Poem

Since I haven't posted a thing lately, I thought I'd at least share this sweet poem from Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. It's the best I can do these days.


"Words from the Front" by Ron Padgett, from How to Be Perfect. © Coffee House Press, 2007.

Words from the Front

We don't look as young
as we used to
except in dim light
especially in
the soft warmth of candlelight
when we say
in all sincerity
You're so cute
and
You're my cutie.
Imagine
two old people
behaving like this.
It's enough
to make you happy.

Amen!

Book TV carried the Miami Book Fair all weekend! It was the sweetest dream imaginable for this lefto book lover, watching political writers talk about their books to adoring crowds.

I'm so darned brain dead lately I haven't been able to come up with anything original to post, so yup, here's more New York Times. Here's quote from Frank Rich's op-ed column on Bush's mess in Pakistan, the supposedly DECENT people in the senate giving the nod to Mukasey's fake-out on torture, and other things. And to this I say, "AMEN!":

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).
This next paragraph is SO true, for me:
Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon.
This, from earlier in the piece, explains it:
What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

Ok, Boys and Girls

This, from an article in the NYT:

Catalyst’s research is often an exploration of why, 30 years after women entered the work force in large numbers, the default mental image of a leader is still male. Most recent is the report titled “Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t,” which surveyed 1,231 senior executives from the United States and Europe. It found that women who act in ways that are consistent with gender stereotypes — defined as focusing “on work relationships” and expressing “concern for other people’s perspectives” — are considered less competent. But if they act in ways that are seen as more “male” — like “act assertively, focus on work task, display ambition” — they are seen as “too tough” and “unfeminine.”
Women can’t win.

I find this to be true, even in teaching. Male teachers don't seem to be held to the same standards as women teachers. I see it in my school. For the no-pay jobs that teachers are often asked to do, especially those which require relationships to be formed or nurtured, or social functions to be managed, the men volunteer less often and are often not asked. Even inside a group of teachers looking for additional help with a particular project, it's the names of women that are most often brought up as those to call upon.

Recently, in a school program I'm working on, this remark was made by a male teacher about a female assistant principal in our school:
"*** has no business doing the job of assistant principal. She was good at mothering the ninth graders in her job as ninth grade dean, but she doesn't have what it takes to be a principal."
This was said without any hesitation on the part of the jerk who said it.

What's more, in my experience students also view men teachers differently. Men have fewer problems with classroom management. You don't often hear a male teacher mention having to have "the talk" with a class about disrespecting the teacher. It's not that kids in their classrooms never show disrespect, but when it does happen, a word or two tends to bring things under control. Generally speaking, when a male teacher talks tough, kids listen. You might hear kids refer to a male teacher as being "strict," but "bitch" or any similar derogatory label attributed to someone in authority is usually not attached.

I don't hear much about male students having issues with male authority, but it's commonplace to hear that a difficult boy can't take direction from female teachers. Often times, when a pattern of misbehavior from a student, male or female, in a woman's classroom is discussed among teachers (and these things are discussed, come on, we're human and need to vent like people in any other profession), the male teachers in the conversation say they've seen few of the same behaviors from the same student. They might agree that the student is quiet and surly, or doesn't do his or her work, but usually not the outright disrespect that women teachers experience. Once, when I called a student on some bullying behavior in the media center at school, the student looked at me and said, "Go away, you're not my teacher." I'd bet a year's salary this wouldn't have happened had I been male.

I've seen male teachers tease kids in a way that a woman teacher would be called to task for- by the student and the administration. Men seem to be able to get away with making a student feel embarrassed about bad behavior, whereas a woman teacher saying something similar would have the student in her face, and if administration was called in to mediate, the female teacher would be reprimanded for this kind of teasing. Now this is only from my personal observations, but I don't think a man would.

I like my job and I find that most kids are respectful. The ones who aren't can usually be managed with the tools we have available to help us bring them around. But I have seen, with my own eyes, the differences between the ways women and men teachers are perceived and treated, and there is a difference.

More on Health Care

Here's another article from the NYT on health care. This one involves a survey of patient satisfaction here and in countries that have a national system. It confirms what those who are against universal coverage most like to talk about: elective surgery. It also supports what we already know about those who can't afford good coverage: 37% of us now avoid care because of costs!!!!

What I don't understand is how those who still support the present system don't see that adequate care for everyone is so important to the well-being of all of us.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

November 1, 2007
Editorial
America’s Lagging Health Care System
Americans are increasingly frustrated about the subpar performance of this country’s fragmented health care system, and with good reason. A new survey of patients in seven industrialized nations underscores just how badly sick Americans fare compared with patients in other nations. One-third of the American respondents felt their system is so dysfunctional that it needs to be rebuilt completely — the highest rate in any country surveyed. The system was given poor scores both by low-income, uninsured patients and by many higher-income patients.

The survey, the latest in a series from the Commonwealth Fund, is being published today on the Web site of Health Affairs, a respected health policy journal. Researchers interviewed some 12,000 adults in Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Given the large number of people uninsured or poorly insured in this country, it was no surprise that Americans were the most likely to go without care because of costs. Fully 37 percent of the American respondents said that they chose not to visit a doctor when sick, skipped a recommended test or treatment or failed to fill a prescription in the past year because of the cost — well above the rates in other countries.

Patients here were more likely to get appointments quickly for elective surgery than those in nearly all the other countries. But access to primary care doctors, the mainstay of medical practice, was often rocky. Only half of the American adults were able to see a doctor the same day that they became sick or the day after, a worse showing than in all the other countries except Canada. Getting care on nights and weekends was problematic.

Often the care here was substandard. Americans reported the highest rate of lab test errors and the second-highest rate of medical or medication errors.

The findings underscore the need to ensure that all Americans have quick access to a primary care doctor and the need for universal health coverage — so that all patients can afford the care they need. That’s what all of the presidential candidates should be talking about.