11D

People Are Weird

People are traveling to the house in Austria where the deranged dad kept his daughter and their children in a cellar for 24 years. They have their picture taken in front of the house or drive by in tour buses. Forget eco-tourism; ghoulish tourism may be the new trend.

People are travelling from neighbouring countries such as Germany and Hungary   to visit the street and have their picture taken in front of the house.

According to reports, the three-storey house facing one of Amstetten’s main   roads has also been put on the route of a sightseeing bus tour which now   routinely stops in front of it.

"It is bad enough that journalists and TV crews have beleaguered our town, but   now there is this ghoulish tourism with people coming to Amstetten just to   see the house in Ybbstrasse. It is appalling, we just want to be left in   peace," said one Amstetten resident.

Time to open a Jeffrey Dahmer museum.

Help After Kindergarten

Inside Higher Ed has a new group blog, Mama PhD. Wahoo! Most of the bloggers are fairly experienced and are starting off well. Many of the topics would well outside of academia, and I'll link to those broader interest posts whenever I have the chance.

Libby had a post last week that discussed the difficulty of identifying remedies to work-family balance problems as the kids get older. Kids and parents still have needs after kindergarten, but those needs may be less easily remedied by specific policies.

I appreciated that the survey had an option that read something like “I don’t need this, but we should have it,” and I checked it over and over again for the lactation room, the onsite daycare, the flexible scheduling, the help with caring for aged parents. But when it came to asking for what I really needed, I was stymied. Sure, after-school programs on campus would be nice for my younger child, as would summer programs (he’s doing two weeks of summer camp on campus already). There was some help available for the college application process with my daughter, though we ended up going it mostly alone. Could we have used more? Maybe. But the real demands of this period of parenting, as of this period in a career, seem to me more amorphous, less easily solved with one-size-fits-all programs and policies. Mostly right now I just feel as if I have to be paying very close attention, at all times, to everything — which means, no doubt, that something will inevitably give. Is just recognizing that enough?

My needs -- After school care that accepts kids with special needs and has smart people to help with homework. Libby has on-campus summer camp? Oooh, I want that, too. I still need flexible scheduling. Full time care when the public schools close for week long breaks.

Girls and Sports

The Times had a crappy article on girls and sports this week. The cover of the magazine has a picture of girl with her head wrapped in gauze getting bonked on the head with the ball. Ouch.

I skimmed through five pages of stories of how girls are getting terribly injuring playing sports. I was looking for the point somewhere. Way back towards the end of the article after it jumped to the page before the crossword puzzle, it said something about how coaches need to train girls differently than boys and then things will be fine. 

How many people read that article to the end to find that point? How many people saw the cover, read the first couple pages, and walked away saying "girls shouldn't play sports"?

The first paragraph of that article should have been a quote from one of the injured girls talking about how important sports were to her life and how she willingly put up with torn ligaments and stress fractures, because she loved winning games.

My knees are destroyed from running nearly fifty miles a week all through high school and into college. My back was so fucked up in my senior year that I could barely walk at the end of the cross country season. What did I gain from all that pain? A whole lot of self confidence. A work ethic. Leadership skills. It sure beat waving pom-poms around.

I have a box of medals up in my attic and two scrapbooks of press clippings. Each scrapbook has been carefully marked to note which races I won and which ones I earned a personal best. Twenty years later, I still remember my time for the mile, two mile, and cross country.

Warrior-girls rule, even if they limp a little.

Weekend Journal

The end of the semester is nigh. I'm proctoring my last exam tomorrow. I've got a stack of finals from last week sitting in a neat pile on the dining room table. I've got a ton of meetings this week, and I'm really not sure where I am supposed to be and when. The bookstore is demanding book order forms. A last minute recommendation. A book review. The end of the semester is nigh, but not nigh enough.

Spreadin' Love

Dooce and other mommybloggers were interviewed by Kathy Lee Gifford on the Today show.

Kathy G. defends unionized workplaces. She writes, "The best research has found that unionized firms are, on average, more productive than their nonunionized counterparts."

In a recent comment thread about teacher tenure, I said that I didn't think that too many professors slacked off after getting tenure. Some of you disagreed with me. Dan Drezner proudly declares it's donut and hobby time, now that he's been made full professor. (While you're there, read his two posts on HIllary.)

In Democracy in America, deTocqueville fears that great mediocrity will happen as the world becomes more democratic and less aristocratic. There will be more malls and Levittown and less Versailles. According to an article in Foreign Policy, the architecture in autocratic nations today is incredibly innovative. Check out the buildings in Dubai and Azerbaijan.

It's Mother's Day, What Do You Want?

via Bitch, Phd

Via Perez Hilton

Myanmar Relief Funds

Myanmar may be allowing some relief organizations in soon. Let's get the money to those groups now. Some links:

Donate to Unicef or Direct Relief International through Google.

Feed the Children.

Catholic Relief Services.

AmeriCares

The Reserve Pool Teachers

There are 600 teachers in the New York City school system that don't have permanent teaching positions, but are still collecting full salaries and benefits. The school system is shelling out $81 million over two years to these reserve pool teachers. These teachers have had their positions eliminated, due to personnel shifts, and until they find new employment, they have to be available to substitute.

A new report suggests that many of these teachers didn't even apply for jobs this year and may be unemployable for a whole range of reasons.

Randi Weingarten of the UFT defends this practice.

5% of the workers at my husband's company will be let go this year. Downsizing is a bitch, but it's the real world.

Web 2.0

Thanks to Russell Arben Fox, I caught this speech by Clay Shirky on how the Internet is reshaping our lives. (Check out the comments at his blog, too.) He speculates we haven't yet completed adjusted to the world in the Internet age, just as there was a lag time before people learned how to deal with the changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Russell summarizes his talk,

I'm dubious about much of the history he invokes, and his math to calculate just "where do people find the time?" sounds a little crackpot to me...and yet the whole thing, his imagined evolution of us from passive tv-watchers to interactive Wikipedia-page-writers, was brilliantly persuasive. In 15 minutes, he travels from the wrenching changes of the industrial revolution (and its essential technology, gin), to the unexpected wealth of the post-WWII world (and its essential technology, the television sitcom), to the "cognitive surplus," to Pluto, and beyond. Watch the whole thing to the end, to make sure you get the somewhat scary (but oh so truthful) story of the 4-year-old and the dvd player.

I'm a little less of a Luddite than Russell, so I'm more easily persuaded by Shirky than he is.

My stories about my kids and technology:

Story One: What's the first letter of the alphabet that my kids learned? W. Because everything in their world begins with www.

Story Two: Jonah's first worlds after the regular "mom" and "dad" were the names of the Thomas trains that he learned from playing the Thomas the Tank Engine games online.

Story Three: Before Ian could talk, he could turn on the computer, find a game under the favorites menu, and then play the game.

Story Four: When Ian is upset about something, he'll often say that he wants "to return to the main menu."

All things considered, I would rather blog, than watch Giligan's Island. 

Jersey Food

Go Outback!

Funny, funny discussion by Megan, Ezra, and Matt who are annoyed by this New York Times review of suburban chain restaurants. I'll take my condescension a la carte, please.

Although I didn't grow up in Manhattan with Megan and Matt, I did live there for nearly twenty years. So, I have to admit that I've never been to the Outback, Red Lobster, the Olive Garden, the Cheesecake Factory, or any of the other places in the article.

But New Yorkers shouldn't be too snobby, because Manhattan has its own chain restaurants. Teriyaki Boy. There's the Fajitas place that's run by Koreans (I forget the name). Dallas Barbecue. And all those Indian restaurants on 6th Avenue share a common kitchen, don't you know.

The Middle Class Crunch

Here's a fabulous Elizabeth Warren speech discussing the main concepts from the Two Income Trap. She compares a family in 1970 with a family today. In short, we have less disposable money, despite having two incomes. Health insurance and housing costs are killing us. We're spending more on houses not for the granite counter tops, but for the schools. Families would rather live next to toxic waste dump in order to have better schools for their kids. College is now a mandatory requirement for middle class status and college is expensive. If someone loses their job, there is no safety net, and the family ends up going bankrupt.

Families with kids are under enormous financial stress.  She thinks we're moving from a three class society to a two class society. (via Corrente and Wendy)

 

Mommyblogging As a Political Statement

Last week, Dooce defended mommybloggers.

But I guess there are some people who are very uncomfortable with the fact that I and many other women are writing about our children on our websites. How dare we violate your privacy like this, how dare we endanger you like this, we obviously care more about ad revenue than what this is going to do to your adolescence....

Am I violating your privacy? If keeping 95 percent of what goes on in your life off limits in terms of what I write on my website, then yes, I am totally invading your privacy. And what about that time I wrote about your poop, aren't you going to be mortified when your classmates read about that in sixth grade? Leta, I stopped writing about your poop many, many months ago, and chances are that all the kids you're going to know in sixth grade will have spent the first three years of their lives shitting their pants, too. Oh wait, THAT'S WHAT HUMANS DO. WHO KNEW.

Finally, I've seen it suggested in my inbox and by various critics online that what we do on our websites is egotistical and exploitative. Some even refer to it as child abuse. I know I am not alone when I say that when I sit down to update my website I do it to connect with other people, I do it to reflect on the absurdity of everyday life with the hope that the people who read it will find similarities in their own routine. I did not know that wanting to be a part of a community qualified as egotism.

... Leta, some people will one day try to convince you that what I've done here is some sort of sickening betrayal of your childhood, and what those people fail to recognize is that I am doing the exact opposite. This is the glorification of your childhood, and even more than that this is a community of women coming together to make each other feel less alone. You are a part of this movement, you and all of the other kids whose mothers are sitting at home right now writing tirelessly about their experiences as mothers, the love and frustration and madness of it all. And I think one day you will look at all of this and pump your fist in the air.

I mommyblog at least once a week here at 11D, but I'm too shallow to concentrate on any one issue on this blog. (Note to people who want to make cash and fame from blogging. Do not do what I do. Be consistent. Or else people will offer you opportunities to syndicate your blog and then take back the offer, because you're all over the place.)

I do the mommyblogging for a couple reasons. Those posts may be the only ones that I will print out and give to my kids some day. I loved our talk about Voter ID laws. It might inspire a longer post elsewhere or an academic paper, but I probably won't print it out and save it in a nice binder. The mommy stuff might be worth saving. The official family record. (Though I may end up deleting the posts about Ian's speech problems.)

I also get off on the politics of it. I think that parenting is undervalued as a profession. I think that mommyblogs tells the world, "I spent 4 hours getting a kid a haircut and 8 hours doing a stupid school project and I work damn hard. Damnit. When I need to leave work early to go to a school conference, I'm not going off to play. I'm doing more work". I think the mommyblogs also shows how we are better people because we have kids, and spawning is a worthwhile pursuit. Damnit.

The problem with my radical parenting blog scenario is that few non-parents read parenting blogs. And if they do, it's only to scoff and mock. They don't read enough to get it. Well, Dooce seems to be satisfied with the community of parents that come out of the mommyblogs. I would have preferred bigger social change.

Update: More from Geeky Mom.

Weekend Journal

Over drinks on Friday, Steve and I compared notes with a couple of fellow academics about how we juggle work and the kids. Things are easier now that both kids are in school. I've got a solid chunk of time, while they're in school and then a few more hours in the evening. It's just that when they're home, things are more intense then when they were babies. More school stuff to take of. More squabbles to mediate. Playdates to arrange. Sports events to coordinate. This weekend was all about kid stuff.

The Pros and Cons of Nature

It's spring, and things are alive in the suburbs.

Yes, there are the gorgeous flowering trees. This is a dogwood tree in my front yard. The magnolia, red leaf, and crab apple trees have been happy, happy in the backyard. I've been visiting the garden stores and drooling over the new plants.

But I had to pull off a tick off the back of Ian's neck with tweezers yesterday. The bugger hung on to his skin and put up quite a fight. Asshole.

I also almost hit a wild turkey on the way to work yesterday. It was huge and ugly and stupid. It just ambled onto the road just as I was accelerating for the ramp to Route 17. I had to come to a complete halt, so the dumb thing could slowly stalk across the road. I briefly considered a Grand Theft Auto slam, but I didn't want it to stink up my car.

I'm Making Tracks

I had only been out of bed for about 2-1/2 minutes, so my brain wasn't quite on yet. Ian marched into the living room slapping his feet on the floor and proudly announced, "I'm making tracks." It took a few precious seconds to compute what was going on. Lag time is a very dangerous thing when parenting.

He had broken into the paints for his model car set, spilled some blue paint on our new counter, and let it drip onto the wood cabinets into a little pool on the new hardwood floors. Then he stepped in it, tried to clean it up with a paper towel, and stripped down to his underwear, because now it was all over his pajamas. Somewhere along the line, he thought that making footprints on the floor was fun and forgot about the wrath of mom.

Certain phrases or sentences that come out of your kid's mouth are an automatic code red. At this age, it's "I'm making tracks" or "Do you know how many Cheerios can fit up my nose." Later it's going to be "I'm not drunk" and "I'm staying at my friend's house tonight and the parents are in Fiji." It's good to work into these things.

Spreadin' Love

The 50 most influential US political pundits.

I love cheap, trendy clothes.

Read this commenter's story about the academic life before you take those GREs.

Megan speculates why academics are bitter. Dan and Megan pick up the conversation here. I'm going to have to post about this.

Gail Collins does some good old fashioned man bashing. But then has so much fodder this week: Bill Clinton, Rev. Wright, Billy Ray Cyrus.

Great post from Elizabeth on the whether or not flexible work hours should limited to parents or be available to all people.

The Face of Evil

Just finished my last lecture. I'm exhausted and giddy at the same time. This last week of work has been a tough slog, so I required lots of breaks to keep going. I played some dumb online games and also read vast numbers of articles on that creep in Austria who kept his daughter and her children in a basement for 24 years.

We were talking about the evil side of human nature in my political theory class today. This guy is a poster child for ultimate evil.

I've been following the progress of this woman and her children with great interest. I'm fascinated by the kids' development of language skills, a side obsession due to my speech challenge kid. The woman, who's my age, has been aged prematurely because of the stress of the her environment. The kids who were kept in a basement are seeing cell phones and elevators and other people for the first time. Is it overwhelming or exhilarating? Aren't they like Socrates's prisoners in the cave coming out to see light for the first time?

Apparently, Austria is getting defensive about its history of meglomaniacs.

Voter ID Laws

On Monday, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's voter identification law, concluding that the challengers failed to prove that the law’s photo ID requirement placed an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote.

Voter IDs have been pushed by Republicans in several states, in addition to Indiana.

Next year, they'll bring back poll taxes and literacy requirements. Good news!

Parental Rights and the State

The subject of child abuse has been in the news and on this blog quite often lately. Just today on the morning news I heard about a freak in Austria who imprisoned his daughter in his basement, that 31 of the teenage girls from FLDS were either pregnant or had already had a baby, and that Mylie Cyrus went topless in Vanity Fair with her parents watching (way to kill the golden goose, folks).

So, last week, I asked what grounds were sufficient to terminate a parent's rights over a kid.

Harry B. at Crooked Timber fleshes out an argument he made in my comment section about parental rights.  He says that parents should have a great deal of latitude to raise a kid as they see fit, however those rights end when a child is abused or neglected. He says that a child's interest is probably more involved that just getting a decent breakfast and avoiding a beating, but he doesn't elaborate in this blog post.

The problem, according to Harry B., is that the remedy for the situation may be worse than status quo. The disruption of families, even bad ones, can lead to other serious problems for the kids. The foster care system in our country has an uneven track record.

Harry throws out a final, and excellent question.

What kinds of public policy will make it more likely that more parents will meet the (in my view quite stringent) conditions on retaining a fundamental right to raise their child. How, in other words, can we arrange policies so that events like this one with the FLDS don’t arise in the first place?

In the interest of not confusing the conversation, respond to Harry at CT. All other random and less serious comments can be left here, as always.