Welcome, Wodens Day

There are quite a few interesting classes going on at TAS these days. They are small, and modest; some are very successful, with the students doing excellent work and making progress, some are mixed. There is a great deal of up and down in teaching (in anything) and today I am feeling both.

The long view is that one kid after another turns out beautifully. It takes time and it requires a teacher to have faith in the student. Without that, a young person can't get a sense of what is possible.

Do all people this age have such resistance to structure? Is writing so hard for even those without obvious difficulties? Why is it that most of the students in my psychology class are so clueless about writing outlines? Keeping the demands up is the other end of the dialectic: expectations are part of having faith in someone.

When I watch Elizabeth Quigley, who has taught for 35 years and never seems to head to the well and find it dry, I get a clear idea of what I have yet to understand. We have another wonderful person coming to present us with some new perspectives in April. And next week, we have a workshop in differential learning, in teaching to different abilities. Sometimes I resist the inservice "culture" of modern education. Much of it is professionalized hooey. But some of that resistance is plain old resistance on my own part, and very much in parallel with my students'.

In our psychology class we are currently discussing sexuality and gender. What a wonderful subject to discuss with 17 and 18 year olds. I frame the discussion, and try to point out what is down the road, both in a college gender studies class and in their lives and the mature and their relationships deepen. We speak frankly and in considerable detail. The students are motivated and insightful.
I think of the storm my own mother provoked in 1975 when she and a friend began teaching sex education at our parish in Stamford, Ct. Rumors swirled that they were anti-catholic, and actually lesbians. But they won, they kept teaching, and people came around.

We still have a long way to go. And biology apparently isn't helping:

...in a "shocking" finding, [Susan] Fiske (a researcher at Princeton) noted, some of the men studied showed no activity in the part of the brain [while viewing pictures of bikini clad women] that usually responds when a person ponders another's intentions.

This means that these men see women "as sexually inviting, but they are not thinking about their minds," Fiske said. "The lack of activation in this social cognition area is really odd, because it hardly ever happens."

Here is the National Geographic link. I found it in an Italian paper, which, of course, is festooned with pictures of scantily clad women. I am surprised it didn't receive more copy in the U.S. I am also surprised it was covered (as it were) in Italy.

The article doesn't say that such patterns in the brain are fixed, but rather that men who test as "hostile sexists" had quite different processing patterns. The implications of this are very interesting. Are they retrainable? Probably. Is there a history of trauma amongst the most "hostile" of these men? Or is there a relationship between learning new patterns and early disruption of attachment with a caretaker? Fascinating. But despite the deterministic tone of the article, i.e. standard issue simple-minded copy making, it is nothing of the sort. There is a subset of men whose attitudes are deeply ingrained and not counter balanced by the kind of processing usually seen in healthy, mature males.