a fair amount of popular concern and conservative rhetoric over the past 20 years has been devoted to the idea that today's parents spend far less time with their children than their own parents spent with them during their early years in the halcyon days of the 60s and 70s. at one point, william mattox of the family research council, borrowing numbers from time-use diary studies by university of maryland sociologist john robinson, claimed that in 1991 parents spent 40% less time with their kids than they did in 1965. according to a US news & world report article by david whitman (7/1/96, vol. 121, issue 1), this statistic was picked up and used by both the g.h.w. bush and clinton administrations as well as myriad news and popular media outlets for varied political purposes.
sure, this conversation is glossed as a "parental" time deficit, but i think it's useful and necessary to read between the lines here. across the years referred to by mattox--the mid 60s through the early 90s, and beyond--there has been a steady increase in employed mothering in the US. according to current population survey (CPS) data, the breadwinner dad/homemaker mom model that characterizes the mid-century american family in our popular imagination actually only accounted for 57% of families in 1965, and only 21% of families by 2000. dual-earning families in which both moms and dads work full-time increased from 12% of households to 31% of households from 1965 to 2000. even more moms work part-time. it seems that what mattox was really concerned about was not a lack of parental time with children, but a lack of (surprise!), maternal time with children. it's a great set-up for scapegoating employed moms.
the kicker is that mattox was wrong! actually, an error in a book john robinson published in 1977 coupled with mattox's own misunderstanding of data from a later article robinson published in "american demographics" led to the flawed "40% less" figure.
the double kicker is that even more recent time-use diary data* shows that married parents actually spent more time with their kids in 2000 than they did in 1965. in changing rhythms of american family life (2006), suzanne bianchi, john robinson (the very same), and melissa milkie discuss just how this is done. a few interesting key points:
-moms in 2000 did 13 hours less housework per week than moms in 1965 (p. 91)
-reported multi-tasking greatly increased for married moms (from 32 to 64 hours/week), married dads (30 to 59 hours/week) and single moms (30 to 62 hours/week) between 1965 and 2000 (p. 98)
-put more simply, half of parents' waking hours in 2000 were spent doing two or more activities simultaneously (p. 100)
-"pure free time" (not spent in childcare, housework, or "grooming") has declined significantly for married moms (from 33 to 26 hours per week) but not as much for married dads (from 30 to 29 hours per week) (p. 103)
-employed moms in 2000 spent as much time in primary childcare per week as nonemployed moms in 1975 (p. 77)
-for married couples, there was a 26% drop (from 12 hours per week to 9) in alone time spent together from 1975 to 2000 and a drop in 20% of overall time spent together (from 35 to 28 hours per week) (p. 104)
the overall picture they paint is one of busy parents who are not, in fact, cutting back on the time they spend with their children (and one could argue that increasingly more and more time with your kids is needed to be considered a good parent), but readjusting what they do (incorporating kids into leisure activities) or don't do (housework), how they do what they do (responding to work e-mails while the lasagna bakes, folding laundry while singing songs with their preschooler), and with whom they do it (joining a kid-friendly moms group rather than the city parks board) to make more time for the kids.
reviewing all of this stuff today makes me reflect on and be grateful for the way i spent yesterday evening. it had been an unseasonably warm day and after dinner my husband suggested we take a walk around the neighborhood. it was already dark, which i thought made the idea a little funny, but we did it anyway. i'm really glad that we did. it was a warm and breezy evening, there were lots of fallen leaves to shuffle through, we got to see some candlelit jack-o-lanterns, E rode most of the way on her pop's shoulders and reached up to touch the tree branches, our poor neglected dog got a second walk, i had time to talk to my spouse that probably would have evaporated if we were in front of the TV or our laptops, and we got a little exercise to boot. it's only at the end of writing that last sentence that i realize that i'm describing our lovely, simple walk as a multi-tasking event. i'm certainly a product of my culture... and maybe it was multi-tasking, but in the best possible way.
*this is a cool quantitative data gathering method in which a representative sample of american parents work with a researcher to reconstruct a detailed diary of how they spent the previous day.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
sally draper, come over here this minute...
(sorry for the hyper-link-looking text here. no idea how to fix this! blah.)
the reading i've been doing lately brings up a lot of interesting ideas about the historical changes to childhood. my favorite show-and-tell example of how what's good for children has changed is der struwwelpeter ("shock-headed peter," or mark twain's translation from the german, "slovenly peter"), a collection of short morality tales for children published in 1845. my sister-and-law brought back a copy for my husband from the struwwelpeter museum in frankfurt.
"slovenly peter," our anti-hero, refuses to have his nails or hair cut and becomes the creepy kid we see here on the cover:
in another story, a little boy won't stop sucking his thumb, and while out one day, a tailor comes along with gigantic shears and chops off the offending appendages (see image below). there's also the girl who plays with matches and burns to death and the boy who refuses to eat his supper and grows so skinny that he dies, too. fun stuff!
the idea of using scare tactics like these to teach children lessons is very much out of place in today's world of parenting where good moms and dads do their best to protect their children from the harshness of the adult world and home is a safe haven from danger.
viviana zelizer's pricing the priceless child (1994) describes the moral transformation that childhood underwent in the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which accompanied industrialization. when the home stopped being the center of economic activity, the role of children changed, too. no longer valued workers on farms and in factories during their young years, children came to embody future potential and emotional pricelessness. child labor laws, compulsory school attendance, and increased attention to child safety marked and reinforced these changes. the bedtime stories parents told their children surely changed, too.
the argument could be made that ever since these changes were set in motion, parents (and especially mothers) have continually needed to step up their game to ensure that their children would be well taken care of--emotionally, developmentally, physically and materially (see previous post on how we define kids' needs). we internalize these standards. this reminds me of my own reaction to one of my favorite scenes ever from "mad men" (aka the very best show ever). here's the clip (embedding disabled--sorry!).
i love how this whole scene is set up. betty and francine smoking at the kitchen table and francine standing up to reveal her pregnant belly. betty calling sally over for a talking-to, but not the sort that a 2009 mom would give (not a toy! warn children of risks of suffocation!). betty's final command for sally, which calls our attention to an unseen toddler.
i don't know how much of betty's mothering we can consider typical of the early 60s and how much is played up for effect (i'd love for a historian of motherhood to write about this!). what i am fairly certain of is that we are meant to be a little shocked and horrified. i was, and i was also a bit comforted--"at least i'm a better mom than betty draper." then again, if our ideas about what it takes to raise optimally well-adjusted, smart and successful children keep ramping up, which of our well-meaning mothering practices will future TV (or whatever eventually, god forbid, replaces TV!) viewers ridicule?
the reading i've been doing lately brings up a lot of interesting ideas about the historical changes to childhood. my favorite show-and-tell example of how what's good for children has changed is der struwwelpeter ("shock-headed peter," or mark twain's translation from the german, "slovenly peter"), a collection of short morality tales for children published in 1845. my sister-and-law brought back a copy for my husband from the struwwelpeter museum in frankfurt.
"slovenly peter," our anti-hero, refuses to have his nails or hair cut and becomes the creepy kid we see here on the cover:
in another story, a little boy won't stop sucking his thumb, and while out one day, a tailor comes along with gigantic shears and chops off the offending appendages (see image below). there's also the girl who plays with matches and burns to death and the boy who refuses to eat his supper and grows so skinny that he dies, too. fun stuff!the idea of using scare tactics like these to teach children lessons is very much out of place in today's world of parenting where good moms and dads do their best to protect their children from the harshness of the adult world and home is a safe haven from danger.viviana zelizer's pricing the priceless child (1994) describes the moral transformation that childhood underwent in the US during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which accompanied industrialization. when the home stopped being the center of economic activity, the role of children changed, too. no longer valued workers on farms and in factories during their young years, children came to embody future potential and emotional pricelessness. child labor laws, compulsory school attendance, and increased attention to child safety marked and reinforced these changes. the bedtime stories parents told their children surely changed, too.
the argument could be made that ever since these changes were set in motion, parents (and especially mothers) have continually needed to step up their game to ensure that their children would be well taken care of--emotionally, developmentally, physically and materially (see previous post on how we define kids' needs). we internalize these standards. this reminds me of my own reaction to one of my favorite scenes ever from "mad men" (aka the very best show ever). here's the clip (embedding disabled--sorry!).
i love how this whole scene is set up. betty and francine smoking at the kitchen table and francine standing up to reveal her pregnant belly. betty calling sally over for a talking-to, but not the sort that a 2009 mom would give (not a toy! warn children of risks of suffocation!). betty's final command for sally, which calls our attention to an unseen toddler.
i don't know how much of betty's mothering we can consider typical of the early 60s and how much is played up for effect (i'd love for a historian of motherhood to write about this!). what i am fairly certain of is that we are meant to be a little shocked and horrified. i was, and i was also a bit comforted--"at least i'm a better mom than betty draper." then again, if our ideas about what it takes to raise optimally well-adjusted, smart and successful children keep ramping up, which of our well-meaning mothering practices will future TV (or whatever eventually, god forbid, replaces TV!) viewers ridicule?
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
no role models
so, this morning i gave a little presentation on my research to my colleagues at university x (my alma mater) where i currently have an office for the duration of my leave from teaching, which opened up into a conversation about family/work balance. here's some of what i said:
Few employed mothers can maintain ideal worker status (unfettered by family responsibilities, able to work a more-than-full-time week) and few, understandably, want to do so when this means seeing their kindergartner for just one waking hour per work day. As much as the ideal worker norm further punishes mothers by pushing them into low-paying, part-time pink-collar jobs and leaves 40% of them and their children in poverty if they divorce their ideal worker husbands who get to take their ideal worker wage with them, this norm isn’t great for men, either. Okay, it is great for men who want to work 80 hours a week while their spouses raise the kids and manage all of the household work, but there are penalties for men who want to play an active role at home or share the second shift equally with their partners. Like women, men who take time off after the birth of a child or negotiate for a more flexible work schedule to meet family obligations may be branded as “not serious” about their job, overlooked for promotions and relegated to less desirable assignments upon their return to work.
Of course, the ideal worker norm makes any kind of care-giving a challenge, not just parenting. Taking care of an aging parent or an ill partner doesn’t fit into this model, either. Farther down on the ladder of selfless care (or perhaps on another ladder entirely), is the nevertheless crucially important issue or caring for ourselves. Can we make adequate time to be and do something more than our work? Or, as in my somewhat flip question for academics—Can we live a life of the mind and still make room for twice-a-week Pilates? Or maintain meaningful friendships? Or be active in spiritual, neighborhood or service communities? Or paint, run, square dance, or read for leisure? We all know you can knit at meetings, so I’ve left that one off the list.
My new project on mothering and work is, not surprisingly, hugely influenced by my own experiences as a tenure-track junior faculty member and the mother of a delightful two-year old daughter. Anthropologists make their careers by listening to other peoples’ stories, and this is where I’d like to open up the conversation to all of you and invite you to talk about your experiences of trying to find balance between academic work and care work—for others or yourself. A few questions: What have your challenges been? Have you had any role models in this capacity? What, if anything, should institutions like the University X do about this?
---
i followed-up on the question people weren't addressing--do you have any role models for a good integration of work with family and other involvements?
dead silence.
one junior faculty member weighed in to say that he has departmental colleagues with young children who do more than a minimum of work, but certainly aren't working 70 hour weeks (as he admitted to doing himself). these colleagues are labeled "dead wood" by others in the department. he said that he admired their commitment to their families and implied that they were probably happier and more well-adjusted than the workaholic professors he knows, but he also made it clear that others saw them as free-riders and less-than-committed to their work. in the hierarchy of academic insults, those jabs are pretty high on the list.
no one else had anything to say. the best we could do in a room of 12 or so faculty members was a cautionary tale.
i was pretty, okay totally, disheartened by this. at the small college where i teach, i have colleagues who pull all-nighters to grade and are uber-accessible to their students (note that the bulk of work i'm talking about here comes from teaching demands, not scholarship) but i also have colleagues who put reasonable restrictions on hours worked per week, even during the most labor-intensive weeks of teaching, and have involved family and non-campus community lives. last year, three female faculty colleagues (2 pre-tenure, 1 tenured) at my college each gave birth to their third child. this may not seem particularly out of place, but a recent chronicle of higher education article talks about the "more-than-two" taboo for female faculty (i think you need a subscription to view it--it's from the june 30, 2009 issue). if enough female professors continue to have babies and expect workplace policies and procedures to adjust to this norm, i think we will see change. i feel lucky to have friends and colleagues who are role models in this capacity. i hope that they see me in this way, too.
Few employed mothers can maintain ideal worker status (unfettered by family responsibilities, able to work a more-than-full-time week) and few, understandably, want to do so when this means seeing their kindergartner for just one waking hour per work day. As much as the ideal worker norm further punishes mothers by pushing them into low-paying, part-time pink-collar jobs and leaves 40% of them and their children in poverty if they divorce their ideal worker husbands who get to take their ideal worker wage with them, this norm isn’t great for men, either. Okay, it is great for men who want to work 80 hours a week while their spouses raise the kids and manage all of the household work, but there are penalties for men who want to play an active role at home or share the second shift equally with their partners. Like women, men who take time off after the birth of a child or negotiate for a more flexible work schedule to meet family obligations may be branded as “not serious” about their job, overlooked for promotions and relegated to less desirable assignments upon their return to work.
Of course, the ideal worker norm makes any kind of care-giving a challenge, not just parenting. Taking care of an aging parent or an ill partner doesn’t fit into this model, either. Farther down on the ladder of selfless care (or perhaps on another ladder entirely), is the nevertheless crucially important issue or caring for ourselves. Can we make adequate time to be and do something more than our work? Or, as in my somewhat flip question for academics—Can we live a life of the mind and still make room for twice-a-week Pilates? Or maintain meaningful friendships? Or be active in spiritual, neighborhood or service communities? Or paint, run, square dance, or read for leisure? We all know you can knit at meetings, so I’ve left that one off the list.
My new project on mothering and work is, not surprisingly, hugely influenced by my own experiences as a tenure-track junior faculty member and the mother of a delightful two-year old daughter. Anthropologists make their careers by listening to other peoples’ stories, and this is where I’d like to open up the conversation to all of you and invite you to talk about your experiences of trying to find balance between academic work and care work—for others or yourself. A few questions: What have your challenges been? Have you had any role models in this capacity? What, if anything, should institutions like the University X do about this?
---
i followed-up on the question people weren't addressing--do you have any role models for a good integration of work with family and other involvements?
dead silence.
one junior faculty member weighed in to say that he has departmental colleagues with young children who do more than a minimum of work, but certainly aren't working 70 hour weeks (as he admitted to doing himself). these colleagues are labeled "dead wood" by others in the department. he said that he admired their commitment to their families and implied that they were probably happier and more well-adjusted than the workaholic professors he knows, but he also made it clear that others saw them as free-riders and less-than-committed to their work. in the hierarchy of academic insults, those jabs are pretty high on the list.
no one else had anything to say. the best we could do in a room of 12 or so faculty members was a cautionary tale.
i was pretty, okay totally, disheartened by this. at the small college where i teach, i have colleagues who pull all-nighters to grade and are uber-accessible to their students (note that the bulk of work i'm talking about here comes from teaching demands, not scholarship) but i also have colleagues who put reasonable restrictions on hours worked per week, even during the most labor-intensive weeks of teaching, and have involved family and non-campus community lives. last year, three female faculty colleagues (2 pre-tenure, 1 tenured) at my college each gave birth to their third child. this may not seem particularly out of place, but a recent chronicle of higher education article talks about the "more-than-two" taboo for female faculty (i think you need a subscription to view it--it's from the june 30, 2009 issue). if enough female professors continue to have babies and expect workplace policies and procedures to adjust to this norm, i think we will see change. i feel lucky to have friends and colleagues who are role models in this capacity. i hope that they see me in this way, too.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
how i became an anthropologist
one of my departmental colleagues is teaching a class for new sociology and anthropology majors and minors this term and has invited everyone in our combined department to write a narrative about how we came to our field of study. even though i'm on leave this term, i did it. it was fun to write, but i probably took way too much time to do it (4 pages, single spaced!). i'll chalk it up as my writing exercise for the past two days. here are a few excerpts:
p.s. this is a great reminder for me as a mom.
Though I’ll briefly mention that, when asked to write a report in fourth grade on what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said “archaeologist (it’s possible that I’d just seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for the first time, and I know for certain that the photos of archaeological finds in my grade school’s library books depicted glittery gold and jewel-encrusted things that are, I now know, totally unrepresentative of what archaeologists actually do tend to find), I feel like the most logical place to start this reflection on just how I became an anthropologist is to tell you that I spent my undergraduate career at a college a lot like College X [where i teach] (and not too far away from it, either), College Y, just an hour’s drive away. My college search was kind of all over the place—I applied to big state schools and little liberal arts colleges, not really knowing what I wanted or where I’d find a second home, which is (beyond academic concerns) what I really wanted. I visited College Y a few times and had a gut feeling that this was the place for me. When I started my first year, I remember picking classes based on what I thought would be interesting to learn about—Philosophy, Psychology, Women’s Studies and yes, Anthropology. I had the good fortune of having parents who trusted my instincts and didn’t push me in one way or another when it came to choosing an course of study. My mom would say that if I loved what I was pursuing (and also got a solid and well-rounded education), that a career or job path would follow. Maybe this isn’t the most practical advice, but I’m grateful every day for the faith they put in my abilities and decisions, and I like to think that they took a good risk that paid off!
p.s. this is a great reminder for me as a mom.
I applied to a handful of Anthropology Ph.D. programs during the winter of my senior year at College Y. I got a few rejection letters and a few acceptances. The only campus I visited during the application process was University X, where I set up meetings with some faculty members whose research interests overlapped with mine. I convinced my then-boyfriend to take the day off to drive me there and back. Compared to College Y's town, University X's town seemed like Mecca to me—bookstores, coffee shops, two Indian restaurants! A few months later I was accepted at University X, though without financial support in the form of an assistantship from the Anthropology department. A few weeks after that, I was offered a research assistantship (from one of those faculty members I met face-to-face on campus who also had an appointment in Women’s Studies, the department that granted my assistantship. Take-away message: face-to-face meetings can yield unexpected and invaluable results), which made the whole grad school endeavor economically feasible. I cried some very happy tears after that phone conversation.
My life has changed a lot in some pretty fantastic ways over the past few years, but these changes, especially motherhood, have made a continued commitment to West Africa as a fieldsite increasingly unfeasible. Fortunately, Anthropology is a flexible discipline that allows us to ask questions about what people think and do in any and all cultural settings. This term, I’m on my pre-tenure leave from teaching and have started working on a new project that returns again to my interest in women’s reproductive health in the US and carries over ideas about the relationships between reproductive and productive work from my dissertation research. In this new work I want to examine the transition to employed motherhood for women returning to paid work after the birth of their first child (where do you think that idea came from?)....Next summer I will start the fieldwork for this project in University X's town (where I still live), which will be comprised of interviews conducted with a cohort of women during their second or third trimester of pregnancy, and again after their return to work within their baby's first year....I am also really interested in how child care decisions made with a first child in early infancy affect long-term patterns of care within the family (especially how mothers and fathers share, or don’t share, child care responsibilities), but those answers are a long way down the road!
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
state-subsidize me!
$680--that's the amount we wrote a check for this morning to guarantee E a spot at a local montessori pre-school for next year. we're happy and confident that we found a good fit for all of us--in our neighborhood, small class size (six 3-4 year olds), kind, energetic and talented teacher, great space (indoor and outdoor), good drop-off time, and affordable. E met her future teacher this morning and, i think, charmed her socks off.
we've been mentally preparing ourselves for the added expense of tuition for next year, but needing to put up almost $700 right now (first and last month's fees) to secure her a place for a year from now made me feel panicky. we could swing it, but just barely. what if we were a one-income family? what if we made substantially less and had very limited savings? i know that many, if not most, families are in that boat.
i'm relieved that we're not in waiting list limbo now, as many pre-pre-school parents are. when E was born, two years ago, we were advised to get her on school and after-school waiting lists as soon as possible. all of the advice was like a persistent ringing in my ears. always there, but never very clear. who do we talk to? where? what are the best programs? do public schools have programs? how long are the waiting lists? it often felt like more than enough just to concern myself with whatever stage or phase baby E was going through, much less think years ahead to when she'd be a walking, talking, play-purse-carrying pre-schooler.
the census bureau reports that, after housing and groceries, the greatest expense for young families is child care. i know that for probably all of you reading this, that's not at all a surprise. what's especially discouraging is how few states provide anything close to universal access to early education for pre-schoolers. the national institute for early education research (NIEER) reports that, as of 2008:
-there are still 12 states that offer absolutely no state subsidized pre-school--no special education, no head start, nothing*.
-the state that does the best job of providing near-universal access to early education is oklahoma, where a full 88% of 4-year olds are enrolled in state pre-k, special ed, or head start programs (the next best are florida at 74% and georgia at 61% ).
-illinois and arkansas are the best states for subsidized pre-school for 3-year olds, with 32% enrolled in state pre-k, special ed or head start at that age.
-if the expansion of state-sponsored pre-k programs follows past growth rates, it will take 20 years to gain universal pre-k access for 4-year olds and 150 years for 3-year olds.
the US pioneered universal public school access for 6-year olds at the beginning of the last century, but we've clearly fallen behind. michael moore fans and freedom fry haters might already know that 99% of french 3-5 year olds are enrolled in pre-schools that are either free or at a small cost to families (ann crittenden, the price of motherhood, pp. 263-264).
we can afford a high-quality pre-school, but many families can't, and it's kids whose families have limited resources that need early education the most. i'm reminded of this classic bumper sticker/t-shirt image:
http://www.pureparents.org/data/files/Bake%20Sale%20T-Shirt%20%281066%29.jpg
*those states are alaska, hawaii, idaho, indiana, mississippi, montana, new hampshire, north dakota, rhode island, south dakota, utah and wyoming.
we've been mentally preparing ourselves for the added expense of tuition for next year, but needing to put up almost $700 right now (first and last month's fees) to secure her a place for a year from now made me feel panicky. we could swing it, but just barely. what if we were a one-income family? what if we made substantially less and had very limited savings? i know that many, if not most, families are in that boat.
i'm relieved that we're not in waiting list limbo now, as many pre-pre-school parents are. when E was born, two years ago, we were advised to get her on school and after-school waiting lists as soon as possible. all of the advice was like a persistent ringing in my ears. always there, but never very clear. who do we talk to? where? what are the best programs? do public schools have programs? how long are the waiting lists? it often felt like more than enough just to concern myself with whatever stage or phase baby E was going through, much less think years ahead to when she'd be a walking, talking, play-purse-carrying pre-schooler.
the census bureau reports that, after housing and groceries, the greatest expense for young families is child care. i know that for probably all of you reading this, that's not at all a surprise. what's especially discouraging is how few states provide anything close to universal access to early education for pre-schoolers. the national institute for early education research (NIEER) reports that, as of 2008:
-there are still 12 states that offer absolutely no state subsidized pre-school--no special education, no head start, nothing*.
-the state that does the best job of providing near-universal access to early education is oklahoma, where a full 88% of 4-year olds are enrolled in state pre-k, special ed, or head start programs (the next best are florida at 74% and georgia at 61% ).
-illinois and arkansas are the best states for subsidized pre-school for 3-year olds, with 32% enrolled in state pre-k, special ed or head start at that age.
-if the expansion of state-sponsored pre-k programs follows past growth rates, it will take 20 years to gain universal pre-k access for 4-year olds and 150 years for 3-year olds.
the US pioneered universal public school access for 6-year olds at the beginning of the last century, but we've clearly fallen behind. michael moore fans and freedom fry haters might already know that 99% of french 3-5 year olds are enrolled in pre-schools that are either free or at a small cost to families (ann crittenden, the price of motherhood, pp. 263-264).
we can afford a high-quality pre-school, but many families can't, and it's kids whose families have limited resources that need early education the most. i'm reminded of this classic bumper sticker/t-shirt image:
http://www.pureparents.org/data/files/Bake%20Sale%20T-Shirt%20%281066%29.jpg*those states are alaska, hawaii, idaho, indiana, mississippi, montana, new hampshire, north dakota, rhode island, south dakota, utah and wyoming.
Monday, October 5, 2009
cutting corners
"In the race against time, parents often inadvertently cut back on children's needs as well. For one thing, they cut corners in physical care. One working mother commented: "Do kids have to take a bath every night? We bathe Jeremy every other night and then otherwise wash his face and hands. Sort of sponge him off. He's surviving." Another mother questioned a child's need to change clothes every day: "Why can't kids wear the same pants three or four days in a row? When I was a girl, I had to change into fresh clothes every day, and my favorite clothes went by so quickly."
--Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift (Penguin, 2003), p. 206
i re-read this passage this morning and something about it really sticks in my craw. my pencil-written margin question is "who defines needs?" i can see her making this point to emphasize that parents see their own busy work/home schedules as interfering with an important aspect of child care, but my read is that the moms she's quoting here don't seem to think that every-other-day baths and re-wearing the same (presumably un-filthy) clothes are sacrifices of their child's "needs." neither do i. we do the same things in our house. maybe that's why this stood out to me ("hey hochschild, don't judge me for letting my daughter wear the same jeans three days in a row!")
it's a small point, but in hochschild's astute account of how american working families negotiate gender ideologies and divide up domestic responsibilities, i was a bit taken aback by the idea of some kind of universal, static parenting standard creeping into her analysis. an imagined sharon hays debates arlie hochschild in my mind--"this is intensive mothering she's talking about here! moms can never do enough or get it just right, can we?"
i think the core of my complaint and unease is the use of the word "needs" here. when it comes to child rearing, it's easy to say that children have needs, but when you get down to it, they're difficult to define or operationalize. they've certainly changed a lot over time (see, especially, rima apple's work). i think everyone agrees that kids need love, but we could talk for days about what that means, right? granted, love is a complex concept to pin down. but what about those more pedestrian aspects of parenting that reflect loving care? is a daily bath a need? what about 5 servings of (organic?) fruits and vegetables? being read to? primary care from a parent? 30 minutes of vigorous physical activity? in various arenas, i've seen/heard all of these labeled as "what children need."
can we give all of these things every day?
if we accept all of these as "needs" do we set ourselves up to be failures as mothers in our own minds?
--Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift (Penguin, 2003), p. 206
i re-read this passage this morning and something about it really sticks in my craw. my pencil-written margin question is "who defines needs?" i can see her making this point to emphasize that parents see their own busy work/home schedules as interfering with an important aspect of child care, but my read is that the moms she's quoting here don't seem to think that every-other-day baths and re-wearing the same (presumably un-filthy) clothes are sacrifices of their child's "needs." neither do i. we do the same things in our house. maybe that's why this stood out to me ("hey hochschild, don't judge me for letting my daughter wear the same jeans three days in a row!")
it's a small point, but in hochschild's astute account of how american working families negotiate gender ideologies and divide up domestic responsibilities, i was a bit taken aback by the idea of some kind of universal, static parenting standard creeping into her analysis. an imagined sharon hays debates arlie hochschild in my mind--"this is intensive mothering she's talking about here! moms can never do enough or get it just right, can we?"
i think the core of my complaint and unease is the use of the word "needs" here. when it comes to child rearing, it's easy to say that children have needs, but when you get down to it, they're difficult to define or operationalize. they've certainly changed a lot over time (see, especially, rima apple's work). i think everyone agrees that kids need love, but we could talk for days about what that means, right? granted, love is a complex concept to pin down. but what about those more pedestrian aspects of parenting that reflect loving care? is a daily bath a need? what about 5 servings of (organic?) fruits and vegetables? being read to? primary care from a parent? 30 minutes of vigorous physical activity? in various arenas, i've seen/heard all of these labeled as "what children need."
can we give all of these things every day?
if we accept all of these as "needs" do we set ourselves up to be failures as mothers in our own minds?
Thursday, October 1, 2009
amazon research
though the title of this post may not seem surprising coming from an anthropologist, it's probably not what you think. the research of which i write has nothing to do with the yanomamo or any other folks who live in amazonia, but instead, amazon.com.
i've been typing up notes from arlie russell hochschild's the second shift (2003 [1989]) and thinking about how women, men and families strategize (both practically and ideologically, as hochschild discusses) to get paid work and house/family work done. i was reminded of all of the amazon entries i'd paged through online when E was a baby, i was going back to work and needed advice about nursing/pumping. when hochschild was writing in 1989, she noted that there was a multitude of advice books for employed moms, but none for employed dads (27). i wondered if this was still true.
to do a quick survey of the field of books written specifically for employed mothers and working fathers as either 1) how to "do it all" advice manuals or, 2) memoirs of the authors' own mis/adventures in parenthood and paid work, i did separate amazon searches--"working father", "working mother" and "working family."
here's what i found, looking at the first 10 pages (120 entries) of each search's results:
"working family"--2 titles
"working father"--3 titles
"working mother"--51 titles (plus 2 more that came up in the "working family" search)
i expected a discrepancy, but was still a little surprised at the huge gap between "mother" and "father" books. clearly, employed motherhood is still the "marked category" that draws attention from both writers and readers and is understood to require a level of balancing/juggling/managing not attached to employed fatherhood. a few titles demonstrate this:
42 Rules for Working Moms: Practical, Funny Advice for Achieving Work-Life Balance by Laura Lowell (2008)
Help Me Before I Go Crazy: Adventures from a Working Mother's Life by Marjorie Nightingale (2004)
Flex Time: A Working Mother's Guide to Balancing Career and Family by Jacqueline Foley and Sally Armstrong (2003)
i've been typing up notes from arlie russell hochschild's the second shift (2003 [1989]) and thinking about how women, men and families strategize (both practically and ideologically, as hochschild discusses) to get paid work and house/family work done. i was reminded of all of the amazon entries i'd paged through online when E was a baby, i was going back to work and needed advice about nursing/pumping. when hochschild was writing in 1989, she noted that there was a multitude of advice books for employed moms, but none for employed dads (27). i wondered if this was still true.
to do a quick survey of the field of books written specifically for employed mothers and working fathers as either 1) how to "do it all" advice manuals or, 2) memoirs of the authors' own mis/adventures in parenthood and paid work, i did separate amazon searches--"working father", "working mother" and "working family."
here's what i found, looking at the first 10 pages (120 entries) of each search's results:
"working family"--2 titles
"working father"--3 titles
"working mother"--51 titles (plus 2 more that came up in the "working family" search)
i expected a discrepancy, but was still a little surprised at the huge gap between "mother" and "father" books. clearly, employed motherhood is still the "marked category" that draws attention from both writers and readers and is understood to require a level of balancing/juggling/managing not attached to employed fatherhood. a few titles demonstrate this:
42 Rules for Working Moms: Practical, Funny Advice for Achieving Work-Life Balance by Laura Lowell (2008)
Mothers on the Fast Track: How a New Generation Can Balance Family and Careers by Mary Ann Mason and Eve Mason Ekman (2007)
The Stuporwoman Files: Observations of an Overworked, Overhwelmed, Overjoyed Working Mother
by Monica L Lewis (2005)
Help Me Before I Go Crazy: Adventures from a Working Mother's Life by Marjorie Nightingale (2004)
Flex Time: A Working Mother's Guide to Balancing Career and Family by Jacqueline Foley and Sally Armstrong (2003)
*i'm looking for more recent studies that document hours spent in employed work and house/family work--if you know of any, let me know!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
the return of lady professor
as most of you who are reading this probably already know, i'm on a term-long leave from teaching and have started a new research project. my blurb for the faculty newsletter went something like this:
Carrie is working on a new research project that will examine the transition to employed motherhood for women returning to paid work after the birth of their first child. US Census data indicates that over half of employed women who become first-time mothers return to work by the time their infant is three months old. The "fourth trimester" is a time of great change and adjustment for women and their families, and for many new moms this also includes the physical, emotional, social, financial and organizational challenges of integrating mothering and paid work. This interview-based ethnographic research will redress the lack of in depth, qualitative investigation into this transition and seeks to understand how employed women make child care decisions (writ large) pre-natally and whether/how they implement those decisions post-partum, as well as the meanings new moms attach to their strategies to integrate their lives as mothers and workers.
these past few weeks, i've been doing a ton of reading that has been, in equal parts, fascinating and exciting and frustrating. social science research on motherhood and mothering emphasizes the personal, relational and emotional triumphs and joys of being a mom while embedding all of these experiences in harsh political-economic realities--mothering is widely acknowledged to be the most important job in the world, but is still the least valued (to paraphrase ann crittenden). i love that this new project resonates with (and frankly, completely grew out of) my own experiences of being a mom and working for pay.*
i was recently reminded of advice from my friend sarah via another friend, lexi. sarah advises those of us who should be writing to start the day by writing something. anything. this feels like the perfect venue to share some of what i'm learning, as well as my own reactions and reflections. again, as when i started this blog, i can't promise myself that this will be a daily practice, but i know it will be a valuable one to help me process some of the stuff i've been thinking about. so here's my morning writing exercise:
yesterday i read about divorce. it was not fun. i grew up having very few friends whose parents were divorced. i always chalked it up to living in a predominately catholic neighborhood and attending parochial school through 12th grade, but now i see something i had been unable or unwilling to acknowledge.
divorce makes women and children poor.
divorce certainly can be emotionally devastating, but it's the financial part that can be the real killer. in my middle-class childhood neighborhood, most moms were at home full-time or worked part-time jobs. in many american families, it is women who are cutting back on hours or leaving work altogether because they want to provide a greater level parental care to their young children (why it is women who are overwhelmingly doing this is another massive can of worms, and i'm sure you can guess many of the reasons why). lots of the moms i knew were college-educated (that's where they met their husbands) but left their teaching or office jobs or stopped working full-time when they started having kids. a few sobering facts (paraphrased from crittenden's the price of motherhood):
-part-time workers (65% of whom are women) in the US are not entitled by law to earn as much per hour or receive proportional benefits as full-time employees, and on average earn about 40% less per hour than full-timers (p. 97).
-a survey by catalyst found that employees who reduced hours to part-time (most of whom were mothers) reported no change in their workload. 10% reported that their workload had increased (p. 97).
take home message: part-time employed moms make far less per hour of work than full-time employed dads and are expected to do just as much work, or more, in a shorter amount of time.
and as we know, neither non-employed moms nor employed moms get any compensation for the family work they do at home that allows children to be nurtured and thrive and allows husbands/dads to function as the ideal workers the marketplace demands--those who are unencumbered by domestic/family responsibilities, can work long hours, don't need to take time off to care for sick kids, etc.
but what about divorce? if the marriage ends, how are women compensated for functioning as non-ideal workers outside the home (and dramatically cutting their own earning potential in the process) in order to work more at home as primary care-giver for the child/ren and manage family responsibilities in a way that (presumably) both women and their partners think best? some more facts:
-neither a married spouse nor children have any legal claim to the other spouse's income aside from basic provisions of shelter, clothing and food for the kids (p. 111).
-no state court requires an equal standard of living for all members of a household after divorce (p. 151).
-though a survey of women indicated that 80% thought they would be able to get alimony if they divorced, only 8% are actually awarded any (p. 156).
-a 1992 survey conducted by the department of education found that only 6% of custodial (post-divorce) parents (mostly moms) expected any support from exes in paying for their children's college tuition (p. 126).
-when ann crittenden interviewed california state legislator bill morrow (R) about his opposition to that state's 1988 legislation to increase child support payments (where even high-earning dads were paying no more than $300 per month in support despite CA's high cost of living), he said, "my parents were children of the depression...they didn't have anything, and they got ahead. you don't have to be middle class to succeed. we can't guarantee that every child can be middle-class or upper-class even if dad is. that's not necessary or even desirable" (p. 174, emphasis added).
-approximately 40% of divorced moms end up living in poverty (joan williams, unbending gender, p. 115)
moms love their kids. sometimes women make decisions that greatly reduce their economic power (really, the only sort of power that matters much) both in and out of marriage to do what they think is right for their families, and especially their children.
women are smart. the moms in my neighborhood were smart. even if they didn't know that their chances of receiving any alimony or adequate child support were slim if they divorced, or that despite their college degrees that they'd likely end up poor, i am sure they sensed that their lives, at work and at home, would be radically changed if they divorced. to what extent did these women put up with ungrateful, unloving, cheating or even abusive spouses because they knew that they couldn't leave the marriage and know for certain that they, and their kids, would be able to make ends meet? i never thought to ask that question. now i do.
*it's sometimes tough to find the right words to describe women who are conventionally known as "working mothers." i was raised by a working mom who wasn't employed and was never remunerated for any of the countless hours of family work she did to care for me and support my dad. i am also a working mom, but one who does get a paycheck for her (non-caregiving) work.
Carrie is working on a new research project that will examine the transition to employed motherhood for women returning to paid work after the birth of their first child. US Census data indicates that over half of employed women who become first-time mothers return to work by the time their infant is three months old. The "fourth trimester" is a time of great change and adjustment for women and their families, and for many new moms this also includes the physical, emotional, social, financial and organizational challenges of integrating mothering and paid work. This interview-based ethnographic research will redress the lack of in depth, qualitative investigation into this transition and seeks to understand how employed women make child care decisions (writ large) pre-natally and whether/how they implement those decisions post-partum, as well as the meanings new moms attach to their strategies to integrate their lives as mothers and workers.
these past few weeks, i've been doing a ton of reading that has been, in equal parts, fascinating and exciting and frustrating. social science research on motherhood and mothering emphasizes the personal, relational and emotional triumphs and joys of being a mom while embedding all of these experiences in harsh political-economic realities--mothering is widely acknowledged to be the most important job in the world, but is still the least valued (to paraphrase ann crittenden). i love that this new project resonates with (and frankly, completely grew out of) my own experiences of being a mom and working for pay.*
i was recently reminded of advice from my friend sarah via another friend, lexi. sarah advises those of us who should be writing to start the day by writing something. anything. this feels like the perfect venue to share some of what i'm learning, as well as my own reactions and reflections. again, as when i started this blog, i can't promise myself that this will be a daily practice, but i know it will be a valuable one to help me process some of the stuff i've been thinking about. so here's my morning writing exercise:
yesterday i read about divorce. it was not fun. i grew up having very few friends whose parents were divorced. i always chalked it up to living in a predominately catholic neighborhood and attending parochial school through 12th grade, but now i see something i had been unable or unwilling to acknowledge.
divorce makes women and children poor.
divorce certainly can be emotionally devastating, but it's the financial part that can be the real killer. in my middle-class childhood neighborhood, most moms were at home full-time or worked part-time jobs. in many american families, it is women who are cutting back on hours or leaving work altogether because they want to provide a greater level parental care to their young children (why it is women who are overwhelmingly doing this is another massive can of worms, and i'm sure you can guess many of the reasons why). lots of the moms i knew were college-educated (that's where they met their husbands) but left their teaching or office jobs or stopped working full-time when they started having kids. a few sobering facts (paraphrased from crittenden's the price of motherhood):
-part-time workers (65% of whom are women) in the US are not entitled by law to earn as much per hour or receive proportional benefits as full-time employees, and on average earn about 40% less per hour than full-timers (p. 97).
-a survey by catalyst found that employees who reduced hours to part-time (most of whom were mothers) reported no change in their workload. 10% reported that their workload had increased (p. 97).
take home message: part-time employed moms make far less per hour of work than full-time employed dads and are expected to do just as much work, or more, in a shorter amount of time.
and as we know, neither non-employed moms nor employed moms get any compensation for the family work they do at home that allows children to be nurtured and thrive and allows husbands/dads to function as the ideal workers the marketplace demands--those who are unencumbered by domestic/family responsibilities, can work long hours, don't need to take time off to care for sick kids, etc.
but what about divorce? if the marriage ends, how are women compensated for functioning as non-ideal workers outside the home (and dramatically cutting their own earning potential in the process) in order to work more at home as primary care-giver for the child/ren and manage family responsibilities in a way that (presumably) both women and their partners think best? some more facts:
-neither a married spouse nor children have any legal claim to the other spouse's income aside from basic provisions of shelter, clothing and food for the kids (p. 111).
-no state court requires an equal standard of living for all members of a household after divorce (p. 151).
-though a survey of women indicated that 80% thought they would be able to get alimony if they divorced, only 8% are actually awarded any (p. 156).
-a 1992 survey conducted by the department of education found that only 6% of custodial (post-divorce) parents (mostly moms) expected any support from exes in paying for their children's college tuition (p. 126).
-when ann crittenden interviewed california state legislator bill morrow (R) about his opposition to that state's 1988 legislation to increase child support payments (where even high-earning dads were paying no more than $300 per month in support despite CA's high cost of living), he said, "my parents were children of the depression...they didn't have anything, and they got ahead. you don't have to be middle class to succeed. we can't guarantee that every child can be middle-class or upper-class even if dad is. that's not necessary or even desirable" (p. 174, emphasis added).
-approximately 40% of divorced moms end up living in poverty (joan williams, unbending gender, p. 115)
moms love their kids. sometimes women make decisions that greatly reduce their economic power (really, the only sort of power that matters much) both in and out of marriage to do what they think is right for their families, and especially their children.
women are smart. the moms in my neighborhood were smart. even if they didn't know that their chances of receiving any alimony or adequate child support were slim if they divorced, or that despite their college degrees that they'd likely end up poor, i am sure they sensed that their lives, at work and at home, would be radically changed if they divorced. to what extent did these women put up with ungrateful, unloving, cheating or even abusive spouses because they knew that they couldn't leave the marriage and know for certain that they, and their kids, would be able to make ends meet? i never thought to ask that question. now i do.
*it's sometimes tough to find the right words to describe women who are conventionally known as "working mothers." i was raised by a working mom who wasn't employed and was never remunerated for any of the countless hours of family work she did to care for me and support my dad. i am also a working mom, but one who does get a paycheck for her (non-caregiving) work.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
babies! babies! babies!
i know eight women who are pregnant right now. at least. maybe there are more who haven't told yet, or don't even know themselves. one grad school friend. four colleagues. one former colleague. one neighbor. one ex-boyfriend's wife.
unlike a lot of my friends, i never went through a invited-to-ten-weddings-a-year phase of my life. now, i'm definitely smack dab in the middle of the everyone-i-know-is-having-babies phase. as much as i love an open bar and passed hors d'oeuvres (i spelled that one right on the first try!), babies are more fun.
i haven't asked any of my faculty colleagues how their students have reacted to their pregnancies. i found mine to be totally ambivalent. i think female college students, understandably, look at pregnant women and think "that can't be me. that won't be me. no. no. no. no." i know that's what i would have been thinking from ages 17-21. and the guys were probably just weirded out.
unlike a lot of my friends, i never went through a invited-to-ten-weddings-a-year phase of my life. now, i'm definitely smack dab in the middle of the everyone-i-know-is-having-babies phase. as much as i love an open bar and passed hors d'oeuvres (i spelled that one right on the first try!), babies are more fun.
i haven't asked any of my faculty colleagues how their students have reacted to their pregnancies. i found mine to be totally ambivalent. i think female college students, understandably, look at pregnant women and think "that can't be me. that won't be me. no. no. no. no." i know that's what i would have been thinking from ages 17-21. and the guys were probably just weirded out.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
a somewhat troubling discovery
on the days that i need to feel most confident, i wear my most impractical shoes.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
owning our own opinions, a la lady professor
a friend who blogs recently posted about the importance of owning up to your opinions and being brave enough to take responsibility for your perspective when discussing difficult issues with people you care about (the post title is borrowed from her). this really resonated with some thoughts that have been floating around in my head lately...
this week, i had my first pre-tenure review meeting. to prepare, i had to write a narrative statement about what i've been doing for the past three years when it comes to teaching, scholarship and service to the college. one of the things they ask you to reflect on is your student evaluations. students are encouraged to write comments on the forms in addition to filling in scantron bubbles. these forms are anonymous. in general, i'm pretty pleased with how i've fared, but i had one round of evaluations that totally threw me for a loop.
i'm sure some great minds have written about how anonymity can produce vicious and harmful responses in nameless, faceless venues like online message boards and teaching evals (if you've read anything in this vein, please let me know!), but i can only speak to my experience. here's the (edited) excerpt from my narrative where i talk about this:
---
My X course evaluation scores were by far the lowest that I have received over
the past two years, and I was especially disappointed that my Rapport with Students score was so low. I was taken aback by these scores and by students written comments as I felt the class went quite well based on the fact that many students often contributed to lively in-class discussions. Clearly, students had a different perception of our classroom interactions than I did. This was my second term at X College and perhaps I got overly confident about the degree to which I could question student responses in class (especially if I had the distinct impression that they had not prepared for class). From my perspective, I was challenging them to think critically. From their perspective, I was being closed-minded and hostile to their contributions. I was thoroughly disheartened by some especially negative comments I received and, in fact, found it hard to see myself in the professor they were describing.
Most disturbing was a comment from one student that was insulting and sexually explicit. I brought this particular evaluation form to the attention of Academic Affairs through a meeting with Dean X, who has a copy of the form on file. Though I was told that I could remove this form from the evaluations on record, I have chosen to include it with all the rest in the supporting materials on file.
Though this was an isolated comment, I think it speaks to a larger and significant issue I have given much thought to since this incident. I suspect that written responses of this nature are seldom if ever received by male faculty members. My interpretation of this anonymous comment is that it was a punishment for my outspokenness and the exertion of my (misplaced, at least from this student’s perspective?) authority as a woman, especially in relation to male students. As a young, female faculty member I have found it challenging to strike a balance between being perceived as a caring person and being perceived as a competent professor * . Perhaps I have tended to put too much emphasis on the latter rather than the former. Obviously, in this section of this course, students found me too harsh and, ultimately, I failed at being either caring or competent in their eyes.
My ultimate goal as a professor is to encourage student learning. I also care deeply about my students and have developed close relationships with some of them that have continued beyond their time at X College. The obvious (it seems to me) synthesis here is caring about whether or not students are learning. I do not want to champion mediocrity in my courses by ignoring students’ lack of preparedness for class or fostering an environment where all responses are equally correct. At the same time, I do want students to feel that my classroom is a place where their input is essential and valued. In the time since this section of X course, I have paid more attention to how I respond to students in and out of class and have worked at fostering an inclusive classroom environment. In general, I think that this is reflected in my evalution scores and in student comments.
My goal in this area of my teaching is to continue to work on creating an open atmosphere in my classes where active participation is encouraged. I love it when students build on each others’ ideas in class and bring the discussion to a new and interesting place, and I want to foster these experiences through positive reinforcement.
* The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has generated interesting insights on gender in the classroom that reflect this tension between competence and caring for female faculty. Research conducted by Hall (1998--"How Big are Nonverbal Sex Differences? The Case of Smiling and Sensitivity to Nonverbal Cues." In Sex Differences and Similarities in Communication. D. J. Canary and K. Dindia, eds. pp. 155-177. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) demonstrated that students associated professors’ tendency to smile with their degree of caring for students. While students’ perceptions of male faculty members’ competence were unaffected by the amount they smiled in the classroom, they found female faculty members who smiled more (and were, therefore, perceived to be more caring) to also be less competent.
---
in general, i learned some important lessons from those negative evaluations and am a better teacher because of them. that one particularly egregious comment was probably the most challenging thing i've had to deal with, on a personal level, in my (albeit short) professional life. i felt ashamed and angry, scared and sad. i was furious that one anonymous comment, one cowardly sentence, could rattle me (an otherwise strong, smart, academic woman who understands how gendered power dynamics work) so completely. if i offended this person in the classroom, at least i did it to their face. i have no idea if the student who wrote that comment intended their words to have such a stunning effect, or if they just wrote them without much consideration for how they'd be received and forgot about them minutes later. i'll never know. did that student know that those words had power, in a lot of different ways? i'll never know. the closest i've been able to get to a rebuttal, or any kind of response, was the statement i wrote for my review. it felt good to write.
i think students should be able to anonymously evaluate their teachers, but i also know that their words, which may mean very little to them, can have lasting effects. there can be both predictable and unforseen consequences when we communicate with anonymity, when deeper motivations are unknown, when there is no accountability, when we don't have to act as members of a community (writ-large or small), and when we don't have to acknowledge that words bear power.
this week, i had my first pre-tenure review meeting. to prepare, i had to write a narrative statement about what i've been doing for the past three years when it comes to teaching, scholarship and service to the college. one of the things they ask you to reflect on is your student evaluations. students are encouraged to write comments on the forms in addition to filling in scantron bubbles. these forms are anonymous. in general, i'm pretty pleased with how i've fared, but i had one round of evaluations that totally threw me for a loop.
i'm sure some great minds have written about how anonymity can produce vicious and harmful responses in nameless, faceless venues like online message boards and teaching evals (if you've read anything in this vein, please let me know!), but i can only speak to my experience. here's the (edited) excerpt from my narrative where i talk about this:
---
My X course evaluation scores were by far the lowest that I have received over
the past two years, and I was especially disappointed that my Rapport with Students score was so low. I was taken aback by these scores and by students written comments as I felt the class went quite well based on the fact that many students often contributed to lively in-class discussions. Clearly, students had a different perception of our classroom interactions than I did. This was my second term at X College and perhaps I got overly confident about the degree to which I could question student responses in class (especially if I had the distinct impression that they had not prepared for class). From my perspective, I was challenging them to think critically. From their perspective, I was being closed-minded and hostile to their contributions. I was thoroughly disheartened by some especially negative comments I received and, in fact, found it hard to see myself in the professor they were describing.
Most disturbing was a comment from one student that was insulting and sexually explicit. I brought this particular evaluation form to the attention of Academic Affairs through a meeting with Dean X, who has a copy of the form on file. Though I was told that I could remove this form from the evaluations on record, I have chosen to include it with all the rest in the supporting materials on file.
Though this was an isolated comment, I think it speaks to a larger and significant issue I have given much thought to since this incident. I suspect that written responses of this nature are seldom if ever received by male faculty members. My interpretation of this anonymous comment is that it was a punishment for my outspokenness and the exertion of my (misplaced, at least from this student’s perspective?) authority as a woman, especially in relation to male students. As a young, female faculty member I have found it challenging to strike a balance between being perceived as a caring person and being perceived as a competent professor * . Perhaps I have tended to put too much emphasis on the latter rather than the former. Obviously, in this section of this course, students found me too harsh and, ultimately, I failed at being either caring or competent in their eyes.
My ultimate goal as a professor is to encourage student learning. I also care deeply about my students and have developed close relationships with some of them that have continued beyond their time at X College. The obvious (it seems to me) synthesis here is caring about whether or not students are learning. I do not want to champion mediocrity in my courses by ignoring students’ lack of preparedness for class or fostering an environment where all responses are equally correct. At the same time, I do want students to feel that my classroom is a place where their input is essential and valued. In the time since this section of X course, I have paid more attention to how I respond to students in and out of class and have worked at fostering an inclusive classroom environment. In general, I think that this is reflected in my evalution scores and in student comments.
My goal in this area of my teaching is to continue to work on creating an open atmosphere in my classes where active participation is encouraged. I love it when students build on each others’ ideas in class and bring the discussion to a new and interesting place, and I want to foster these experiences through positive reinforcement.
* The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning has generated interesting insights on gender in the classroom that reflect this tension between competence and caring for female faculty. Research conducted by Hall (1998--"How Big are Nonverbal Sex Differences? The Case of Smiling and Sensitivity to Nonverbal Cues." In Sex Differences and Similarities in Communication. D. J. Canary and K. Dindia, eds. pp. 155-177. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum) demonstrated that students associated professors’ tendency to smile with their degree of caring for students. While students’ perceptions of male faculty members’ competence were unaffected by the amount they smiled in the classroom, they found female faculty members who smiled more (and were, therefore, perceived to be more caring) to also be less competent.
---
in general, i learned some important lessons from those negative evaluations and am a better teacher because of them. that one particularly egregious comment was probably the most challenging thing i've had to deal with, on a personal level, in my (albeit short) professional life. i felt ashamed and angry, scared and sad. i was furious that one anonymous comment, one cowardly sentence, could rattle me (an otherwise strong, smart, academic woman who understands how gendered power dynamics work) so completely. if i offended this person in the classroom, at least i did it to their face. i have no idea if the student who wrote that comment intended their words to have such a stunning effect, or if they just wrote them without much consideration for how they'd be received and forgot about them minutes later. i'll never know. did that student know that those words had power, in a lot of different ways? i'll never know. the closest i've been able to get to a rebuttal, or any kind of response, was the statement i wrote for my review. it felt good to write.
i think students should be able to anonymously evaluate their teachers, but i also know that their words, which may mean very little to them, can have lasting effects. there can be both predictable and unforseen consequences when we communicate with anonymity, when deeper motivations are unknown, when there is no accountability, when we don't have to act as members of a community (writ-large or small), and when we don't have to acknowledge that words bear power.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
my favorite teaching evaluation form comment of the day
"this class was wonderful, but i am glad it is over because it was hard."
thanks. i guess.
kvetch of the day
this afternoon i ran into a student who took one of my classes last term. i was teaching two different courses, one for senior majors and one mid-level course with no prerequisites. this was only the second class she had taken in the discipline and though she was originally registered for the upper-level class, i encouraged her to wait on that one and get into my other class (which fit into her schedule) instead. it didn't make any sense to me for her to take this advanced class first when the other one was more in line with her plan of study. i signed her drop and add slips and we were good to go.
or so i thought.
several weeks later, this student came in to my colleague's office as i was leaving mine. i overheard her say, "she told me to drop her one class and join the other one. it made a lot of problems for me and i lost my scholarship." what?! i felt horrible and hated to think that i might be at fault for jeopardizing a student's financial aid. after class one day, i asked if we could talk for a minute and i brought up the conversation i had overheard--i expressed my distress, but didn't back off of my initial advice, which i felt was sound. the problem seemed to come from our antiquated, paper-based drop/add system. basically, she was dropped from my upper-level course without being added to the mid-level class, subsequently went below full-time enrollment and was declared ineligible for a federal grant. she reiterated what a problem it had been to get her tuition paid.
i was frustrated on her behalf, but was still irked that she seemed to be blaming me (at least in part) for this mix-up. i told her that i'd be happy to call the financial aid office on her behalf and see if something couldn't be done. it seemed crazy for a student to lose her scholarship over a clerical error, the simple fact that someone let her drop one class before she was added to another.
so i called. and found out that the filing error happened because she had written an incorrect course number on her add slip (her mistake, but one i probably should have caught, though faculty members sign blank drop/add slips all the time), which held it up. i also found out that the college had found supplementary funds to compensate for her lost grant and the outstanding balance she and her family had to pay was only $250. granted, in these times, i'm not saying that $250 is insignificant, but she had more or less led me to believe that thousands of dollars were at stake.
i was irritated that she had held me responsible and had painted me as the bad guy to my colleague, and maybe to other people, too. and i was a little resentful that i had taken on so much guilt about this. i spoke to her again and indicated that i had learned of some of the details that she had left out--the incorrect course number, the college's efforts to get her money back, etc. she more or less ignored all of this and again emphasized how economically difficult this whole situation was for her and her family. i felt badly about the money, but i decided to be at content with the fact that i had at least done my best to advocate for her (though under false pretenses).
fast forward to today. i'm leaving campus and spot her heading in the same direction. i slow down to say hi...
"hey X. how's it going?"
"good, thanks."
"how was your break?"
"it was really great..."
wait for it...
"...i went to key west!"
Saturday, March 7, 2009
desperately seeking rhoda
lucy and ethel. wilma and betty. florida and willona. mary and rhoda. the sitcoms i grew up watching (and i watched a lot of them) showed me all of these examples of female best friends who were also neighbors. that physical proximity often led to zany, madcap adventures. they got jobs together and stuffed their puffy hats with chocolates. they won prize money with their upside down flint rubble bubble cake. they also endured job loss and and overbearing parents and silly husbands and disappointing boyfriends and why-can't-i-be-in-the-show-ricky. they were a part of each other's daily routines.
maybe this is a totally unrealistic model of friendship, but it's also a really appealing one.
the reality is that i don't live any closer than a two-hour drive from my dearest friends. over the years i've gotten used to being relatively far away from my high school girlfriends since i don't live near the city where i grew up. i still do live in the town where i attended grad school but, not surprisingly, the wonderful friends i made during those years have spread out across the country to do research, get jobs, start families, etc. even my sisters-in-law are in different states. at this stage in my life, it seems that work should be the most obvious place to make new friends, but that's a bit complicated by my one-hour commute.
happily, our social lives have been busier than they have been in years lately. we're in a dinner club with my husband's work friends and their spouses, we've been invited into a wine tasting group through one of those couples, and we have great relationships with my departmental colleagues and their families. and i do my best to keep in close contact with my best girls from coast to coast and jump at the few and far between chances to see them in person...
but i don't have an ethel, a willona, a betty, a rhoda. i have had them, but not right now. maybe part of me thought that i'd have made all of my life's close friends by now and that i wouldn't have to work (is it work?) at making new ones. but i know that i miss having those relationships in my life. so maybe the title of this post is hyperbole--i'm not desperate. but i guess i am seeking.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
professor mama
this afternoon i received an exciting e-mail from a friend i used to work with. she's 12 weeks pregnant and eagerly anticipating the arrival of baby #1. sadly (for me), she now teaches elsewhere as an adjunct. and there's the rub...
she doesn't have a contract for next year yet, and consequently, hasn't told anyone at work about her pregnancy. the year that we worked together, i was in the exact same boat. i had applied for a tenure-track job at the college where i had a one-year position and due to a long series of complicated events, i didn't find out whether or not i had a more permanent job for several months, when i was five months pregnant. i clearly remember having coffee with this same friend a few weeks before i found out that i got it. i walked up to the table, she glanced at my belly and then her eyes met mine with a look that said, "who are you kidding, girlie-girl?" we both laughed (maybe a little nervously, for me) at how ridiculous the situation had become. i was still cramming into my regular clothes (not surprisingly, nothing makes you look more pregnant than maternity clothes) and had only told a handful of friends--no one in my department, of course.
when i was finally able to tell people, it was so anti-climactic. i felt like i'd be insulting people's intelligence and basic powers of perception if i announced the news as if it were news. i was (and still am) resentful that it felt so risky to be a pregnant woman in the workplace and that i had to hide my wonderful, joyful, happy news (and belly) during most of my waking hours.
one of the senior female faculty members in my department talks (often) about how she had her baby and was back in the classroom three days later. i am (and all women/mothers are, i'd argue) deeply indebted to all of the feminist foremothers who fought the good fight and won those essential victories like maternity leave, but i also feel like the "bad old days" discussions have a tendency to cover up the fact that we have a long way to go.
in the meantime, i hope my friend gets her contract soon...
and in the meantime, i'm absolutely thrilled for her and for the lucky little baby who will call her mama.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
leisure reading with clam juice and pickles
i consider it a small miracle that i finished some leisure reading over this break. i tend to have these inflated, unrealistic ideas about how much time i'll have to do the things i want to do before the next term starts, so i've started to move in the other direction and assume that i'll get next-to-nothing done. E's naps have been blessedly long this past week--topping out at three hours--but there's always laundry to do, a dishwasher to empty, e-mails to respond to, etc. still, i managed to read the brief wondrous life of oscar wao by junot diaz with a few days to spare (the other novel i bought recently, the children's hospital by chris adrian, is just over 600 pages. it will have to wait.). i do a lot of reading for work/school and the difference between that experience (even books/articles i really like) and reading just to get lost in a good story is always surprisingly and wonderfully stark. thank god for that. maybe i'm a little afraid that one day i'll lose the stay-up-late-to-finish-feeling that a satisfying novel can bring. hasn't happened yet, though...
anyway, oscar wao was great. those pulitzer prize folks know their business. it was being considered by my college as the book that all first-year students read before starting their first term, but it was rejected. if you read it, i suspect you'll know why. still, for a few reasons i think it would have been good for our mostly suburban, white, middle-upper middle class kids--yunior, the narrator, and oscar, the protagonist, are dominican-american; the dominican republic's recent history and racial politics play out in footnotes and through the multi-generational, biographical storylines (what do we know about the DR apart from baseball?); yunior's voice is young and street, laced with sci-fi/fantasy/generally nerdy references, which makes it a really fun book. mostly, the characters are complicated and believable.
---
i'm making clam chowder for dinner tonight. i always feel a little funny about buying clam juice. i don't really know what it is (do they squeeze the clams?) and maybe i don't want to know...
---
this morning when i went into E's room, she looked at the round, green flowers on my shirt and, with nuk-in-mouth, said "pickles!" it was a great way to start the day.
Monday, March 2, 2009
i'd say that i have a pretty full plate--mothering, marriage, work, commuting, old and newer friendships, yoga once a week, making meals and eating them, tidying up, knitting. i even have another blog, too, but here i am creating a new one.
let me explain...
ever since our daughter was born, 20 months ago, the original blog has pretty much been her turf. her adorable mug certainly deserves it. before then, it was a space for me to share stories, memories, ideas, rants, whatever was on my mind. i was reminded of how much i miss having that outlet when a college friend sent me a link to her blog, which she publishes semi-anonymously. she doesn't use her real name, but everything she writes about is real--family, kids, work, books.
i hope that this space, lady professor (what i am, somewhat tongue-in-cheek), will be my version of that. i am using my real (first) name, but will probably try to walk a line between candid and confidential when it comes to specific people and places.
so, again with the full plate...we'll see how often i update here. unlike a kid-centric blog, there are no photos to transfer and upload, no videos to edit and shrink, so i'm hoping that posting will be relatively quick and painless. then again, i've been nursing this little post for well over an hour (distracted by 'confessions of a dangerous mind' on hdnet).
time to finish oscar wao...g'night!
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