So I've decided to give in to my pleasure at perusing all things human sexuality and gender identity related in my blog feeds and try setting aside my Sunday post for highlighting my favorite links of the week on those topics. We'll see how it goes! "So many times I don't think sex is a matter of health," Dr. Leonore Tiefer, a sex therapist and founder of the New View Campaign to challenge the medicalization of sex, told me the other day. "I think it's more like dancing or cooking. Yes, you do it with your body. You dance with your body, too. That doesn't mean there's a department of dance in the medical school. You don't go to the doctor to learn to dance. And in dancing school the waltz class is no more normal than the samba class."
Last Monday, I spent seven hours at Northeastern entering metadata ("information about information") into the Greenstone database for my scrapbook digitization project. Since this only really required the left side of my brain, I entertained the right side of my brain by listening to podcasts, NPR programming, and other miscellaneous audio programs. Here's some of what I listened to. Social scientists have long suspected that the internet contributes to our growing isolation. But Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, set out to test that assumption. He says they found that Americans aren't as isolated as we thought and that being active on the internet might actually help prevent social isolation.
Is the conservative right undergoing a transformation? Journalist David Weigel thinks so. Weigel covers the Republican party for the online magazine The Washington Independent, where he's written about tea party protests, anti-health care activists, the "birther" movement and the recent Values Voter summit.
Weigel formerly covered national politics for the libertarian magazine Reason. He's also written for Slate, Time.com and The Nation.
I find it difficult to read new fiction during the semester, and tend (if I have the time), to revisit old favorites rather than branch out in new direction . . . even new directions that take little intellectual or emotional effort. But this passed week, Patricia Brigg's new installment in the Alpha & Omega series (werewolves; modern American West), Hunting Ground, so in the spirit of Hanna's recent five-minute book reviews, I thought I'd offer a couple of reflections.The Nineteenth Amendment which extended the political franchise to American women, already emancipated in everything save politics, followed about half a year after the Eighteenth, prohibiting the sale of alcoholic liquors. The twin amendments--twin victories for feminism some would say--had much in common. Both prohibition and woman suffrage had roots deep in American history and represented a final triumph obtained after almost a century of continuous agitation. Both were attempted in many places on a state-wide scale before they forced their way to the front as national issues. Both were first mooted by Puritan reformed in Northeastern states, when actually carried into effect by their radical sons who had moved to the Western plains and mountains, and opposed almost to the last ditch by their conservative grandsons who had stayed in the East. (157)
In England a fairly large radical wing of the suffrage movement had tried to badger the government of the day into action by such means as broken windows, interrupting public meetings, destroying mailboxes, and other 'nuisance tactics.' Nothing so extreme occurred in the United States, the nearest approach to it perhaps being the picketing of the White House with banners denouncing President Wilson (himself already a convert to the cause) for not putting more pressure on Congress . . . Even this very mild form of militancy was frowned upon by the majority of American suffragists, who used no method except political organization and open discussion. Their speedy success seems to have been due in part to the skill of their political managers, in part to the chivalric tradition in American life which made it difficult to refuse any really sustained demand by women . . . and in part as a tribute to the indispensable services of American women during the World War. (160)
Today is the official launch date for Paper Not Included a new group blog that Hanna, along with four other bloggers, will be contributing to. They plan to blog about books and reading with a particular emphasis on new ebook technologies and their effect on books and reading culture. Add them to your blog reader of choice and see what they have to say!
Bella gets dumped by Edward (for her own safety, naturally), and spends thirty minutes grieving via night fits normally seen in three-year-olds. Edward’s spirit appears at random intervals to scold her like she actually is one. Jacob wants her to be his girlfriend—except it’s too dangerous—except she’d better not go back to Edward Cullen or else.
Usually it is the children, not the parents, who are loath to spend their evenings practising spelling and learning times tables. But a Canadian couple have just won a legal battle to exempt their offspring from homework after successfully arguing there is no clear evidence it improves academic performance
After waging a long war with their eldest son, Jay, now 18, over his homework, they decided to do things differently with their youngest two, Spencer, 11, and Brittany, 10. And being lawyers, they decided to make it official.
It took two years to negotiate the Milleys' Differentiated Homework Plan, which ensures their youngest two children will never have to do homework again at their current school. The two-page plan, signed by the children, parents and teachers, stipulates that "homework will not be used as a form of evaluation for the children". In return, the pupils promise to get their work done in class, to come to school prepared, and to revise for tests. They must also read daily and practise their musical instruments at home.
1. The negative effects of homework are well known. They include children’s frustration and exhaustion, lack of time for other activities, and possible loss of interest in learning. Many parents lament the impact of homework on their relationship with their children; they may also resent having to play the role of enforcer and worry that they will be criticized either for not being involved enough with the homework or for becoming too involved.
2. The positive effects of homework are largely mythical In preparation for a book on the topic, I’ve spent a lot of time sifting through the research. The results are nothing short of stunning. For starters, there is absolutely no evidence of any academic benefit from assigning homework in elementary or middle school. For younger students, in fact, there isn’t even a correlation between whether children do homework (or how much they do) and any meaningful measure of achievement. At the high school level, the correlation is weak and tends to disappear when more sophisticated statistical measures are applied. Meanwhile, no study has ever substantiated the belief that homework builds character or teaches good study habits.
3. More homework is being piled on children despite the absence of its value. Over the last quarter-century the burden has increased most for the youngest children, for whom the evidence of positive effects isn’t just dubious; it’s nonexistent.
It’s not as though most teachers decide now and then that a certain lesson really ought to continue after school is over because meaningful learning is so likely to result from such an assignment that it warrants the intrusion on family time. Homework in most schools isn’t limited to those occasions when it seems appropriate and important. Rather, the point of departure seems to be: “We’ve decided ahead of time that children will have to do something every night (or several times a week). Later on we’ll figure out what to make them do.”
Not so much commentary on this rainy Saturday links list, but some good stories for those who need procrastination fodder!I spend a great amount of time talking to educators, researchers, students, friends, family members, and many others about why I think it is important that we reframe the ways that we think about sexuality education and sexuality research, shifting away from a model that focuses on disease and prengancy prevention that I believe pathologizes sexuality and sexual behavior in a way that is harmful and confusing. One of the responses I constantly receive regards the evidence of such an approach and whether or not it will continue to work; and to be honest, this is a part of the conversation where I tend to flounder a bit. "Chapter Nine" [in When Sex Goes to School by Kristin Luker] allowed me to understand why I have such a hard time answering this question, and I disagree with Dr. Luker about whether or not this is the right question. The problem is not whether or not it works but how we (and I mean everyone from researchers to students to politicians to parents to teachers) decide whether or not it works.
Yesterday, LISNews linked to a post by self-described "conservative librarian" Bert Chapman, who blogs at townhall.com, in which Mr. Chapman made the "economic case against homosexuality." For those of you who might entertain fleeting hopes that he was taking the New York Times route, and tabulating the cost of homophobic discrimination against gay couples in our society, I am sad to report that this is not the case. No. Instead, Mr. Chapman tries to argue that "our nation cannot afford the extremely high financial costs of this [homosexual] lifestyle." "oh, yes, the shopping. I had to give up the lifestyle when I couldn't afford the clothing."
"'Lifestyle' - really? Really? I can't believe people still use that word in this context."
"There are a number of lifestyles I object to. The idiot lifestyle, the bigot lifestyle, the uneducated lifestyle, the fearmongering lifestyle, the use-of-the-word-"lifestyle" lifestyle, the describing someone's existence as a lifestyle, the vile hate disguised as a scholarly opinion lifestyle, the cowardly bully lifestyle and the sub-literate Townhall columnist lifestyle."
In treating the history of the concept of childhood, social scientists have emphasized the differences between [the pre-industrial] status of children . . . where they are regarded simply as small or inadequate versions of their parents, totally subject to traditional or otherwise arbitrary parental authority . . . [and on the other hand] the modern, industrial, middle-class view of children [in which] children are increasingly treated as members of a distinctive social category, their social participation . . . increasingly limited to age-homogeneous groups.
. . .
The prevalent view of children at The Ranch (and other communes like it) fits neither of these models exactly. Rather than being members of an autonomous category of "children" or being inadequate versions of their parents, legitimately subject to their arbitrary authority, children and young people (or "small persons," as they are sometimes deliberately, perhaps preciously, called) are primarily regarded as "persons," members of the communal family, just like anyone else -- not necessarily less wise, perhaps less competent, but recognized primarily, as my colleague Bruce Hackett put it, "by lowering one's line of vision rather than one's level of discourse."
Amid the turbulence connected with this reconstruction in political machinery, woman suffrage was once more brought out of the parlor and the academy, reviving an agitation which, after giving great umbrage to the males of the fuming forties, had died down during the Civil War . . . With a relevancy that could hardly be denied the feminists now asked why the doctrine [of universal suffrage] did not apply to women, only to receive a curt answer from the politicians that sent them flying to the platform to make an appeal to the reasoning of the public at large (562).
In September, 1918, with a congressional election at hand, [President Wilson] went before a joint session of the Senate and the House in person to urge the passage of the national suffrage amendment, yellow with age, as a measure "vital to the winning of the [First World] war." By June of the following year, the requisite two-thirds vote was assembled and the resolution was sent to the states for ratification. After three-fourths of the commonwealths had approved it, the Nineteenth Amendment was proclaimed in the summer of 1920 a part of the law of the land. The fruit of a hundred years of agitation and social development had finally been garnered.
As this posts, I'm somewhere in the air between Michigan and Massachusetts, retracing the route I took last week to visit family and friends. Even though I was vacation, I didn't entirely tune out the blogosphere. A few things that made it into my Google Reader "share" queue: SAN FRANCISCO—After gently unfastening the elastic strap keeping his dearest musings safe from prying eyes, little literary artiste Evan Stansky penned a few more darling thoughts into his clothbound Moleskine notebook Wednesday. "These are much higher quality than the notebooks you find at CVS," lilted the auteur, who couldn't be bothered to use—dare it be said—a journal of lesser craftsmanship or pedigree, or one not famously used by such legendary artists as van Gogh and Hemingway. "They're a little more expensive, but I try to write on both sides so I don't go through them as quickly." At press time, the princely scribe was seen finishing his apricot jasmine tea, asking a mere mortal sitting nearby to watch his literary accoutrements, and then prancing off to the Starbucks powder room, light as a feather.