Day: May 21, 2001

When I Was Your Age…

…no, I didn’t walk 30 miles to school in the snow uphill both ways, but on the other hand the school textbooks didn’t suck either. I got involved in this thread on Plastic.Com about the atrocious state that textbooks are in today.

I didn’t realize just how lousy current textbooks are until I volunteered to tutor the 10th grader who used to live next door. He was having difficulty in understanding geometry. After a frustrating 30 minutes wrestling with his textbook it was obvious why.

When I was in school we had an ugly red geometry book with no pictures that I can remember. The text was in black, with axioms and some important theorems occasionally in red, and enough mindbending diagrams to give me nightmares.

My neighbor’s textbook, on the other hand, looked like a 750 page edition of USA Today. The oversized book weighed a ton and practically every other page was a full color photo of something or other with some explanatory text trying to connect it to geometry (say, a photo of a pyramid with some very shallow description of how the ancient Egyptians calculated some aspect or another in the process of building it).

If, for some bizarre reason, you wanted a coffee table geometry textbook this would definitely fit the bill. If you actually wanted a shot at understanding geometry, you were probably out of luck. The editing was atrocious. I took one of the geometry problems he was having particular difficulty doing and led him through understanding how to approach solving it. The problem was when we turned to the book it was clear that one of the tools required to solve this particular problem wasn’t actually introduced until a few chapters later.

The kid I was tutoring would have a lot of problems comprehending geometry even in an ideal learning environment. The textbook made it certain that he would never understand it.

The Whole Vince Carter Thing

It was like one of those surreal moments that’s only supposed to happen in nightmares. Here I am prepared to watch the last couple games of the NBA Eastern Conference semi-finals and what’s the big story — should Vince Carter attend his college graduation ceremony in North Carolina the morning of the Big Game? This was like the worst of all possible bad jokes.

USA Today sports columnist Joe Saraceno put Carter’s graduation ceremonies in perspective today noting that, “All I heard was how Carter’s preparation, focus and rest might be adversely affected. But if generations of athletes who’ve been drunks, druggies and womanizers performed their typical night-before-the-game rituals, I’m pretty sure Carter could figure out how to get a good night’s rest, attend this graduation, fly 75 minutes to Pennsylvania and play basketball.”

It was understandable when the media jumped all over Michael Jordan years ago for spending the night gambling in Atlantic City before a playoff game with the Knicks, but to feed this story about Carter’s graduation merely to find more ways to question his dedication and heart (the knock on Carter is similar to Grant Hill — loads of talent, but doubts about his desire) was obscene. And, of course, Carter’s teammates didn’t help with their noncommittal “it’s his decision” responses.

Toronto ended up losing to Philadelphia when Carter’s last-second shot hit the back of the rim, but I defy anyone to watch that game and seriously argue that attending his college graduation affected his game.

Activists Angry Over Children Watching Cow Slaughtered

About 85 students at Carbon Canyon Christian School in Brea, California, watched as a butcher immobilized and then slaughtered a 2-year-old 1,000 pound steer named T-Bone. The steer had been raised at the school, and was part of a project to teach children where meat comes from. Of course, animal rights activists were less than thrilled.

Despite the fact that the school obtained parental permission for all children who watched the slaughter, animal rights activists were aghast that children would be exposed to seeing how cows are slaughtered from meat. Of course it wasn’t so long ago that many young children would have been actively participating in the killing of animals on the farm.

About a dozen teenaged animal right activists from other schools in the area unsuccessfully tried to stop the slaughter, and Lacey Levitt of Last Chance for Animals from chiming in that, “Studies have shown that when children view violence against animals, it desensitizes them to animal cruelty and makes them more aggressive.”

After slaughtering the animal, the butcher gave the children a close-up look at the heart, tendons and other internal organs of the cow.

Although the activists were troubled by the slaughter, the kids seemed to handle it okay. The Associated Press reported that a few got queasy but that others found it an educational experience. Suzanne Daigle, 14, told The Orange County Register that, “I want to be a surgical nurse and that proved to me that I could handle watching it. The butcher was very skilled. It wasn’t violent.”

Sources:

Cow’s Slaughter Causes Uproar. KCBS Channel 2000, May 19, 2001.

Class gets a graphic lesson on meat. Chelsea J. Carter, The Associated Press, May 19, 2001.

Independent Women’s Forum Runs Provocative Ads in College Newspapers

The Independent Women’s Forum has recently begun running a provocative ad attacking campus feminism and women’s studies departments. The text of the ad debunks what the IWF calls “The Ten Most Common Feminist Myths.”

These myths include: One in four women in college has been the victim of rape or attempted rape; Women earn 75 cents for every dollar a man earns; 30 percent of emergency room visits by women each year are the result of injuries from domestic violence; The phrase “rule of thumb” originated in a man’s right to beat his wife provided the stick was no wider than his thumb; Women have been shortchanged in medical research; Girls have been shortchanged in our gender-biased schools; “Our schools are training grounds for sexual harassment… boys are rarely punished, while girls are taught that it is their role to tolerate this humiliating conduct”; Girls suffer a dramatic loss of self-esteem during adolescence; Gender is a social construction; and Women’s Studies Departments empowered women and gave them a voice in the academy.

For the most part I agree with the IWF’s analysis of common feminist myths, but the opening text to the ad really crosses the line. According to the IWF ad,

Campus feminism is a kind of cult: as early as freshman orientation, professors begin spinning theories about how American women are oppressed under “patriarchy.” Here is a list of the most common feminist myths. If you believe two or more of these untruths, you may need deprogramming.

Some Women’s Studies departments on American campuses certainly do their best to spread myths, but comparing them to cults and the students who buy into the myths as requiring deprogramming is a cheap rhetorical tool designed to enrage rather then enlighten.

In fact many people who take these courses are able to see through the faulty reasoning. Comparing Left wing Women’s Studies departments to cults is just as obnoxious as feminists who dismiss the IWF and other groups as participating in their own oppression or being nothing more than tools for patriarchal ideas.

If reasoned discourse prevails, the myths that the IWF complains about will quickly be punctured. In choosing to go for a gut-level emotional response and accuse these departments of being cults, it will end up alienating many students who might have otherwise taken a more seriously look at feminist myths.

Source:

Take Back The Campus. SheThinks.Org, April 17, 2001.