Topic 32: Company Manners

Carol:

Minding Our Peas and Queues

“Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use."(Emily Post)

Emily Post

Raise your hand if you have heard of Emily Post. Anyone? Anyone? I suspect this best-selling author is no longer a household name, but when I was growing up, Post was the touchstone for appropriate behavior in any situation, in other words good manners. There really wasn’t a distinction drawn between good manners in private and good manners in public, as I recall, but my mother wanted to make sure I went out into the world well-prepared for any situation, so she gave me Emily Post’s book on manners as a high school graduation gift, a hefty 800 pages of rules for life. It was the umpteenth version of a book simply called Etiquette that Post had first published in 1922.

People may think of etiquette as an endless series of old-fashioned, stuffy rules of behavior, anachronistic in the 21st century. Certainly, that impression is reinforced by  the 1869   Frost's Laws and by-laws of American society: a condensed but thorough treatise on etiquette and its usages in America, containing plain and reliable directions for deportment in every situation in life. Quite a mouthful of a title. In her introduction, Sarah Annie Frost notes that  rules of comportment are based on the principles of comfort and convenience;  disconnected from those values, rules of behavior achieve the opposite effect and “must inevitably produce discomfort and extravagance of behavior” (9). I don’t think Frost would argue at all with Emily Post’s use of the phrase “sensitivity to the needs of others” as a broad definition of the word “etiquette.”

This idea of the spirit or values behind the rules sometimes gets lost when we look only at the minutia of social situations: how to set a table, going through a receiving line  at a wedding, what to bring the hostess at a dinner party. But Frost, Post and other etiquette writers also provide rules for handling grief and loss. In a 2008 review of Laura Claridge’s book Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, Azra Raza comments that she was surprised at the inappropriate and awkward responses of family and friends when her husband died, and that Post felt it it is exactly at such moments of intense emotion that “etiquette performs its most vital and real service” (qtd in Azra).

So, is the art of etiquette on the outs? Is Emily Post a has-been? In actuality, Emily Post has become a family business, and in 1946 Post and son Ned founded The Emily Post Institute, which now has a home on the web at emilypost.com   No less than seven family members are directors, authors, and speakers for The Emily Post Institute. And, the website includes an interactive “Etipedia” with the latest “company manners” related to instant messaging, tweeting, and social networking. 

My niece came for a quick visit last week with her two toddlers, and we enjoyed a multi-generational family meal. They may not know who Emily Post is, but the first rules of “company manners” are already in place: no farting, no farting talk, no burping, and… what do we say? Anyone? Anyone? PLEASE pass the potatoes. THANK YOU.


Sources:
Emily Post Institute
Sarah Annie Frost
Raza, Azra. “RX: Emily Post and Laura Claridge: Two Women Possessing the Genius of Etiquette (book review)
               

Megan:

Two common interpretations of this topic apply to how one acts when one either has a guest or is a guest.  There are a number of rules of etiquette applicable to both, but I have to confess that although I am aware of these rules, I hardly ever remember to follow them. There are reasons for this, but first, let us examine some of the rules of hospitality required of hosts and guests.

If you have a guest:                             If you are a guest:

Be clean                                                 Stay clean
Offer drinks/food                                    Accept drinks/food
Do not fight with spouse/partner            Do not overstay your welcome

Now I will go through each of these rules, and explain where I have fallen down in the past.

If I know that guests are expected, then of course I clean the house. But I discovered while I was living alone that keeping a tidy house is not actually my natural state. In England, people had a habit of dropping by unannounced, which is something I actively discouraged. I made it known that I needed at least an hour’s notice, or one would not be admitted.  I think I inherited this personality quirk from my grandmother.

As a guest, keeping the house clean is somewhat easier. You make the bed, help with dishes and try not to be sick in the bathroom. It’s the last one I have the most problems with – I can’t count how many times I have had food poisoning or nasty migraine headaches while staying with friends. Getting sick in someone else’s house is pretty much my worst nightmare, and it happens to me all the time.

Offering and accepting food and drinks is not something I’m very good at. In England, the first thing anyone does when you walk into their house, or their office (or the library) is say, “Shall I put the kettle on?” and offer a cup of tea. I never remembered to do this, mostly because I don’t drink tea. Or coffee. Unless it’s offered to me.

                        
And then only sometimes. The reason I have a hard time accepting food or drink, is that I have a slightly codependent streak that doesn’t want anyone to go to any trouble. This is the only situation where that comes up (as it obviously doesn’t cause me to compulsively offer refreshments in return). But if anyone offers me a drink or food, my first instinct is always to say no. I just can’t help it. I think I get this from my grandmother as well.

Finally, there is not fighting with spouse/partner and not overstaying your welcome. I don’t have a partner, nor do I remember ever fighting publicly when I did. But I have witnessed this behavior as a guest, and it made me uncomfortable. 

But not uncomfortable enough to leave. I am a super-over-stayer (made-up-word!!). I have reasons for this too. While living abroad, I would sometimes go years without seeing some of my friends, and when we did get together I made the most of it. So, if I haven’t seen you for a few years, and it took me 3 days to drive to your house, I don’t care if you are getting divorced in front of my face, I am staying.

After all, who knows if I’ll ever be invited back.

Mini-Break

Carol & Megan are going to The Vegas for a few days and will return with an all-new post next Monday, October 18th. 

Topic 31: On Stepping Aside

Carol:

Deal Me Out

   

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.        --Kenny Rogers “The Gambler”

I’m going to Las Vegas today, so my mind has been on gambling images. I have been to Las Vegas many times, always for education conferences. This time, I am going along for the fun of it while my husband goes to a professional conference. Because…. I am retired. I loved teaching, and I loved my job, but I was ready to retire, really ready. Thanks to an experimental “phased retirement option,” I had three years of half-time teaching to make the transition to a different kind of life and different kind of pace. I get up every morning excited to start my routine that now includes reading and writing for pleasure instead of work. Most people don’t have the luxury of choosing how and when they will retire, my own father being such an example.

Ed Scott, Alaska 1937

Ed Scott graduated from UCLA in 1932 in the middle of the Depression with a degree in geology.  He was lucky to find a job, and he was lucky to get one that he loved. Being a field geologist in the 30’s was an adventure; he kept a suitcase packed and never went on a trip without his rock pick. His first  summer at Union Oil  in 1933, he rode the countryside around Santa Barbara on horseback taking notes to turn into geological survey maps. He spent six months in the late 30’s in Alaska, camping and riding Kodiak Island doing “exploration research.” He was exploring the coast of British Honduras (now Belize) in the spring of 1970 when a plane dropped off the message that his mother died. He was carrying that rock pick in his luggage when he came home from the funeral.
Ed worked for the same company, Union Oil for 45 years. He watched the company and the industry change dramatically during that time span. As late as the 1950’s, Union Oil still felt like a small family, and it cultivated loyalty through old-fashioned family picnics and holiday gatherings at the home of its then president, Cy Rubel. Corporate restructuring and mergers changed that. By the time he retired in 1974, Ed was “Manager of Exploration Research,” and he told me most of the men who worked under him had graduate degrees and “high tech” training. Union Oil became Unocal and mapping by horseback was replaced by satellite imaging.

I guess Dad wasn’t ready to “fold his hand” when he retired because a year later in 1975 he was hired by the US Geological Survey. I wasn’t around for the conversations that took place between him and my mother during that year when the retiree had exchanged his pick ax for a golf club. She was a company wife for those 45 years, after all, and not really used to have him underfoot 24 hours a day. The retired geologist got back in the game for ten more years, an active and productive time with a government agency that appreciated his expertise and wisdom.

I appreciated that wisdom too. He taught me lessons about work, about play, and about timing. Everything I know about gin rummy I learned from him, and it was mostly about timing, knowing when to lay down the cards early for points or to strategize to “go for the gin.”  Retirement?  It’s all about timing.

Megan:

How (not) to Step Aside

Say you find out the person you’ve been dating is thinking about returning to their ex, or is interested in someone else. There are a couple ways to handle this. You can scream and cry and create a lot of drama. You can step aside gracefully.  You can combine the two – although it is difficult to scream and cry gracefully and then step aside dramatically.  I have tried some variation of them all, as this is something that seems to keep happening to me.  So here is a list of 10 things to remember not to do, if you should find yourself in this situation.

1. Do not measure their time together against your time together: If they were together for six years, and you were together for 3 weeks--  Six years wins.
2. Do not send emotional texts or emails – the digital age has no eraser. If you must leave whiny, pleading messages, consider writing them in condensation from the morning dew on his car. This is romantic, but also … creepy.
3. Do not corner him in the parking lot after work. This will force him to say a bunch of mean things that are also true. You will feel bad after.
4. Do not start dating his best friend.
5. Do not burst into tears the first time you see them together again, especially if you are at a New Years Eve party and slightly tipsy.
6. Do not stare at her engagement ring.
7. Do not believe him when you run into him alone and he drunkenly confides that he made a mistake and that there will not be a wedding.
8. Do not stand across the street and watch as they enter the church to get married. This will not feel like closure, it will just hurt. And again, creepy.
9. Do not forget to say "Congratulations" when he tells you about the baby.
10. Do not quit your job and leave the country, unless there are other good reasons to do so.

Of course, this is not the complete list – a list of what not to do could go on forever (for example: do not kidnap his dog). You might consider becoming friends with the new girlfriend (but it depends on how you acted during the transition). Some of my best friends started out as the partners of the object of my affection, and have stayed my friends long after the affection has faded. The important thing to remember when stepping aside is to act with confidence as though it was your idea – as though you are doing them a favor – even though, more likely than not, you have no choice in the matter whatsoever. That’s the graceful part.

Topic 30: Mental Lapses

Carol:

Remember Me?

My first real job was working for four professors, all doing research, so I spent most of my time typing articles for publications and notes for speeches. One morning I deposited a time-sensitive manuscript in the mailbox across from the office  and returned to work.  About two hours later, that little light bulb we see in cartoons blinked on. “Omigosh,  I didn’t put any stamps on the package. It won’t get delivered, and I’m going to lose my job.” I called Marc, who drove me to the huge, main post office. I pleaded my case with the postal supervisor, and he let us go through all the gigantic mail containers to find the package. We did find it, and it was missing the stamps, and no one at work ever found out.  

Most of the time, thank goodness, our mental lapses are the little memory gaps about everyday objects, facts or names that drive us nuts. That movie title that was on the tip of our tongue suddenly pops into our head and wakes us up at 3 a.m. Such mind blanks are so common that  we have all those great words like “do-hickey,” “thingamabob, “whosit,” “whatchamacallit”and  “whatshisface.”  

                                      

For the plain work of memorizing and retaining facts, I have always liked that array of acronyms, rhymes, and musical games called mnemonic devices. Most professions have them, especially fields with a lot of jargon or masses of facts. One of the first grammar rules taught in school uses rhyming: “I” before “e” except after “C” and….well,  English grammar is complicated enough that they don’t really help that much with spelling.  The medical fields must use lots of mnemonic tricks for learning anatomy, and I don’t mean “the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the leg bone.” I found my favorite on the Internet: the acronym “Lazy French Tarts Lie Naked in Anticipation,” which stands for “the nerves that pass through the orbital tissue in the skull” or as we laypeople would say “TNTPTTOTIS.” The first one I learned was from music lessons: “Every Good Boy Does Fine” for the lines on the treble staff. Trouble is I had to look it up today to remember what it was supposed to help me remember.

Besides acronyms and rhymes, making word associations helps retain facts. My father traveled a lot and met new people all the time. He told me one time that he relied heavily on word associations to put the names with the faces, He noted, “It usually works for me. Usually. Here’s an example. I ran into a guy I had worked with years ago, and I knew his name had something to do with officers. So, I just started running through them all to hear what sounded right: Sargent, Major, even Copp, but nothing caught on. Then, the mental light bulb went on. The man’s  name was “Officer.” "

So, okay, mnemonic devices are helpful, but they aren’t fool-proof. One of my favorite science fiction movie titles, the one starring, oh I can see his face so clearly, is “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” and some days I am a little short on cash.
 

Source: Mnemonic Device. Eu 

Megan : 

A Mental Lapse

When I first became dissatisfied with my job in the prison, but before I started thinking about quitting, I considered going back to school. The idea came, sort of out of nowhere, while I was weeding books from the shelves. Weeding books is one of those mundane tasks that I actually really enjoyed. You pick up each book, and flip open the cover to see the last time it was checked out. Then you examine its physical condition. Deciding which books to remove is subjective and tricky in a small library. You don’t want to get rid of popular books, but on the other hand, there’s no reason to hold onto a book once everyone has read it. And books that have never gone out … is it because they haven’t been marketed properly, or are they really just not suitable for the population? On top of that, you might be a librarian with very specific ideas about what items a library needs to have in order to be a Library. That is why, in a tiny library, in a maximum-security prison filled mostly with black men in their early 20’s, you will find the complete Jane Austen.

Anyway, that’s what I was doing when I had my brilliant idea. I came across a prison studies book that hadn’t been issued in 2 years… and I thought, maybe I could use this place as a case study. I had a ‘captive’ audience that I could study and do my thesis on the uses of a prison library and finally get my Masters in Library Science. I was standing on a chair, dropping discarded books on the floor. That’s something else you get to do when you’re a librarian – you can ‘mistreat’ books. In the course of your daily duties, but especially during weeding season, you can drop the books on the floor, you can toss them across the room aiming for a box (usually you will miss, but when you make it, you can throw your arms in the air and shout Heeeyyyy!), you can write on the books and you can rip out pages. And you can do those things because you are The Librarian.

                                                                 
 

So I continued for most of the morning, working backwards in my mind from planning my Masters in Library Science thesis, to selecting programs, to wondering if I would have to pay foreign tuition after living in England for so long, to mentally composing my application and updating my resume. I flipped through a book and blew a bunch of dust straight into my eyes. I rubbed at them with the back of my hand and bemoaned the fact that I always seemed to develop conjunctivitis while weeding books and was that a side effect of being a librarian or being a prison librarian?

Which is when I remembered.

I already have a Masters Degree in Library Science. 


  

Topic 29: Uses of Disagreeable People

Carol:

The Pundit, the Pig, the Protester, and the Philosopher

The word “Curmudgeon” sort of means what it sounds like,  disagreeable with a personality like a cudgel, another great word. In fiction,  curmudgeons are often comic characters—think Mr. Wilson or Mr. Magoo. In the real world, they challenge our patience but they can also jolt us out of complacency. We need disagreeable people.

William F. Buckley Jr.  comes to mind, one of America’s best known and influential American conservatives. I hear he was an affectionate friend,  but he used his New England accent and cranky-looking  persona to great effect at my 1970 graduation from UC Riverside.  Buckley was a controversial choice for the keynote—several months after Governor Reagan temporarily closed down the UC  campuses to quell  increasing anti-Vietnam unrest, after Kent State. What were they thinking?

The event was entertaining if lacking the usual pomp and solemnity of most graduations. There was the pig, the stink bomb, the purple bikini, all those mortar boards with big peace signs on top of them, and there was Irving Wesley Hall. A gadfly is a curmudgeon with a purpose, and that was Irv Hal, a well-known and vocal student activist.  In the UCR newspaper The Highlander, Richard Maxwell described Hall with vivid detail:
   

Hall is not a leader, more a kind of glorified scapegoat, who takes people's sins and aspirations on his shoulders and makes them dramatic or startling. Or annoying, since he has no sense of timing, substituting a bouncy energy, bouncing in on everybody, starting the hell out of them and telling them the wrongs of the world. A good act: Irv Hall can talk  (source: website  Notinkansas).

So, Irv Hall, UCR’s most vocal protester, decided to express his opinion of  William F. Buckley’s inclusion on the podium with symbolism--donning a shirt, tie, suit jacket, and red and white boxer shorts to receive his Master’s diploma.

Apparently, William F. Buckley thought my graduation was unforgettable. He wrote about it several times, including a March 30, 2001 column about Hillary Clinton : “…I looked down on a cardboard box brought up and dropped on my lap by a dissenting student. The wiggling betrayed a live presence; from the box, offloaded from my lap, a small pig emerged and scampered over to the [UCR] university president…” The column was a commentary on whether or not Clinton should be “disinvited” from speaking at Yale’s graduation. Decades earlier, Buckley had successfully fought to rescind a similar invitation from Yale to Communist Party head Gus Hall, noting “That was worth high moral and intellectual exertion, but Mrs. Clinton isn’t in that category…”(source: National Review online).

 Socrates, often called “The Gadfly of Athens,” defended himself at his trial:

For if you put me to death, you will not easily find another, who, to use a rather absurd figure, attaches himself to the city as a gadfly to a horse, which, though large and well bred, is sluggish on account of his size and needs to be aroused by stinging (Source: Harper’s Magazine online).

What are the uses of disagreeable people? They make us laugh, they make us mad, they make us uncomfortable, but they also make us think and, hopefully, they make us move.

Sources: 

Irving Wesley Hall:  We’re Not in Kansas Anymore.
Socrates: Harper’s Magazine online  June 18, 2010  

William F. Buckley:  WFB Crestomathy Feb 28, 2008

 

Megan:

Uses of Disagreeable People 

1.  Signposts along the way.

("I believe that certain people in life are meant to fall by the wayside… to serve 
        as warnings for the rest of us. Signposts along the way." --Igby Goes Down.)

I was at this dinner party once. It was a nice Ladies Only sort of affair and we were dressed up, eating little bits of cheese and drinking wine. Another woman showed up who hadn’t explicitly been invited, and she plopped down at the table and took off one of her knee-high boots. “Just getting my stash,” she said. “Anyone want a line?” And she proceeded to snort several lines of cocaine right at the dinner table, next to all the food. Nobody had drunk enough to overcome the traditional British reserve, nor did we want to embarrass the hostess, so the woman was ignored.
                    

2. Someone with whom you can quarrel.

See Topic #6.

3. Someone to fear.

There was a inmate at the prison we called Crazy Legs Smith (to distinguish him from other Smiths). He had tattoos all over his legs and he wore really short shorts. We did not call him Crazy Legs to his face because he was crazy in his head too. He used to be in the Special Secure Unit, but had graduated back to the main wing. You could tell when he was going through a bad patch, psychologically, because his hygiene deteriorated. He’d grow his hair and a matted beard and stop washing himself. He once asked me to get him a book that was 30 years out of print. I told him it was not available, but he continued to ask me for it week after week for at least 6 months. Finally he snapped at me that he thought I had the book, but just didn’t want to give it to him for personal reasons. He was jumped in the shower once by a group of other prisoners and his leg was broken. The assailants were transferred to other prisons for their protection.
                          
4. Someone to unite against

I knew this officer when I worked at the prison who was suing the service for not defending him against what he termed a consistent pattern of racist bullying. He was, he told me, a member of the 'smallest minority' of British citizens. He was from Northern Ireland (like my friend Sean). He was trying to sue everyone who ever called him a Paddy – not because he thought it was a racist term but because it refers to Irish (Republic of) people. He was angry that people mistook his accent; he wanted to be treated as a British citizen, not an Irish citizen. He wanted lots of money in his settlement.  He couldn’t understand why no one liked him or would talk to him, and took that as further evidence of their bigotry. I wanted to tell him, “People don’t hate you because they think you are Irish, they hate you because you’re a jackass” but I didn’t want to get sued.

5. Entertainment value. 
        See above.


       

Topic 28: The Shrinking Earth

Carol:

What On Earth Was She Thinking?

I really wanted to write about Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) this morning.  Of all the women writers I have studied, she is one who is most enigmatic to me. I love to read her poetry, hate to teach her work—like pulling a flower apart and trying to put it back together without killing it, impossible. I have created my own scientific theory of the incredible expanding and shrinking world of Emily Dickinson.

Emily ventured out into the world through education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1847-48, a distance of eleven miles from her home. Mount Holyoke’s curriculum was rigorous with a strong emphasis on laboratory sciences; she wrote to her brother Austin  that she was “all engrossed in sulfuric acid” (source: Emily Dickinson Museum). But, the school also emphasized morality and religion, and Dickinson was not one to “profess” what she did not believe. She left Mount Holyoke after that first year, but so did most young women, higher education being superfluous for young ladies destined for marriage, mission work, or teaching. 

Dickinson’s  most extensive writing years were also those of the upheaval of the Civil War. Between 1855-1865, she wrote and revised hundreds of poems,   Although her physical world had narrowed significantly, she was not a recluse and enjoyed the companionship of her brother’s family, who lived next door, and countless visitors to the homes of both the senior and junior Dickinson families. Extended trips to Boston for the treatment of a painful eye condition would be her last travels before she narrowed her physical universe to the grounds of the family home.

During the later part of her life, she continued to write poetry, much of which were written on scraps of paper.  Significant people during this time were Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Helen Hunt Jackson, author of Ramona. Higginson, a frequent writer for Atlantic Monthly, carried on a lengthy correspondence with Dickinson and  would become the publisher of her posthumous collection of poems.  By the time she died in 1885, she had been in ill health for sometime and was confined to bed for the last 7 months of her life.

Theories have been put forward by Dickinson scholars to account for the increasing reclusivity of “The Belle of Amherst.” Was it her failing eyesight, thwarted love, family tradition (her sister was also a recluse)? My theory is one of light and space. Imagine looking down a hallway towards a window of incredible beauty, an inviting glow attracting you towards it. But, open doors along the hallway and the light emanating from those rooms creates a distracting glare. Wouldn’t it be quite natural to close those doors to concentrate on that one, lovely, intense light at the end? Imagine the infinity of that interior world of light and space that Emily Dickinson chose to explore.

I really wanted to write about Emily Dickinson.

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Sources:
Emily Dickinson bio 

Emily Dickinson Museum

Megan:

A Shrinking World: the role of the ‘twitter-graph’

That this should be an essay topic in a book first published in 1917 seemed oddly out of place to me, out of time. After all, 80-90 years ago, there were no computers, no Internet, no social networking sites to collapse distance in the way we witness today. The first transcontinental phone call happened only two years before our useful little book of topics was published.
 

So, what was I forgetting? In 1837, Samuel Morse invented the electric telegraph and changed everything. The telegraph was arguably the very first Twitter – transmitting short bursts of information without context: updates, gossip, and news headlines. Writing on the subject of a transatlantic cable, Thoreau wrote in Walden:  “We are eager to … bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news … will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough” (as quoted in Postman, 65).  In his  book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that the telegraph changed the way people processed information, which spawned
 

the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve… but may attach merely to it novelty, interest and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses and meaning (65).

According to Postman, the invention of the telegraph inundated people with information that had no direct impact on their daily lives; novelty and scandal became news, headlines scrolling past, quickly replaced with whatever was immediate and ‘up-to-date,’ allowing no time for assimilation or reflection. Does this sound familiar?

And Postman’s book was first published in 1985. 

There’s definitely an argument to be made about social responsibility and cultural awareness, that the “shrinking world” has brought nations together through trade and shared information. One might argue that international news has led to intervention in cases of genocide, led to generous donations in times of natural disasters – but is that really true? The money promised to Haiti from the US has not actually been released. How often has the US intervened except when it directly benefited our country? Can you believe that until I moved to England, I thought WWII had started in 1941?
 

The telegraph Internet may have made the country world  into ‘one neighborhood,’ but it was a peculiar one, populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other (67-- strike-though and ammendments mine).

What happens over there doesn’t actually have any impact on our daily lives. We watch the news, read the headlines, spend a moment expressing outrage or sympathy, but rarely take any action. We change the channel or click the next link. The world isn’t any smaller, it just seems that way.


Source: Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Penguin Books. New York, 1985.

Topic 27: Academic Snobbishness

Carol:

Education: A Profitable Idea

Yesterday morning I sat down at the dining-room table to enjoy my favorite breakfast, the New York Times. I admit I spend more time on the Arts section than I do on the Opinion page, but I always skim Section A first. I stopped the skimming at A17. No, it wasn’t an editorial or an expose; it was an open letter from “The Coalition for Educational Success,” which says that it represents the nation’s leading “proprietary colleges.” Now, I had to look that term up on the internet and it means “for-profit” colleges, such as University of Phoenix, Capella University, DeVry,  and ITT Technical Institute, all of which advertise heavily on television and the internet.

The letter itself was addressed to President Obama, beginning, “Mr. President, include all colleges in your education initiative,” referring to the “Skills for America’s Future” initiative announced by the White House on October 4, 2010.    The letter included a list of figures showing that community colleges have lower graduation rates, cost taxpayers more, and less success in job placement that  “career colleges,” which I assume is another term for proprietary colleges. As I read on, I found myself getting really riled up. Really riled up. Why? Was it personal, defensiveness because I taught at a community college for 24 years? Philosophical, a kind of academic snobbery against the idea of for-profit, career-oriented higher education?

My first reaction was to the tactics employed in the letter. In education, as in politics, I have never been swayed by arguments based on building oneself up (or one’s party, or one’s organization) by tearing down someone else.  My second reaction was that in education, as in politics, it’s pretty easy to twist numbers, to take them out of context, or to omit factors that account for those statistics. What was omitted from the letter from the Coalition for Educational Success?  Mission.

The mission of an institution is its reason for being—what service does it provide, why, and for whom? A large research university with an impressive list of Nobel Laureate faculty has a different mission than a beauty college. An exclusive Ivy-league college with a large endowment has a different mission than a church-affilated college. A community college has a different mission than a proprietary college. Statistics about graduation rates, cost per student, job placement, etc. are really only meaningful when framed around institutional mission.

The city of Los Angeles has an incredible variety of colleges and universities. Google “Los Angeles City College,” and the first entry is “LAC,” Los Angeles College, a for-profit career college. Their mission is “A Better Career. A Better Life.” with emphasis on degrees in business, criminal justice and health care. Look up LA City College, and you will see the much broader mission of a school  that calls itself “an urban oasis of learning that educates minds, opens hearts, and celebrates community.” (Source: LACC website). 

People attend proprietary colleges to achieve a clear goal which is easy to track and verify through statistics. Do they complete the career-training programs, do they get the jobs? Not so easy at a community college where a student may only want one class, or who transfers to a university after one semester, or has no idea what educational or career paths to pursue?

 Well, this wasn’t an easy essay to write, it wasn’t fun, and it wasn’t funny. And I don’t have a catchy ending. I love learning, and I like to think that learning something new everyday makes people happier, wiser, healthier, and… kinder. How they get that learning—the local library, a walk in the woods, or a $40,000 a year tuition bill—doesn’t matter so much. So, I AM a snob, an education snob.
                                                                  

Listen to Alexander Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing.")

                                          

 Sources :
  Los Angeles College
  Los Angeles City College
 “Skills for America’s Future”:

New York Times National: Section Wednesday, Oct. 6 2010, A17

Painting of Alexander Pope: Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723)

Megan:

Anti-Academic Snobbishness

I used to get into arguments with my friend Sean all the time, and he would automatically disregard anything I said because he thought it came from books. Our most common argument:

    Him: “Sadam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks.”  
    Me: “No he wasn’t!”
    Him: “You don’t know anything. You only read books. I was there!”
    Me: “No you weren’t!”
    Him:“I was in the army, I know what the army is like. Books can say  anything, but I actually lived.”
    ME: “No you didn’t.”

I didn’t say it was an articulate argument; after all, it usually took place in the pub. But his attitude towards “book learning” was actually very typical in the town where we both lived. I’d never before encountered such a contempt of education.

This was compounded by the fact that people generally don’t know that librarians need a Master’s degree to be qualified. They assume the job just involves sitting around and reading novels. And if I mentioned my academic qualifications I was treated as if I had been bragging – so, I was treated with contempt. “Well… la di dah” someone would say, with his finger pushing up his nose. 

Not all of my friends from high school went to college, but no one ever questioned that I would. And of course, once I was in college I was insulated by similar-minded people. So, it wasn’t until I moved to March, in England, that I discovered people who actively resented higher education.

 It took me awhile to realize it was a class issue. In the UK, about 33% percent of 18 year olds go on to higher education (in the US, it is 40%), however that is a recent development.  In the town of March, only 30 miles from Cambridge, only 9% had a higher education qualification,  according to the 2001 census (the most recent).  This is a working class town, where most people are educated on the job through apprenticeship and experience, and some view a university education, with the assumed increased earning potential, as “taking the easy way.” 

[In the prison, an officer could advance to a rank of Senior Officer after years (or decades) of hard work, but if he had a university degree, he could "fast-track" and become a Governor (the highest rank) in only 3 years.]

Perhaps this attitude comes from hundreds of years of oppression by the higher classes. Oxford was founded in 1096 and Cambridge in 1209. No other universities were established in England until the 19th Century, with the majority of the 89 universities in England being founded after WWII.  The most recent expansion of the university system was in 1992, when 35 polytechnic (trade) schools were given university status.  Now more people are attending university than ever before, but in the country towns and villages haven’t quite caught onto that trend.

I have more I could say on this, and say it more clearly too, but when I blew my nose just now, the room started spinning. I'm not quite coherent yet, so I'll try again tomorrow.

http://www.britishcouncil.org/usa-education-uk-system-k-12-education.htm
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/news/hefce/2010/trends.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_university
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Universities

Topic 26: The Tendency to Exaggerate

 Carol: 

Order Me a Up A Whopper

When I woke up this morning, I looked down into the yard instead of up at the mountain. It has been raining buckets here for two days, and now those weeds with the little yellow flowers are growing as high as, well, an elephant’s eye. If I’ve told Marc once, I’ve told him a million times that we need to weedwack more often.  I’d nag him to do it this morning, but he is snowed under at work right now. I’d ask Megan to do it, but this latest cold has knocked her dead. I’d do it myself, but I have tons of stuff to work on this morning, including finishing this darn essay on the tendency to exaggerate.

                             

The weeds are as high as a coyote's eye.

When I drew the topic, I wondered if this was kind of like that “curiosity in chickens” topic. As a breed, do chickens exhibit curiosity? Never did really answer that question. As a culture, do Americans tend to exaggerate?  Do we live in a world where everything has to be the biggest, the best, the brightest, the fastest, the most?  And if it isn’t, can we just “make it so” with the words we choose? Or am I just exaggerating?

In the United States we have a strong history of story-telling that stretches the truth both for fun and to make a point. In fact, every region of the country has its own tall tale, starting with Paul Bunyan, the giant lumberjack, and his big blue ox Babe. According to legend he was born in Maine and he was so big it took seven storks to deliver him. Eventually, he got so large he outgrew the state of Maine, so his parents moved to Minnesota.  If he’d gone much further west, he would have met up with Pecos Bill, the cowboy who was so tough he could ride anything, including a tornado. It’s only fitting that Pecos Bill  would marry a woman like  Slue Foot Sue, who looked pretty good in that river riding a catfish as big as a whale. If Maine got too small for Paul Bunyan, Texas got too tame for Pecos Bill, so he headed out to New Mexico.

In Arizona, we just don’t need to make up tall tales because the real characters are already larger than life. Take Mary Katherine Haroney (1850-1940).  Her history rivals any folktale, how  she was born into an aristocratic family in Budapest, was sent with them to Mexico in 1862, then turned up in  a “sporting house” in Kansas in 1874, next to Texas where she met up her “on-again, off-again” lover Doc Holliday, and finally to Arizona. At some point, the aristocrat from Hungary became Kate Elder, the prostitute, but in Prescott we call her “Big Nose Kate.”  At the end of the 1870’s, Kate, Doc Holliday, and the Earps were all here. Virgil Earp was an assistant constable, Wyatt’s wife Bessie was running a sporting house, and Doc was doing a lot of gambling at the Palace Bar.  Long after that shoot-out in Tombstone, long after her final break-up with Doc Holliday, Big Nose Kate returned to Prescott. She lived in the Arizona Pioneer Home, died a week before her 90th birthday, and is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery.  And that’s no whopper.  

Big Nose Kate

Sources:
Big Nose Kate
Paul Bunyan
Pecos Bill: A Legend of Frontier Spirit

Megan: 

has diagnosed herself with either pneumonia or tuberculosis, or maybe some other life-threatening respiratory disease. Hopefully, she will be cured soon. 

Topic 25: The Responsibility of a 'Perfect' Baby

Carol:

Learning From the Experts

When I was pregnant in 1981, I didn’t have friends or family nearby to count on for quick advice; so I bought books.  It just seemed natural. After all, I had been raised by Dr. Spock’s advice in the 1945 The Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare.  My first purchase was not Dr. Spock but Letty Cottin Pogrebin’s Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the 80’s. After all, I was also raised by Ms. Magazine.  Not that my generation was new to the idea of “parenting by numbers.” Somewhere along the way, raising children moved from family guidance and instinct to “read all about it.”

The first books about children read by American women were written by physicians and ministers.  In Essay on Nursing and the Management of Children from Their Birth to Three Years of Age(1749) Dr. William Cadogan wrote about  sensible approaches to the care and nursing of children rather than “pre-enlightment” practices and prejudices: “In my opinion, this business[of nursing] has too long fatally left to the management of  women, who cannot be supposed to have proper knowledge to fit them for such a task. . ."(3) The books published by physicians during the next century extended to such topics as toilet training, controlling emotions such as anger and jealousy, obedience, etc.

By the mid-19th century, emphasis was placed on the importance of the middle-class in raising men as productive citizens, and on the mother as the “Queen of the Household.”  .In his 1871 book Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young, Jacob Abbott emphasized that:

    …the work of training her children to the habit of submission to her authority is a
duty, the responsibility of which devolves not upon her children, but upon her; that it is a duty, moreover, of the highest importance, and one that demands careful consideration, much forethought, and the wise adaptation of means to
an end.

The mother was the “supreme being” within the private sphere, and poetry in popular women’s magazines exalted her to either royal or divine status. Mind you, that was inside the home.

Mamie and Lonie DeWitt, around 1895.

                         

By the early 20th century, child-rearing had become the stuff of professionals—pediatricians, child psychologists, educators—and government. In 1912 the U.S. Children’s Bureau was established and Parents Magazine, which included a variety of columns by both parents and experts, began publication in 1926.

It didn’t take long me to realize that I was too busy raising  children to read about raising children. The telephone was a quick resource for emergencies, some of which can’t be looked up in the index of a book. The National Poison Control Center Hotline told me Marshall couldn’t die from eating Carmax  and even lowered my guilt, “Don’t worry, M’am, most of our calls come from mothers of two-year-old boys. “ Another afternoon while the kidlets  were napping, I decided to do some home repairs with SuperGlu. When I realized I had glued my right-hand thumb and middle finger together, I called my mommy. Her advice was quick: “Call the emergency room and ask them what to do, but don’t tell them your name.” 

I don’t know how to raise a perfect child (sorry, Megan and Marshall), nor do I know how to raise a child perfectly (sorry, Megan and Marshall) Let’s hear it from an expert, not Dr. Spock but Dr. Cosby:

In spite of the six thousand manuals on child raising in the bookstores, child raising is still a dark continent and no one really knows anything.  You just need a lot of love and luck - and, of course, courage.  ~Bill Cosby, Fatherhood, 1986

Megan and Marshall, around 1988.

Sources:  

Abbot, Jacob. Gentle measures in the management and training of the young. 1871

Cadogan, William. An essay Upon Nursing and the management of children from their Birth to Three Years old. 1749  Googlebooks

Mehling, Jay. Child-Rearing Advice Literature.

Megan:

Is once again in poor health and suggests you read this instead: The Good Enough Baby by Andy Borowitz.

Topic 24: After He Was Dead

Carol:

Mountain Sketches 

When we moved to Prescott in the early 1980’s we sacrificed the convenience of the town and the serenity of the pines for the Williamson Valley vistas of Bill Williams Mountain and the San Francisco Peaks. But, the view framed by the windows at the front of our house gives me the greatest sense of wonder.  The official height of Granite Mountain is 7626 feet although 5000 of those feet are already the altitude of Prescott.  This mountain isn’t one of grandeur or of breath-stopping scale; it is one of daily, even hourly change as the light and weather play across its rocky surface. I wish I could paint it. No, I wish Cezanne could paint it.

Cezanne had plenty of practice painting mountains, well one mountain-- the limestone ridge outside the city of Aix-en-Provence in Provence.  Like Granite Mountain, Mont St. Victoire  would not not immediately impress those used to the Alps or the Canadian Rockies, but at a height of 3317 feet it dominates an otherwise fairly flat terrain. When I was a student  in Aix in 1968, I used to contemplate Cezanne’s mountain from  the wide windowsill in my room at the LaPlane family’s 300-year old farmhouse. I understood why Cezanne would paint it over 60 times from different angles, under different lights and weather conditions.

Aix was the childhood home of both Paul Cezanne and the future writer Emile Zola. Cezanne’s  love of Provence and its intense light, colors and varied landscape would bring him back to the Midi despite a complex and often painful relationship with his own family and with the town itself.  Retreating from the Paris art scene, he spent his final years in an almost reclusive lifestyle but one of great artistic energy and productivity.  However, his reputation in his own town was so low that the director of Aix’s Musee Granet, Henri-Modeste Pontier, refused to exhibit Cezanne’s work (Murphy 166).

"Cezanne was the ultimate outsider and misunderstood during most of his life. Success came little and late, although young promising painters came to visit him during his last years"  (Exposhop).

Paul Cezanne died on October 23, 1906 after contracting pneumonia. Days earlier, he had been caught in a storm while walking home from one of his painting excursions near Mont St. Victoire. He was buried in one of Aix’s oldest cemeteries.

One year after he was dead, a successful 1907 exposition of his work in Paris marked his increasing influence on  the 20th century modern art movement.

Twenty years after he was dead, the Musee Granet displayed the first Cezanne painting -- after the death of Director Pontier.

Fifty years after he was dead, The Musee Granet held its first major exhibition of Cezanne’s work.

One hundred years after he was dead, France declared 2006 “The Year of Cezanne.”
The highlight of national events was a celebratory exhibit at a newly renovated Musee Granet.  Aix-en-Provence finally learned to love its native son.

After he was dead.

 

Sources:

Cezanne, the Artists' Artist

Cezanne - Wikipedia
Exposhop.com: Cezanne 

Coutagne, Denis. Cezanne in Provence. Universe/Vendome 1996

Murphy, Richard W. The World of Cezanne 1839-1906 Time-Life Books, New York 1968

Megan:

Posthumous Executions

In England, I lived across the street from the Oliver Cromwell Hotel. Throughout Cambridgeshire County numerous places and landmarks are named for him because he was born in Huntingdon in 1599, which is about 20 miles south of March, where I lived.  I didn’t (and still don’t) know much about English history, so I did a little research. Apparently, he played a significant role in the English Civil War and is credited with making England into a republican Commonwealth. After he helped kill King Charles I, Cromwell became Lord Protector. He’s not too popular with the Irish because he’s responsible for killing a lot of them, but that doesn’t seem to be something the English hold against him. He died a hero in 1658, and was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey.

Politics in England shifted dramatically as Charles II was restored to the monarchy in 1660. Cromwell’s body was exhumed in 1661, and he was publicly executed – hung then beheaded – for his crimes against Charles I. His body was dropped in a pit, but the head was passed around for the next 300 years until it was finally buried at Sidney Sussex College in 1960.

I have to say I find the idea of posthumous executions bizarre.  They indicate extreme rage, but also frustration on the part of the executioners, especially if the victim first died of natural causes. Anyway, I did some more research because I was curious about who else might have been executed after he was dead. The ever-helpful, if not completely accurate Wikipedia has a list of them, the most interesting are reprinted below:
 

• Li Linfu, Chancellor of Tang China during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (712–756) in the latter years, was exhumed and executed for crimes of high treason by his rival Yang Guozhong for his implication in the An Lushan Rebellion.
• John Wycliffe (1328–1384), was burned as a heretic 45 years after he died.
• Captain William Kidd, whose body was gibbeted in 1701 — left to hang in an iron cage over the River Thames at Tilbury Point — as a warning to future would-be pirates for twenty years.
• In 1917 the body of Rasputin, the Russian mystic, was exhumed from the ground by a mob and burned with gasoline.
• In 1918 the body of Lavr Kornilov, the Russian general, was exhumed from the ground by a pro-Bolshevik mob, beaten, trampled down and burned.
• In 1945 the body of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was lynched, hung (upside down), kicked in the head by passers-by, and shot several times after his execution by a firing squad.
• General Gracia Jacques, a supporter of François Duvalier ("Papa Doc") (1907–1971), Haitian dictator, whose body was exhumed and ritually beaten to 'death' in 1986.

Source: Posthumous Executions

Topic 23: Curiosity of Chickens

Carol:

CHICKEN SCRATCHINGS:

With Apologies to My Vegan Friends

“Chicken Little likes to walk in the woods. She likes to look at the trees. She likes to smell the flowers. She likes to listen to the birds singing.” (from Chicken Little)

One of the most memorable scenes in Giant is the Thanksgiving dinner scene.  When Elizabeth Taylor’s children find out the delectable looking stuffed turkey on the dining room table had been their “friend” Pedro the day before, they burst into tears and the meal is ruined.  Being a city girl myself, I haven’t had a lot of “up close and personal” moments with farm animals other than Sammy, the goat we owned for 5 years because he came with the house. But, I have talked to people who were raised on farms and generally they are unsentimental about animals and most likely don’t go naming them except for the occasional 4-H project.  We don’t eat our friends.

Most of the chicken stories I know are rated V for violence, not F for friend. On our morning walk today, I asked my friends (both transplanted Midwesterners) whether or not as children they had been around chickens. Mary replied that she had not, but her mother would buy  live chickens, then slaughter  and pluck them for dinner. Marilyn, who was raised on a farm, admitted that she and her sister had killed a chicken for dinner while their parents were not home.“It wasn’t pretty,” she said.  I too remember the chickens that pecked around in my grandmother’s yard during our childhood visits to their farm near Clovis, California.  Grandma was  a sweet, gentle lady, but she had no problem grabbing a chicken, wringing its neck, plucking its feathers, and serving it an hour later with dumplings and rice. Did those chickens have names? Personalities? Curiosity?

   

The chicken experts in my family live an hour away in Cornville (chickens and corn—they just go together, don’t they?). My niece and her family live in a rural community just half an hour and a culture apart from Sedona the chic. I would have asked them whether or not chickens should be named, chickens have personalities, or chickens are curious, but Allison is busy with her nursing classes, Craig is off managing the vineyard at Page Springs Winery, and the REAL expert… well, he’s at kindergarten.

Troen is the keeper of the chickens, the catcher of the chickens, and the harvester of eggs. He got this job by way of his size and speed. When he was younger, he was the only one who could get into the coop and catch a chicken, or squeeze in and grab a fresh, warm egg. He didn’t have to name the chickens. He will probably tell you they already came with names, like Leghorns or Rhode Island Reds or Plymouth Rocks. He will also tell you that eggs aren’t always white but come in beautiful shades of blues and greens as well. After all, he’s the expert. 

Higgledy, piggledy, my black hen,

She lays eggs for gentlemen;

Sometimes nine, sometimes ten

Higgledy, piggledy, my black hen.

Megan:

Three Reasons I Don't Like Chickens

A couple of months ago, my cousin Allison asked me to chicken-sit while she and her family went on vacation. My responsibilities were to open their pen in the morning and shut the pen at night, make sure they had enough food and collect the eggs.  Pretty easy, right? Actually no.

I’d always had this idea of free-range organic chickens skipping happily through the grass, clucking occasionally, gathering around while a farmer’s wife in a white apron scattered feed in the wind.  Like all idealized fantasies, I got that from the movies. Turns out chickens are disgusting, revolting pests only one step higher than pigeons.  Over the course of four days, I had at least 3 run-ins with these beasts that made me want to strike them from the planet forever.

First, after going to the grocery store to stock up on supplies, I left the car door open as I was unloading. When I came back outside there were no less than 5 chickens flapping and clucking around inside the car. This might have been charming, but they were pooping too.

Second, it’s hotter where my cousin lives. It’s only about an hour away from Prescott, but it’s at a lower altitude, which makes it closer to the fires of hell (science!). I’d only just returned to the country and had not adjusted yet. I was lying on the floor of their living room in my underwear, with a cold wet beach towel draped over me when I saw the shadow of a monster pass by the door. It was shaped like a rooster, but it was more than 6 feet tall. I’m not going to get into all of the details of what happened next, but there was screaming. I felt pretty stupid when I realized it was only a regular sized rooster, lit from behind by the setting sun, which cast a shadow bigger than a man.

The third event took place another evening after I’d shut them in their pen for the night. I suddenly heard the most god-awful racket coming from the pen. A chicken was screaming like it was being murdered.  It took me a minute to get myself in the proper frame of mind to go outside in the near darkness to confront a predator. As I opened the door, the racket ceased and a chicken suddenly went running past me into the bushes behind the house. And then the screams started again from the coop, so I went over to check. A chicken was in the tree that grew in the coop. It was scooting along the branch that overhung the fence, screeching and clucking like it was terrified. Once it passed over the top of the fence, it gave a final terrible chicken scream and fell out of the tree onto the ground outside the coop. Then it picked itself up and ran off into the bushes after its friend. Dumbest escape I’ve ever seen. I didn’t even try to herd them back, I just went inside and closed the door.