Essays: August 2003 Archive Page

The special efforts made by schools to steer more girls into advanced math and science classes came after powerful advocacy groups embraced the problem. But Gurian and other advocates for boys say they run into resistance from educators who point to males' success in the workforce as proof that advocacy for boys is unnecessary. | In spite of the lack of research, anecdotal evidence shows that far more effective strategies are available for teaching boys than plying them with Ritalin. -- USA Today --Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin (USA Today Op/Ed)

And the opposing view from Jacqueline E. Woods:

The message to women and girls is clear: You are taking more than your fair share. You are too successful. You have come too far, and boys are paying the price for your accomplishments."

Sorry -- that's not the message I get when I read the coverage on the education of boys. The message I get is that the healthy behavior of normal boys (on average more rambunctious and physical, and far less verbal than the girls in their class) has been pathologized.

Topics of interest to most boys (sports, adventure stories, comic books, computer games) are sometimes seen as too competitive, too aggressive, etc. While boys from an early age outperform girls in areas like spatial relationships, which may account for why mathematics and engineering continues to be a male-dominated field, see: BusinessWeek, Christina Hoff Summers, CBS News.

With great anticipation, I contacted the project manager -- let's call him A.H. -- who would copy-edit my manuscript and, I genuinely hoped, find ways to improve it. I had no idea things could go so wrong.

as he kept the schedule.

...

For the book to be published on schedule, I would have needed to return the corrected pages no later than October 14. Clearly, we would not make that deadline.

round of copy-editing.)

--Rescuing My Manuscript (Chronicle)

To err is human... I'm amused that the online version of this article on the copy-editor from hell has been textually mangled. The fragments in the quote above are reproduced just as they appear on the website.

"[E]excuse me, I just got my sight back last week after being totally blind for 43 years. Could you help me figure out what I am seeing?" -- Mike May --Mike's Journal (Sendero Group)

A fascinating excerpt:

I found it very distracting to look at people’s faces when I was having a conversation. I can see their lips moving, eye lashes flickering, head nodding and hands gesturing. First, I tried looking down and if it was a woman, a low cut top would be even more distracting. It was easiest to close my eyes or tune out the visual input. This was necessary often in order to pay attention to what they were saying. I am sure there will come a time when all this visual communication will mean more to me but for now it is just distracting.

May's description of the visual component of music (via a marching band), his musings on a game of catch, and his new reaction to the previously meaningless pleasantry "Nice to see you" are all quite interesting. Another fascinating passage:

When I noticed dark patches behind me, it didn’t register right away that these were my footprints. I never thought of footprints as images other than when reading about them in an old west novel. To me, they were the thump; pivot push and the texture of the sand on my foot not dark splotches following me around like a shadow.

The reflections on the site are organized the old-fashioned way -- chronologically, not reverse-chron like a weblog. I'm so used to coming into online stories in media res that I felt a bit... insulted? by the clinical introduction that tells me what I'm about to read. It's not a criticism of the site (though it is too long to read online in one sitting -- I jumped to the end after I was about a quarter through); rather, it's an observation about my own perception of the world (or at least, of online texts).

We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism -- that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased. That clearly doesn't apply when one deserts the front page for the editorial page and the columns to which opinion should be isolated. -- Walter Kronkite --Siding with the powerless: Ideas from 60 years in journalism  (Salt Lake Tribune)

Yet even though Mr. Crowley had moved mountains on the scientific and business fronts to get the treatment into testing, he couldn't seem to speed the drug to his own rapidly weakening children. When he sold his company, he gave up control of the medicine they needed. The shortage of the drug, conflict-of-interest questions and Genzyme's own internal protocols rose up in his path. His personal goal -- getting the drug to his kids -- at times conflicted with the company's view of how to get the drug to market as soon as possible. --Geeta Anand --For His Sick Kids, a Father Struggled to Develop a Cure (Wall Street Journal)

I am cutting the whole thing into paragraphs, using my very sharp scissors. I will read a paragraph at the time. I will read it disjointed and jumbled, and see what I can do about the argument before me, without linking it to the devastating argument over or under on the page. Doing this I am asserting my power over the criticism, which, right now, does feel like an attack. -- Torill Mortensen --Panic Attack (thinking with my fingers)

Torill is preparing for her dissertation defense, which involves responding in a very public venue to criticism written by three experts in her field.

I daresay that in the months since she completed her dissertation, Torill has been doing more blogging than grappling with the specific issues that formed her 400-page dissertation. So she is going to chop up her committee's comments into blog-size chunks, defamiliarizing the old-media scholarly essay, forcing it into the realm of the trackback, the ironic quip, and the fisk -- a realm where Torill feels she comfortable.

But you've already spent years preparing for this defense, Torill -- you can draw on that, along with your mastery of connection-building weblogging, to pull through. Good luck!

With a bachelor's in chemistry, a Ph.D. in history (with a concentration in the history of science) and publications in hand, I applied for the job. The director never interviewed me. He hired a 22-year-old communications major but promised me work as a landscaper and all-purpose cipher as long as I wanted it. | He reinforced an important lesson I learned long ago: Class trumps everything else. I was not part of the middle class and never would be. -- Chris Cumo --Blue Collar Ph.D. (Chronicle)

"Too many ?studies? and ?reports,? with tables of data in small print appended, have purported to reveal truths about welfare or policing or sex education but in fact have revealed nothing but the initial prejudices of the ?investigators.? For me, the epiphany came when I interviewed the nation'sleading climatologists for a magazine article on acid rain (about which I knew nothing) and discovered mostly ideology, not knowledge?among scientists. When I also learned some years ago that academic paleontologists at that time couldn't hope to get tenure if they questioned the theory that a giant meteor explosion had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs?thus providing a model of what a so-called nuclear winter would produce?my own skepticism took on a certain wryness." Myron Magnet --What Use Is Literature? (City Journal)

Most of the article simply praises literature, "the accumulated wisdom of the race, the sum of our reflections on our own existence. It begins with observation, with reporting, rendering the facts of our inner and outer reality with acuity sharpened by imagination." But I was drawn to the above swipe at science, which is supposedly above the ideological baggage that burdens humanities scholarhip.

"As most people know by now, dictionary makers today merely record how the language is used, not how the language ought to be used. That is, lexicographers are descriptivists, language liberals. People using "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested" does not displease a descriptivist. | A prescriptivist, by contrast, is a language conservative, a person interested in maintaining standards and correctness in language use. To prescriptivists, "disinterested" in the sense of "uninterested" is the result of uneducated people not knowing the distinction between the two words. And if there are enough uneducated people saying "disinterested" (and I'm afraid there are) when they mean "uninterested" or "indifferent," lexicographers enter the definition into their dictionaries. Indeed, the distinction between these words has all but vanished owing largely to irresponsible writers and boneless lexicographers." Robert Hartwell Fiske --Don't Look It Up: The Decline of the Dictionary (The Weekly Standard)

"The National Council of Teachers of English, recommending the use of hip-hop lyrics in urban public school classrooms (as already happens in schools in Oakland, Los Angeles, and other cities), enthuses that ?hip-hop can be used as a bridge linking the seemingly vast span between the streets and the world of academics.?|But we?re sorely lacking in imagination if in 2003?long after the civil rights revolution proved a success, at a time of vaulting opportunity for African Americans, when blacks find themselves at the top reaches of society and politics?we think that it signals progress when black kids rattle off violent, sexist, nihilistic, lyrics, like Russians reciting Pushkin." John H. McWhorter --How Hip-Hop Holds Blacks Back (City Journal)

"A bright feature story on 16-year-old 'Mary' might refer to her by first name throughout. A straight news story on how she was charged with a crime might use her last name instead.|Youth can be a big factor in how we report the news. In the case above, the tone of the stories would be dramatically different, and we try to mix common sense with reader sensibilities in determining how to refer to minors." Lewis Brissman --Covering Youth an Exercise in Judgement (Richmond Times-Dispatch)

Lewis was the managing editor at the University Journal, at the time one of two competing daily student papers at the University of Virginia, where I was an assistant photo editor and assistant features editor.

You'll note that I didn't link to the home page of the UJ, which tells you how it fared in the competition I mentioned. Our paper never recovered from its jump from three days a week to five -- it folded a few years after I graduated. Oh, well... we gave it a good try.