An opinion column by Caitlin Flanagan in the NYTimes today, entitled “Hysteria and the Teenage Girl,” maps out for us why it is that girls experience “hysterical reactions” to stress more often than do boys, especially in the pressure-filled teenage years. She lists separate episodes in which groups of girls or young women from various cultures—two [...]
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September 8th, 2011 I am privileged to live in a district with superb public schools. But, despite its proximity to some of the most affluent suburbs of Philadelphia and access to significant tax revenues, this is also a school system, like so many others in the nation, with a documented achievement gap between African American students and those [...] June 14th, 2011 I’ve been watching the spread of a troubling recessionary idea: That sending fewer Americans to college will solve our economic problems. In STEM fields, this is part of the whole “skills gap” story so popular in talk about education-for-jobs today…the notion that in order for the nation to thrive, we need more people who prepare [...] February 9th, 2011 Interesting: A paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Cornell researchers Stephen J. Ceci and Wendy M. Williams has gained a great deal of media attention, as these things go. Reading the coverage, I’d say we’re definitely a culture split between those who want to put gender bias behind [...] November 24th, 2010 From "H.R. Pufnstuf," Gold Key Comics, April 1971 A page from a kids’ comic book, 1971…a single, marvelous page illustrated in a way that brings home the gendered nature of American work in that era. For boys, a future in drafting. For girls, jobs as librarians. Interesting, too, that we can tell at a glance that this [...] September 12th, 2010 At an academic workshop a few years ago, I saw a bumper sticker on a Volvo that said “Life is Too Short to Drink Bad Wine.” I fretted. This is just the kind of thing that makes people assume that all professors spend their summers swilling sauvignon on Martha’s Vineyard (the bumper sticker on the [...] June 8th, 2010 Thank you, John Tierney! Through your efforts, essentialist thinking about gender and intelligence may keep its hold on Americans for a while longer. Tierney suggests in today’s NY Times “Findings” column that we look with skepticism on a new Congressional proposal to require workshops on gender equity for all those receiving federal science research funding. The [...] May 17th, 2010 I could be projecting here, but it seems to me that 2-year colleges are getting a lot more media attention these days. The coverage brings bad news or good news by the day, depending on how you see the role of higher ed in America. On the worrying side of things for me is a growing conservative enthusiasm [...] May 4th, 2010 An immigrant family works at home, in 1909, but do they work hard enough for David Brooks? from http://ephemeralnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/cigaretterollers.jpg Do you supposed David Brooks’ wristwatch runs counter-clockwise? His column in today’s New York Times, “The Limits of Policy,” certainly seems to try to set the clock back on our understanding of ethnicity and economic [...] March 23rd, 2010 Today’s edition of NPR’s Radio Times spent an hour on proprietary colleges: the for-profit world of DeVry, ITT, the University of Phoenix, and other schools familiar to anyone who takes public transportation or watches local TV, where their ads offer training and quick advancement in nursing, computing, office management, and a host of technical occupations. It [...] |
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