Segregation – Integration – Choice
A fascinating new and very long article from The New York Times Magazine section discusses a school where boys and girls have a choice of integrated or segregated classrooms – in the same school.
I would have hated going to an all-girl school, and at the same time, I think it is far for people to have a choice in how they want to learn. What was right for me is not right for everyone else, and maybe not for YOU – or your children.
Here is a quote from deep in the article, about how things are succeeding at one same-sex school. I wonder how this technique would fly in Kuwait đ
If a child arrives at 7:31 a.m., his parents will receive a call at 5:45 the next morning to make sure that boy will be at school on time.
By ELIZABETH WEIL
Published: March 2, 2008
On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Benderâs fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls donât appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boysâ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girlsâ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.
Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the schoolâs principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called âBoys and Girls Learn Differently!â After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foleyâs lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in âWhy Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.â Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Saxâs book and lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girlsâ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girlsâ artwork and make boys feel that theyâre drawing incorrectly. Under Saxâs leadership, teachers learn to say things like, âDamien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like itâs going faster.â âNow Damien feels encouraged,â Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. âTo say: âWhy donât you use more colors? Why donât you put someone in the vehicle?â is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, âWell, this is nice, but why donât you have one of them kick the other one â give us some action.â â
During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to read âBoys and Girls Learn Differently!â and, in the spring of 2004, to attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boysâ and girlsâ innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girlsâ and a boysâ class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each grade remained coed.
Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their childrenâs public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girlsâ crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University Women published âShortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,â which described how girlsâ self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a âman bites dogâ sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys. Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught âby soft-spoken women who boreâ boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Education, claiming that his high school â where there are twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys â discriminated against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools.
Foley Intermediate School began offering separate classes for boys and girls a few years ago, after the schoolâs principal, Lee Mansell, read a book by Michael Gurian called âBoys and Girls Learn Differently!â After that, she read a magazine article by Sax and thought that his insights would help improve the test scores of Foleyâs lowest-achieving cohort, minority boys. Sax went on to publish those ideas in âWhy Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences.â Both books feature conversion stories of children, particularly boys, failing and on Ritalin in coeducational settings and then pulling themselves together in single-sex schools. Saxâs book and lectures also include neurological diagrams and scores of citations of obscure scientific studies, like one by a Swedish researcher who found, in a study of 96 adults, that males and females have different emotional and cognitive responses to different kinds of light. Sax refers to a few other studies that he says show that girls and boys draw differently, including one from a group of Japanese researchers who found girlsâ drawings typically depict still lifes of people, pets or flowers, using 10 or more crayons, favoring warm colors like red, green, beige and brown; boys, on the other hand, draw action, using 6 or fewer colors, mostly cool hues like gray, blue, silver and black. This apparent difference, which Sax argues is hard-wired, causes teachers to praise girlsâ artwork and make boys feel that theyâre drawing incorrectly. Under Saxâs leadership, teachers learn to say things like, âDamien, take your green crayon and draw some sparks and take your black crayon and draw some black lines coming out from the back of the vehicle, to make it look like itâs going faster.â âNow Damien feels encouraged,â Sax explained to me when I first met him last spring in San Francisco. âTo say: âWhy donât you use more colors? Why donât you put someone in the vehicle?â is as discouraging as if you say to Emily, âWell, this is nice, but why donât you have one of them kick the other one â give us some action.â â
During the fall of 2003, Principal Mansell asked her entire faculty to read âBoys and Girls Learn Differently!â and, in the spring of 2004, to attend a one-day seminar led by Sax at the school, explaining boysâ and girlsâ innate differences and how to teach to them. She also invited all Foley Intermediate School parents to a meeting extolling the virtues of single-sex public education. Enough parents were impressed that when Foley Intermediate, a school of 322 fourth and fifth graders, reopened after summer recess, the school had four single-sex classrooms: a girlsâ and a boysâ class in both the fourth and fifth grades. Four classrooms in each grade remained coed.
Separating schoolboys from schoolgirls has long been a staple of private and parochial education. But the idea is now gaining traction in American public schools, in response to both the desire of parents to have more choice in their childrenâs public education and the separate education crises girls and boys have been widely reported to experience. The girlsâ crisis was cited in the 1990s, when the American Association of University Women published âShortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America,â which described how girlsâ self-esteem plummets during puberty and how girls are subtly discouraged from careers in math and science. More recently, in what Sara Mead, an education expert at the New America Foundation, calls a âman bites dogâ sensation, public and parental concerns have shifted to boys. Boys are currently behind their sisters in high-school and college graduation rates. School, the boy-crisis argument goes, is shaped by females to match the abilities of girls (or, as Sax puts it, is taught âby soft-spoken women who boreâ boys). In 2006, Doug Anglin, a 17-year-old in Milton, Mass., filed a civil rights complaint with the United States Department of Education, claiming that his high school â where there are twice as many girls on the honor roll as there are boys â discriminated against males. His case did not prevail in the courts, but his sentiment found support in the Legislature and the press. That same year, as part of No Child Left Behind, the federal law that authorizes programs aimed at improving accountability and test scores in public schools, the Department of Education passed new regulations making it easier for districts to create single-sex classrooms and schools.
Children Damaged by Materialism
A recent study discussed in BBC Health News:
Children ‘damaged’ by materialism
Some 89% of adults think children are more materialistic than ever
Most adults in the UK believe that children’s well-being is being damaged because childhood has become too commercial, a lifestyle poll has found. Some 89% of adults in the GfK NOP survey of 1,255 people believed today’s children were more materialistic than previous generations.
The poll is one of the contributions to a continuing inquiry into childhood.
The Children’s Society said adults had to “take responsibility for the current level of marketing to children”.
Bob Reitemeier, chief executive of the society, said: “A crucial question raised by the inquiry is whether childhood should be a space where developing minds are free from concentrated sales techniques.
“To accuse children of being materialistic in such a culture is a cop-out,” he said.
Mr Reitemeier said: “Unless we question our own behaviour as a society we risk creating a generation who are left unfulfilled through chasing unattainable lifestyles.”
The children’s market is worth an estimated ÂŁ30 bn a year.
As chief executive of the National Schools Partnership, Mark Fawcett brings business and marketing into schools, and he believes you cannot shield children from the real world.
“We have to live in the current communications era where children can see a huge amount of information,” he told BBC TV news. “We have to use our judgement and we have to, as an industry, make sure we are working with children and families, and not exploiting them.”
Selling lifestyles
The evidence on lifestyle is part of a six-part series of investigations published by the Children’s Society for a continuing inquiry into childhood in the UK which brings together the views of academics, religious communities, teachers, local authorities and authors.
Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is patron of the inquiry, said: “Children should be encouraged to value themselves for who they are as people rather than what they own. “The selling of lifestyles to children creates a culture of material competitiveness and promotes acquisitive individualism at the expense of the principles of community and co-operation.”
Comment: It’s not just children. We are ALL damaged when we start to measure ourselves by what we own. You can read the entire article Here.
Iranians “We Do Not Want an Islamic State”
I found this reference on Global Voices: Kuwait:
#Several bloggers including Schrr have reported[Fa] that today in Sadeghyeh in Tehran,while security forces wanted to arrest a young girl,many people came to help her.Here is a video film about this event where people chanted âwe do not want Islamic Stateâ.
The video is a little chaotic, but I love it that bloggers/U-Tubers can share all this news quickly and efficiently.
How Decisions are Made in Kuwait
Here is the problem expats have in any country: you don’t know what you don’t know.
If you know you don’t know something, you can learn it. If you don’t know that you don’t know, there is this huge void in your understanding. Many times you can suspect there is a void, and if you ask, people will look at you like you are a little odd, and they will tell you there is no difference.
There IS a difference.
Working together with people of different nationalities, I have learned that some nationalities just forge on ahead and do things. Some nationalities use a more consultative process. Some nationalities expect to be told what to do and don’t do what they are not told to do.
In Friday’s Kuwait Times (February 21) is a column by Shamael Al-Sharikh, called The red, white, green and black. She talks about Kuwait National and Liberation Days, she talks about the shared heritage of all Kuwaitis (honestly, I would love to link you directly to this article but the website is still down) and then – I got a huge “AHA!” She talks about how decisions are made in Kuwait. I will quote a brief section, but I urge you all to find this column and read it in it’s entirety.
“. . . it has become painfully clear that there are nationals of this country who have no sense of belonging to it whatsoever.
However, the storm is about to subside. In a move that shows just how ready Kuwaitis are to mobilize for the sake of their national pride, a few diwaniyas in Kuwait signed a petition and sent it to the Takatul Shaabi political alliance at the National Assembly. It stated that unless MPs Adnan Abdulsamad and Ahmad Lari are asked to withdraw their membership from the Takatul Shaabi, none of it’s members will be welcome in Kuwait’s diwaniyas nor at weddings and funerals.
The move worked: the MPs have been asked to leave. . . the petitions included diwaniyas from all corners of the Kuwaiti society, both Sunni and Shiite, and it covered all sorts of ethnic backgrounds. . . I have never been more proud to support the red, white, green and black than I have now, and I am so proud to be a Kuwaiti.”
Not being welcome in diwaniyas, at weddings or at funerals is not something I would have considered political pressure. It matters here. It mattered enough that when diverse communities within Kuwait made the threat, it was effective. Who knew? Thanks to this column, I learned something I didn’t even know I didn’t know.
Keystone Cops
As you all have seen from US Crime tapes, this news story could happen anywhere, but it happened in Kuwait. I would love to see a video of this!
Kuwait Times, 21 Feb 2008
Drunken Man
The operations room received an anonymous call reporting that a drunken man had been dancing in the streets of Fehaheel and terrifying passersby. A police patrol rushed to the scene and managed to arrest the suspect, who initially resisted arrest.
However, after being cuffed and forced into the patrol vehicle for just a couple of seconds, he managed to step out and ran for dear life while police were busy putting some gear into the vehicle’s trunk. A wild goose chase ensued with police hot on his trail, while the man returned to the spot where the vehicle was parked, got in, stepped on the gas and sped to his freedom again. Police later tracked the vehicle that was dumped in a deserted area in Jleeb. A manhunt has been launched to arrest this man.
I commend the writer on the correct use of the plural “passersby.” Bravo.
Your challenge: how many cliche’s did this staff writer use to write this article?
Aidan Hartley’s Zanzibar Chest
I started Zanzibar Chest in December, and could not get into it. It was interesting, but at first the tone was . . . I don’t know, maybe pompous? Something in the tone put me off, and yet I didn’t put it back on the bookshelves, nor did I give it away. It sat on my bed table while I attacked lesser works, more enjoyable fare. Then, one day, I just knew it was time to try it again, and this time, I could hardly put it down.
Born in Kenya, just before the rebellion, Aidan Hartley spent his life mostly in Africa. He skillfully interweaves three main story lines – the life of his mother and father, the life of his father’s best friend and his own life as a news correspondent.
This is not a joyful book. It is not inspirational. It is a tough, hard look at the people who cover the news, and the toll it takes on their lives. It is a story of drugs and alcohol to numb the pain of what they are observing, the comraderie of gallows humor and surviving the intensity of living through life-threatening moments together.
He covers some truly awful events. He covers the wars in Somalia, and in Rwanda. He covers Kosovo and Serbia. He is sent into some of the most dangerous and awful of places. He pays the price.
In his Zanzibar Chest, he takes us with him.
I will share a couple quotes with you, and if you are sensitive, please stop reading now. This book is not for you. It is almost not for me, except that sometimes I think we need to come face to face with just how awful reality can be to put our own lives right, to set appropriate priorities.
“I can’t put my finger on exactly how death smells. The stench of human putrefecation is different from that of all other animals. It moves us as instinctively as the cry of a newly born baby. It lies at one extreme end of the olfactory register. Blood from the injured and the dying smells coppery. After a cadaver’s a day old, you smell it before you see it. From the odor alone, I could tell how long a body had been dead and even, depending on whether brains or bowels had been opened up, where it had been hacked or shot. A body would quickly balloon up in the tropical heat, eyes and tongue swelling, flesh straining against clothes until the skin bursts and fluids spill from lesions. Flies would get in there and within three days the corpse might stink. It became a yellow mass of pupae cascading out of all orifices and the flesh literally undulated beneath the clothes. The tough bits of skin on the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet were the parts of the body that always rotted away last. As living people, these had been peasants who had walked without shoes and worked hard in the fields. A man who had been dead seven days reeks of boiling beans, guava fruit, glue, blown handkerchiefs, cloves and vinegar. After that he starts to dry out into a skeleton until he’s almost inoffensive . . .
The dead accompanied me long after Rwanda. It was months before I could order a plate of red meat served up in a restaurant. I smelled putrefaction in my mouth, or in my dirty socks, or as sweat on my body. I imagined what people I met would look like when dead. . . “
These guys all suffer from Post traumatic stress syndrome, they deaden themselves with drug and alcohol, and they are totally addicted to the adrenalin rush their job gives them. Living on adrenalin takes a huge toll – on their health, on their mental health, on their relationships, on their belief in goodness. They are the witnesses to the enormity of man’s inhumanity against one another.
In another quote, the author tells us:
“It was impossible for latecomers to comprehend the evil committed here but the British military top brass were still so scared of what their soldiers might see and what it would do to their minds that they sent a psychiatrist to accompany the forces to Rwanda. Bald Sam and I were amazed at that. We laughed about it. A shrink! It seemed extravagant. But the truth is that we stuck close to that man for days. We said it was all for a story, but really it was about us. The psychiatrist, whose name was Ian, told us his special area of interest was the minds of war correspondents. I could see Bald Sam squirming with happiness at all the attention, and I felt quite flattered myself. . . .
. . . for years I did endure some sort of payback. I have to try every day to prevent the poison that sits in my mind to spread outward and hurt the people I love. Sometimes I can’t stop it and I wonder if in some way the corruption will be passed on from me to my children.”
Toward the end of the book, the author tells us how hard it is to give up this adrenalin-news-junky life:
“Whenever I see a news headline to this day I half feel I should board the next flight into the heart of it. I’d love to get all charged up again and I could write the story with my eyes closed. I’m sure the sense that I’m missing out while others get in on a great story will never completely pass. . . The sight of people committing acts of unspeakable brutality against others fills a hole in some of us. The activity is made respectable by being paid a salary to do it, but there is a cost.”
This is not a book I really wanted to read, but it is a book I will never forget. Hartley doesn’t spare himself in the telling of this tale. He takes us with us and shows us all of it, and all of his own warts along with the tale. Would I recommend this book? Not for the sensitive, not for those who don’t want to look at the dark side. Between idyllic sequences on the beaches near Mombasa, in the hills of Kenya and Tanzania, in the dusty deserts of Yemen, there are some very intense and bloody moments. This is non-fiction, it is a documentary, it is a slice of the real life one man has seen, and that to which he has been witness. Read the book, and like him, you pay a price. You carry images in your head that you can’t forget, and a sorrow for our inability to solve our differences peaceably.
(Available in paperback from Amazon.com for $10.88. Disclosure: Yes, I own stock in Amazon.com.)
Date Night Sparks
This is the #1 most e-mailed article from the New York Times, and you can read the entire article by clicking HERE:
Reinventing Date Night for Long-Married Couples
By TARA PARKER-POPE
Published: February 12, 2008
Long-married couples often schedule a weekly âdate nightâ â a regular evening out with friends or at a favorite restaurant to strengthen their marital bond.
But brain and behavior researchers say many couples are going about date night all wrong. Simply spending quality time together is probably not enough to prevent a relationship from getting stale.
Using laboratory studies, real-world experiments and even brain-scan data, scientists can now offer long-married couples a simple prescription for rekindling the romantic love that brought them together in the first place. The solution? Reinventing date night.
Rather than visiting the same familiar haunts and dining with the same old friends, couples need to tailor their date nights around new and different activities that they both enjoy, says Arthur Aron, a professor of social psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The goal is to find ways to keep injecting novelty into the relationship. The activity can be as simple as trying a new restaurant or something a little more unusual or thrilling â like taking an art class or going to an amusement park.
The theory is based on brain science. New experiences activate the brainâs reward system, flooding it with dopamine and norepinephrine. These are the same brain circuits that are ignited in early romantic love, a time of exhilaration and obsessive thoughts about a new partner. (They are also the brain chemicals involved in drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder.)
Most studies of love and marriage show that the decline of romantic love over time is inevitable. The butterflies of early romance quickly flutter away and are replaced by familiar, predictable feelings of long-term attachment.
But several experiments show that novelty â simply doing new things together as a couple â may help bring the butterflies back, recreating the chemical surges of early courtship.
Just Bad English
I am adding a new catagory today called Just Bad English.
No, I am not going to troll your blogs looking for grammar mistakes or misspellings or unusual use of English. I have noticed that I am blogging in English, and that many of the Kuwaiti bloggers are blogging in their second language – that is tough enough without the Language Police lurking in the background, and that’s not my point, nor my interest.
If, however, you are writing for a newspaper, you are held to a higher standard, even if English is not your native tongue.
So tell me, in this article from the Arab Times Kuwait Crime News, how many people were arrested? What were they arrested for?
Meanwhile, a team of securitymen has launched a surprise inspection campaign in Ahmadi resulting in the arrest of two Kuwaitis wanted by law for various criminal charges and 105 jobless expatriates. The arrested individuals were referred to the concerned authorities.
I have another complaint. In the Kuwait Times, we often read of the police “suspecting” a car and pulling it over, or
“suspecting” some individuals and chasing them.
We don’t use “suspecting” that way.
There is suspicious behavior. People are suspected OF something – you can’t just look at a car and “suspect” it, you have to suspect it OF something – erratic driving? What made the police suspicious?
examples of good usage:
Police suspected him of being under the influence of drugs, and pulled him over.
He looked nervous, and police suspected him of being an illegal resident, so they asked to see his papers.
Police received a tip that a brothel was operating in Farwaniya, and based on that suspicion, raided the apartment, breaking down two iron doors in the process which gave the occupants enough time to escape through a hidden hatch in the back of the apartment.
A sharp eyes policeman spotted the car, which appeared to be one stolen a few nights previously. Suspicious that the driver was not the legal owner, they stopped him and interrogated him, and demanded to see his registration and residency papers.
(I made up all the above. Any resemblance to a case you may know is purely coincidental.)
I have also noticed that almost every suspect gives up his drug accomplices, pimp, fellow thieves, smugglers and drug stash after interrogation. I suspect Kuwait police have some extensive experience in encouraging these confessions. Most of these confessions seem to result in other valid arrests. Sometimes, I can believe, these confessions are made by people who are very very afraid. On the other hand, sometimes a confession elicited by fear of a lot of pain might be totally false.
How do you know the difference? What if someone experiences a lot of pain and confesses to a crime they did NOT commit? This means that an innocent man suffers and the one who committed the crime skates. This happens in every country in the world. (That is just a rant, not a language criticism, just a general question in my mind; how do we protect the innocent?)
Diet Soda and Metabolic Syndrome
Bad news about a recent study on Diet Soda from The New York Times. You can read more up-to-date health news by clicking on the blue type.
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: February 5, 2008
Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome â the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels, and elevated blood pressure.
The scientists gathered dietary information on more than 9,500 men and women ages 45 to 64 and tracked their health for nine years.
Over all, a Western dietary pattern â high intakes of refined grains, fried foods and red meat â was associated with an 18 percent increased risk for metabolic syndrome, while a âprudentâ diet dominated by fruits, vegetables, fish and poultry correlated with neither an increased nor a decreased risk.
But the one-third who ate the most fried food increased their risk by 25 percent compared with the one-third who ate the least, and surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with those who drank none.
âThis is interesting,â said Lyn M. Steffen, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the paper, which was posted online in the journal Circulation on Jan. 22. âWhy is it happening? Is it some kind of chemical in the diet soda, or something about the behavior of diet soda drinkers?â
Kuwait Weirdness
This is such a small thing, but just TOO WEIRD! In the tiny little weather forecast in today’s Kuwait Times, it says that today’s weather will reach a high of 48°C and tonight will reach a low of 32°C. Like Weather Underground says 24°C/14° – that’s very different. It was hot today, but much more like 24° than a summery 48°C (118.4°F.)
More weirdness – isn’t there any warning when a major road is going to close, you know, like GULF ROAD??? I was caught in the quagmire today, trying to get home and not able to get on Gulf Road and seeing all the north-south major roads in total gridlock. What is this??? I never saw a word, not in Arab Times, not in Kuwait Times, not in the blogs – did anyone know this was coming?
Recent Comments
ExpatAlien on What Country am I Living … intlxpatr on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Michelle on Yellowstone: Old Faithful to C… Cathy on No Grown-Ups in Charge intlxpatr on Waiting for Snow Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 