Caterpillar Reading

The kindergarten students were part of a reading race to first grade. Students had to read 6 books at home and then they received a part of a large caterpillar. Each kindergarten class had their own display of a caterpillar and we raced to first grade. Mrs. Lenihan's class won with 75 caterpillar bodies, that's 450 books read by the kids. They had a popcorn party to celebrate.

Summer is Here!

Beginning May 25,2011

Summer Hours for the
Marshall Jewish Learning Center

The MJLC will be open:

Monday 9 am - 5 pm
Tuesday 9 am - noon
Wednesday 9 am - 5 pm*
Thursday Closed
Friday 9 am- noon

Wednesday nights by appointment only

Do Girls Rule The World? A Response To Beyonce Inspired By A Young Feminist

It's really amazing what you can find on the interwebz

A feminist vlogger who posts to YouTube under the the name NineteenPercent is responsible for an incisive critique of the new Beyonce song "Run The World (Girls)." This young intellectual, who could give any second waver from the 1970s a run for her money, points out that putting snappy tunes out there about how girls (or women) "run the world" is diss-information since equality for "Lady Humans" is not on the agenda nowadays.  Then she runs it down how bad things really are:  in one state a bill making cockfighting a felony crime was passed recently but a bill that would have made assaulting your wife a felony failed.

If women are making 78 cents to every dollar a man earns, NP points out, women do not run the world.  Not even close to it.  Furthermore, women are definitely not running the anti-violence agenda if, when we discuss crimes that are overwhelmingly committed against women, we have to footnote our remarks apologetically by acknowledging that women are not the only victims of that crime, and men are not the only perps, and so it can't really be a way of enforcing systemic gender discrimination, right? 

Take rape for example.  This is a crime that Beyonce and her girlfriends are able to prevent in the video by dancing skillfully in front of a gang of men who have apparently come to beat and rape them.  Much as Austin Powers defeated the fembots, Beyonce and her dancers terrify their assailants into submission by donning metal fingernails, shaking their scantily-clad hoo-hoos at them, and proving (DUH!) that girls run the world.  However, apparently this technique has not yet been deployed on college campuses, which is why the rape of women by men (78% of college rapes are by a known assailant) is a huge problem.  Perhaps because it is a well-known fact that girls run the world, should you be in a situation convened to discuss said rapes, you may be reproved by men and women alike if you do not adhere to the following rules for discussion:

a.  You have to constantly amend everything you say to include the (often pointless and unproven) "fact" that men are raped by women too, and women are raped by other women.  You have to stipulate this even though, according to Department of Justice Statistics, 91% of rape victims in the United States are women, 99% of rapists are men and you are probably in that room because of a recent and (too) horrible (to cover up) rape of a woman by a man.  Go here if you want to see a truly idiotic discussion on the topic of female rapists that nevertheless semi-accurately reflects every exchange I have heard the under reporting of these dastardly criminals who are using forced sex to maintain their rule of the world.  Only one commenter interrupts the thread by asking: "how can women rape men without a penis? like, with a strap-on?"  No one answered this incisive question, so eager were they to break the silence and report on the dozens of men they personally knew who had been raped by women taking time off from ruling the world.

b.  You have to refer to a woman who has been raped as a "survivor" as if she had suffered a near death experience, or was returning from a form of social death caused by the rape.

c.  You have to have long conversations about consent, as if unwanted sexual intercourse had occurred because of a failure to communicate rather than a WOMAN being physically overpowered by a MAN who wanted it, and wanted it now.  What now passes for anti-rape programming is often commonly called "consent training." It is a lot like dog training, in which women are taught to send very clear signals (andnotgetdrunkandnotgoplacesaloneandneverleaveyourfriendsatapartyandstayprettycoveredupbecausea guymightgetthewrongideaanddontputyourdrinkdownanywheresomeonemightputsomethinginitanddontgoupstairs atthefrathousewithanyoneandalwaysmeetaguyinapublicplaceforthefirsttimedontlethimknowwhereyoulive) and men are taught to keep their ears free of wax so they can hear a woman say no -- "which means no!"  The difference between consent training and dog training is that in the latter case dogs receive treats when they listen and respond to commands (here's an idea:  women could carry cans of beer, and when they say no to sex and men agree not to rape them, the guy gets a can of beer.) You would be surprised how confusing "consent training" is to college women who end up believing that the outcome of any given sexual encounter is a fifty-fifty proposition even when they said quite clearly that they did not want to have sex. 

OK sure, did we expect much of Beyonce anyway, given that she was the woman whose big hit a couple years ago informed the man she dumped that she had done so, not because she didn't dig him, but because he hadn't "put a ring on it?" I think we know from whence she thinks grrrrl power derives (should Hilary try this in the Middle East?)  So without further ado, let's hear from NineteenPercent.



Hat tip.

If You Don't Teach Well, At Least No One Dies

We at Tenured Radical are sorry to hear that Zenith alum and historian of Africa Tim Burke, over at Easily Distracted, was temporarily sidelined by a bout of diverticulitis. For the non-cognoscenti, this is a manageable, chronic condition that tends to introduce itself with excruciating pain. From here on out, it's Fiber City, Tim. Get well soon, you hear?

As anyone in our tribe might have done, Tim used this small emergency and its resolution as an opportunity to blog. In a meditation on the state of two large, amorphous industries, higher education and health care, he writes:

Academia’s issues I see from the professional’s side, medicine’s problems from the perspective of the clientele. The first perspective tends to put me in the position of an apologist, the second as accuser. Maybe between the two some kind of insight is possible, though when I add it all up, I’m left with the sense that many modern professions are simultaneously indispensable, a high water mark of social progress and hopelessly screwed up in ways that can’t really be fixed by outsiders or insiders.

In the absence of any systematic fix, as Tim notes, we are all left to meander our way through the maze of what the insurance industry and the government call our "health care options," feeling lucky if we make a good connection with a physician and get decent care, or fighting grimly to hang on when we can't seem to make sense of why we are being treated with what appears to be diffidence. Like patients in our polyglot health care system, students at university are told in many ways that they get the education they deserve: if said student goes to a large, anonymous diploma factory, s/he must not have exhibited the virtues or intelligence necessary at precisely the right moment to have been admitted to a prestigious SLAC, Ivy or flagship public U. If s/he goes to a prestigious school, and can't seem to navigate it, pick the right courses or succeed in class, s/he is told that s/he is under prepared, irresponsible, immature, lazy and failing to take advantage of the cornucopia of opportunities just beyond hir grasp.

Think about it: as teachers, do we sometimes mistake the romance of what we do for its reality, and judge students accordingly when they don't perform? How many of us watch Gray's Anatomy because the idea of being able to get our health care at "Seattle Grace" hospital (despite the occasional psychotic shooter as in last night's season finale) is so seductive? Everything at Seattle Grace is handled by a skilled, empathetic and highly trained surgeon. People are reproached for their failings, and grow as a result of it; residents who make mistakes apologize for them. Patients get the outcomes they need, not the ones that happen to be available at the moment. (And by the way? I know this is totally irrelevant, but Cristina Yang is my idol: last night I was sucking back the tears as she found the courage to take charge of McDreamy's surgery.)

What Tim Burke points out in his post is that becoming a client can provide useful perspective on how we, as professionals, treat others to whom we are responsible. I found this extremely provocative. Long-time readers may remember that last fall I fired my primary care physician in a rage because the practice wouldn't refill my asthma meds when I was in the middle of an attack. But the larger issue was that actually making an appointment with any doctor in that practice -- much less my own -- had become a gargantuan, alienating chore. My doctor didn't think I needed an annual check-up; she preferred to phone in prescriptions without seeing me; and in the incident that resulted in the firing, refused to prescribe because I had not had an office visit in over two years and left a time for me to visit the office for my asthma on my office answering machine. I didn't get the message, of course, being sick and at home, and when I called to check about the appointment I had already missed it, and there wasn't another one for five hours. Meanwhile, I was sucking wind big time. They suggested I go to the emergency room. Practiced wheezers know that asthmatics are the last people treated in an urban ER (although at my age, murmuring "chest pains" can get me ahead of the bluish seven year-old from public housing.) Instead, I fired their asses and called my gynecologist. She fixed me up with the prescriptions I needed to help me breathe and the name of a new PCP.

Who, by the way, I love. She is funny and nice. She is younger than me (this is key, by the way, when you are in your fifties.) She does medical histories herself. She delivers all instructions in writing. She explains things. She says, "Call when you need us and we'll get you in." She watches all the same TV shows I do. If she were a cardio-thoracic surgeon, she would be Cristina Yang.

There's a lot in the story about the tortuous path by which I have found my dream doctor that hints at common frustrations about the medical system as it exists, even for those of us who have what passes for really good insurance. Doctors who are too busy and discourage their patients from coming in; staff sending patients for an expensive, time-consuming ER visit rather than taking a little extra time and care to talk to them directly and/or see them regularly; blaming the patient for not having overcome the barriers put in the way of care; the failure to make relationships that convey an ethic of care to the patient; and "managing" patients rather than establishing a set of cooperative practices between patient and physician that enhance wellness.

But Tim is right: the parallels to similar failures of professionalism in the academy are intriguing. My guess is that many undergraduates experience college with the same sense of powerlessness and frustration that I experienced in the failed relationship with my first PCP. How many of you have colleagues who have no scheduled office hours? Who are abrupt and peremptory with students in a way that discourages them from seeking help, or even making contact? Who then blame students for not having come to office hours? Who are often unavailable even if they have posted office hours? Who give assignments without saying what they are for or what the student is supposed to learn from them? Who give grades without any comment or instruction about what is right or wrong with the paper? Who deal with students who are not learning -- not by teaching them -- but by sending them to the writing workshop, the learning center or for tutoring by another undergraduate?

And the question is: how might one act on what might be conceived as a professional obligation to point these systemic flaws out and offer some comprehensive solution to them? I agree with Burke: it's hard to imagine. But perhaps not impossible. What I do know is that the testing structure, and demands by people who are not educators for what is now called "accountability" do not add up to the kind of close work and critical thought that would be necessary to re-invigorate the teacher-student relationship. The result is that some of us do what we are paid to do in generous and caring ways and others do not, and with the exception of the occasional teaching prize here and there, teaching is a set of professional obligations that one either takes personal responsibility for -- or not.

Readers?

Why Does The Sun Go On Shining? Why Does The Sea Rush to Shore?

The answer to these and other pressing questions can be found here, with a Big Hair Bonus.  (And yes, I would embed, but YouTube won't let me.  Buncha intellectual property pansies, if you ask me.)

For a brief history of Skeeter Davis, born Mary Penick, go here.  Here's hoping you survive the day, and if you don't, that we encounter each other in that Big Blogger Meetup in the Sky.

In Search Of The History That Hasn't Happened: Caster Semenya, Gender Barriers And The Right To Compete

Several weeks ago, while watching some early round matches at the U.S. Open, a friend of mine and I were discussing how unbelievably homophobic the world of sports still is. Of course, you might point out that we were having this conversation at the National Tennis Center, which is named after a lesbian. Billie Jean King first fought sexism in the sport; was then forced out of the closet; and then, having lost all her sponsorships, competed as an out lesbian. Subsequently, Martina Navratilova (pictured at left in all her glorious butchness) came out, lost her sponsorships, competed as an out lesbian and -- also like King-- became a serious player in the political and legal struggle for civil equality.

But friends, this boundary in tennis was broken thirty years ago. Where is the history of queer athletes moving into the mainstream that should have followed? Can you name more than one or two openly queer tennis players who are active today? Are any of them men? Can you name any other active, queer professional athletes, men or women? Even though there must be hundreds -- thousands -- of them?

The conversation with my friend easily slipped over into a related subject: transphobia in sports, why it affects women exclusively, and the ongoing investigation of the outstanding South African runner Caster Semenya. For those of you who are not sports fans, Semenya's gender identity as a woman has been challenged by some of her competitors, prompting an official scientific inquiry by the governing body in international track and field as to her "real" gender. I say "a related conversation" because, despite the critical alliances between gay and lesbian people and people who identify as transgendered, it's not the same conversation and sometimes it is a very different one. Perhaps the most prominent thing shared among those people described by the initials G,L,B and T is that we do not enjoy full constitutional rights. Hence, we are often unable to fully merge our private and our public selves without becoming the objects of bigotry and violence, and our access to status and success is often limited by our inability to present ourselves as simultaneously legally, physically and socially "normal."

The categories described by the initials often overlap as well (as categories tend to do because they are all intellectual constructions to begin with), which is another important reason for such alliances: people shift from one initial to another, or inhabit several of them simultaneously. In a world dominated by monogamy, bisexual people in the end tend to choose one partner and that choice is a socially defining one: regardless of the gender identity of that person, they have to work pretty hard to remind people that they belong in the B category. Similarly, many female to male transsexuals begin their adult sexual lives as lesbians, become men while still desiring women sexually, and then become socially "straight" - often while still thinking of themselves as queer. Male to female transsexuals who continue to be attracted to women become lesbians, and some FTM's find themselves powerfully drawn to sex with men for the first time in their lives. Some transpeople proudly identify as ungendered, as transgendered, or as transsexual. Others go stealth which, for the uninitiated, means living in the gender that you feel is rightly yours and leaving the gender assigned at birth behind. Hence, some transpeople are freed to no longer be perceived as queer at all.

So let's come back to the trouble gender creates for women athletes, and is currently causing for Caster Semenya (pictured at right) in particular. You may recall that, having come out as a lesbian in 1981, Navratilova intensified her training and transformed her body to achieve a level of athleticism previously unseen in the girly-girl world of women's tennis. As she swept up title after title, there were increasingly nasty public remarks about Navratilova not being a "real" woman; some said she should only be permitted to compete against men. That Navratilova came from the Soviet bloc, where the use of hormones and other forms of doping in national athletic development programs had become state policy, undoubtedly fueled a prejudice that was entirely American: Navratilova was simply not feminine enough in her physical or her social self.

It was probably no coincidence that Navratilova's transformation occurred just subsequent to Renee Richards' successful battle against the USTA for the right to compete against women after having undergone sex reassignment. What is also important, in my view, is that while homophobia affects everybody, it is the female body that is the object of scientific scrutiny in sports. Demands for chromosomal testing for women who looked too powerful to be women have been pervasive since it was possible to do chromosomal tests. As the documentary movie about the history of women's rowing, A Hero For Daisy (Mary Mazzio, 2000) underlines, women who raise the level of female competition are always perceived as being improperly gendered. Chris Ernst, a short, wiry, muscular Olympic rower who won gold in the women's double sculls at the 1986 world rowing championships, was repeatedly challenged throughout her rowing career as to her "real" gender.

According to this article published in 2000 by Myron Genel, an endocrinologist and Professor of Pediatrics at the Yale University School of Medicine, there is a history to this form of scrutiny that begins with women's difficulty in gaining access to national and international athletic competition in the first place. As the resistance of national and international athletic organizations was eroded by the determination of women to compete at high levels, and the popularity of high profile women like Babe Didrickson Zaharias, "increasing attention was devoted to the concept of a 'level playing field.'" As Genel writes,

In a number of instances, questions were raised regarding the "femininity" of highly successful female competitors, in particular during the Cold War era of competition between the United States and the former Soviet Union. These rumors were abetted by anecdotal reports of recognized athletes who were found to have varying degrees of intersexuality. In 1 case, a Polish sprinter with an apparent chromosomal mosaicism was stripped of her medals. Three track and field champions who competed as women before World War II subsequently underwent reconstructive surgery and sex reassignment. These cases led to efforts to ensure that women competing at international events were in fact women, initially with rather crude and demeaning efforts at physical examination. In 2 instances, women athletes were required to parade nude before a panel of female physicians, and at another event women athletes were required to undergo direct gynecologic examination.

By 1968, an unreliable form of chromosomal testing was added to physical examinations, which over the next decade became routine at the Olympic level for men and women. Chromosomal testing has become more sophisticated since then, but no less controversial, in part because the more we learn about the science of gender the less we can say with confidence about gender as a social category. Put simply, our binary gender system cannot account for the many chromosomal combinations that occur in real bodies or the hormonal variations that suppress or enhance gendered physical characteristics. Because of this, in 1999, at the urging of the Athlete's Commission, the IOC suspended routine testing for the Sydney summer games, replacing it with a policy pioneered by by the governing body of international track and field that "permits intervention and evaluation of individual athletes by appropriate medical personnel if there is any question regarding gender identity." But as Genel points out, the only effect of chromosomal testing has been to bar women who exceed the female performance norm from potentially competing against women who are at the norm or fall short of it. People who are socially male and are weaker are allowed to simply lose, whereas people who are socially female face suspicion that they might not be women after all.

For those who have been following the news about Caster Semenya, it may be dispiriting to see how far athletics has not come in being able to imagine that the phrase "female athlete" is not, in some way, a contradiction in terms. But it is even more dispiriting to read the impoverished nature of the public discussion, which posits Semenya and her supporters' claim that she is a "real woman" against the possibility that she is just a "freak." Last week, the Associated Press reported that an Australian newspaper had scooped the gender tests on Semenya (which include an MRI) that are not to be officially completed or released until November, prompting the new rumor that she has internal testicles and no ovaries, and is therefore not "a woman." Meanwhile, the Semenya camp has arranged for a cover shot of her dolled up as a girly-girl which -- for any of us who were forced into clothes that made us feel wrong, wrong, wrong -- is simply horrifying. Yes, she makes a very pretty fixer-upper as a "girl." But she is also very handsome the way she chose to be in the first place, as a no-nonsense, athletic, butch woman.

Defenders of Semenya argue that her privacy has been invaded, which is also so not to the point: gender is social, and a public matter, if it is anything. If gender were private, then we could all change our official documents at random and people with intersexed children wouldn't be told to "choose" as pediatric surgeons were standing by to sculpt a newborn's genitals into something that other people will be comfortable with. Indeed, the idea that not being gendered "normally" is a devastating public tragedy is clear from the response of those friendly to Semenya. Several supposedly sympathetic South African supporters have been quoted to the effect that the revelation of her "true" gender would not only be career-ending it would be life-ending: they have voiced fears that she might kill herself.

With friends like this, who needs the Australian press, I ask you? My old friend Tavia Nyong'o, over at Bully Bloggers has written a beautifully intelligent piece that asks whether, instead of obsessing over the naturalness of Semenya's gender, we might imagine "turning the question around and denaturalizing the world of gender segregated, performance-obsessed, commercially-driven sports, a world that can neither seem to do with or without excessive bodies like Semenya’s and their virtuosic performances?"

It is a very tangled web indeed, which grows all the more tangled if you consider --as Nyong'o does -- that had Semenya chosen to present herself in a "girly" way to begin with she might have been less vulnerable. We can't know that, of course, but there is a certain washroom logic to it (I am referring to the fact that any of us who confuse others as to our gender know that bathrooms are ground zero for the gender police.) Semenya is fast, but she certainly is not the fastest woman we've ever seen (although many of the fastest women later turn out to be hyped up on synthetic hormones), and she is twelve seconds slower than the fastest men. But no matter: it is appearances that count. And these appearances are carefully scripted for women: pony tails, pastels and makeup can accomplish a lot, as any drag queen could tell you. In fact, many female track and field athletes, tennis players, figure skaters and gymnasts, famous for their lack of breasts and ropy, cut muscles, would look like guys too -- or at least little boys -- if you gave them the right haircut and put them in a tee shirt and jeans. As proof of how easy it is to become a "normal woman," Caster's handlers in South Africa have done just that. You have probably seen the femmy makeover pictured on the right which gushes, "Wow, Look At Caster Now!" Because if she's on the cover of a women's magazine, dolled up like a woman, she must be a woman. Right? Can't fake that!

Uh huh. I am looking at Caster now, and whether she chose that makeover or not, it fills me with dread and sorrow. Because, short of a world where it is acknowledged that we have a right to choose our own gender, it will nearly always be women who are marginalized by these defining practices and, as many black South Africans rightly believe, people like Semenya who come from populations that are already stigmatized in some ways by their racial or colonial histories. A truly just society would simply allow people to compete according to ability, would not require from them as much as we do, and it would not ask them to perform anything as athletes but feats of speed, strength and skill.

Cross posted at Cliopatria.

Love Is A Many Splendored Thing Department: This Week's Sexual News In Review

Happier Days?  Photo credit.

I want to start out by saying that there are more men than Arnold Schwarzenegger who have children that they know about but did not acknowledge to their wives and the children they live with until much, much later in the game.  I have met four in my lifetime, quite ordinary men who were not governor of anything, so it's not really that rare.  But I have the same question about all of them, large and small:  how do you hide a second family?  And more important, how many people have to be paid off not to reveal that you have a second family when you are governor of California?

Personal responsibility is definitely taking a hit this week, since it turns out that pedophile priests are not responsible for their actions, and the church was not responsible for supervising them.  No,  it's what you suspected all along: the collective power of queers and fornicators to ruin innocent lives is too powerful, even for God!  According to a five year study commissioned by the Catholic Church, the sexual abuse of children and teens by priests rose dramatically in the 1960's "because priests who were poorly prepared and monitored, and were under stress, landed amid the social and sexual turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s."  The report, commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and executed by a "research team" from John Jay College to the tune of $1.3 million, must be a great relief to the Universal Church.  "The bishops," so reporteth the New York Times, "have said they hope the report will advance the understanding and prevention of child sexual abuse in society at large." Probably not.  It probably won't advance the understanding of sexual abuse in the church either.

If it is true that it never occurred to priests to abuse children until they were put under such intense psychological pressure by other people having sex, that would mean it could never happen again.  How do I know this?  I'm a historian, of course.  My analysis of the data (done for free, just this morning, and I offer it to the Pope out of shame for how queer people hurt these poor priests) has revealed the 1960s are not only over, but will probably never happen again.  Only the law of circular time, which governed Aztec history prior to their conquest (and conversion to the One True Faith) by Spain in the early 16th century, would suggest otherwise, and everyone knows that in the United States we live in linear time. 

And the Church wants to know why people don't take it seriously anymore?  Mary, please.

In other news, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has resigned as head of the IMF following charges that he tried to rape a chambermaid.  Strauss-Kahn, whose nickname is "Hot Rabbit," according to the New York Daily News, is in Riker's Island, asserting his innocence.  57% of French citizens also think he has been set up by his political enemies.

I would take this even possibility even semi-seriously except for two things:  one is that French people think Americans are too hysterical for words about sex, which is true, but I doubt that the NYPD would have walked into this $hit $torm unless they believed the woman (and why would an immigrant woman and a single mother call attention to herself in this way unnecessarily? I ask you.)  More important in my calculus is the number of powerful American men who have firmly asserted their innocence and/or threatened to bury people for spreading rumors about them that turned out not only to be true, but part of a pattern of out of control and/or criminal sexual behavior.  For example, Ah-nohld and his campaign staff responded viciously to charges of sexual harassment:  in 2003, one woman sued then-governor Schwarzenegger, charging that he and his staff had spread false rumors that she was a convicted felon.  And do you recall that president who did not have sexual relations with that woman -- except that, actually, it turned out that he did?  And John Edwards, who first lied about, and then finally admitted, having had an affair with videographer Rielle Hunter, but denied being the father of her child -- except that it turns out he is?

There seems to be a certain kind of man -- and not surprisingly, he is usually a rich and powerful one (The Council of Bishops, The Leader of the Free World or Aspiring LOTFW, The Governor, The Banker Of The Planet) -- who thinks that if he just asserts something is so the rest of us are bound, by some strange compact, to believe him.  Surely this is a much more interesting topic for historical analysis than the strange theory that priests crumbled under the weight of birth control, gay liberation and abortion, and were forced to calm their nerves by diddling children.