In support of sex ed

My state legislature just passed a law severely restricting sex education.  If we don't hear about sex, the thinking must go, it won't happen.  At least, teenagers won't do it.

Others have argued about the truth of that statement elsewhere, and I don't want to go there for this post.  For the point of this post, let's assume it is true.  If we don't tell teenagers what sex is, then they won't have sex while teenagers.  No more unwed mothers.  No more abortion clinics -- or at least, no teens in there. That's great!

The thing about sex, though, is that it's actually a pretty natural, normal thing.  Eventually, these teenagers are going to grow up, and be in healthy, loving relationships, and happily married, and they're going to want to have sex.  And then what?  Well, sex is this scary thing that we don't talk about.  So now the healthy adults don't know what they're doing or what to expect, or even that there are options for birth control besides abstinence and abortion.  Where do they go now to learn these things?  How can we teach them?  How can we let them know that sex is a healthy part of a normal relationship?  How do we teach our daughters to stand up for their sexual well-being if we are afraid to use the word sex in front of them?  We missed our chance.

So let me be honest.  As a teenager, I hated health class, and sex ed, and I really didn't want to be there.  On the other hand, the intention wasn't really to teach the sixteen year old me frozen in time.  The point of health class was to help me and the rest of these teenagers to develop habits and learn facts that they would need into adulthood.

For example, most of us had parents who took care of our cooking, and yet we all had to learn about nutrition.  Why?  Because someday in the near future we would all be adults, making choices about what we would eat that would affect our overall health and well being.  Daily.  And all those parents who didn't want their kids messing up their kitchen when they were teenagers?  Tough.  They didn't let their kids opt out of the nutrition week.  Because nutrition is about the adult the teenager will become.

So back to sex.  Eventually teenagers will be adults, and living on their own, and they'll need to make their own choices on food AND sex.  And the more education we can give them now, the better those choices will be.  The more fear and secrecy we build around this horror called sex, the more ashamed they will be to learn about it, and the more their relationships will suffer.  Not just their teenage relationships.  Also their healthy, normal adult relationships.

Dear state legislators, I don't mean to offend you, but sex is totally normal and natural.  In fact, even your parents had sex.  At least your biological ones did.  And those teenagers?   Knowing a little about sex, even including options for contraception and not just abstinence, can really improve their future spectacular marriages -- the ones that I know you are aiming for when you pass this law in the first place.

If we don't teach our kids about sex in high school, we are missing an important chance.

Visiting Teaching

I went over to Norma's house this afternoon.  Norma, who is now 83, has been retired from her job as a professor for many years.  My next door neighbor Cassia came, too.  Cassia retired recently from a teaching job, and her husband retired within the last couple of weeks from his university job.  

Norma and Cassia and I, we laughed a lot, and read over the new instructions for visiting teaching that were just released in the most recent church magazine.  We then scratched our heads and agreed we didn't know where the changes were.  It has always been a program we had to adapt to our own needs and the needs of our neighbors.  It's always been more about helping people than checking dates off a chart.  Hasn't it?  Then what are the changes?

And then Norma and Cassia began reminiscing.  They've been neighbors for decades, and visiting teachers to one another many times in those years.  Cassia recounted how impressed she was the very first day she attended church in this neighborhood, and Norma was teaching, and keeping the class on its toes.  She laughed at the way Norma had teased her decades ago when she dropped her husband off at the university without giving him a kiss goodbye.  

Norma reminded her, do you remember the fun we used to have when I was your visiting teacher with Gail?  And they laughed, and then told me that Gail had died.  And then the conversation turned sober, and Cassia asked, do you remember when I had cancer?  And she told the story of how she had survived.  But Gail had not.  And she said she felt badly for years that she had survived and Gail had not.  

And Norma told how when she had her own cancer, in her late 60s, how she had asked God if He would please let her live to be 70.  And she lived.  And then she told God she was very grateful, but if it be His will, could she please live to be 75?  And she lived.  And then she thanked God, and told him she wouldn't ask for anything more.  But could she please NOT live to be 90?  

And me, I sat back and watched these women laugh, and felt ... an ache.  I was watching something beautiful, but outside.  I was born too late.  Too young.  Moved too recently.  Here these two amazing women had been such friends for so long, and had heaped so much of life upon themselves.  Two impressive careers, illnesses, friendships, neighbors, parents, caring.  What became of the woman who had lived on the corner?  She moved to Arizona years ago.  Do you remember?  Yes, but I was too busy then, with baby and full time job and dying brother.  Did you ever meet my grandmother when she lived with me?  The woman up the street helped me care for my mother.  And as they laughed and reminisced about all the people they had cared for, and the ones who had cared for them, they knew that visiting teaching had been good to them, through the years.  

Someday, when I am 83, with life heaped upon me, will I laugh with my neighbor, and say, did you remember Norma?  Who lived in so and so's house just around the corner?  She showed me how to do visiting teaching. 

Fear

I'm afraid of a lot of things.

In two days, I'm meeting with the dean, about women's issues, and that scares me.  Sometimes I am afraid of having a job at Good Old Dude's University.  I am a feminist, meaning I believe women and men should receive equal opportunities, and I believe they can perform equally well with said opportunities.  I have never been silent on these beliefs.  And I am also a religious person, although my personal spiritual experiences have led me in different directions than, say, the dean.  Or at least, I presume that to be the case.  Which brings us back to where we started.  I'm afraid of meeting with the dean.

I like my job.  Is it dishonest to want to keep it, and yet still be a feminist?  Is it stupid to hang on?  Should I be applying for other jobs while I am still pre-tenure, and therefore easier to hire elsewhere?  

Yes.

But I'm very afraid of the idea of moving an entire family.  

That is what the only other woman in my department with family reminded me.  She is a postdoc, and she doesn't think her family has another short-term move in them, in order for her to take another postdoc position elsewhere in two years.  Which probably means in her case that she won't end up with a research job.  And then she'll end up spectacularly happy, because studies have been done, and people who end up in the lower-paid and less-prestigious teaching jobs end up happier than the mean and nasty researchers who claw tooth and nail over each others' sad carcasses to win the last measly crumbs of grant money.  

Ha ha.  It's not really that bad, or I wouldn't like my job.

I'm afraid of writing my next grant proposal, because it has to be a big one.  And if I get the grant?  I will have to run summer programs or organize conferences or something else Big, to match the big proposal, and I'm scared of the very idea.  

I'm also afraid of stuff in my calendar between the dean's meeting and the grant proposal due date, like travel at the end of March to speak at a conference on a topic I haven't yet chosen.  And hosting visitors for a few weeks in a row.  And I'm afraid that I won't get anything done, and yet my task list is deep and wide and stinky.  

I'm so scared I'm going to cry.

Single parent

Tim was out of town last week.  When he travels, I think about how life would be different if something were to happen to Tim and I were single.

When I was very young, my father was in a serious bicycle accident, and ended up in the hospital with a severe head injury.  I only have vague memories of the event.  It was summer, and I think I was about five years old.  It happened in the evening.  Dad was expected home and didn't come.  My mother must have been frantic with worry, but I don't remember that.  I remember hearing that they had found a man unconscious after a bicycle accident, and it might be my dad.  I remember my just-older brother identifying the bicycle.

In the ensuing days, I remember being shuffled from house to house around the neighborhood as our church members took turns caring for us, so that my mom could be with my dad in the hospital.  In retrospect, those church members showed some very serious Christian charity to our family.  If I was five, then my older brother was six, and I had three younger siblings.  I may have been only four.  In any case, there were somewhere between four and six of us, very young children.  We were taken into neighbors homes and cared for.  I liked seeing other people's homes.  I didn't understand the seriousness of the situation.

My mother, however, must have been frantic with worry.  There was a very real possibility that my father wouldn't survive the accident.  There was also a possibility that he would come through it disabled, or with a completely different personality.  Head injuries can do that.  My mother would have had to care for all of us children alone.  She was well educated, with a master's degree in social work, and she had been employed for several years before deciding to have all those children at once.  But if I was five, then she hadn't been employed outside the home for over six years.  Her children were very young and needed constant care.  It would have been very difficult for her to find a job, and then put us all into daycare or hire a nanny.  Even if she had been more recently employed, a master's degree in social work didn't pay that well.  It would have been very hard for her to draw the kind of salary that could adequately support her large family.

My mom's story had a happy ending.  My father completely recovered.  She went back to caring for children full-time (essentially running her own private daycare out of our home, with just my siblings enrolled).

When Tim goes away, I reconsider my own situation.  What if something were to happen to him?

Unlike my mom, I am currently employed, and I have a great job.  And our family is tiny.  We would be ok, financially. There would be a lot of things that would be hard.  It would be incredibly hard to always be the responsible parent, 24/7.  Tim and I take turns now picking up from school, cooking dinner, cleaning dishes, folding laundry.  When Tim goes away from a week, it gets tiring taking over all these chores on my own.  But it's not a big deal when I know it's only for a short time.  However, it would be exhausting to be responsible for all these things day after day, week after week, year after year, with no end in sight.  And in spite of our egalitarian marriage, there is some division of labor.  I would have to learn again to do the tasks that Tim has taken care of for both of us for many years.  And with Jonathan's school schedule, I would have to work evenings, every evening, whereas now I can take many evenings off.  It would be exhausting.

And then I think about the single moms I have known over the years, especially those whose kids were my friends growing up, and my heart goes out to these women.  I had no idea how hard it was.  But they did a really great job.  At least, their kids turned out spectacularly.  It can be done.

That brings me so much relief.

Real-life things I wish my students would understand

1.  Jobs are competitive.  They do not land in your lap.  You have to go out and find what it takes to get the job that you want, long before you start to apply for the job that you want.  Then in the ensuing months or years, you have to make the effort to fulfill the requirements.  The other people who are applying for that job?  They figured this out two years ago.  (But yeah, I'll write you a letter of reference anyway.)

Our grad students, even our good ones, seem to have no clue as to the nature of the profession they are planning to join, and its weird mating rituals (i.e. job application processes).  I think I'd better start running some workshops, ASAP.  

Here are a couple of things for my undergraduates, along the same lines:

2.  Even though the world is a little scary, there are amazing things to do outside of your comfort zones.  And people will pay you to do those amazing things, too.  (Why is no one applying for an REU or internship?)

3.  God probably doesn't want you to sacrifice your talents on the altar of religion.  God probably gave you those talents for a reason, and wants you to actually develop them in order to make the world a better place, and to make your life a better place.  (That one for my women, especially.)

I'm only speculating on #3.  But in a religious university, you have to wonder.  Our best students aren't even trying to reach their full potential.  Especially our top women.  Why not?  They won't even apply.  What is going on?  We need them to be more, to reach higher.  We need them.  I need them.  I don't want to be the lone female in my research group for the next 35 years until I retire.  Step up, ladies.  

And then for those that do apply, and head off away from sheltered G.O.D. University into the wide world, more advice:  

4.  When you do go out and find amazing things in the world, and that helps you suddenly see all the warts on those things you left behind, remember that unfortunately there are warts in lots of places.  This doesn't mean that the warty things should be chucked completely.  It does mean that you will have to revise your opinions, and do some thinking.  But perhaps it's a good idea to do that thinking privately.  Because if you don't flame all the bridges behind you as you go, you may actually be able to use those fancy new skills you're developing to help improve things back where you've been.  (Here I am thinking of angry religion exit stories posted regularly on Facebook.)

Sigh.

Dilemma

Some stuff I should do:

1. Write papers.  Three work papers are in limbo, waiting for me to bring them to life.  The research is all done.  It's all there.  Somehow I just have to write....
2. Read papers.  I have two student meetings tomorrow, and a thesis defense in a few days.  And I need to look at all of their writings and give them useful feedback before they go off into the wide world.
3. Review papers.  Because people want to know whether they should publish or extend funding or give job to said paper writer. 
4. Prepare lecture.  I'm speaking in our seminar tomorrow on stuff I haven't read for a while.
5. Grade.  Because grading never goes away.  
6. Learn French.  That's the first item that's only marginally work related.  I have a couple upcoming work trips to French speaking locales, and I grow nervous that I will not be able to communicate.  
7. Exercise.  30 to 60 minutes per day.  
8. Eat vegetables.  

Some stuff I'd rather do:

1. Read online news.
2. Skim recent events on facebook.
3. Angry birds.
4. Eat candy from the Valentine's day stash. Not until tomorrow.  

*Sigh*.  Back to work.

Ten times

Jonathan:  I can multiply ten times anything.

Me:  Oh yeah?  What's ten times Bunny?

Jonathan:  (Blinks.)  Bunny Zero.

Me:  I think you say, Bunny-Oh.  What's ten times finger?

Jonathan:  Finger-Oh.

Me:  What's one hundred times finger?

Jonathan:  Finger-Oh-Oh.

Me:  You say Finger-Ooh.  What's ten times "you're my ear"?

Jonathan:  You're my ear oh.

Me:  Oh thank you.  What's one hundred times "I can't ear"?

Jonathan:  (Grins.)  I can't ear you.

(We continue for a while.)

Me:  What's ten times ten?

Jonathan:  (Slight pause.)  One hundred.

Me:  No.  It's ten-oh.

Me:  What's ten times one hundred?

Jonathan:  (Smiling.)  One hundred-oh.

Me:  No.  It's ten-ooh.

(We both laugh our heads off.)

...

Tim:  It's not actually that funny.