even less necessary.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I don’t think these initiatives are necessarily a bad thing. They offer people the opportunity to get to work faster and receive the training they need to potentially move up the ranks of their place of employment and receive higher pay and a better standard of living. Not everyone needs to go to college, and I do think that some of these trends are helping to balance out the over-reliance on Bachelor’s degrees as the key to middle class access.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">The problem comes from the reaction to these realities. Instead of recognizing that technical training might be done somewhere else, too many schools (especially those serving low-income and minority students) feel the need to directly compete with these new methods instead of differentiating themselves and offering a different kind of education for different kinds of careers or (and this is the part that's been lost completely in too many discussions) for the sake of learning and being an informed citizen capable of critical thinking.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> Trump's State of the Union calls for <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/02/02/trump-calls-converting-community-colleges-vocational-schools" target="_blank">community colleges to be converted into vocational training</a> points directly at this kind of short-sighted, damaging thinking. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Let’s go back to Pearson. Their partnership directly with corporations should come as no surprise, and they’re happy to take a large slice of as many pies as they can. They’re also working to automate higher education course delivery with <a href="https://www.educationdive.com/news/pearson-partners-with-ivy-tech-for-self-paced-online-gen-ed-courses/23844/" target="_blank">self-paced (and mostly instructor-free) general education options</a>. The <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/how-online-education-saves-everyone-money/426024/" target="_blank">economic benefits of online options</a> have long been touted, and some see them as a way to make sure that everyone has access to a quality education. Utopia usually isn’t as simple as it first appears, though, and we’ve also known for quite some time that access alone isn’t enough and online options <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/akelly/2015/04/08/the-university-of-everywhere-isnt-for-everyone-the-future-of-learning-will-be-a-big-tent/#391890301972" target="_blank">don’t successfully reach everyone</a>. Predictably, it is the most vulnerable student populations (the ones our utopian dreams promised to save) that are being harmed the most. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/19/business/online-courses-are-harming-the-students-who-need-the-most-help.html" target="_blank">the New York Times reported</a> earlier this year:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">“But in high schools and colleges, there is <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/who-should-take-online-courses/" target="_blank"><span class="s2">mounting evidence</span></a> that the growth of online education is hurting a critical group: the less proficient students who are precisely those most in need of skilled classroom teachers.”</span></span></blockquote>
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<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Pressure to standardize online courses to make them infinitely replicable further eliminates the elements of teaching that reach students who are hard to reach. The result of online education <i>can be</i> meaningfully-crafted online courses that reach extremely motivated students who wouldn’t have access to education otherwise, but that doesn’t negate the fact that putting all of the emphasis on online education cuts off the only viable pathways that many at-risk and just-average students have to meaningful education, and many of them don't see the pay-off as worth the risk in the first place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">So where does that leave education? What will come out on the other side of the space where all of these converging trends come together? I have some theories, and I’ll explore them in Part 2.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photos: <span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: , , "san francisco" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "ubuntu" , "roboto" , "noto" , "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; white-space: nowrap;">Photo by </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/U5y077qrMdI?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; transition: 0.2s ease-in-out, 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Mark Duffel</a><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: , , "san francisco" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "ubuntu" , "roboto" , "noto" , "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; white-space: nowrap;"> on </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/search/photos/training-on-the-job?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; transition: 0.2s ease-in-out, 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Unsplash</a>, <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/D4z30KWaKKs?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; transition: 0.2s ease-in-out, 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Jason Leung</a><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: , , "san francisco" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "ubuntu" , "roboto" , "noto" , "segoe ui" , "arial" , sans-serif; white-space: nowrap;"> on </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/search/photos/%22mechanical-rabbit%22?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; transition: 0.2s ease-in-out, 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Unsplash</a> </span></div>
Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-3011831649962276492018-01-18T06:40:00.000-06:002018-01-18T06:45:19.087-06:00Well, What Was She Doing There Anyway? (On Buying Cars and Owing Sex) <div class="tr_bq">
By now, you've probably read all about "Grace" and her <a href="https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355" target="_blank">unpleasant encounter</a> with Aziz Ansari. You've likely also read, or at least heard snippets of, the responses, many of which revolve around tried and tired tropes like "Well, why did she go to his apartment if she didn't want sex?" "What kind of mixed signals was she sending?" "Why did she give him a blow job if she didn't want sex?" "Why didn't she just leave?" (Even though she did, um, leave guys. That's literally what she did.) </div>
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Writer <a href="https://annglaviano.com/" target="_blank">Ann Glaviano</a> had a reaction to these reactions that she <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ann.glaviano/posts/10108608830007685?pnref=story" target="_blank">published on Facebook</a>. The whole post is worth a read, but I want to specifically focus on one part that really resonated with me. Glaviano wrote this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>it sounds to me like she was expecting some sexual encounter to take place, but at a pace that perhaps included her own arousal (!), and with some amount of skill (!). when he made it clear that he wasn't about those things, she perhaps had second thoughts about continuing to have what sounds like objectively terrible sex. (not terrible because of his moves - terrible because of his complete refusal or inability to notice his partner and how she was responding.)</i></blockquote>
So many of the conversations about whether or not Aziz's behavior was acceptable (it wasn't) or indicative of a larger problem (it was) ignore this crucial point: Grace didn't owe him sex even if she initially wanted to have sex. Grace could have gone into his apartment with every intention of having sex all night long, and that doesn't make what happened once she got there any less disturbing. All those "Well what was she doing there anyway?" questions are really saying, "Come on! She wanted sex!" as if that somehow makes it all okay.<br />
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I have been vocal in the past about the problems with analogies that <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2013/11/anti-rape-panties-and-bulletproof.html" target="_blank">turn bodies into physical property</a>. I stand by those assertions. That said, I'm going to give an analogy here that veers into that territory just because it seems like the kind of thing that might make this understandable.<br />
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Let's say I see an ad on the internet for a used car. The car looks awesome. The pictures are taken from just the right angle. It lists the amenities like a sunroof and a Bluetooth-enabled audio system. I decide to go check it out in person and show up at the dealership.<br />
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Now, I want to buy a car. I have every intention of buying <i>some</i> car. I might want to buy <i>this</i> car, but I haven't decided yet. I have certainly walked into the dealership in a way that communicates the possibility of buying a car.<br />
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The car dealer comes out. He's rude. He's pushy and aggressive and not very friendly. He rolls his eyes when I tell him which car I would like to see and huffs as he goes and gets the keys for me to test drive it. When I get to the car, I see that it is not as advertised. There's a huge dent that those pictures conveniently hid. The sunroof isn't operational. The engine doesn't turn over right away when I try to start it, and the whole thing reeks of cigarette smoke.<br />
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At this point, I'm going to leave the dealership. If the dealer cornered me, pressured me, tried to force me to sign a check, he'd be wrong. I am not going to buy that car.<br />
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"But why did you even go in the dealership if you didn't want the car?!" "Why did you ask to test drive it if you weren't going to buy it?!"<br />
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Do you see how silly these questions are?<br />
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Maybe if I really, really want a car and the dealer changes his attitude and starts showing me better cars, I'll stick around and consider a different purchase, but at some point, I'm likely to realize that this isn't the place for me. They don't have the car I want. This whole dealership is full of shitty cars, and I am under no obligation to buy a shitty car.<br />
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We are under no obligation to have shitty sex. Even if we have made plenty of indications that we were considering having <i>some</i> sex, we are under no obligation to have <i>this particular</i> sex. We are probably likely to reject this particular sex if the signs start to demonstrate it is likely to be particularly shitty sex.<br />
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I'm not going to presume to know what "Grace" intended to do when she went to Aziz's house, but there are plenty of Graces in the world, and there are lots and lots of Azizes. That's the problem. This is a very common story, and our collective reaction to Grace is a very common problem.<br />
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We are still operating under some Puritanical ideal that women's virtue is the foundational reason that rape, sexual assault, and rape culture are a problem. If we can demonstrate that a woman was not quite as virtuous as we thought, then we can excuse whatever else happens to her.<br />
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Rape culture isn't bad because it sullies virtue. Rape culture is bad because it promotes rape. Rape culture is bad because it violates another person's autonomy and boundaries about what happens to his/her body.<br />
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Wanting to have sex is not an obligation to actually have sex, and indicating that you might want to have sex does not excuse anything else that happens after that if it become non-consensual. When we can fully wrap our minds around that apparently very difficult concept, I think a <a href="https://youtu.be/oQbei5JGiT8" target="_blank">culture of consent</a> might start to emerge. Until then, we'll be hearing a lot more people saying "me, too."<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Photo: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/119886413@N05/17102696410/in/photolist-s4iMN3-s2xKeg-UW2EHm-ebNcEu-uhFs7-i1SeQy-9tEZng-dvD1Pc-pFeGaX-9HJAdF-idUVxL-9HJzY6-bpFLp-5Qtm8i-7C85R-kXBSog-9HMJ1s-j8KnJy-enpTfQ-qaTUf-s4qwiR-fxf81a-bvGrjF-eh6hvz-6j6Ete-roSCK5-ffL6Ys-fNBZKX-9TVsuU-21tLZ3s-qaTMw-bXBMaf-kgYAgL-Ztvsmh-dQGZKa-edWCYi-ncWUms-p8DhAH-qshF3c-6SvzNo-rp55kv-sMwarj-7pG4fr-neZpwV-pePxW2-jhKPs4-dUTc6M-ncWMFi-neZtDa-eHeALt" target="_blank">Michel Curi</a></span>Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-68510343131634149952018-01-10T08:19:00.000-06:002018-01-10T08:19:34.285-06:00Signs Pointing Toward the Future of Education Laura McKenna has an excellent article at Edutopia about <a href="https://www.edutopia.org/article/will-letter-grades-survive" target="_blank">the shift away from letter grades</a>. Here are some key takeaways from the article, but if you have a minute, you should go read the whole thing:<br />
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<li><b>Assessment policies don't match modern workplace demands. </b>"Somewhat independently, schools and lawmakers have come to the same conclusion: The old models of student assessment are out of step with the needs of the 21st-century workplace and society, with their emphasis on hard-to-measure skills such as creativity, problem solving, persistence, and collaboration."</li>
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<li><b>The changing of the guard will result in major changes to education as a whole. </b>"The emerging alignment of K–12 schools with colleges and legislators builds on a growing consensus among educators who believe that longstanding benchmarks like grades, SATs, AP test scores, and even homework are poor measures of students’ skills and can deepen inequities between them. If the momentum holds, a century-old pillar of the school system could crumble entirely, leading to dramatic transitions and potential pitfalls for students and schools alike."<br /></li>
<li><b>The new methods could cause even deeper educational inequities for marginalized student groups</b>.<br />"Some critics have suggested that the new transcripts may be a way for wealthier schools, especially private schools like those in the MTC, to give their students an even greater advantage when competing for limited positions at the best universities."</li>
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Watching what is happening in higher education right now (<a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2017/12/the-loss-at-stlcc-is-loss-for-st-louis.html" target="_blank">from the very front row</a>, in fact, you could even say I'm watching it from the stage, and <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2017/12/reflections-on-losing-your-dream-job.html" target="_blank">my character is about to get killed off)</a>, I have a personal stake in this game. Of course, you can never really tell when you're at a watershed moment until time has passed and you can look back with the clarity of hindsight to connect all the dots, but I have both the sinking suspicion and the cautious hope that this is one for education (and maybe also our economy and our cultural values since those things are pretty tightly braided together). </div>
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Assessment is important because the evaluation of the final product shapes the process by which the product is created. This is what we mean when we complain that standardized testing forces well-meaning teachers to "teach to the test." It results in a school environment where "covering" the material is more valued than "mastering" it. Most importantly, standardized testing leads to standardized thinking. </div>
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If the answer can be boiled down to a multiple choice question on a test that everyone takes, then the information isn't novel or creative or probably very interesting. Most of being successful on standardized tests (and I say this both as someone who is very good at standardized tests and who has spent many years helping other people do well on them) is a combination of short-term memorization and being able to break down language patterns and use process of elimination to figure out likely right answers. </div>
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The type of reading you do when you are preparing for a standardized test is superficial. You spend a lot of time skimming for key words and definitions, thinking like a test writer rather than a researcher. In fact, if you read the text in a way that no one else has, you will fail the test because that means no questions will arrive at your answers. </div>
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The bottom line is that standardized testing makes for standardized thinking and standardized performance. And here's the thing, if the way that you think and perform can be standardized, it can be automated, and if it can be automated, in the next five to ten years, it <i>will </i>be automated. </div>
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We don't need to produce human cogs for the machine anymore because we now have robot cogs for the machine, and they don't need vacation time, sick days, or overtime pay. They don't get distracted from the task because they are in a fight with their sister. They don't get tired because they were up all night with a sick baby. They do routine tasks better than we do with more consistency while costing less. We cannot compete. </div>
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Some schools (*cough* I'm looking at you STLCC), see the change coming and are reacting by <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/19/pearson-partners-ivy-tech-self-paced-online-gen-ed-courses" target="_blank">doubling down on standardization</a>. They're turning higher education into course-in-a-box cookie cutter classes that can be easily automated. Eventually, they'll likely replace (or at least greatly reduce the need for) flesh-and-blood teachers and turn to automated grading software and self-paced courses that require <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/09/28/553753020/who-is-a-college-teacher-anyway-audit-of-online-university-raises-questions" target="_blank">very little teacher interaction.</a> I can't tell if this motivation is made in earnest and they really think this is the wave of the future or if they are just short-term thinkers who are trying to make as much money as possible while the making is good. Either way, it's a bad plan for all the reasons pointed out in the Edutopia article. We're going to shift <i>away</i> from standardization and automation in education, not toward it. </div>
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I'm going to make a prediction. <b>If schools don't operate with some foresight and reject standardization and automation as the models for their underlying philosophies, we will soon see a complete de-coupling of credentialing from institutions. </b></div>
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Think about it. The students coming out of these course-in-a-box programs will not have the skills necessary for the only jobs available, jobs that require creative thinking, flexibility, and independence. When those doing the hiring recognize (as many already have) that a college degree doesn't mean much in terms of matching the skills they're seeking, they'll turn to in-house training and accepting more and more non-traditional methods of demonstrating "education." </div>
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The rise of unschooling homeschoolers, online class platforms like Udemy, Outschool, and Coursera, and a host of other fledgling trial runs demonstrate a likely future. People will be able to get educated in whatever way they see fit: online classes, one-on-one instruction, apprenticeship models, etc. All they'll need to do is demonstrate that they have the skillset necessary for the job, and when the transcript full of A's doesn't do that anymore, the employers will stop asking for it. </div>
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I think it is very likely that we're entering a period where educators will all become independent contractors. The <a href="http://www.online-phd-programs.org/adjunct/" target="_blank">adjunct crisis </a>is already a sort of model for this, albeit one that was arrived at through cruel exploitation rather than innovation. Adjunct instructors, who now make up the bulk of the higher education workforce, have very few formal ties to an institution and instead are free to take their skills anywhere (or to several anywheres simultaneously). If the decoupling of credentialing and institutions continues, we will soon return to an education model much like the Ancient Greeks. We'll all be Plato or Quintillian standing outside the gymnasium trying to convince people to train with us. Except now we'll have Facebook and YouTube to help us.<br /><br /><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;">Photos by</span><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;"> </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/_GuagSmFj00?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration-skip: ink; transition: color 0.2s ease-in-out, opacity 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Vita Marija Murenaite</a><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;"> and</span><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;"> </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/mQ5x4hEkM78?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration-skip: ink; transition: color 0.2s ease-in-out, opacity 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Steve Halama</a><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: nowrap;"> </span></div>
Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-707355861034978592018-01-06T22:37:00.000-06:002018-01-06T22:37:08.981-06:00Postpartum Depression: The Recovery <div class="tr_bq">
A friend of mine shared one of my old posts today, and when the page views made it pop up in my blog stats, I re-read it and thought back on the experience that led to writing it.<br /><br />It was <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2016/08/a-copy-of-copy-of-copy-postpartum.html" target="_blank">this post</a> about suffering from postpartum anxiety and depression after the birth of my son a year and a half ago. It made me think about what my life has looked like since writing that post, and the truth is that it took a long time to stop feeling the way that I felt the day I described there: </div>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Even as it's happening--the panic, the shaking, the breaths that catch in my throat--there's a part of me that's outside of it all, watching it. There's a part of me screaming, "This isn't a big deal! Get it together!" But I can't hear her. In that moment, I feel like I am in fight or flight, but the threat is me. How do you run from yourself?</span></span></i> </blockquote>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">With a quick glance or in the right light, I still seem like myself. I still make wry jokes and plan to meet with friends. I still smile. I still love and enjoy both of my children.</span></span></i> </blockquote>
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">But like a copy of a copy of a copy, if you look closer, the picture isn't quite right. I'm not quite me. The edges break down and the lines start to blur.</span></span></i></blockquote>
In the first weeks following my son's birth, I felt like this <i>all of the time</i>. Every single thing in my world overwhelmed me. I was particularly frustrated with myself because my son was such an easy baby (especially compared to my high needs daughter who, for the first four years of her life, <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2015/01/the-cuddle-alarm.html" target="_blank">never slept more than an hour or two at a time</a>). This newborn was sleeping for three hours, waking up to nurse, and going right back to sleep for another four hours. He was the infant that they use to write those parenting books that make all the rest of us feel like we're failing at everything. Even when he was awake, he was just as happy to coo quietly in a bassinet as he was to be held in my arms or swaddled up in a carrier. He just went with the flow.<br />
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And I still couldn't handle anything.<br />
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The microwave would beep and I'd fall into hysterics because the thought of dealing with finishing lunch would be too much. I'd have to call to pay a bill over the phone, and it would feel like someone was asking me to climb a mountain barefoot while juggling fishbowls that I couldn't spill. Everything was just <i>too much</i>.<br />
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At the worst moments, I would fall into a heap on the floor and sob until I had nothing left to sob. At most moments, I walked through my day with my muscles tense, as if I were permanently braced for a blow that never came.<br />
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It got better . . . slowly. It was like a pendulum swinging wider and wider with each arc. My normal was on one end, and the terror of being completely consumed by daily living was on the other.<br /><br />At first, the pendulum would swing from one to the other every couple hours. Eventually it would swing back and forth only a few times a day. Then a few times a week. Then a few times a month. Then once a month. All told, I have only felt like the swinging stopped (fully rooted in my normal world) within the last few months. Part of me wonders if it is really done or if it is just on a particularly long arc.<br /><br />As time went on, I learned to treat the anxiety like a monster that would sometimes escape a cage but that I knew couldn't actually hurt me. I just had to let it wear itself out until it was too tired to resist being led back into the cage. It was always there, waiting and growling from the darkness, but as long as I could keep it contained, it couldn't ruin my day.<br /><br />Looking back now, I think the thing that hurts the most is that it feels like time lost. My memories of my earliest weeks with my wonderful son are of terror punctuated with tiny moments of love and joy. I am so glad that I have pictures and videos from his earliest days now that I can look back on them with a clearer mind, without a monster snarling in my face.<br />
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Postpartum anxiety and depression is very common. The chances are high that someone you know and love has suffered through this roller coaster of emotions . . . even if you don't know about it. The fear we have about being open and honest about our mental health holds us back from getting the help and support we need.<br /><br />Monsters are strongest in the dark. Once we turn on the lights, they never look quite as terrifying. Let's make sure we shine them brightly.<br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">Photo: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/shannonmary/150650362/in/photolist-ej873-6ARCwP-og25G-66DjU4-5r27p-66HBf9-66HAyb-66HAD3-66HBwG-66DmJK-66Dmmi-66HB33-734ub1-66Dkde-8oY1B3-66HBpf-66HAzA-mJW4p-8haKKe-eeF372-eeF33D-eeF36M-eeLLBh-eeF37H-M71AP-eeLLzL-qmdZVh-v8XYg-vcocX-8xxrv-8PXAv6-eeF328-5hjqXX-vcon3-6CuuP8-8PXC5v-eeF31x-9roM3D-eeF33X-eeF34M-eeLLAu-eeLLxs-eeLLvA-WBg4i6-byGK2Z-6KET4a-8Q1HyA-aN1C9P-mJVX2-EaCyb" target="_blank">Shannon Kokoska</a> </span>Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-12224956785920938312017-12-31T10:01:00.000-06:002017-12-31T10:01:16.172-06:00Every Episode of Black Mirror Season 4, Ranked I thoroughly enjoy <i>Black Mirror </i>both as a general concept and in the execution of its individual episodes. While there are a few duds and the series is a bit ham-fisted with its moralizing much of the time, it ticks a lot of boxes for the criteria I use to judge a television series. It's entertaining, balances out optimism and pessimism, examines the crucial intersection of humanity and technology, and provides talking points for very real ethical dilemmas.<br />
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<br />I just finished Season 4, and here is my ranking for all six episodes. (Spoilers, obviously.)<br /><br /><br /><br /><b><u><span style="font-size: large;">6. Crocodile- </span></u></b><br />
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My least favorite of the season was overwhelmingly "Crocodile." In fact, this is the only one that didn't make it into the positive category on my "is this good?" initial test.<br /><br />I'm not alone in my distaste for the episode. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/black-mirror-crocodile-is-a-nihilistic-nordic-noir/549380/" target="_blank">David Sims writes</a>: "I don’t know if I’ve ever been as frustrated by an episode of Black Mirror as I was by “Crocodile,” a miserable hour that left me both emotionally and intellectually unfulfilled. . . . It is, undoubtedly, relentlessly depressing. And yet it also didn’t seem to have much of a deeper point."<br /><br />That pretty much sums it up for me, too. Crocodile opens with a couple drunk driving through open countryside when their car slams into a cyclist, killing him instantly. The male driver of the car convinces his female passenger to help him dispose of the body in a nearby lake despite her insistence that this is a terrible plan. Flash forward 15 years later, and the woman (Mia) has made an incredibly successful life for herself as an architect as well as a nice family with a husband and son. When the driver from the past accident shows up in her hotel room to tell her he's going to anonymously write to the widow of the man he killed, she freaks out about the possibility of getting tangled up in the murder investigation that would likely follow. To avoid the possibility of being discovered as the accomplice to vehicular manslaughter nearly two decades in the past, she murders her friend with a display of brash (and completely unrealistic) violence.<br /><br />The technology part of the show doesn't make an appearance until it's well on its way, and then it takes a long time to fully reveal itself. We see an insurance investigator who is trying to find out the details of a crash involving an automatic pizza delivery car. To do this, she uses a standard-issue device that reads people's memories, subjective data that she uses to piece together a more complete picture of the accident in order to help her company with lawsuits and assigning blame. Mia had witnessed the accident right after she killed her friend, and the insurance investigator eventually finds her, hooks her up to the machine, and sees the memories of her murder.<br /><br />Mia, completely terrified that she will now get caught for <i>that</i> murder, ties the investigator up in her shed, tortures her with the fact that she will also hunt down her husband and kill him, and then bludgeons the investigator to death with a log. She vomits, which I guess is supposed to show she doesn't <i>like</i> beating people until their brains are exposed, but she drives 50 miles and breaks into the investigator's house to quietly sneak up on her husband and beat him to death with a hammer. Then she notices their infant child and murders her, too (off screen, thankfully, but probably with the same hammer).<br /><br />The twist is that she forgot to kill the guinea pig, and we see police hooking it up to a memory machine just before the episode ends.<br /><br />I don't have a problem with gore or nihilism, but this episode fell flat in so many ways. Mia's motivations made absolutely no sense. There was no development of her character before or after she snapped that would give us a lesson from her actions. On top of that, I'm pretty sure that murdering four people with your bare hands in the span of two days is the kind of thing we can already investigate and prosecute pretty well, and that's without the help of memory machines that makes every passer-by who might have driven past your car as you made this 100-mile round-trip murderous trek into photographic evidence.<br /><br />The plot feels lazy, and the end reveals that the child was blind, a line that felt like it was supposed to be packed with meaning that they forgot to write (or maybe got cut out in editing). Finally, the guinea pig felt like a glib joke in the middle of what was otherwise played as a pretty straight, serious piece of writing. It just didn't work. Any of it.<br /><b><br />Entertainment value: 1/5<br />Ethical exploration: 1/5 </b><br /><br /><u><span style="font-size: large;">5. <b>Arkangel- </b></span></u><br />
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I <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2017/12/black-mirrors-arkangel-privacy-is.html" target="_blank">already wrote a post analyzing Arkangel</a> as a piece of commentary about modern day parenting and the constantly renegotiated boundaries of privacy. I won't re-hash the plot summary and analysis from there.<br /><br />It was a little surprising to me that this episode ended up so low in my rankings because I really did enjoy it. It was meaningful and interesting, and I felt invested in the characters and their stories.<br /><br />The message was often a little too shoehorned into the plot, but overall it was relevant, if not particularly groundbreaking.<br /><br />In the end, this was just an okay episode, and there are much better episodes, so "okay" lands it in fifth place.<br /><br /><b>Entertainment value: 3/5</b><br />
<b>Ethical exploration: 2/5</b><br /><br /><u><span style="font-size: large;">4. <b>Metalhead</b>- </span></u><br />
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This episode was the most thematically striking of the bunch. Shot in black and white, the entire feel of it was darker and less playful than all of the episodes (expect perhaps Crocodile, but I'd rather just pretend that it didn't happen, so I'm going to ignore it in comparisons).<br /><br />In Metalhead, we're introduced to three characters who are on a mission to get some very important but unknown object from a warehouse. They're in a post-apocalyptic, barren landscape where cars and buildings are abandoned and falling apart, a clear sign that whatever terrible thing happened was widespread and pretty thorough. Our protagonists are discussing other people to whom they hope to bring comfort, so it's clear that there are survivors, but it seems like more of a hanging-on-by-our-teeth kind of survival than a rebuilding-society kind of survival.<br /><br />When they get to the warehouse, they toss a rock at a van to make some noise as a test but leave the keys in their ignition, so we know right away that whatever villain exists in this dystopia isn't human. When they find the box they're looking for (contents still unknown to us), they accidentally trigger a "dog," a robot that has been designed to serve a surveillance and protection role. And by "serve a surveillance and protection role," I mean kill anyone it encounters. It is really, really good at this. It is nearly indestructible, able to open any door lock with a its universal passcode abilities, and able to hunt down people both by shooting tracking devices into them and by using clues like blood, sound, radio waves, and heat. In other words, once you've triggered a "dog," you are very likely going to die.<br /><br />To underscore this fact, two of our three protagonists are killed pretty much immediately, leaving most of the episode as a tense, well-paced suspense where one woman tries to escape one robot. They both take a lot of damage. It loses a leg; she digs the tracker out of her thigh, leaving a gaping wound. She runs its batteries out; it recharges and keeps hunting. It loses its shooting capacity, so it finds a knife instead. It's like the old Spy vs. Spy cartoons but with a lot more emotional investment in one side.<br /><br />The thing I liked about this episode is how much I was rooting for the woman and rooting <i>against</i> this machine, to which I most certainly ascribed agency and intention. This was an evil robot. I hated it. The sight of it making a comeback made me angry.<br /><br />I was treating it like a villain. A human villain. A sentient villain. But it wasn't.<br /><br />It was just doing what it was programmed (and left behind--forever?) to do.<br /><br />In the end, the woman finally destroys the dog, but not before it fills her face and, most importantly, throat full of trackers. There is no way she can remove them without slitting her own throat, and so that's exactly what she does, killing herself rather than face the doom that's on its way to her. As the camera pans away from the house she's in, we see several dogs quickly but also somewhat mundanely and routinely marching across the barren landscape. The final scene takes us back to the warehouse where the box they wanted so desperately, the one that contained an item that would bring some measure of comfort to a never-seen but obviously-hurt companion, was stored. Its contents had spilled. It was full of teddy bears.<br /><br />The implications of this episode are on protectionism and the way that capitalism has taught us to value possessions and profits over human lives and compassion. Those dogs were programmed by someone to protect the contents of the warehouse, and though the humans who care about such things are long gone, the dogs remain, wreaking havoc on every tiny bit of humanity that remains with them.<br /><br />It's a solid episode that didn't really teach me any new lessons but made me reflect on ones I already knew in a more powerful way. The tension was palpable throughout, and the tone (though bleak) was even and consistent.<br /><br /><b>Entertainment value: 3/5<br />Ethical exploration: 3/5 </b><br /><br /><u><span style="font-size: large;">3. <b>USS Callister</b>- </span></u><br /><br />This one seems to be coming out as the fan favorite of the season. It's getting high praise from people like <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/black-mirrors-uss-callister-is-much-more-than-a-star-trek-parody/549191/" target="_blank">David Sims</a>, <a href="http://ew.com/tv/2017/12/29/black-mirror-uss-callister-star-trek/" target="_blank">Darren Franich</a> and <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/12/black-mirror-recap-season-4-uss-callister.html" target="_blank">Charles Bramesco</a>.<br /><br />This is the one I have seen discussed most often, so I'll keep my recap brief. It opens with a terribly corny <i>Star Trek</i> spoof where the crew of a spaceship fall all over themselves to fawn over their captain, Cole (a man who looks like he would come in fourth place at a local Matt Damon lookalike contest). It was a jarring way to start the new season because the throwback film quality and the obviously tongue-in-cheek acting as well as the overall jovial but completely nonsensical plot (they're hunting a bad guy with a jewel or something) didn't feel like a <i>Black Mirror</i> episode at all.<br /><br />Because it wasn't.<br /><br />That was a glimpse inside a video game where the "real" Cole is co-founder of a gaming smash hit but garners no respect from his employees or partner. Instead of standing up for himself in the real world, he secretly collects the DNA of the people surrounding him and replicates their consciousness into the game so that he can torture them at his leisure. His character is played perfectly with equal parts pitiable stooge and sadistic dictator, a dangerous combination when he's handed God-like power.<br /><br />Like many episodes of seasons past and present, it explores the ramifications of consciousness being separated from the bodies that we assume hold it. The "real" versions of these characters continue on in the "real" world with no knowledge that a version of themselves is being tortured day after day. This episode adds a particularly interesting twist when an uploaded character manages to communicate with her real-life self, further throwing into question what identity and consciousness really mean.<br /><br />The imprisoned crew hatch a plan with the help of their newest member that allows them to escape the clutches of Cole by plunging themselves into a black hole update patch. They think this act will merely "kill" the code and eliminate their existence, but it instead strips away the modified version of the game and gives them an eternity to act of their own free will within the online version of the game, interacting with actual players from the outside world.<br /><br />Perhaps the most interesting to me from a moral standpoint is that I (as I suspect is true for most viewers) felt that Cole got exactly what he deserved when he ends up trapped inside the game as his modification deletes itself, his real-life body left limp and unresponsive. What does this mean about my own moral code? The crew didn't know this would happen to him, so it wasn't a premeditated killing, but even if they had, they would have acted out of completely justified self defense. Still, the "people" he tortured were just lines of code. Does everyone who has removed the door from a burning house on The Sims in order to watch them die deserve such a grisly demise? What turns a line of code into a being deserving of justice or revenge?<br /><br />The episode is at times overwhelmingly silly and at other times horrifyingly sad. It's an impressive roller coaster of emotions to pack in. In places, the pacing feels a little off, and some of the acting left a bit to be desired, but overall, it was a very fun and thought-provoking episode. I can see why it's shaping up to be the favorite, but there were two other episodes that outshined it for me.<br /><b><br />Entertainment value: 4/5<br />Ethical exploration: 3/5 </b><br /><br /><b><u><span style="font-size: large;">2. Black Museum</span></u></b><br />
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I had a hard time arranging my first- and second-place picks. One packed a harder punch when it came to ethical exploration, and the other packed more entertainment value. They are both superb episodes.<br /><br />I went into Black Museum cautious because I had seen rumblings online that said it was a very disappointing finale for the season. <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/29/16822796/black-mirror-black-museum-recap-season-4-review" target="_blank">Caroline Framke </a>says the end "isn't quite good enough to hold the episode together." <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2017/12/black-mirror-recap-season-4-black-museum.html" target="_blank">Charles Bramesco</a> gives it only 2 out of 5 stars. <a href="https://www.avclub.com/black-mirror-ends-its-fourth-season-with-a-dud-1821635228" target="_blank">Zack Handlen</a> calls it a "dud."<br /><br />Most of these critics fault it on technical lines. The set up was too complex (it has two dense mini stories leading back up to our frame story). The plot connections were overly contrived. The required level of suspension of disbelief was too much.<br /><br />I can't disagree with them on any of these statements. I will agree that it is not the best episode in terms of technical execution. The seams tying the stories together are much more like the oversized stitches holding together the body parts of Frankenstein's monster than the streamlined precision of, say, Metalhead.<br /><br />But I don't care. I'm giving it second place anyway.<br /><br />This episode opens with a young woman (Nish) pulling into a deserted charging station. The scene mixes a 60s feel with modern technology as she pulls out a solar panel charger for her vintage-looking car. She's stuck there for a few hours while it fills up. Looking bored, she wanders to an abandoned-looking building titles "Black Museum."<br /><br />This is (apparently, though I didn't know it at the time of watching) a reference to a real museum. <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3265971/Doors-open-grisly-exhibition-Scotland-Yard-s-Black-Museum-notorious-crimes-opens-today-revealing-weapons-fascinating-police-documents-remained-hidden-public-decades.html" target="_blank">Scotland Yard's Black Museum</a> is full of real-life artifacts from famous crimes. My first thought (especially since Nish is black and the setting has a 60s feel) was that it referred to race. I had assumed it was a reference to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/03/arts/stage-colored-museum-satire-by-george-c-wolfe.html" target="_blank">George C. Wolf's <i>The Colored Museum</i></a>. After I watched the show (still not knowing about the Scotland Yard museum), I assumed that the "Black" in the museum's name referred to <i>Black Mirror </i>itself. This is because the museum, like the real-life one, is a collection of criminal artifacts, but they are all crimes from the <i>Black Mirror </i>universe. Several of them are recognizable as objects from previous episodes. The implication that all of these terrifying technologies have strung together in the same reality (and that somehow that reality is still more-or-less functional) is sobering.<br /><br />The museum is owned and operated by Rolo Haynes, a superbly acted conman type who puts on a magnificent performance that mixes slimy salesman with cold-hearted capitalist and unattached scientist.<br /><br />As Rolo takes Nish around his museum, she stops at two particular artifacts, the catalysts for the aforementioned mini stories. The first is a mesh net that fits on someone's head, a device that allows a doctor with an implant to feel whatever the wearer is feeling. At first, this gives him the remarkable and altruistic ability to diagnosis very difficult medical cases, and we are sympathetic to his willingness to put himself in excruciating pain to help his patients. All goes awry, though, when he wears it through a death, turning him into a pain-seeking sadist who first slices himself to ribbons trying to seek his next high. That doesn't give him the mix of pain and genuine terror he craves, though, so he turns to drilling through the head of a homeless man to get his fix. This leaves him in a vegetative (but ostensibly eternally blissful) state.<br /><br />The second object is a stuffed monkey. It turns out that the monkey still contains the uploaded consciousness of a woman who was hit by a car just as she was starting a happy new family with her partner. Her partner visits her weekly while she's in a coma. She is able to answer yes or no questions with a light up device attached to her brain, but she is otherwise unable to see or interact with her partner or son. Rolo (who worked at the hospital and was responsible for finding "volunteers" for devices like this one and the pain connector above) offered her partner the chance to download the woman's consciousness into his own mind. She could hear, see, and feel everything he could, but only he would be able to hear her. As you might imagine, this turns out to be a miserable experience for both of them. He can't get any privacy and has a constant nag in his mind. She has no agency and has to watch her whole life from the background. She starts referring to his body as "theirs," and he is clearly not on board. He eventually upgrades to a way to pause her, allowing her to only be "on" on weekends so she can see their son. When he meets a new woman, though, it becomes too much, and she is finally uploaded into the stuffed monkey, a monkey that can only respond as happy ("Monkey loves you!") or sad ("Monkey needs a hug!") Her son tires of this toy almost immediately, so she spends her life (which appears to last an eternity) as a discarded and disembodied being with no way to physically interact with the world.<br />
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The most chilling part of this whole episode to me is the throwaway commentary Rolo gives for why the woman still inhabits the monkey and what makes it count as a "crime" artifact. He says that it is now illegal to upload consciousness into anything that doesn't have at least five emotional responses, and it is also illegal to delete her from the monkey. That means that the technology itself is still alive, well, and legally regulated. It also means that uploaded consciousness is akin to immortality, at least from a legal standpoint.<br />
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In the end, these two pieces of technology come together as we find out Nish is not who she seems to be. Rather than a random tourist who needs to charge her car, she is a hunter on a mission of revenge. Her father (or, rather, his hologram consciousness) has been trapped in the museum and tortured until he is a slobbering vegetable. A man wrongly accused of murder, his actual body was put to death by electric chair. Rolo convinced him to give up his consciousness in exchange for financial security for his family after his death (something I assume was a lie). Visitors got to throw the switch on the man themselves, keeping a permanent copy of his consciousness in the moment of the most pain as a keychain with his hologrammed, agonized face screaming for all eternity. Nish poisons Rolo, uploads his consciousness into her father's hologram, mercy kills them both, and keeps a keychain of Rolo's final moments as her own keepsake. Then she rides off into the sunset with the monkey by her side. At this point, we learn that she actually has her mother's consciousness uploaded into her own brain, so her acts of revenge were a team effort.<br /><br />My love for this episode is not in its technical execution. The critics are right that it is a bit sloppy and overwrought. However, what it lacks in that arena it more than makes up for in ambition and purpose.<br /><br />Zack Handlen writes, "Squint enough, and you could mark Haynes as a satiric version of Charlie Brooker himself; or at least, a version of the writer the show’s most vehement critics often conjure up."<br />
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<a href="https://nerdist.com/black-mirror-black-museum-recap/" target="_blank">Scott Beggs</a> takes the same observation one step further and suggests that this episode is Brooker calling for help:<br />
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<i>In short, why do we watch this show? </i></blockquote>
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<i>That’s for each of us to decide, but if Nish represents us, Rolo represents Brooker, and the Black Museum represents Black Mirror, it says a cursing mouthful that Nish poisons Rolo and lets the museum burn.</i></blockquote>
Are we complicit in the same kind of torture that the museum visitors inflicted upon Nish's father when we watch the show? Or does it at least point to this same sadistic impulse within us that would make us those kinds of monsters given the right technology?<br /><br />The racial overtones (including a set up that feels a lot like the way slave artifacts are displayed for voyeuristic consumption across real America) and the fact that they bring back an electric chair (as the way Nish's father is actually executed in the real world, not just a prop in the museum) point to the true depravity of human beings. We're terrible to one another in the flesh. We hurt, we kill, and we justify it through notions of utility and vengeance. The question isn't what could we become. The question is what are we already. What have we always been?<br />
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<b>Entertainment value: 4/5<br />Ethical exploration: 5/5</b><br /><br /><b><u><span style="font-size: large;">1. Hang the DJ</span></u></b><br />
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I'm ending on the fun one. This was by far the most enjoyable episode to watch, but that's not the only reason that it gets to be my top-place pick. It packs a meaningful punch as well.<br /><br />In Hang the DJ, we're introduced to a futuristic dating landscape where people are coached by a device as they are matched up with a partner for a predetermined amount of time until the machine's algorithms gather enough response data to find a "true match," something the creators claim to do with 99.8% accuracy.<br /><br />I spent a good chunk of this episode frustrated and incredulous. We're introduced right away to two people (Frank and Amy) on a date. They find out that their "expiry date" is only 12 hours away, so (despite their obvious chemistry and attraction for one another) they part ways and begin meeting their other potential mates. Some they end up paired with for only a few hours. Others they stay with for months and months. Frank, in particular, is tied to a terrible match for a full year. While matched, a couple must live together and, at least as far as we can tell from the show, spend all of their time together. One of the things that bothered me is that these people seem to have no other purpose. They don't have jobs. They aren't shown with friends. We don't even see them talk on the phone. They are sometimes reading while lying next to one another and sometimes jogging alone while waiting for their next match, but otherwise their entire purpose seems to be to date, knowing full well that their relationships will end, and mostly being miserable in the meantime.<br /><br />It becomes clear that this world has some kind of dystopian authority hanging over everyone's heads. The "matched" characters in the background seem cult-like and wooden. There are guards with tazers to keep people in line, and people aren't allowed to be together once their time is up. When Frank and Amy finally decide to run off together because they know they're truly in love and will find no one better by waiting for their "true match," they climb a literal wall in a scene that is every bit as silly as the climax of <i>The Truman Show</i>.<br /><br />Then comes the twist. Frank and Amy weren't real people. They were the uploaded consciousness of real people sent to play out a simulation to test their compatibility. We see that the versions we watched were actually the 1000th iteration of such a simulation, and 998 of the versions had rebelled to be together. This triggers the real-life Frank and Amy to both get notifications on their phones that they are near a 99.8% match, and they look up and smile at one another.<br /><br />There's so much that we don't know in this episode. Were all 1000 simulations the same scenario, or were virtual Frank and Amy put through the test in multiple venues and circumstances? Are there an infinite number of these virtual selves paired with literally every other participant in the program, or is there some kind of initial screening that only puts likely matches through this rigorous test? Are the virtual selves deleted after the simulation, or are they left holding hands at the finish line for all eternity?<br /><br />What makes this episode work so well for me is that Frank and Amy have such genuine on-screen chemistry that I was truly rooting for them. The unfairness of being ripped apart in the name of some algorithmic decision-making was visceral for me. <i>Machines don't know more about love than people do!</i> Of course, when they run off together, I felt vindicated in that belief, but then they turned it all around to tell me that maybe I was wrong and machines <i>do </i>know more about love than people do; they just had to use the very human system of narrative and storytelling to get the information.<br /><br />That's what ultimately makes this episode my top pick. In a (usually very bleak) reality where technology shows us the very worst of human nature, this (like San Junipero before it) gives a more optimistic outlook on the merger of humanity with technology. In both cases, though, that successful (and not horrifying) merger is dependent upon the humanities: storytelling, the mess of human emotion. Algorithms can work to make our lives better, but first they must be rooted in the stories and meaning of what it is to be human.<br /><br /><b>Entertainment value: 5/5<br />Ethical exploration: 4/5</b><br />
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It's no coincidence that my top three picks all deal with the same basic theme: what happens when human beings are exported out of their bodies and given consciousness beyond themselves? This idea absolutely terrifies me. The thought of not having control over my body is my biggest fear, and the scariest future I could ever imagine is being trapped without the ability to respond to the world around me. The cookies in White Christmas or the monkey in Black Museum point to the absolute horrors of these possibilities, but even the feel-good versions in San Junipero and Hang the DJ chill me to my core even as they offer a more optimistic outlook. <br /><br />If we enter a world where people's consciousnesses can be turned into transferable code, what's the difference between spending an eternity living your best life like in San Junipero or spending an eternity suffocating by your own mouthless face like in USS Callister? Why, the difference is simply what human coder has control, and history doesn't bode well for how that will eventually turn out.<br />
<br />Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-24778005842356110562017-12-30T00:27:00.000-06:002017-12-30T00:27:03.846-06:00Black Mirror's Arkangel: Privacy is Relative This post contains spoilers for "Arkangel," Season 4, Episode 2 of <i>Black Mirror</i>.<br /><br />I just finished watching "Arkangel," and I had some thoughts about it.<br /><br />First, the show does an excellent job of making the mundane and ordinary moments of terror in daily life come through in a pitch perfect way. The episode opens up with a shot of a mother giving birth, but all we can see is her head and torso as the rest of her body is blocked from view (from us and from her) by a sheet. On the other side are men apparently poking and prodding as a female nurse peers over the curtain. They're testing her numbness to make sure they can proceed with a c-section. She turns to the nurse and apologizes, shamefully, for not being able to push anymore.<br /><br />The episode is not at all subtle in the territory it treads. This is a look at modern parenting that shows us from this opening moment that the guilt, sense of competition, and desire to do it "right" are setting us up for failure. By playing on the idea that women will feel guilty if they don't give birth in the "right" way, the show establishes from the opening shot that this woman (and by extension, all of us trying to navigate the barrage of expectations of modern parenting) are doomed to fail, if for no other reason than one person's right is another person's wrong.<br /><br />There are a few terrifying moments where the baby appears not to be breathing, and the shots of the mother's face capture that true terror very well. The baby starts to cry, and all is well. The doctor's hand her over, and the pure love of a mother cradling her newborn fills the screen.<br /><br />This opening scene turns out to be a precursor to the episode's premise. The mother's terror was rooted in what she could not see. The curtain blocked her view of the c-section that brought her baby into the world, and then--while she was immobile on the operating table--the bodies of the doctors blocked her view of her daughter's first few moments of life. Shrouded in the unknown, the terror of the worst possibilities fill the scene.<br /><br />The little girl (Sara) gets older, and when she is three, she follows a cat away from the playground while her mother is preoccupied chatting with another mom. The screams of Sara's name from the whole neighborhood joining in a search once again pull the very real terror of a very common occurrence to the forefront. Yes, this is a regular thing (that usually turns out just fine), but it is also a terrifying one (that could turn out in the worst way imaginable). The what-ifs, the unknowns, the imagined horrors of the world are the ones that haunt us all, but they haunt parents in ways that can be paralyzing.<br />
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Obviously impacted by this scare, the mother elects to have her daughter implanted with a chip called Arkangel that tracks her location, gives her mother access to her daughter's field of vision and audio, and grants parental controls that block out scary images and sounds based on the child's biological responses to fear. As a result, little Sara grows up under constant surveillance from her caring and loving mother but also unable to interact with her peers the way she would like.<br /><br />The show skips ahead to her pre-teen years, and we see her trying to fit in with a crowd that is obviously a little more rough-and-tumble than her bubble-wrapped existence has allowed her to become. In particular, she is enamored with a boy named Trick.<br /><br />Our introduction to Trick shows him watching incredibly violent videos online of people beating one another. Of course, Sara can't see these images because of the filters. Her friend is grossed out by the images and tells Trick she wishes she couldn't see them either, but Sara doesn't have that luxury of arriving at her own ethical boundaries. They've been put in place for her, and they are therefore artificial with little meaning. Trick agrees to describe the images to her, and she becomes fascinated with the idea of blood, which she's never seen. When she draws an image of a beaten body with blood spewing and then subsequently cuts her own finger to see it bleed, her mother becomes concerned and takes her to a psychologist who tells her that the Arkangel system has been banned in Europe and was never approved for full-scale use in the U.S. He says there is no way to remove the chip, but the mother can simply throw out her monitoring platform. Sara can still have a normal life with appropriate peer interactions if her mother is willing to give up her window into her mind.<br /><br />Sophie Gilbert has <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/black-mirror-arkangel-mines-the-horror-of-helicopter-parenting/549368/" target="_blank">a post up</a> about this episode, and she points to the interesting potential exploration of the mediated material kids in the show's world (and, by extension, our own) can access:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Acting out is a normal part of human behavior, it preaches, and parents who deny their children the freedom to experiment will end up losing them. Far more interesting to me was the episode’s subtext about what kids <b>already</b> have access to. When young Sara’s chip is turned off, a kid in her class shows her hardcore porn and execution videos on his iPad with disturbing nonchalance. Later, in her first sexual encounter, Sara mimics the women she’s seen in pornography, horrifying her mother, who’s turned on the long-dormant Arkangel device to find out where her daughter is. The impact of this kind of instant access to adult imagery is as novel as the implant is, and as unclear. But the episode seems more concerned with lining up a tidy parable about helicopter parenting than peeking into the prospects of the nearer-present.</i></blockquote>
Gilbert's desire for a more nuanced exploration of how mediated reality can impact developing minds is a valid one, and the show definitely seems to have a ham-fisted goal of taking on parenting choices, but I still think that it packs a little more subtly into the conversation than this criticism gives it credit for.<br /><br />The mother does indeed turn off the filters and hide away her monitoring device in the attic (a clear sign that it will be making a comeback later), and for several years Sara develops just fine, even with exposure to hardcore porn and violence on her friend Trick's screens.<br /><br />Later, we see Sara and Trick enter a sexual relationship, and Sara (a virgin) uses the pornographic language she saw in his videos. He tells her she doesn't have to talk like that for him. With this, the show dances into the territory of questioning what impact this access to mediated realities has on children, but it also seems to close it up pretty neatly. <i>It might give them a warped sense of the world, but they'll figure it out pretty quickly, </i>the show suggests.<br /><br />What happens next, though, is a very clear critique of overprotective parenting. When the mother realizes that Sara has been lying about her whereabouts to be with Trick, she dusts the device off and starts secretly monitoring her, witnessing her having sex and snorting a line of cocaine. She then confronts not Sara, but Trick, threatening to turn him into the police if he doesn't cut off all contact with Sara. She also makes it clear that she'll be watching Sara's every move, so he can't even tell Sara why he's ignoring her.<br /><br />When Sara, as teenage girls are wont to do, breaks down because of his rejection, her reaction tips her mother off that she is actually pregnant--something Sara doesn't even know herself. Her mother slips an abortion drug into her smoothie, and when the side effects send Sara to the doctor, she finds out what has happened and that her mother has been watching her. Understandably upset about finding out not only that she's being constantly monitored but also that she was pregnant and has unwittingly had an abortion, the confrontation with her mother turns violent. Sara beats her mother with the monitoring device until the filter that keeps her from seeing the harm she's doing shuts off. At that point, she flees, leaving her mother bloody and the device non-functional. We see her hitchhiking away when a truck stops for her on the highway. Her mother wakes up, realizes she has lost her daughter and cannot use the device to track her, and breaks down sobbing. The end.<br />
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The obvious lesson of this show is that children need privacy and the freedom to make mistakes and learn their own boundaries. While she isn't in many scenes, we have Sara's friend to act as a counterbalance for a child who has boundaries without technological enforcement of them. The friend sneaks off to make out with boys at the lake, too, but she gets caught the old fashioned way (by not being where she said she'd be when she said she'd be there) and has to face her parents and the consequences. Sara has no such experience, and I can't imagine a very happy ending for her hitchhiking adventure, especially since she has very little worldly experience and spent most of her life literally blocked from seeing the worst the world had to offer.<br /><br />A more interesting lesson to me, though, is about the relativity of privacy. Sara has a hard time fitting in not because her mother sees her every move alone, but because her implant makes her an anomaly. Her mother sees her every move, but the other kids' don't have such a burden. Privacy is a relative term, and you tend to notice how much you have or don't have in relation to the people around you.<br /><br />This is something we see in the real world with the rise in social media. The sharing of pictures, thoughts, and life events that seems commonplace among my generation (and even more so those younger than me) feels like an affront to privacy for many people older than me. The concept of privacy didn't change, and I think that younger people still value privacy. What changed was the boundaries around what constituted privacy in the face of shared experiences.<br /><br />In some ways, the breaking down of privacy can be a good thing. When we remove the barriers to sharing about common experiences of being human (say, having anxiety or depression or the gross but totally normal bodily responses to childbirth) we empower people to open up about their own experiences, seek medical attention where they might otherwise have been ashamed, and otherwise feel more comfortable in their own skin.<br /><br />That only works if the majority are on board, though. A breaking down of privacy for a select few while everyone else gets to keep their boundaries firmly in place creates an imbalance that makes privacy social capital.<br /><br />This isn't to say that I think the Arkangel episode would have been a happy tale if everyone had microchipped their children and spent their days staring at a mediated version of their minds instead of actually parenting them. It's a creepy concept that would have damaging effects on everything from ethics to parenting itself. Can you imagine how much mom guilt and the mommy wars would grow if you could literally demonstrate to other parents what your child was thinking? Your responsibilities to be a "good" parent would be beyond overwhelming! No, I definitely think that the message against the Arkangel is a good one.<br /><br />But it's not just a good one for us to think about individually. The lesson is not simply to make sure that we give our own children freedom to explore their world and make their own mistakes. It's also a lesson to carefully monitor and push back against attempts to change the overall definitions of privacy and acceptable breaches of it. It's not just our own participation at stake; it's the overall norming of privacy itself that has to be protected.<br /><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; white-space: nowrap;">Photo by </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/xJc--frJbuw?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; text-decoration-skip: ink; transition: color 0.2s ease-in-out, opacity 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Siarhei Horbach</a><span style="background-color: whitesmoke; color: #111111; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; white-space: nowrap;"> on </span><a href="https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText" style="background-color: whitesmoke; box-sizing: border-box; color: #999999; font-family: -apple-system, system-ui, "San Francisco", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Ubuntu, Roboto, Noto, "Segoe UI", Arial, sans-serif; text-decoration-skip: ink; transition: color 0.2s ease-in-out, opacity 0.2s ease-in-out; white-space: nowrap;">Unsplash</a></span><br />
<br /><br />Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-83322514193049357522017-12-29T11:06:00.000-06:002017-12-29T11:28:43.140-06:00The Loss at STLCC is a Loss for St. Louis<i>Two weeks ago, I got the devastating news that I would be among the 58 faculty members laid off from the community college where I work. I wrote <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2017/12/reflections-on-losing-your-dream-job.html" target="_blank">this post at the time</a>, saying I wasn't ready to talk about it in any concrete way. I'm a little more ready now. </i><br />
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<i>*****</i></div>
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St. Louis Community College just lost 58 full-time faculty members. This means there will be fewer teachers, counselors, and librarians for the thousands of students who attend STLCC. This loss is tremendous for the individuals who were informed they would be laid off through the controversial Reduction in Force, but it is a loss that will be felt most keenly by the students that STLCC serves, students who by-and-large come from and will remain in the St. Louis region. The loss is all of ours, and the response should be, too. <br />
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I was one of the faculty members laid off last week. Half an hour before I was scheduled to meet my students for their final class period of the semester, I received a call scheduling a meeting to hear that my position was being eliminated. <br />
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The first person in my family to even attend college, I worked hard and rose through the ranks of academia to attain my PhD, and I knew early in my professional career that I would dedicate my life to teaching at-risk and vulnerable student populations. To me, it would be a testament to the teachers who had made a difference in my own life. These were teachers who saw through the statistics telling them that I, a child on food stamps in a single-parent household in rural Missouri, wouldn’t have much chance at academic success. Those teachers gave me every opportunity to succeed by providing challenging learning environments and an unwavering system of support. I knew that all students deserve exactly what I got: the chance to learn anything they want from teachers who believe they can do so. Before STLCC, I worked with low-income and underrepresented minority students through Upward Bound and the McNair Scholars Program. Through these experiences, I realized that my true calling was in the classroom. <br />
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In 2012, I started my career at STLCC as an English teacher specifically hired to teach developmental writing classes. I teach at the Forest Park campus, which serves one of the most diverse student populations in the state. I have worked with students who are homeless, students who were just released from prison, students whose families do not approve of their efforts to earn a degree, students who are going to college for the first time in their 60s, students who report never having read a whole book before, and students who graduated with high grades from their high schools. <br />
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At Forest Park, most students have to take developmental coursework. Some of them are returning to school for the first time in decades and need the courses to help refresh their skills and memories. Some of them were not adequately prepared in high school. Some of them are trying to turn over a new leaf after missing opportunities earlier in their educations. All of them come in with big dreams and hopes for the future. Developmental students are those who do not pass the entrance exams placing them in college-level classes. Before they can enter English 101, they have to take courses designed to fill the gaps in their education and provide preparation. Without this opportunity, these students would not be able to complete any degree.<br />
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During my layoff meeting, I was informed that there would be adjunct positions I could apply to in the future. In addition to being an incredible personal insult (with what would amount to a 70% reduction in my salary and complete elimination of my benefits), this is also a loss to the students. To be sure, adjunct faculty members serve an invaluable function in our educational system, working tirelessly for what often amounts to minimum wage pay to provide students quality courses. However, they do so without the stability, compensation, or institutional support that gives them access to all of the tools necessary. <br />
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As a full-time faculty member, I hold a minimum of thirteen office hours a week, time where I meet face-to-face with students to discuss their work, their goals, and their challenges. Adjunct faculty members are required to hold one such office hour per class, and the fact that they often have to work at multiple campuses to make a living means that their availability is often limited. Full-time faculty members are given professional development funds, funds that I have used to take additional training beyond my doctoral degree specifically geared toward teaching developmental students and toward conducting research in the field. I made developmental writing the focus of my doctoral research and completed a dissertation about the history and theory behind teaching these classes. Full-time faculty members also serve on committees across the district. I have worked to redesign curriculum, train incoming faculty members, and create programming for students outside of class. <br />
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An elimination of full-time faculty is more than an elimination of the jobs for the people who served in those roles. It is a systematic deconstruction of the support for our most vulnerable student populations. Chancellor Pittman’s <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/19/pearson-partners-ivy-tech-self-paced-online-gen-ed-courses">previous position at Ivy Tech</a> and his own strategic initiatives for STLCC point to a future that will rely heavily on online coursework and automated content. While this kind of education may sound efficient and cost-effective, this vision does not serve developmental students, thousands of whom come to STLCC specifically because of its open access admissions policy. Many of these students have nowhere else to go and cannot get their needs met with disconnected online classes.<br />
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Of the 58 positions cut, 14 were in English and 9 were in Reading, by far the hardest-hit disciplines, and two-thirds of the disciplines that serve developmental students. The teachers who were cut are among those who are the most passionate about and who have the most training and experience in developmental education. Falling enrollment numbers have been cited as the justification for these layoffs, but of 29 developmental writing courses offered at Forest Park this past fall, 13 of them were already staffed with adjunct faculty, and 12 more of them were staffed with faculty members who received layoff notices. It’s obvious that the students’ need for these classes already exceeded the resources given to meet them, but now those limited resources have been decimated to make way for administrative raises and flashy new building projects to house those administrators. <br />
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St. Louis Community College does not exist to provide cushy administrative positions (complete with housing and car allowances) on the taxpayers’ dime while the people who do the work of actually serving students are eliminated. It exists to provide opportunities for education to the people in our community—all of the people in our community. <br />
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The current vision for St. Louis Community College is orchestrated by a Chancellor and approved by a publicly-elected Board of Trustees who answer to us, the citizens of the districts served by STLCC. Our classes are full of our future nurses, chefs, police officers, small business owners, lab techs, and childcare providers. They are filled with the future of St. Louis. It is up to all of us to make sure that we communicate loudly and clearly to the Board of Trustees what kind of future we want to have.</div>
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Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-20450578980064017872017-12-19T23:13:00.000-06:002017-12-19T23:13:06.219-06:00Anti-Consumption as Personal Moral Failing: Dixie Cup Knows Best<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I recently threw my daughter a birthday party that involved a lot of paint, some decorate-them-yourself cupcakes, and a house full of busy, happy children. It was a lot of fun and generally went a lot smoother than I expected.</div>
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I typically don't buy disposable dishes, but I did buy some for this party. In particular, I purchased some Dixie cups to put the frosting in to make the cupcake decorating less of a free-for-all of licked spoons being dipped into a communal tub of sugar.<br />
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While I was getting the supplies out for the day, I noticed something interesting on the side of the box of Dixie cups.<br />
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It says, "Dixie everyday cups are versatile and affordable, so you can focus on your day and not the dishes.</div>
Dixie<br />
Be more here"<br />
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I was curious, so I looked into the campaign and found a few commercials with the same slogan.</div>
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The entire campaign centers on the idea that dishes are distracting us from the more important things in life. We are implored to "be more here" by engaging in conversations and family experiences rather than dishes.<br /><br />I take issue with this on several different levels.<br /><br />First, let me be clear. I hate doing dishes. I am not here to defend doing the dishes. It's a miserable, endless, thankless task that I did tonight, and yet magically when I go downstairs in the morning, the sink will be full of dirty dishes. This despite the fact that all the people who <i>use</i> the dishes will have been asleep upstairs all night. It's a mystery. I can't explain it.<br /><br />Anyway, even though I really hate doing the dishes, I still don't feel the need to be pressured into a constant supply of disposable products to avoid them. For one, someone still has to wash all those serving bowls and utensils and cookware that produced the food on those plates, right? The dishes are a-callin'.<br /><br />Secondly, even though the campaigns don't overtly gender the would-be dish-doer, I think it's pretty clear that this is tapping into mom guilt. You already waste so many of your precious moments away from your children. Are you really going to miss out on the chance to help with homework just so you can wash that plate? Well, are you, Susan? And whose fault will it be when little Timmy gets a C?<br /><br />Finally, this campaign suggests that being "here" (a call upon the general trend toward mindfulness in our lives and specifically in consumer practices) is a wholly individual, self-centered thing. My being "here," according to Dixie, means in my own home, focused on my what is right in front of me.<br /><br />But the drive to use fewer disposable products (the drive I am sure Dixie is reacting against with this campaign) is also about being "here." They just define the "here" in a broader, more collectively impactful way.<br /><br />People who refuse to buy more than they need do so often with an eye toward reducing the negative impacts of consumerism, particularly on the planet. They are "here," too.<br /><br />This meme sums it up pretty well:<br />
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Dixie's attempt to make doing your own dishes a source of guilt over missing out over life's better moments is shameful. I understand that this might be a challenging time, ethically, to sell disposable products, but this kind of doublespeak about the motivations behind efforts to consume less isn't helping.<br />Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-15864934281520341252017-12-14T08:51:00.001-06:002017-12-14T08:51:30.553-06:00Reflections on Losing Your Dream Job<i>I'm not ready to write about it in any concrete way because I am too close, too in it, too surrounded. This week, I was notified that I would be "RIFfed." A projected future budget shortfall due to state budget cuts made the salary I get to teach developmental writing too much to bear (despite the funds existing for a new $50 million building to house upper administration and a brand-new administrative position hired just this month. Despite a Chancellor who makes $300,000 a year and still gets a housing and car allowance. Despite. Spite.) Fifty-eight full-time faculty members received the same notice. </i><br />
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"That's mommy's work," I proudly declared to my daughter, strapped in to the carseat in the back, as we passed the old red brick building. "Mommy's work!" she would call out in her lilting toddler voice every time we passed. I would swell with pride. </div>
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"You know, part of college is learning to follow directions and paying attention to the details. It's really important that you type your papers and submit them through the online system."<br /><br />"Well, you see, I . . ." </div>
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"What? What's wrong? Do you need help finding the computer labs? You could use the public library, too, if that's easier. I can open the lab classroom for you after class if you want to be near my office to ask questions." </div>
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<br />"Ma'am, it's just that I have to leave right after class. I can't come back to the computer lab."<br /><br />"Well, I know that everyone has very busy schedules, but we'll have to find some time you can make it to the lab."<br /><br />"Yes, ma'am. I'll work on it. It's just that . . ."<br /><br />"What?"<br /><br />"It's just that if I'm not in line for the shelter by 4pm, I probably won't get a bed, and it's been so cold this week, and I just . . . I'll figure it out."<br /><br />"You can turn it in handwritten. It will be fine. We will work this out." </div>
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I'm bad at treasuring items. I don't have shadow boxes or scrapbooks.<br /><br />In some plastic basement tub sits the high school graduation cards full of love and congratulations. I was the first person in my family to be heading to college.<br /><br />In some other plastic basement tub sits the cords I wore around my neck at graduation. Honors. English Honors Society. <i>Summa cum laude</i>.<br /><br />In a stack of notebooks and novels and books full of advice on parenting a spirited child, a blue certificate holder embossed with silver letters holds a piece of paper. PhD. </div>
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I'm handing back graded papers with handwritten comments along the margins. </div>
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"Wait. You actually read these? None of my teachers have ever read my papers." </div>
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<i>Fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck. </i></div>
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<i>"</i>I've never read a whole book before." </div>
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One student comes to my office after every paper grade is returned. She's an angry tornado. Papers spill out of her arms and onto the floor. She can't sit she is so furious. She paces. She yells. </div>
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"I can't believe you gave me this grade! I can't believe you! Do you know how hard I worked on this? I <i>asked</i> you if you thought it was a good topic! I did the work!"<br /><br />"Do you want to sit down?" </div>
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"I can't do this anymore! I never should have taken this class. I never should have come to college! You don't even want me to pass this class!" </div>
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"Do you have any questions about the comments?" </div>
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She plops into the chair. She's crying. I hand her a tissue.</div>
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"So are you going to revise it?" I ask.</div>
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"No! I'm done! I'm just dropping out. This is stupid!" </div>
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"Do you want help revising it?" </div>
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"Yes! I have no idea what to do! You told me that I need a clearer thesis statement, so I guess I need to change this sentence, and then you told me that none of these paragraphs are focused, so I guess I would put this one here and then put this one here." She sits and plans out her entire revision without me saying another word. "So what am I supposed to do?!"<br /><br />"That." I gesture at the flurry of notes she angrily wrote in front of her. She looks at them like she's never seen them in her life. </div>
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"It's due next week." </div>
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"Okay." </div>
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<br />She takes two more of my classes over the next year and a half.</div>
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All my colleagues have closed their doors or hidden away off campus. It is too hard to look at one another. It is too hard to see it in the eyes, feel it in the hall, breathe it into truth. </div>
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"I know you worked really hard, and I think you can do this, but you didn't quite make the grade to pass. You can take it again next semester. There are a lot of teachers teaching this class, so if you want to take it with someone else . . ."<br /><br />"Oh. No! I'm taking your class again." </div>
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"You can check the College website for employment opportunities. There will likely be plenty of adjunct positions available." </div>
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<i><br /></i>Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-9481141007923595572017-11-19T18:23:00.000-06:002017-11-19T18:23:09.645-06:00Why I Hope Al Franken Resigns Kate Harding has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/17/im-a-feminist-i-study-rape-culture-and-i-dont-want-al-franken-to-resign/?utm_term=.662848e35da5" target="_blank">an opinion piece up</a> for the Washington Post explaining why she doesn't think Al Franken should resign amid allegations that he sexually assaulted Leeann Tweeden. She says plenty of smart things, and she is positioning herself as a voice of pragmatic reason in a sea of knee-jerk reactionaries with short-term thinking:<br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #111111;">When you combine these things — an awareness that the Democratic Party is no more or less than best of two, and an understanding that men in power frequently exploit women — it becomes difficult to believe that Franken is the </span><span style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #111111;">only</span><span style="color: #111111;"> sitting Democrat with a history of harassment, abuse or assault. The recent #metoo campaign demonstrated how normalized unwanted kissing and groping are in our culture. Donald Trump was caught on tape crudely admitting to both of those transgressions, and we made him our president. According to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 1 in 3 women experiences some sort of contact sexual violence in her life. Sexual harassment and assault are simply too widespread for Democrats to respond to Franken’s offense with only Franken in mind: We need to respond in a way that helps us develop a protocol for meaningful change.</span></span></i></blockquote>
She's making a very similar argument to <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-missed-a-chance-to-draw-a-line-in-the-sand-on-sexual-misconduct/" target="_blank">the one that Nate Silver makes</a> to explain why he thinks Democrats are punting on what could be a politically safe move for them:<br />
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<i>Of course, what might be politically expedient for Democrats isn’t necessarily expedient for Schumer — or for McConnell, or for the White House, all of whom may be acting out of a sense of institutional self-preservation. If there’s a precedent that sexual harassment is grounds for removal or resignation from office, then a lot of members of Congress — including some of Schumer’s colleagues and friends — could have to resign once more allegations come to light, as they almost certainly will. President Trump’s conduct could also come under renewed scrutiny, as could the conduct of former presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. Politics is a male-dominated institution, and a conservative institution, and conservative, male-dominated institutions have pretty much no interest in flipping over the sexual harassment rock and seeing what comes crawling out from underneath it.</i></blockquote>
Both of these writers are making the same basic claim that Franken's response will be precedent-setting, and that politicians might need to be careful in setting the precedent that former sexual misconduct should lead to present resignation. The whole system, it seems, could come crashing down.<br />
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Let. It. Crash. </div>
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I'm serious. Donald Trump is president of the United States. This is a man who is grossly unqualified to play the mayor in a school performance, let alone lead our country. He ran on a ticket of, basically, promising to blow shit up, and a lot of people across the country said, "We're with you on that." Obviously, the discontent is running deep already.</div>
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If our system is so fragile that it can't handle having an actual process of accountability and value-based standards for its participants, then it needs to crash because--and this is important--<i>it isn't working anyway!</i><br />
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I have been involved in approximately 11,000 debates about Al Franken since the story broke, and the vast majority of my liberal friends seem to be taking this wishy-washy "pragmatic" view that wants to preserve the party's effectiveness rather than hold a member of it accountable.</div>
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The bottom line for me is this: either we meant what we said or we didn't.<br />
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Here, I'll <a href="https://www.facebook.com/senatoralfranken/posts/1517209188364958" target="_blank">let Al Franken explain it</a>:<br />
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At the end of his Facebook post, he quotes from the Gretchen Carlson piece and says this: </div>
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<i>[Gretchen writes,] 'I encourage victims to stand up and tell their stories, which I know requires immense bravery. And I’m hopeful that we’ll see changes in our laws and our culture that will allow them to do so without being victimized yet again.' I couldn’t agree more."</i></blockquote>
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He <i>encourages women to stand up and tell their stories</i>. If they do so, even though it "requires immense bravery" we will see <i>changes in our laws and our culture</i>. <i>CHANGES IN OUR LAWS AND OUR CULTURE! </i>It doesn't get to return to normal. It doesn't get to be business as usual. The system doesn't get to continue running merrily along its patriarchal, violence-laden track. We (including Franken himself) collectively asked for women to come forward. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/10/the-movement-of-metoo/542979/" target="_blank">And they did</a>, and they keep coming, and they're going to keep coming.<br />
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I am not on a "witch hunt." I do completely recognize the difference between the accusations against Franken and those against, say, Roy Moore. They differ in severity, number of victims/repetition, and age of victim. All of those things matter. It matters, too, that Franken's victim says she accepts his apology and isn't trying to force him out of office. It all matters.<br />
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But none of it changes the fact that Franken needs to hold himself up to the standard he set. (I am also not interested in arguments that he wasn't really touching her, it was trick photography, it was a thick coat, the military escort says it didn't happen, blah, blah, blah. Both Franken and Tweeden say it happened. The man doing the action and the woman having the action done to her both say it was wrong. We don't need to play mental gymnastics on this one).<br />
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I think that this piece from The Establishment titled "<a href="https://theestablishment.co/so-youve-sexually-harassed-or-abused-someone-what-now-ed49a934bab1" target="_blank">So You've Sexually Harassed or Abused Someone: What Now?</a>" does an excellent job of laying out what the next steps should be. It lays out steps for accepting responsibility, avoiding re-victimizing victims, and moving forward in a way that transforms the cultural landscape for the future.<br />
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Here's the thing, I <i>like</i> Al Franken. I support his work in the Senate. I think he means it when he says he's an ally who wants this world to change. But now I need him to walk the walk and demonstrate what taking responsibility for those past actions means. Are there other ways to do that besides resigning? Perhaps. Are there other ways to do that besides resigning that don't become a huge distraction and road block for the momentum building against actually changing the culture surrounding sexual assault? I don't think so.<br />
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The chorus of "it's not as bad" that people are using to defend Franken in comparison to Moore, Weinstein, Louis C.K., etc. runs the risk of morphing. "It's not as bad" can easily become "it's not that bad," and that's a risk we cannot take at this moment. That's a risk we cannot afford at this potential tipping point.<br />
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There are lots and lots and lots of people out there right now desperate to hear "it's not that bad." They are coming to terms with the fact that all of those #MeToo posts mean that some of the behavior they passed off as "just a joke" or "boys being boys" or "I got a little tipsy" was actually incredibly damaging and weighed on the women in their lives. They feel guilty, confused, and frustrated. They don't want to be labeled as sexual harassers, assailants, or sometimes even rapists. The fact is that if <a href="https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence" target="_blank">1 in every 6 women reports having been raped</a>, there are a lot of rapists out there. There are even more sexual harassers. And many of them have never thought of themselves in those terms. Many of them have never considered that the acts they took could have long-lasting damage. But now that they see people they love and respect coming forward to say how harmed they've been, they're pausing, reflecting, and recognizing.<br /><br /><i>This is important. This is necessary. This is the step we have been missing! </i></div>
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Al Franken demonstrating true remorse while simultaneously displaying the seriousness of committing to doing better is the symbolic response we need right now. That isn't short-term thinking. It's long-term thinking. It's hoping for a better future where we no longer accept sexual harassment and assault as the natural side effects of being human. If Franken really wants to be an ally, the easiest way to do it is to resign.<br /><br />I hope he will do the right thing. </div>
Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-21803584958042464222017-10-30T20:10:00.000-05:002017-10-30T20:10:08.203-05:00Acceleration to Nowhere? Only If That Was Always the DestinationThere's an article over at Inside Higher Ed called "<a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2017/10/30/why-colleges-shouldnt-abandon-remedial-education-essay?utm_content=buffer40153&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=IHEbuffer" target="_blank">The Fast Lane to Nowhere</a>" and it decries developmental education acceleration because <span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="background-color: white;">we have already promoted so many students at all levels who don’t know the material that we are drowning in a sea of bogus diplomas and degrees -- and far worse, the holders of those dishonorable documents are floundering."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Author John Almy makes many claims that I can't argue against. He says that "[w]e cannot continue to pass students and then hand them high school diplomas that they cannot read."</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Agreed. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">He says, "</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We are hurting students by not teaching them the material before we pass them, and that process begins in kindergarten and continues through college."<br /><br />Absolutely. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But he makes a logical jump from those valid points to an angry tirade against acceleration without connecting the dots.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />In part, Almy writes, "</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We put remedial students who are incapable of surviving remedial classes into transfer-level classes alongside students who are supposedly prepared, and that, along with a little extra tutoring, will somehow provide the lower-level students with the desire and abilities to quickly acquire all the skills they have failed to gain in the first 12 years of their educations. Baloney!"</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Except it isn't "baloney." We <a href="https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/ccbc-alp-student-outcomes-follow-up.html" target="_blank">have</a> the <a href="http://accelerationproject.org/Publications/ctl/ArticleView/mid/654/articleId/36/categoryId/3/Accelerated-English-at-Chabot-College-A-Synthesis-of-Key-Findings" target="_blank">data</a> to back it up. Acceleration (often by shortening the developmental course sequence) and co-requisite enrollment (where developmental students are placed in credit-bearing courses at the same time they take their "remedial" class) are sweeping the nation and making plenty of people nervous because we're disrupting the traditional gatekeeping mechanism of blocking student access to "real" college.<br /><br />I take a lot of issue with Almy's claims. First of all, he himself admits that these students "failed to gain [the necessary skills] in the first 12 years of their educations." So one more semester is the magic bullet? They had 144 months to learn these things, but four more should do it?<br /><br />This is especially troubling when so many "remedial" classes follow curricular models that look a lot more like high school, or middle school, or even elementary school than they do college. Students doing endless grammar drills or being forced to write a perfect sentence before they are given the freedom to express their ideas in robust and complete essays is a surefire way to kill any interest in the subject. Turn writing into an exercise in proving one's academic identity rather than a way to express one's ideas, and you're going to send a whole lot of first-generation, low-income, and minority students running for the door feeling like they don't belong. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>That's</i> what we lose when we disrupt the traditional model of developmental education. We lose the chance to protect our precious definitions of what college writers should sound like (and by extension, often what they should look like, dress like, and spend money like).<br /><br />This isn't to say that we should embrace all efforts at developmental education reform without question. Accelerated models deserve scrutiny, and they are not all created equal. <a href="http://communitycollegedata.com/articles/the-corequisite-reform-movement/" target="_blank">This article</a> from Alexandros Goudas points out that some attempts to create a co-requisite ostensibly modeled off of the very successful ALP model from Baltimore Community College have actually become nothing more than a cost-saving measure that slaps a one-credit-hour lab component to traditional credit-bearing English 101 with no curriculum support that actually follows the model.<br /><br />I personally think that many conversations surrounding developmental writing reform have focused too much on the structure and not enough on the curriculum. Acceleration works only when both components are taken into account. Students don't magically learn the same material at a faster rate just because you deliver it quicker (though many students who are capable of doing the work but who have life issues that prevent them from successfully completing multiple semesters of developmental coursework might still benefit). The true benefit comes from a curricular model that puts belief in students' abilities to succeed at the forefront of course design. If we get rid of the grammar drills and insultingly low hurdles and instead place high standards and the means to reach them in our students' paths, we see success. It is really that simple . . . and that hard. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The challenging part of developmental education reform is that it means not just reforming our classrooms and our curriculum, but reforming ourselves. We have fallen into tired stereotypes about developmental writers for decades, and Almy is going through them like a greatest hits record. His claim that students haven't learned any skills in twelve years of school is a ridiculous one. I have <i>never </i>had a student come into my developmental writing classroom without a rich rhetorical skillset. I have <i>never </i>had a student come into my classroom without complex experiences of rhetorical dexterity. They are not blank slates arriving to us to learn kindergarten-level sentence structure. Just because they do not write the way we want them to write doesn't mean they can't write.</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have been teaching remedial writing classes for a decade, and I have had hundreds of students enter my classroom. Nothing in my experience matches Almy's description of developmental students as "</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">those who don’t want to or can’t learn" and who are "</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">draining our valuable resources." I can count on one hand the number of students I have met who seem truly incapable of meeting the demands of a rigorous, complex writing curriculum. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Furthermore, Almy pleas for us to <span style="font-family: inherit;">"[t]</span></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">each those of us who have the desire -- really teach us -- what our instructors neglected to teach us the first time. And above all, make us learn or leave. Make us accountable. Make us earn our way." </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>That is exactly what I do</i>! The fact that I do it in an accelerated format doesn't make it any less rigorous. In fact, my accelerated classroom is leaps and bounds <i>more challenging </i>than the remedial course profile I was teaching from before our redesign. My students are absolutely, 100% held accountable. They do "learn or leave," though I try very hard to make them learn rather than leave. I don't understand why Almy thinks that an accelerated model is somehow a guaranteed A. It isn't.<br /><br />It is ridiculous when he goes on to suggest that acceleration is somehow at odds with the goal of high standards and accountability, that I am somehow not letting students <span style="font-family: inherit;">"</span></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">feel pride in what [they] have accomplished" and am instead bestowing upon them "arrogance in how [they] circumvented the system."<br /><br />The only "system" they are "circumventing" is one designed to make them take classes with no college credit while they eat through their financial aid allotment, dragging out their "two-year" degree for years and years while we continue to steep them in current traditional rhetoric practices that didn't work in the first place and then pat our backs about our "rigor" when they give up.<br /><br />Then he calls upon remedial education and its lengthy sequence as a way to build grit. <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2016/02/what-do-we-mean-when-we-praise-grit-and.html" target="_blank">And we all know how I feel about that. </a><br /><br />It's a bad system, one rooted in systemic discrimination against minorities and anyone whose discourse identities don't align with our own sense of superiority. If it makes us uncomfortable to dismantle it (or, really, just disrupt it a little), then that says much more about us than it does about the students who have become collateral damage in a historical battle over our attempts to shore up our academic boundaries. </span></span>Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-87997919386648518392017-10-26T03:14:00.000-05:002017-10-26T03:14:24.138-05:00Archer in a Blindfold (A Look at Modern Parenting)"You have an auto car!" my daughter said excitedly from the back seat.<br />
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"Huh?" I wasn't sure what she was talking about.<br />
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"I saw the button up there. It says 'AUTO.' That means it drives on its own."<br />
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"What button? This car doesn't drive on its own, but if you tell me where the button is, I'll explain what it does."<br />
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It is the button for my driver's side window, and it means that the window descends completely with a single press instead of having to be held down continuously until fully open. I explain this, but then I am struck by a realization that I hadn't really had before. I am talking to my six-year-old. She has another decade before she will learn to drive. <i>Will she learn to drive? </i><br />
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<i>"</i>By the time you're old enough to learn to drive, though, it probably really will be an automatic car."<br />
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"Cool," she responds absently. She's moved on to other thoughts, humming along to the four thousandth playing of the Kidz Bop version of "Seven Years," which is being broadcast through my car's stereo system from one of her many personalized Spotify playlists via Bluetooth. A thing that holds no marvel for her.<br />
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I'm lost in a dense web of quickly connecting thoughts. <i>What will teaching someone to drive look like in ten years? If she doesn't have the skills to drive, will that be limiting somewhere down the line? It's not that big of deal. I don't know how to bake my own bread, and that's not a big deal. Not all skill sets need to be preserved. Wait. Maybe it is a big deal that I don't know how to bake bread. What other skills are we losing? What do we lose with them? Will there be rogue parents who teach their children 'old-fashioned' driving? Will we be legally allowed? Will we have to buy antique cars with outdated features to do so? What else will she not know how to do? But think of all the things she gets to do that weren't even a fantasy when you were her age. It's a trade off. Everything's a trade off. </i><br />
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At this point we arrived at our destination and my thoughts shifted to the minutiae of getting two kids safely out of the car and into the house. It didn't come back to me until I was in bed, trying to sleep.<br />
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It's not just automatic cars. It's everything. As <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2017/07/hey-guess-what-were-homeschooling.html" target="_blank">I've mentioned before</a>, I'm homeschooling my daughter, so that means that the parameters of curriculum are on me. I get to decide what knowledge is necessary for her, and it's a responsibility I take seriously. It makes the future-focused concerns of parenting emerge from the fuzzy darkness in a crystal clear way. I've read <i>Outliers</i>. I know about the 10,000-hour rule. What she learns now matters, will shape her skillset in the future, will determine where she places her focus somewhere down the road, will open some doors and shut others. It's not that I think my choice of which math workbook I buy will make or break her future career choices, but I do know that these early years are framing her worldview and her interests in a way that lasts. That matters.<br />
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<i>The New Yorker</i> ran a cartoon this summer entitled "<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/things-im-afraid-my-daughter-will-be-doing-in-2026" target="_blank">Things I'm Afraid My Daughter Will be Doing in 2026</a>."<br />
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It included anxiety about the continued encroachment of technology on our lives and also anxiety about the downfall of society as a whole. Her daughter, in her mind, has equal chances of spending her teenage years "hacking into my Facebook account and reading all the mean things I said about her as a baby" or "watching a flame in a busted-out TV like those kids in 'The Terminator.'" </div>
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It feels like a coin flip. Heads: a world so technologically advanced as to be unrecognizable and threaten the core principles of society. Tails: a world in impoverished, dystopian ruin where the institutions of education, government, and social order have completely broken down. In the meantime, what songs would you like me to add to your Spotify list this week, baby? </div>
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I try not to fall into paranoia about the future. I try to remain hopeful, but the fast-paced news cycle bringing a constant barrage of doomsday scenarios intermixed with constant signals that the future will be nothing like the present is whiplash inducing. Today I read about Jeff Flake resigning from a career in politics because (as he said in his <a href="http://time.com/4995730/jeff-flake-senate-speech-donald-trump-republican-transcript/" target="_blank">speech announcing the decision</a>) "our children are watching." He couldn't bear the thought of contorting himself into a Trumpian pretzel of debased values in order to win his primary. Today I also read that Amazon Key will now allow delivery drivers to enter your house when you're not home so that you can get your packages with ease. (A move that is surely making a blueprint for a future when the human element of the delivery is <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-25/amazon-s-dream-of-drone-deliveries-get-closer-with-trump-order" target="_blank">removed entirely</a>, and I can't decide if the thought of robots entering my house when I'm not home is better or worse than the thought of flesh-and-blood delivery drivers doing so.) </div>
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I'm prone to anxiety and overanalyzing things, I realize, but I don't think it's far-fetched to think that the world my daughter enters won't look much like the world today in many ways. Truth be told, even the five-year age gap between my children is a big difference. When my daughter was born in 2010, I didn't have a smartphone. My son, born in 2016, has been video recorded and had near-daily pictures snapped of him since the moment he arrived in this world. Their earliest experiences of reality are already very different from one another, and they were born in the same decade. If my daughter sees no marvel in the pleasures of Spotify or Osmo games, my son will see even less reason to be impressed. He will probably see things that I would have looked at as alien technology as outdated relics from a distant and irrelevant past. And we're talking about five years. </div>
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How do you raise kids in this environment?! </div>
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I realize this is a question born of privilege and surrounded by privilege. Plenty of people throughout human history have raised their children in times full of much more perilous uncertainty. People have raised children through genocides and the ravages of active war. I'd much rather ask myself how I am going to prepare my daughter for an uncertain future career than watch the Black Plague claim my children before they escape infancy. Things aren't so bad. I know that. </div>
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We focus on the constantly oscillating matrix of fear and hope wrapped up in technological advancements. Maybe we'll all lose our jobs when the robots take over and end up without a means to support ourselves in a pseudo-capitalist society under <i>Hunger Games-</i>esque wealth inequality . . . . or. . . maybe we'll be freed up from menial and dangerous labor to pursue nobler acts like art and philosophy, enacting the Greek ideal life without the unethical practice of forcing slaves to make our wages. Again. Toss up. </div>
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In some ways the uncertainty is freeing. Instead of chasing after some specific future end point, it strips us down to our bare principles. What do I teach my child? To love. To learn. To think. To question. To explore. To experiment. To analyze. To grow. To adapt. </div>
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And maybe also how to make electricity from a potato--just in case our robot overlords throw us into eternal darkness. </div>
<br />Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-86109418913632887402017-09-10T09:47:00.000-05:002017-09-10T09:47:22.527-05:00A Tale of Two DumpstersDo you want to know how to lose faith in humanity and start disliking everyone around you? Shovel (literally shovel) someone else's garbage up for an hour on a Sunday morning.<br />
<br />
Let me back up.<br />
<br />
Despite <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2017/04/next-year-when-i-decided-being-present.html" target="_blank">this post</a> boldly declaring that we were staying put in our smallish house because I had embraced a minimalist outlook (and the constraints of our budget), we actually moved a couple weeks ago. A series of events (some fortunate, some unfortunate, some neutral) led to us changing our minds and our circumstances, and now we're in a bigger space (<i>more than one bathroom!!!</i>) that really fits us well (<i>a <a href="http://www.balancingjane.com/2017/07/hey-guess-what-were-homeschooling.html" target="_blank">classroom for homeschooling</a>!!</i>)<br />
<br />
The new house is very close to the old house. It's about a mile away, crossing one major city street. In fact, we can easily walk between the two. The differences between the two, though, are somewhat shocking.<br />
<br />
That short jaunt put us in a different property tax bracket (<i>ten times</i> higher), a different alderman's ward, a different demographic make up (though both are pretty racially diverse), and . . . different dumpsters.<br />
<br />
Well, actually, the dumpsters are pretty much the same. The city has dedicated alley dumpsters for trash, yard waste, and recycling. They look the same, plopped down behind houses, in both neighborhoods. But there is definitely a different dumpster <i>culture</i>.<br />
<br />
The new house shares an alley with a very well-to-do block behind it. One of the first things I noticed when we were looking at houses was the <i>immaculate</i> state of the alleyways. Spotless! The alleyway behind my old house was frequently overflowing with illegally dumped garbage, a disgusting heap of disrespect and loss of hope.<br />
<br />
I have dumpsters located immediately behind my house in both locations, and that means that I am legally responsible for keeping them clean. A <a href="http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/5-on-your-side/a-strangers-trash-cost-her-money/469829273" target="_blank">recent local news story</a> explores how frustrating this can be. I can get fined because my neighbors (or someone driving in from somewhere else and illegally dumping) leave the alleyway a mess.<br />
<br />
This wouldn't be such a problem except for the house next to my old one is owned by <a href="https://www.riverfronttimes.com/stlouis/nathan-cooper-has-been-gobbling-up-st-louis-homes-and-raking-in-federal-money/Content?oid=6707136" target="_blank">this guy</a>. Disbarred for immigration fraud, a former lawyer turned real estate "investor" has gobbled up a ton of very cheap houses in my former zip code, done the bare minimum to get them up to "code," and then rented them out with absolutely no oversight over who lives there or what they do. He's preying on low income individuals who don't have other housing options and leaving them to live in substandard squalor, disrupting neighborhood stability as he rakes in the money.<br />
<br />
He has owned the house next to us for most of the time that we lived there. In that time, <i>several</i> families came and went. Many were great neighbors. Many were not. Some fought violently in the streets and left a litany of ordinance violations in their wake. Most were eventually evicted after the complaints stacked up and triggered the city's <a href="https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/public-safety/neighborhood-stabilization-office/documents/upload/m.%20Public%20Nuisance%20Ordinance%20685352.pdf" target="_blank">nuisance property process</a>.<br />
<br />
The tenants who were in this house most recently had been, to put it lightly, not great neighbors. They broke out our windows, fought constantly, dumped trash in our yard. There were also at least thirty people living in a two-bedroom house. The ongoing issues were one of the reasons we decided to move.<br />
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Ironically, they were finally evicted just one week after we started living in our new house. They also left me some parting gifts when I returned to do some cleaning this weekend.<br />
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I wish I could say that I was shocked, taken aback, completely flabbergasted by this. But it was not the first time (though I hope it is the last time) that I had to take a snow shovel and literally scoop up other people's garbage. </div>
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There's something intimate about garbage. Here I was scooping up bras and full, unopened canned goods. I found the cover of a Charles Dickens adaptation for kids. There were the toys that the children had played on for hours upon hours left in heaps. </div>
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It's weird to feel so much sympathy even as you feel so much anger. I had talked to these neighbors several times. Their kids had played with my kids in my backyard. I didn't want to see their life thrown into upheaval with an eviction anymore than I wanted to be scooping up the aftermath of that resolution, but I also didn't want to keep living next to violent outbursts. </div>
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I left the alley in better shape than I found it, but it still doesn't hold a candle to the immaculate cleanliness of the alleyway behind our new house. </div>
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I don't have any conclusions to this post. I don't know how to address gentrification, substandard housing, predatory slumlords, the instability of poverty, or my own place in it. I don't know how to feel about fleeing one neighborhood for a "better" one. I don't know what will happen to my former neighbors. I just know that the materiality of the dumpsters tells a tale of St. Louis in a way that makes all the statistics and handwringing very, very concrete to me. </div>
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While my new neighbors use social media to advertise alley way pick up posts of their gently used and unwanted discards, my old neighborhood will continue to fill up with the haphazardly displaced belongings of evicted tenants. And I will continue to not know what to do or how to feel about it. </div>
<br />Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-85537669683098782622017-09-06T22:22:00.000-05:002017-09-06T22:22:18.765-05:00Am I On Team Human: A Social Media Project Approach to Overthinking Things<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Am I on Team Human? It seems like an odd question. On the
one hand, what other team would I be on? Not only am I a member of the human
species (the most obvious reason for my allegiance) but I’m also a member of
the “humanities” discipline, ostensibly dedicated to researching, cataloging,
examining, and spreading what it is to be human. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The question of whether or not I am “on Team Human”
references <a href="http://teamhuman.fm/" target="_blank">a podcast titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Team Human</i></a>.
I stumbled upon it looking for something to listen to on a long drive. It’s
hosted by Douglas Rushkoff and features thoughtful and thought-provoking
conversations with experts across a range of disciplines as they examine the
intersection of technology and humanity. Rushkoff’s tagline is that Team Human
is the “last best hope” for humanity. <br />
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
I’ve listened to a half dozen or so of these episodes since my initial stumble
upon them, and I recommend them. They’re interesting, and they definitely touch
upon relevant questions that we should be asking.<br /> <br />
That said, I haven’t been able to figure out if I align myself with “Team Human”
as an opposition force. Am I against the rising technology around us? Do I
believe that it is negatively impacting (or even eradicating) humanity? Can I
be on Team Human if a robot vacuums my floors?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
While many of the episodes in this series have caught my interest, it’s the
very first one I listened to (which is actually a two-parter) that has stuck
with me. I listened to the first part in its entirety without distraction as I
drove a very long and uneventful stretch of Midwestern highway, and then I
listened to the second part on that same stretch of highway heading the other
direction two days later.<br /> <br />
For both episodes, I was left vacillating rapidly between cries of “YES” and “are
you fucking kidding me?” This is unusual. Something that makes me move between
total agreement and almost angry disagreement so many times is . . .
worthwhile? Intriguing? Probably sitting at the intersection of some
contradiction worth exploring?<br /> <br />
The episodes in question feature a conversation between Rushkoff and his
college best friend Walter Kirn (author of the novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Up in the Air </i>that became the George Clooney movie). The
conversation is easy and engaging, and it winds through several different
topics. I tried to summarize what I agreed with and what I disagreed with, but
it didn’t work. The concerns were too tangled, and my own thoughts were
bouncing too quickly into subtopics, wandering off into the woods.<br /> <br />
I’ve been wanting to unpack my thoughts on this conversation for almost two
months now, and I’ve finally decided that the only way to really do it is to
listen to it again, pause when I get to something that makes me have something
to say, and then write about it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Closing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Default Paragraph Font"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Continue 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Message Header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Salutation"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Date"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text First Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Block Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Hyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Document Map"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Bottom of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Definition"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Sample"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Variable"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation subject"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="No List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Simple 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Classic 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Grid 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table List 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table 3D effects 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Contemporary"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Professional"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Balloon Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Theme"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Note Level 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51" Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52" Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="52"
Name="Grid Table 7 Colorful Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46"
Name="Grid Table 1 Light Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="49" Name="Grid Table 4 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="50" Name="Grid Table 5 Dark Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="51"
Name="Grid Table 6 Colorful Accent 6"/>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So that’s what I will be doing. I’m going to find out if I’m
on Team Human or not. And if you have an interest in the intersections of
technology, humanity, and the future of both, you might be interested in giving
these episodes a listen and asking yourself that question with me. (<a href="http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-45-walter-kirn/" target="_blank">Part 1 is here</a>; <a href="http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/kirn-pt2/" target="_blank">Part 2 is here</a>). </span><o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: x-small;">Photo: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/18819419569/in/photolist-uF1rMc-AZhaf-6odinW-6PECu-6a6cy5-8BXh-4jYn1D-AZhjf-7DVc-7k2hT-GH6aa-4o6om-aRp1hp-55s51v-9g67sV-8ChuB-nzygGv-9Hjew7-avfefk-9gE87-JWFjn-yXcsJ-3XcboQ-8ovfq1-yR6ec-8eRKQC-7k6y7h-aBpPc5-8od7Hh-5NXnz3-75mVp7-2yiQ1-9Fr6ey-7DXMYm-aVyp9-7teAn2-9oGis-875e7L-yR4Wi-avfefB-9g64p2-iawN-9Hgm5B-qxrKUd-4jYmX8-9Hgmqk-yR89o-9oGgv-75i4mt-7DYaFY" target="_blank">Mike Mozart</a></span></div>
Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5827968588643415787.post-55432278975654211402017-07-11T21:03:00.000-05:002017-07-11T21:05:33.698-05:00Hey, Guess What! We're Homeschooling!So, we're homeschooling.<br />
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I have tried to write this post five times. I have five separate versions of this post sitting in various states of completion in multiple mediums. That usually doesn't happen to me, so I know I'm sitting on some raw emotions. To date, I have the following versions of this story:<br />
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<li><b>The Angry One</b>- In this post, I rant and rave about a school system that failed my daughter and mistreated her so badly that I could not see straight. I get deep into the well of emotion as I describe watching my bright, funny, energetic little girl turn into a sullen, anxious, cloud of misery.</li>
</ul>
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<li><b>The Positive One</b>- In this post, I present my excitement about this new educational undertaking and go on and on about the possibilities that I've uncovered, the supportive communities I have found both virtual and in person, and the ways that it has already improved my daughter's mood and educational outcomes. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><b>The Self-Dissecting One</b>- In this post, I try to unpack what it means for someone who has staked much of her identity (professional, political, and personal) on the principles behind public education to pull out of the public education system. I was educated in public schools through my BA. I teach in a community college. I believe in open access, publicly funded schools that meet the needs of a diverse set of learners. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><b>The Activist One</b>- In this post, I veer quickly from my personal story to stats and anecdotes about the needs of "Twice Exceptional" children, the label that best fits my daughter. These are children who have both a diagnosis of giftedness and a diagnosis of some kind of learning disability or challenge (like ADHD). Often, they're emotional and social skills lag while their academic abilities soar, and the result is never finding a way to get their needs met on either side of the equation. </li>
</ul>
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<li><b>The Overwhelmed One</b>- In this post, I panic about the fact that my balancing act now includes finding a way to work full time, manage a household, raise two children (one still nursing and in diapers), and homeschool a first grader with special needs in multiple directions. </li>
</ul>
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Any one of those posts would have been a valid, honest account of what I've been thinking about, researching, and doing in the past four or so months, but none of them was quite right. I am at once disappointed, excited, overwhelmed, scared, hopeful, angry, and getting by. There are days when this seems like the best decision I have ever made and days when I don't know what I have gotten myself into. My kitchen table has been completely overtaken by workbooks, chemistry experiments, and library books. I am awash in a million open browser tabs of free resources, curriculum plans, and homeschooling blogs. I go down rabbit holes and make two weeks worth of lesson plans only to scrap them all the next day and start over. </div>
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I imagine that some people reading this who know me have some questions. How long will we do this? Will we homeschool both kids? Will we try a private school? </div>
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I don't know. I don't know the answer to any of those questions because this whole experience has taught me that my penchant for planning (and it is a strong one) is no match for the fact that life is unexpected and throws you some curveballs. This is not the path I imagined walking, but it is the best one for the moment, and I'm going to stay on it until I find a better one. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheCX8IhEn8usVtBh2eVU5-e-h8Y0Pjn14KCu2TiQDik9OCu7rbvZ-_H0k-w_oyiCfhWSf3x-aaWwIzewkU6C2Uv5-wylwJvTr9w_gwu8qM1roa3TDDdV1IJ-iyrXFhtxsEAxxWLsol8Fk/s1600/34176259566_127a80f192_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="427" data-original-width="640" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheCX8IhEn8usVtBh2eVU5-e-h8Y0Pjn14KCu2TiQDik9OCu7rbvZ-_H0k-w_oyiCfhWSf3x-aaWwIzewkU6C2Uv5-wylwJvTr9w_gwu8qM1roa3TDDdV1IJ-iyrXFhtxsEAxxWLsol8Fk/s320/34176259566_127a80f192_z.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Because here's the part that needs to stay from that angry post I mentioned above: at one point in this whole process, I was finding myself up against the need to fight for my daughter, to go to battle with the school district and insist upon accommodations. And that's what it felt like: a war. It felt like I was fighting the people charged with educating my daughter to educate her. And if we're fighting, we're on opposing sides, and my side is that I want my daughter to become a self-sufficient, supported, kind individual. If you're on the other side of that, what does that mean? </div>
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Ultimately, my husband and I made this decision because we refuse to put our child in an environment where there is a battle over her well-being. Educating a child should not be a war. There should only be one side. And whether I homeschool for the rest of my daughter's childhood, send her to private school, or figure out some other arrangement, I know one thing: I will not settle for an educational environment that doesn't want her and support her. </div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Photo: Philip McEarlean</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 193px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 906px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;"></span>Michellehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07801229525416203656noreply@blogger.com0