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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Published Letters: 77 Editor's Choice: 7
I have two opinions about Mrs. Waldman's well-written and evocative essay. 1. the homework mentioned is indeed silly. 2. However, homework is not at all silly and is in fact conducive to one's academic progress.
I say this as a person without children -- flame away! -- but who grew up in a very rough public school and then a private school in the lowest-ranking state (by SAT scores) in the nation. I always had homework and when I was younger I suffered for it. I failed one 6-week period of math due to an abject failure to organize my personal math log. I lost -- and was forced to pay for by my tough-love parents -- a handful of textbooks that I lost when taking them home to do my evening reading. But I don't rail against homework in general because it is a primary reason for my success.
My workload when I was little was mostly rote or project-type stuff (for gifted class -- regular class was almost all memorization), with the middle grades devoted to papers, research, and reading. By high school I wrote at least one paper weekly. And I struggled nightly through my math homework. My high school's bench mark for homework was 30 minutes per course, which worked out to 2-3 hours of work nightly if all my classes were academic (which they usually weren't). This isn't an uphill in the snow story, however. In retrospect, I'm very glad I did all that work because, while my contemporaries were struggling through English and Math 101, having rarely written a paper or completed a full-length test, I was earning exemptions in English and History and skipping forward to classes in which I could accomplish something meaningful, and getting out of college-level math almost entirely. It was well worth it.
Additionally, I believe it's rare that one becomes proficient at a skill without practice. Second, when your little one graduates he or she is in a marketplace -- and no one really cares why he or she doesn't have the best skills, merely that better alternatives are available. Third, we learn by both carrot and stick -- failing a subject in grade school or suffering the consequences of poor study and organizational habits is a step on the way to developing professional skills.
On to today's letter: no f*&^%ing way, Cary!
This woman isn't imagining her mother-in-law's nastiness and she'll probably never be able to get that woman to grow the ^%$# up and treat her the way she deserves to be treated. But she has something the mother-in-law wants -- actually, two things. Which means she has the ability to change the mother-in-law's behavior to one of kindness and respect, or at least terrified politeness.
So, my advice to the LW is short and simple and based on my own monster-in-law experience -- work on your husband and yourself, and forget your mother-in-law. Deny her access to your entire family unless she demonstrates a willingness to treat all of you with kindness and respect. And work on being strong enough yourself to take your baby and your husband and exit any situation where you are being abused. Now. Get your husband on board and do it.
(Incidentally, the mother-in-law in this case sounds like my stepmother-in-law. and i did try to ignore it, or to be magnanimous when she detroyed my relationships with others through lying about a variety of things. It doesn't work with sociopaths. They are simply made bolder by your seeming lack of resistance. The only thing they respect is denial of those things they value, or an awareness that you understand and won't tolerate their game.)
The article is quite interesting and raises some good points, but I have two issues with it. First, it somewhat uncritically presents the destruction of fetuses in a very early stage of development as an ill to be avoided. This, to me, seems to be waving the white flag on Roe v. Wade.
Second, it seems to proceed on the notion that women are entitled to bear children. News flash: they're not. Some simply will never be able, though IVF and whatnot decrease that number from what it has been traditionally. And children are entirely elective. There are many reasons why women feel they have to give birth to their own children, and all of these reasons are more about societal values and individual status than about an objective societal good. This means, naturally, that I also disagree that any insurance company should offer infertility benefits.
Finally, though I agree that some practices in fertility clinics should be limited, I don't necessarily believe they should be any more regulated than they currently are. Because, after all, this is about choice and privacy -- you choosing to have a child by any means necessary instead of pursuing other alternatives, and short of committing a crime being free to do so. A limitation on either choice or privacy in the name of ethics leads to other potentially discriminatory and intrusive judgment calls on what is or is not an ethical use of the technology -- offering IVF to married women only, for example. Or not to women above or below a certain age. Or not to lesbians.
My choice, as hinted at above, is to adopt despite the fact that I can have children. I have a variety of reasons for this, much as I suspect infertile women have their reasons for wanting to bear children. However, I find it irresponsible to assert that childbearing is a right to be subsidized by the society for the benefit of individuals.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
Salon headlines in your mailbox
