![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liri
I am an angry, angry woman at the best of times and my uterus is cramping like a motherfucker, and then today when I was driving home some imbecile who apparently can't see battle auras disapproved of my driving and dared to HONK at me to let me know, so I can at the moment incinerate large fratboys with my EYES. If you click any of the LJ-cuts, you can't claim I didn't warn you.
At my university, you needed to take a capstone course for your major at some point after the first semester of your third year. I couldn't get into one for the end of my fourth year; I had to take an extra semester just for that, and to add insult to injury, the only one I could get then was on Adrienne Rich, a poet and radical feminist. I guess by the standards of modern poetry she's considered a good poet; I pretty much hate poetry, and having to do close readings of her pissed me off when she turned up in an earlier class, the one that soured me for good and all on the word "patriarchy." Having to do close readings of her poetry for my capstone even though she had virtually nothing to do with anything else I'd focused on - I liked English drama and novels, 19th-century and earlier - was like a whole semester of chewing glass.
Anyway, my instructor for that class - not a full professor, but he'd taught there a long time - was a man in his seventies who nonetheless urged the women in the class not to denigrate things like menstruation, pregnancy, etc., because we shouldn't let the patriarchy tell us what to think of our bodies. FUCK YOU, SIR. I hate my period because it's messy, intensely painful, and once a month drives me insane, and YOU are the only male authority figure who's ever tried to tell me what to think of it, so SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Damn, it would have been so much more satisfying to say that to his face. Except maybe not, I might have felt guilty if he'd cried. He could've - he sort of reminded me of the English teacher on Daria.
Anyway, pain? Last night I couldn't get to sleep until after 2 a.m. because the GODDAMN FUCKING ALEVE IS DEFECTIVE I SWEAR TO GOD. Pregnancy looks GOOD right now because even if you're in labor for thirty-six hours it's not as much time as you'd spend menstruating in the nine months leading up to it.
I don't want to let my ranting obscure the fact that I'm a feminist and not one of the ones who likes to add "but I shave my legs!" either. That may have just been Freyja that did that, but I still haven't forgiven her for it. Anyone who tries to tell me I'm less a feminist because of anything I do, say, or think gets an assful of my foot, especially if they try to say it today, but petting the cat has taken enough of the edge of the wrath that I no longer want to go looking for blogs that'll piss me off.
OMG! Something we already knew about the way boys perform in school is suddenly a crisis!
...because my head didn't explode hard enough the first time! Mercifully this article is more in-depth and less FUCKING MORONIC than the last one, but still.
Before I tackle anything wider about this one, a few snippets from the article:
....um. This says nothing about sex-segregating classes. It also says nothing about the scoring scale on the tests (apparently not 0-100) or about the actual average scores both boys and girls were getting before. So we're left with the shocking revelation that kids do well in school when classes are interesting and creatively taught and they aren't being bored to tears.
Um... this sounds like ME in seventh grade. I made a joking reference to seventh grade being associated with depression and self-loathing in an earlier post (and it still is! My GOD, my hair was ugly then! I don't blame myself for hating me!) but it really was. I got to seventh grade and I felt completely socially isolated, lost, confused, and miserable. Also, sore, because I had to carry all my books with me because I couldn't get into my locker without a janitor's help for about the first three weeks of school. I don't take it too seriously now, because crap, it was nearly fifteen years ago, but at the time I wanted to die. Needless to say, my grades dropped, not because I couldn't understand the subject matter but because I wasn't doing my homework. It might have just been because of the depression, but I seem to remember it as a rational decision to kill time; whether I took the bus or had my father drop me off on his way to work, I'd be stuck at school an hour or more before classes started and no one spoke to me unless they wanted to laugh at my accent, so I needed some way to kill the time. No telling if my issues were the same as those of the kid described there, but I don't think it's a gender-specific thing; my brother went through something similar, just a bit later, and I know others who've gone through the same thing. The shift to middle school is fucking nightmarish, no matter who you are.
Um... and whose fault is that? Boys can join clubs and activities and from what I remember, they did, so what's the point there? Teenage girls need to back off and let the boys lead because it's bad for America if they don't learn early that men are in charge? WTF? The male mentor thing seems to be part of a thread about single-parent households that runs inconsistently through the article; of the struggling boys the writer spotlights, she often either doesn't mention whether the father's around, or in the case of the one I just cited, it's implied that both parents are involved and it still didn't help.
And from the Q&A about the article:
As we all know, teachers are grown in vats out of soy protein and raised on all-female teacher farms, then deposited in the classroom never having seen a male before. This also explains the puzzling pseudo-trend of good-looking women in their twenties sleeping with fourteen-year-old boys; everyone knows that no actual human female wants to sleep with a fourteen-year-old boy.
The Q&A is less maddening - for one thing, a couple of commenters who clearly have my problems with the article pop up, and also, it's clarified there as it isn't, really, in the article proper, that the concern is more about low-income and minority students, rather than "OMG, middle-class white thirteen-year-old boys are rowdy in class!" And a detail from the Q&A that I didn't catch in the article; they're comparing the way boys of that age perform in school now to the results twenty years ago, not just to the way girls are doing now, which makes it sound more like an actual problem and less like "Wait, girls are doing well! We need to restore the former balance of power!"
And then there's this, which is at least refreshingly different, though I still resist any attempt to generalize about the sexes, even when it's more recognizably fair. If I were to try to pin down my core values and beliefs, the easiest to identify would be "STFU with the stereotyping, ALL OF YOU." I don't care if scientists believe sex differences have to do with brain chemistry; scientists used to believe that the vagina was an inside-out penis. Science is always to some extent colored by worldview.
Other redeeming factor for this set of articles; at least they're talking about adolescents, not about making fourth-graders sit on a goddamn rug and talk about their feelings. This isn't entirely a new issue, but the focus has changed. I remember from my own middle-school years, when the focus was on trying to fix girls, that there were studies showing that girls, at least, did better in single-sex classrooms; it'd kind of stand to reason the same would work for guys. Incidentally, at the time all the "OMG, girls are scoring too low on standardized tests! Their grades are fine so the tests must be the problem!" stuff was going on in the early nineties, it made me livid with rage just like this does; at that time, because I totally PWNED standardized tests, therefore other girls could too, if they weren't idiots. It's somewhat more abstract now. Somewhat.
Still don't like making it a gender thing, though. And not just because some of the proponents of this theory are proponents because of a lot of sexist assumptions (this is more evident in the article from September, and in the outside research I did on the writer featured prominently in that one.) Schools typically suck. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the end result is that being a student is pretty miserable until, if you're lucky, college. It'd be nice if that could change, though it's unlikely. If the fad of the moment made schools noticeably better very quickly, that'd rule, no matter how objectionable the fad might appear, but I still think it's unlikely, and I still wish I weren't seeing so much publicity for a fad that appeals so much to people who think women are inherently nurturing. Fuck that nurturing shit. I want to go kill some stuff now I've reread the earlier article.
At my university, you needed to take a capstone course for your major at some point after the first semester of your third year. I couldn't get into one for the end of my fourth year; I had to take an extra semester just for that, and to add insult to injury, the only one I could get then was on Adrienne Rich, a poet and radical feminist. I guess by the standards of modern poetry she's considered a good poet; I pretty much hate poetry, and having to do close readings of her pissed me off when she turned up in an earlier class, the one that soured me for good and all on the word "patriarchy." Having to do close readings of her poetry for my capstone even though she had virtually nothing to do with anything else I'd focused on - I liked English drama and novels, 19th-century and earlier - was like a whole semester of chewing glass.
Anyway, my instructor for that class - not a full professor, but he'd taught there a long time - was a man in his seventies who nonetheless urged the women in the class not to denigrate things like menstruation, pregnancy, etc., because we shouldn't let the patriarchy tell us what to think of our bodies. FUCK YOU, SIR. I hate my period because it's messy, intensely painful, and once a month drives me insane, and YOU are the only male authority figure who's ever tried to tell me what to think of it, so SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Damn, it would have been so much more satisfying to say that to his face. Except maybe not, I might have felt guilty if he'd cried. He could've - he sort of reminded me of the English teacher on Daria.
Anyway, pain? Last night I couldn't get to sleep until after 2 a.m. because the GODDAMN FUCKING ALEVE IS DEFECTIVE I SWEAR TO GOD. Pregnancy looks GOOD right now because even if you're in labor for thirty-six hours it's not as much time as you'd spend menstruating in the nine months leading up to it.
I don't want to let my ranting obscure the fact that I'm a feminist and not one of the ones who likes to add "but I shave my legs!" either. That may have just been Freyja that did that, but I still haven't forgiven her for it. Anyone who tries to tell me I'm less a feminist because of anything I do, say, or think gets an assful of my foot, especially if they try to say it today, but petting the cat has taken enough of the edge of the wrath that I no longer want to go looking for blogs that'll piss me off.
OMG! Something we already knew about the way boys perform in school is suddenly a crisis!
...because my head didn't explode hard enough the first time! Mercifully this article is more in-depth and less FUCKING MORONIC than the last one, but still.
Before I tackle anything wider about this one, a few snippets from the article:
Two years ago Kelley King, principal of Douglass Elementary School in Boulder, Colo., looked at the gap between boys and girls and decided to take action. Boys were lagging 10 points behind girls in reading and 14 points in writing. Many more boys than girls were being labeled as learning disabled, too. So King asked her teachers to buy copies of Gurian's book "The Minds of Boys," on boy-friendly classrooms, and in the fall of 2004 she launched a bold experiment. Whenever possible, teachers replaced lecture time with fast-moving lessons that all kids could enjoy. Three weeks ago, instead of discussing the book "The View From Saturday," teacher Pam Unrau divided her third graders into small groups, and one student in each group pretended to be a character from the book. Classes are noisier, Unrau says, but the boys are closing the gap. Last spring, Douglass girls scored an average of 106 on state writing tests, while boys got a respectable 101.
....um. This says nothing about sex-segregating classes. It also says nothing about the scoring scale on the tests (apparently not 0-100) or about the actual average scores both boys and girls were getting before. So we're left with the shocking revelation that kids do well in school when classes are interesting and creatively taught and they aren't being bored to tears.
When Brian Johns hit seventh grade, he never admitted how vulnerable it made him feel. "I got behind and never caught up," says Brian, now 17 and a senior at Grand River Academy, an Ohio boarding school. When his parents tried to help, he rebuffed them. When his mother, Anita, tried to help him organize his assignment book, he grew evasive about when his homework was due.
Um... this sounds like ME in seventh grade. I made a joking reference to seventh grade being associated with depression and self-loathing in an earlier post (and it still is! My GOD, my hair was ugly then! I don't blame myself for hating me!) but it really was. I got to seventh grade and I felt completely socially isolated, lost, confused, and miserable. Also, sore, because I had to carry all my books with me because I couldn't get into my locker without a janitor's help for about the first three weeks of school. I don't take it too seriously now, because crap, it was nearly fifteen years ago, but at the time I wanted to die. Needless to say, my grades dropped, not because I couldn't understand the subject matter but because I wasn't doing my homework. It might have just been because of the depression, but I seem to remember it as a rational decision to kill time; whether I took the bus or had my father drop me off on his way to work, I'd be stuck at school an hour or more before classes started and no one spoke to me unless they wanted to laugh at my accent, so I needed some way to kill the time. No telling if my issues were the same as those of the kid described there, but I don't think it's a gender-specific thing; my brother went through something similar, just a bit later, and I know others who've gone through the same thing. The shift to middle school is fucking nightmarish, no matter who you are.
In the past, boys had many opportunities to learn from older men. They might have been paired with a tutor, apprenticed to a master or put to work in the family store. High schools offered boys a rich array of roles in which to exercise leadership skills—class officer, yearbook editor or a place on the debate team. These days, with the exception of sports, more girls than boys are involved in those activities.
Um... and whose fault is that? Boys can join clubs and activities and from what I remember, they did, so what's the point there? Teenage girls need to back off and let the boys lead because it's bad for America if they don't learn early that men are in charge? WTF? The male mentor thing seems to be part of a thread about single-parent households that runs inconsistently through the article; of the struggling boys the writer spotlights, she often either doesn't mention whether the father's around, or in the case of the one I just cited, it's implied that both parents are involved and it still didn't help.
And from the Q&A about the article:
In your opinion, how should the high percentage of female teachers be equipped to effectively educate the boys in thier classroom? Particularly, female teachers who have no previous interaction with boys?
As we all know, teachers are grown in vats out of soy protein and raised on all-female teacher farms, then deposited in the classroom never having seen a male before. This also explains the puzzling pseudo-trend of good-looking women in their twenties sleeping with fourteen-year-old boys; everyone knows that no actual human female wants to sleep with a fourteen-year-old boy.
The Q&A is less maddening - for one thing, a couple of commenters who clearly have my problems with the article pop up, and also, it's clarified there as it isn't, really, in the article proper, that the concern is more about low-income and minority students, rather than "OMG, middle-class white thirteen-year-old boys are rowdy in class!" And a detail from the Q&A that I didn't catch in the article; they're comparing the way boys of that age perform in school now to the results twenty years ago, not just to the way girls are doing now, which makes it sound more like an actual problem and less like "Wait, girls are doing well! We need to restore the former balance of power!"
And then there's this, which is at least refreshingly different, though I still resist any attempt to generalize about the sexes, even when it's more recognizably fair. If I were to try to pin down my core values and beliefs, the easiest to identify would be "STFU with the stereotyping, ALL OF YOU." I don't care if scientists believe sex differences have to do with brain chemistry; scientists used to believe that the vagina was an inside-out penis. Science is always to some extent colored by worldview.
Other redeeming factor for this set of articles; at least they're talking about adolescents, not about making fourth-graders sit on a goddamn rug and talk about their feelings. This isn't entirely a new issue, but the focus has changed. I remember from my own middle-school years, when the focus was on trying to fix girls, that there were studies showing that girls, at least, did better in single-sex classrooms; it'd kind of stand to reason the same would work for guys. Incidentally, at the time all the "OMG, girls are scoring too low on standardized tests! Their grades are fine so the tests must be the problem!" stuff was going on in the early nineties, it made me livid with rage just like this does; at that time, because I totally PWNED standardized tests, therefore other girls could too, if they weren't idiots. It's somewhat more abstract now. Somewhat.
Still don't like making it a gender thing, though. And not just because some of the proponents of this theory are proponents because of a lot of sexist assumptions (this is more evident in the article from September, and in the outside research I did on the writer featured prominently in that one.) Schools typically suck. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the end result is that being a student is pretty miserable until, if you're lucky, college. It'd be nice if that could change, though it's unlikely. If the fad of the moment made schools noticeably better very quickly, that'd rule, no matter how objectionable the fad might appear, but I still think it's unlikely, and I still wish I weren't seeing so much publicity for a fad that appeals so much to people who think women are inherently nurturing. Fuck that nurturing shit. I want to go kill some stuff now I've reread the earlier article.