Archive for March, 2007
26 March 2007
Posted in Controversy, My education, Racism at 4:19 pm by Miss Fox
So, something got me thinking, today, about all the random things I did/said as a kid. Well, not all of them (as that would be a lot of things…), but some of the more strange ones. Take, for instance, Army dodge ball, a game that even my ex-Army friends don’t know about (which makes sense - I imagine soldiers don’t sit around playing dodge ball all day.). I grew up in Fayetteville, NC - a military town right outside of Fort Bragg, NC, so Army dodge ball was the only kind of dodge ball I ever played as a kid. It seems so strange to me that so many people have no idea it even exists.
But, I also thought of a couple phrases I used to say that were not only random, but also very wrong. For instance, I remember being told, as a child, to sit “Indian-style”.
Now, as a student teacher, I know that phrase is no longer used, and instead teachers say “criss cross applesauce” or just “cross-legged”. (I hate cutesy phrases, so I’ll be using the latter when the time comes.) It’s not a particularly hurtful phrase, but it’s not very descriptive and relies on stereotypes of cultures for its meaning.
I also used to use the phrase “Indian giver”,
which I didn’t understand at the time I used it. I’m still not entirely sure why it’s such a widely used term… weren’t we the ones who kept taking away things (land) from the Native American tribes after we had so graciously given them? (Because, you know, the Native American totally had no land before we came along, and we were so awesome to give them ours, even if we did take most of it back. We disgust me.)
There’s one more, though, that I tried to research, today, for which I couldn’t find a source. The phrase is “Chinese skipping”, which apparently references a jump rope game. When I was little, though, it had nothing to do with jumping rope - to “Chinese skip” somebody, was to skip them in line, in a rather clever and sneaky way. Say you’re standing in the lunch line. Mary is in front you. Joe comes up and tries to skip you in line. “NO! Joe, you can’t skip me,” you say, “go back to the end of the line.” So, he whispers to Mary for a second, and they snicker. Then Mary lets Joe skip her in line. Then, Joe lets Mary skip him, putting him in front of you. Thus, you have been “Chinese skipped”. It sounds like just another made up phrase, still racist even though it has nothing to do with any stereotypes of the Chinese culture (that I know of).
In my searching for that phrase, I did run across a whole bunch of “Chinese ____” phrases, such as “Chinese fire drill”.
According to the article, “Chinese here comes from British military tradition of using the word to mean clumsy, inept, or inferior. It is likely that this was not intended as a slur on the Chinese people, but rather a play on the phrase “one wing low” which referred to a clumsy pilot and was thought to sound Chinese.” Regardless, it is yet another insensitive, and stupid term.
Luckily (or not), I had no idea I was saying anything racist at the time. Hell, even now I’m not entirely sure why anyone even created those phrases. If you aren’t racist, it makes no sense. I don’t hold the belief that the Chinese are confused or chaotic… I don’t think all native people sit cross-legged… and I don’t think Chinese men pee in Coke bottles. I never did. Yet, I remember hearing and using these phrases, because that’s just what you did. I didn’t know why it was called “Chinese skipping”, it just was. I didn’t know why we sat “Indian-style” on the magic carpet for storytime, we just did.
I’m not a very P.C. person - I hate having the sidestep issues by using euphamisms and cutesy phrases to keep from offending people (what about apples, huh? Maybe they don’t like “criss cross applesauce” so much…), but I also don’t understand why we use such mindless phrases.
So, what’s going around the playground, these days? Are we making fun of Muslims and Iraqis, now? I don’t want to be surprised when one of my fourth graders blurts out some off-the-wall, seemingly random yet racist phrase.
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24 March 2007
Posted in Controversy, Feminism, Sex, Student teaching at 11:28 pm by Miss Fox
This is an old argument - the sexualization of little girls. Where does it come from? Why is it encouraged? How can we stop it?
A quiz on PBS (“Is Love in Our DNA?”) referencing another article (named below), makes a good point:
Beautiful young women are sexually attractive to men because beauty and youth are closely linked with fertility and reproductive value. In evolutionary history, males who were able to identify and mate with fertile females had the greatest reproductive success … A 14-year-old woman has a higher reproductive value than a 24-year-old woman, because her future contribution to the gene pool is higher on average.
–David Buss, “The Strategies of Human Mating,” American Scientist, 1994
It’s not a pleasant thought, but if you think about it scientifically, it makes sense. A 14 year old girl is (typically) sexually mature… in nature, that’s usually good enough. So, if you look at it that way, it’s pretty much going against nature to say being attracted to young girls is wrong.
Does this mean we need to encourage it? Of course, not. It’s an evolutionary thing that has, like pinky toes and the appendix, become obsolete in the human race. Why? It’s not like we’re hurting for people, here - there is no immediate, urgent need to perpetuate the species. So, while there are reasons why men are attracted to younger females, there aren’t really any good reasons to act on it.
So, then, we tend to view men with this attraction as evil predators. While I agree that men who actively pursue underage girls against their will are wrong, I do have issues with this. It’s perfectly natural for men to be attracted to young girls. It’s how they act (or don’t act) on that attraction that makes the difference.
Dressing little girls up in “sexy” clothes and putting all the responsibility on men is a problem. Again, there are some men that actively pursue young girls… but the girls aren’t always innocent in the matter. Today, I heard a story about a group of fifth grade girls who saw their teacher’s IM window, in which she had been talking to her boyfriend during downtime. A few days later, said teacher gets a call from her boyfriend, asking her who all these girls are who are IMing him. Apparently, they were having a sleepover, and one of them remembered his name, so they IMed him pretending to be adult women and hit on him. He was smart enough to know that something wasn’t right, but I’m sure that this isn’t the only time that men have been pursued by underage women. Just because these girls wouldn’t have known what to do in the event this man really did show up at their house ready to have sex, doesn’t take the blame off of them completely.
So, who is to blame? Mothers? Fathers? Advertising? All of the above?
Parents need to pay attention to their kids. Easier said than done, but still true. They need to say no, and enforce it, when girls want to do/wear/watch things that aren’t appropriate. They need to be honest and open with their kids about sex (boys and girls), so that they learn more from their parents than from a porn site. And, they need to stop letting their little girls wear things like this:
(Yeah, that says “wink, wink” and “eye candy” - and they’re sized for girls ages 10-16)
and this:
It’s not “cute”.
There are others, but I (obviously) can’t find pictures on the ‘net without going through some rather unsavory channels. And, quite frankly, I don’t want to see little girls who could be my students wearing skin tight ass pants, shirts with phrases like “little hottie” and “sexy princess”, and padded bras for six year olds.
Alright, so what does this have to do with education? All this came from an experience I had with my fourth graders. They are all learning how to write letters for a purpose - they’re writing to somebody to ask for something. One girl is writing the president to ask for peace, a boy is writing his apartment manager to ask them to clean up the apartment complex he lives in, and several are writing celebrities to ask for autographs.
A rather large group of girls has decided to write Hannah Montana (warning: link goes to a Disney.com site) (or, more correctly, they’re writing to Miley Cyrus, the actress that plays her). I had no idea who she was (I really should brush up on my pop culture to keep up with the kids), but I learned very quickly that finding her address was hard.
Actually, it was impossible.
The Disney website says on its FAQs page that they can’t “…provide contact information, forward e-mail, or grant meetings or interviews on their behalf…” because “the performers you are referring to are not permanent employees of The Walt Disney Company…” and, instead, they recommend you “start your search [with the] Internet Movie Database.” So, knowing the joy of imdb, I decided to go there. I had to click on the link to her official site pretty quickly, though, because at the bottom of the page, where the discussion forums are, there happened to be a topic titled “She’s Got a Really Great Ass!!!” This girl is 15.
But, when you dress her up like she’s 18+:
I can see how people might be confused.
So, yeah, I finally got so frustrated with having to tell the girls, repeatedly, “no, that’s not really her address” and “that’s not really her website… you really shouldn’t send your letter there” that I gave up.
I’m not really surprised that Disney is using sex to sell its kids’ shows… I mean, look at The Cheetah Girls:
So, yeah… anyway. This post has been entirely too long, already… mostly, I’m angry because (1) the girls in my class deserve better female role models than that (2) Disney should take some responsibility and at least give an address to send mail to the studio - I wonder how many little girls have written letters to creepy pedophiles trying to get to “Hannah Montana” (3) viewing women as sex objects is already a problem - do we really need to shift this pressure to 10 year olds?
I do hate to sound prudish, but seriously, this is a problem. My 10 year old girls are wearing ass-pants and writing letters to girls who look like they should be starring in porn. What ever happened to characters like Clarissa?
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21 March 2007
Posted in Journal-related at 10:38 pm by Miss Fox
First of all, I’ve updated the rules and added a little blurb about me.
So, the biggest change is that I’m no longer concerned with the kid-friendliness of the journal. I decided that I didn’t want to censor myself, or others, when there are so many things I want to discuss on here that aren’t kid-friendly.
Also, I’d really like to be part of community of teachers that have online journals. Not only because none of my friends read this, but also because I’d love input from others in the field. So, if anybody knows of an educators “blogring” or other such place, do point me in that direction, please.
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20 March 2007
Posted in My education, Student teaching, Violence at 11:59 am by Miss Fox
Me, either. But, apparently one of my fourth graders was opening boxes before he came to school this morning.
That’s why he had a knife on him.
Apparently.
Why he was showing it to classmates in the lunch line, I have no idea (since, you know, he accidentally stuck it in his pocket after opening that box, this morning, and didn’t mean to bring it to school). Luckily, the girl next to him in line had the sense to come tell me, and I had the sense to tell a real teacher (having no idea what the specific policy for “a kid in the cafeteria has a knife” is for my school). I was able to prevent mass hysteria by keeping the same girl from telling the rest of the cafeteria, and the other teacher was able to get the pocketknife (one of the foldable kinds with a 2″ blade) from him without a problem.
I remember when I decided to be a teacher. I got a lot of reactions from people when they heard the news, most commonly comments like, “But you’re so smart!” and “Oh, you’ll change your mind with your first paycheck, har har!” There were a few people, though, that remarked, “Well, I hope you don’t plan to teach high school, because those kids bring weapons to school - you’ll get shot or stabbed.”
Guess what! Elementary kids do it, too.
*sigh*
Remarkably, I didn’t really freak out. It helped that it (1) wasn’t really a threatening situation and (2) was caught pretty quickly. My biggest reaction was, “Poor Kevin*, I wish I knew what was going on with him…” You see, I only spend four hours a week in the classroom, and was actually getting ready to leave at the start of the knife incident. This kid has obvious issues (he’s mopey, depressed, negative - has apparently made comments about hurting himself), but I don’t know the specifics. There hasn’t been time to discuss it with my teacher.
There’s lots of reasons why it could have happened… to get attention is the most likely one I can think of… still, I can’t help but wonder how common the issue of weapons/depression/suicidal thoughts is in schools - particularly elementary schools. And, what’s the best way to handle it? (As an individual teacher, an entire school, and/or a community…)
*Kevin is, obviously, not his real name.
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