Apt. 11D

Thimbles, Needles, Aprons, and All Other Strange Things

Ian is in a great, new school. The staff at his special education kindergarten is working very hard to improve his speech. I'm so happy with the program that I'm rethinking my prior commitment to inclusion. I just had a meeting with his school, because he has already met all of his yearly goals. (Thanks for the link, Dave. I'll write a post about it next week.)

His teachers often use worksheets for reading and speech. Ian is supposed to identify an object and explain what that object is used for. The problem is that the worksheets assume that kids come in contact with a mom who's a good housekeeper. Someone who sews holes in their jeans, instead of tossing them out and buying a new pair. Someone who cooks nice meals and protects her clothes with an apron. Someone who regularly sweeps and mops the floor, instead of leaving it for the cleaning lady. Someone who irons shirts, instead of dropping them off at the drycleaner. Poor Ian doesn't have one of those moms.

As his therapists drill Ian with new words and phrases, he's coming across completely alien objects. Needles, thread, thimbles, mops, irons, aprons, dusters. What is that weird shit?

Objects that Ian is familiar with: takeout menus, wine bottles, cell phones, Blackberries, computers, scanners, color-coded calendars, remotes, drive through windows, and game systems.   

Kitchen Class

This morning, I pushed the kitchen table out of the room and arranged the black IKEA chairs by the back door. I squinted at the diagram from the kitchen dude and mapped out the new layout in blue tape on the kitchen floor. I am a little worried that Steve and I are going collide when cooking.

Taking Marriage Backwards

In yesterday's Times, Stephanie Coontz writes another anti-marriage opinion piece. Coontz always goes for the cool and hip, but leaves the logic behind. Someone at the Times must have said, "hey, let's distract people from our snoring columnists. Someone call up that kook, Coontz."

Coontz starts off with a history of how the state got into the business of legitimizing marriage. Actually, I found the history quite interesting.

For 16 centuries, Christianity also defined the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s wishes. If two people claimed they had exchanged marital vows — even out alone by the haystack — the Catholic Church accepted that they were validly married.

In 1215, the church decreed that a “licit” marriage must take place in church. But people who married illictly had the same rights and obligations as a couple married in church: their children were legitimate; the wife had the same inheritance rights; the couple was subject to the same prohibitions against divorce.

Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices. In part, this was an attempt to prevent unions between young adults whose parents opposed their match.

Government began relying on the marriage license in the 1950s, as a way of distributing social security benefits and health insurance. But Coonz says the marriage license no longer makes sense, because people aren't getting married anymore.

Possession of a marriage license is no longer the chief determinant of which obligations a couple must keep, either to their children or to each other. But it still determines which obligations a couple can keep — who gets hospital visitation rights, family leave, health care and survivor’s benefits. This may serve the purpose of some moralists. But it doesn’t serve the public interest of helping individuals meet their care-giving commitments.

So, Coontz wants us to do away with this marriage license nonsense. There are so many reasons to have problems with this argument that I don't even know where to begin.

I'll let the social conservatives talk about why state sanctioned marriages force feet draggers to get married and that this is good for children and society. Instead, I'll talk about why the marriage license is good for women.

So, Steve and I get married  on a mountain top, by a hippie who got his ministerial license from an ad in Rolling Stone magazine. We have no state license, just a batik print paper from the hippie saying that we're married. We hang out for few years and have a couple of kids. Then he decides that he wants the corporate life and a wife who shaves her legs. He leaves me in the trailer park with the dirty kids. I need to sue him for child support, but now he says that the marriage wasn't binding, because the hippie officiant was stoned at the time. I think he'll have the edge in court.

That marriage license provides women with guarantees for social security, alimony, and child support. Women need these protections, because they are more likely then their spouses to stop work or to take less demanding jobs after the children are born. Women are the most vulnerable to poverty in their older years. A marriage license provides them with certain guarantees that private unions cannot.

It might even be better for women if marriage licenses were written with the details of pre-nup contract. It could provide detailed information about property divisions and proportions of future salaries, if the marriage should dissolve.

Coontz's proposal to get government out of the marriage business might distract us from the latest Dowd column, but it is still a lousy idea.

UPDATE: A different take on this issue from bean. More from Family Scholars. See blogrunner for everything.

Weekend Journal

At 6:30am, I put on my glasses and poured myself a huge cup of coffee. I had been sleeping late for the past few days, and it really hurt to wake up this early. Late night efforts at creating powerpoint presentations didn't help matters much. I sat on the sofa hugging my coffee and watching the vacant morning shows hoping to get enough energy to get ready for the morning.

I couldn't remember what I was supposed to do first. Pour the cereal? Make lunches? Copy my files to my flashdrive? Five days of loafing, and my brain had been reset.

Spreadin' Love

Megan can't explain why DC has so much crime, while Vietnam doesn't, despite much deeper poverty.

Don't ask me how I ended up at Courtney Love's blog last night. It was the result of a strange google search followed by some random clicks. OK. OK. I admit it. I'm a big Hole fan. Yeah. Check out the depravity at Love's blog. Is this woman allowed to drive a car and tend to her daughter?

E-books sound awful, mostly because they are heavy and big. Books must fit into a bag for quick reading on the subway. Even if you no longer ride the subway.

Great Thanksgiving links at Raising WEG.

I like Foreign Policy's reasons to be thankful.

Spreadin' Love

Matthew Yglesias has a lovely chart showing the change in public opinion towards women's role in society.

Dawn Friedman, the godmother of all mommybloggers, has a piece on PJM on being a pro-choice adoptive parent.

Slow day at work? Watch 150 Monty Python sketches. (via Dooce)

Brooks is worrying about the growing racial segregation of music taste. He says never has alternative music been so white. Not. I don't think remember a whole of lot of urban youth running out to buy REM's Murmur album.

The Adjunct Problem

The front page of the New York Times declares that "The Decline of Tenure Track Jobs Raises Concerns."

"Raises concerns" is such a mild phrase. Lots of things raise my concerns. Britney Spears' driving habits, my over use of hair product, the fact that we're down to only two Coronas in the fridge. All those things cause me to scratch my head for a moment, mumble "something should be done," and then I go about my day. The decline of tenure track jobs or, more specifically, the abuse of adjunct faculty makes my blood boil.

The article provides a few useful statistics.

Three decades ago, adjuncts — both part-timers and full-timers not on a tenure track — represented only 43 percent of professors, according to the professors association, which has studied data reported to the federal Education Department. Currently, the association says, they account for nearly 70 percent of professors at colleges and universities, both public and private.

Tenure, the grant of permanent employment for faculty, may be on its way out, and I don't really bemoan that development. I'm not sure how many professors would lose their jobs for making unpopular statements. We're a pretty conservative lot (in behavior, not politics).

The gap in pay between tenured and non-tenured positions is the more serious problem.

Keith Hoeller, who has been teaching philosophy for 17 years as a part-timer in Seattle, described it this way: “It’s a caste system, and we are the untouchables of academia.”

Aletia Droba taught for 10 years as a part-time philosophy professor in the Detroit area. She said she was paid as little as $1,400 a course at community colleges and as much as $2,400 a class at universities.

One class can consume about 20 hours per week devoted to lecturing, lecture prep, grading, and student conferences. Over the course of a semester, adjuncts, many of whom have spent a decade in graduate school, make less than a worker at McDonald's. Tuition for one student in the class exceeds their pay.

Adjuncts live in the shadows of universities teaching Intro to History and writing classes and survive on ramen noodles and coffee. Universities, which have been tauted as bastions of liberal thought, turn a blind eye to this injustice in their midst, because nobody really wants to teach Intro to History or those writing classes. How many of those adjuncts are women with children who don't have the freedom to relocate to tenure track opportunities across the country?

The article mentions some feeble attempts by unions to raise their pay, but the results are laughably poor. State legislatures are slashing the budgets of public universities. Tenure faculty feel that they aren't paid terribly well either. Change is going to have to come from students who grow tired of exhausted and disgruntled adjuncts. They will have to grow tired of plugging in frowning faces into Rate My Professor and march into some Dean's Offices with demands.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

Spreadin' Love

Roller Derby! Steve and his buddies saw these guys last month. I want a cool name like Brigitte Barhot.

I rarely watch Oprah, but I was seriously fried last week after class and got hooked into watching two days of The Secret Lives of Hoarders. Ohmygod! This woman had floor to ceiling crap in her house that she had accumulated by buying shit on sale. Peter Walsh, from Clean Sweep, was there to give this woman some support over the 6 weeks that it took to clean out her house. She had something like 3,000 pairs of shoes. They filled two warehouses with her crap. Check out the video of her home before the clean up.

Weekend Journal

Saturday afternoon, I jumped onto the 11a bus for Manhattan and immediately fell in a dead sleep. I've been working too hard for months now, and I pass out whenever I get these spare moments of quiet. By the time I met up with my friends, Margie and Suze, at the Barnes and Nobel on W. 8th St., I had come out of the post-nap daze.

Dining Room