Tuesday, May 03, 2016
Commence rant. (This week is Mother's Day. Indulge me.)
I was told today that it's unfair to stereotype millennials, and was reminded that (although I am not really a boomer or Gen X, but something between the 2) before we created a generation well educated but hip deep in student loans, they have become a generation spending more time on line and less time interacting with flesh and blood people, and dependent on social media for everything from pizza delivery to spirituality. There have always been slackers, burnouts and disaffected types. But we created the folks you see sitting side by side in a coffee shop texting each other and sending LOL emoji's instead of actually just laughing. Posting stupid stuff that should never see the light of day for everyone to see. For the life of the Internet. We didn't mean to, but we did it nonetheless.
So, yes, Andrea, there **are** flakes in every generation, but in my world the flakiness differences between boomers, Gen X and millennials (particularly in terms of how they approach the entire concept of work and learning) are so clear that everyone and their brother has written (or is writing) a book on how to engage them, keep them engaged, and how to tell if they are learning anything useful. etc. (I'm a technical instructional designer. We talk about this stuff as nauseum.) And even if you aren't a cranky old fart, you have to admit it is true. Millennials aren't necessarily worse, but they are DIFFERENT. Particularly in the US. It's part of the reason why other countries are kicking our butts on standardized tests.
And most of the differences can be laid at the feet of -- not just the millennials themselves, but the folks a generation or 2 back-- so the biggest reason it makes me sad is that we created the issues with all the best intentions, and now we are bitching about the unintended consequences.
--Part of the shift is due to the changes in institutionalized educational processes from preschool on to grad school. (AKA "no child left behind" "common core" and the rise of homeschooling, and the holy grail of standardized testing, to name a few) (all pretty much ineffective in their own way) And my rant on homeschooling will be reserved for another day,
--Part of it is the ubiquity of information--- most of it unvetted (which is a pedantic way to say "not everything on the internet is true or correct." Yet despite being inundated with "stuff" we no longer teach students critical analysis. I was explicitly taught how to learn beginning at the primary level-- in a session called "study skills" -- We learned how to look things uphow to problem solve, how to validate information, how to identify opinion vs. fact. Yes, I went to private schools selected for their academic results, rather than social status, religious affiliation or convenience, and they did a lot of stuff there that is no longer PC, but I got an excellent education.
,
--Another part of it is that the democratization of the classroom -- while done with the best of intentions, this has become a disaster for social learning. Kids are kids and teachers are teachers. They are not equals until you get to grad school, and maybe not even then. Teachers, dress like you have an important profession and are in charge, not like you are going to a club or the gymn. You can be comfortable and still display respect for your self, your job, and your students. You can also be relevant and use proper grammar and an adult professional vocabulary.
There is a natural social order to classrooms and offices and factories and military units and football teams and every other group of people engaged in group activity. If we don't teach young people how to interact with adults who are in positions of leadership, they leave school expecting the world of work to be an extension of the idealized family, where everyone loves you for the special little snowflake you are, and they make infinite adjustments for your quirks.
Unfortunately, that's not the real world in 98% of workplaces.
Sucks, but it's just the way it is.
When parents routinely criticise teachers in front of their kids, it undermines the teacher's authority in the classroom. When a student has a problem with something happening in school, the adults in charge need to work it out together, and then explain to the child how they are all going to work together to implement the agreed-upon solution.
Kids need consequences proportionate to their mistakes as much as they need encouragement for doing well.
It's really not the fault of the millennials...Their parents -- whether left or right leaning-- rebelled against traditional education processes, because it wasn't meeting their immediate needs.... but they threw the baby out with the bathwater and applied quick fixes to complex issues.
Once in a while you run into parents who get it and realize that the system isn't completely broken, but it does require some serious work and even more hands-on parental involvement (You can't outsource your kids' education to the public school system-- it has to be an adjunct to the hands on work YOU are putting in on an everyday basis)
The worst thing previous generations have done to millennials is that, now that they are becoming adults with kids of their own, we didn't prepare them to parent--not with hokey classes where you carry a doll or an egg around-- but by teaching them by example that learning is not something you go to a school building to get, like bananas at a market or discard when it is past the expiration date. That the lessons start when you rub the sleep from your eyes in the morning and never stop.
My parents were complicated people and not perfect, but they were awesome when it came to education. They not only supported us academically, but they taught us how what we were learning in school applied to the real world. Admittedly, Dad taught statistics and averages at baseball games and at horse races, geometry on a billiards table and percentages learning how to calculate a tip. Mom let me read trashy historical novels on the beach, and then made me pick out any anachronisms of language or setting or timeline. I learned practical applications of physics, chemistry and algebra taking recipes for 4 servings and adjusting them to our much larger household.
None of this was stuff you learned to pass a test... it was stuff you learned to live your adult life to the fullest.
So, millennials, if we say "Sorry, we screwed up. We didn't mean to, but we were young and foolish and had the best of intentions." And if we promise to help you, can you please try to fix this before your own kids send your Mother's Day and Father's Day cards directly to the chip embedded in your brain in waveform because keyboards and voice to text have become "so early 21st century!" ? Because if cursive handwriting disappeared because people stopped putting real pens to real paper, when we lose our keyboards and voices, we could lose music, poetry, drama, and so much more.
I was told today that it's unfair to stereotype millennials, and was reminded that (although I am not really a boomer or Gen X, but something between the 2) before we created a generation well educated but hip deep in student loans, they have become a generation spending more time on line and less time interacting with flesh and blood people, and dependent on social media for everything from pizza delivery to spirituality. There have always been slackers, burnouts and disaffected types. But we created the folks you see sitting side by side in a coffee shop texting each other and sending LOL emoji's instead of actually just laughing. Posting stupid stuff that should never see the light of day for everyone to see. For the life of the Internet. We didn't mean to, but we did it nonetheless.
So, yes, Andrea, there **are** flakes in every generation, but in my world the flakiness differences between boomers, Gen X and millennials (particularly in terms of how they approach the entire concept of work and learning) are so clear that everyone and their brother has written (or is writing) a book on how to engage them, keep them engaged, and how to tell if they are learning anything useful. etc. (I'm a technical instructional designer. We talk about this stuff as nauseum.) And even if you aren't a cranky old fart, you have to admit it is true. Millennials aren't necessarily worse, but they are DIFFERENT. Particularly in the US. It's part of the reason why other countries are kicking our butts on standardized tests.
And most of the differences can be laid at the feet of -- not just the millennials themselves, but the folks a generation or 2 back-- so the biggest reason it makes me sad is that we created the issues with all the best intentions, and now we are bitching about the unintended consequences.
--Part of the shift is due to the changes in institutionalized educational processes from preschool on to grad school. (AKA "no child left behind" "common core" and the rise of homeschooling, and the holy grail of standardized testing, to name a few) (all pretty much ineffective in their own way) And my rant on homeschooling will be reserved for another day,
--Part of it is the ubiquity of information--- most of it unvetted (which is a pedantic way to say "not everything on the internet is true or correct." Yet despite being inundated with "stuff" we no longer teach students critical analysis. I was explicitly taught how to learn beginning at the primary level-- in a session called "study skills" -- We learned how to look things uphow to problem solve, how to validate information, how to identify opinion vs. fact. Yes, I went to private schools selected for their academic results, rather than social status, religious affiliation or convenience, and they did a lot of stuff there that is no longer PC, but I got an excellent education.
,
--Another part of it is that the democratization of the classroom -- while done with the best of intentions, this has become a disaster for social learning. Kids are kids and teachers are teachers. They are not equals until you get to grad school, and maybe not even then. Teachers, dress like you have an important profession and are in charge, not like you are going to a club or the gymn. You can be comfortable and still display respect for your self, your job, and your students. You can also be relevant and use proper grammar and an adult professional vocabulary.
There is a natural social order to classrooms and offices and factories and military units and football teams and every other group of people engaged in group activity. If we don't teach young people how to interact with adults who are in positions of leadership, they leave school expecting the world of work to be an extension of the idealized family, where everyone loves you for the special little snowflake you are, and they make infinite adjustments for your quirks.
Unfortunately, that's not the real world in 98% of workplaces.
- Most commercial businesses are driven by a balance sheet.
- Even in service and professional workplaces (like hospitals and fire houses where one hopes that quality of care outranks the P&L), if you are scheduled to be in a particular place at a particular time doing a particular thing, and you aren't, people can die.
- Even if you are working in a "creative" job, there are still milestones to meet in order to make the endeavor profitable
Sucks, but it's just the way it is.
When parents routinely criticise teachers in front of their kids, it undermines the teacher's authority in the classroom. When a student has a problem with something happening in school, the adults in charge need to work it out together, and then explain to the child how they are all going to work together to implement the agreed-upon solution.
Kids need consequences proportionate to their mistakes as much as they need encouragement for doing well.
It's really not the fault of the millennials...Their parents -- whether left or right leaning-- rebelled against traditional education processes, because it wasn't meeting their immediate needs.... but they threw the baby out with the bathwater and applied quick fixes to complex issues.
- On a pragmatic level, go anywhere where high school and college kids are operating cash registers. See how many of them can make change for a $20 bill when the purchase is $9.42 with a 6% sales tax ---without a computer telling them what the answer is supposed to be.
- Go to lunch with half a dozen millennials and tell them that you need to split the check four ways and need to leave an 18% tip. Everyone will pull out their phone.
- They have stopped teaching cursive handwriting. I write a birthday card to my 12 year old granddaughter and she struggles to read it. (Yet her standardized tests say her reading skills are well above average.) I might as well be using a Cyrillic alphabet.
Once in a while you run into parents who get it and realize that the system isn't completely broken, but it does require some serious work and even more hands-on parental involvement (You can't outsource your kids' education to the public school system-- it has to be an adjunct to the hands on work YOU are putting in on an everyday basis)
The worst thing previous generations have done to millennials is that, now that they are becoming adults with kids of their own, we didn't prepare them to parent--not with hokey classes where you carry a doll or an egg around-- but by teaching them by example that learning is not something you go to a school building to get, like bananas at a market or discard when it is past the expiration date. That the lessons start when you rub the sleep from your eyes in the morning and never stop.
My parents were complicated people and not perfect, but they were awesome when it came to education. They not only supported us academically, but they taught us how what we were learning in school applied to the real world. Admittedly, Dad taught statistics and averages at baseball games and at horse races, geometry on a billiards table and percentages learning how to calculate a tip. Mom let me read trashy historical novels on the beach, and then made me pick out any anachronisms of language or setting or timeline. I learned practical applications of physics, chemistry and algebra taking recipes for 4 servings and adjusting them to our much larger household.
None of this was stuff you learned to pass a test... it was stuff you learned to live your adult life to the fullest.
So, millennials, if we say "Sorry, we screwed up. We didn't mean to, but we were young and foolish and had the best of intentions." And if we promise to help you, can you please try to fix this before your own kids send your Mother's Day and Father's Day cards directly to the chip embedded in your brain in waveform because keyboards and voice to text have become "so early 21st century!" ? Because if cursive handwriting disappeared because people stopped putting real pens to real paper, when we lose our keyboards and voices, we could lose music, poetry, drama, and so much more.
Sunday, May 01, 2016
Random memories of an outsider
It's odd what you remember sometimes.
On the last day of her life, I sat on the side of her bed, trying to keep her calm so she wouldn't struggle against the oxygen and palliative medications as she had been earlier in the evening. Having been with her every day for 5 years, I had accepted the inevitability of her death. It was different for my brothers.
She had put my brother through the wringer on the late night shift, and his wife had insisted he go home, grab a shower, some breakfast and some sleep while I took the next watch. He was in need of a break
Mom wasn't a warm and fuzzy person in the best of times, and when upset she could be tough to take.
I make dark jokes about it, but this really was our very last conversation.
Me: "You know, Mom, I know I was never the kind of daughter you wanted, but I think in the end I was the kind you needed."
Her response was classic Mom. "You were always so strange. I never understood a goddamn thing about you."
I am 62 years old. My mother died almost exactly 15 years ago. . .just a few days before Mother's Day 2001. The older I get, the more I understand and accept about my mother. She wasn't cruel, but she was distant and demanding. With me. She was probably rather damaged by a tough and unforgiving childhood of her own. As the oldest, and without a consistent presence of her father in her life, she had to grow up much too quickly. Having BEEN her mother's favorite child, she never experienced the feeling that her mother wished she had never been born. And, while she never used those words directly, she would tell young women "have your children when you are young... if you wait too long, it's not good for you or them" So the sadness has never really left me. When I found that poem in the box of papers and photos, I realized that she always knew I felt like an outsider-- but she was unable or unwilling to deal with it. I got over the anger years ago, but around Mother's Day all the missed opportunities and misunderstanding, and unasked and unanswered questions still make me sad.
- My sister was 6 years older than I am. I remember that she loved Pat Boone in the 60's. I emphatically did not. I had moved on to edgier stuff like Motown and the Beatles and Beach Boys-- not that their stuff was all that edgy, but in our household it was revolutionary. It was also a bone of contention from about 1963 to 1971. (when she got married and I went away to college) we never lived together again.
- She was the third child, the first girl, and the first to be born after WWII. I was the youngest of 4, born when a 40 year old mother was considered "advanced maternal age".
- She wanted to look like Doris Day and later Mary Tyler Moore. I wanted to look like Jackie O and later Mary Quant and Ali McGraw.
- We looked nothing alike. If I didn't look so much like my father's family I would have genuinely wondered if we had the same parents.
- This was underscored by the fact that there are baby pictures of all of my siblings, but in the youngest picture of me, I am about five. No birthdays, no Christmas, no christening, nothing. I was told that my pictures were lost when our basement flooded when I was 6 or 7, but somehow mine were the only ones lost. I suspect the real answer is less "act of God" and more human nature. I am the 4th child. My father wasn't away in the service any longer, and every youngest knows that there is an inverse ratio between birth order and photos. The firstborn has a camera in their face for every milestone. the last .... not so much.
- We were typecast from the beginning. She played sports, I was a klutz. She was small and girly, ("she wore size 6x til she was 9") I was the tallest girl in my class. She worked hard to get good grades. I got better grades without really studying. She was left-handed and couldn't spell well, I was right-handed and won spelling bees. Ed has brown eyes, like my Mom's, Peg and Stan have blue eyes like my grandfather's, mine are hazel or green, like my Dad's.
- I loved her, but I can't tell you that we were ever best friends. A big part of that, other than the age difference, was that we were so different, and the primary reason we were so different was that she "belonged" in our family in a way I never felt I did.
- I never really knew why I felt like an outsider, I just knew it was true.. I have a crystal clear memory of sitting on the foyer steps in the Alton Street house, sobbing my heart out after yet another fight with my mother, asking her why I could never, ever please her. If it was the Alton Street house, I had to be younger than 12, because I celebrated my 13th birthday in the Applegrove house. (Another crystalline image.) I don't remember what that fight with Mom was about, it could have been anything. It might just have been the combo of her menopause colliding with my puberty.
- Initially I tried to emulate Peg, but of course no one can be as successful pretending to be someone else as they are at just being themselves. Besides, I couldn't convince my parents it was real-- they never bought the act. So I resigned myself to being strange and misunderstood and went back to being me. Pretending didn't get me what I wanted anyway.
- At 9 or 10, someone gave me a book of "The Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe". I was drawn, not to the horror or detective stories, but to a poem called "Alone." It struck me so intensely, I copied it in my very best penmanship, put it in a frame, and hung it in my room in the Alton Street house. Mom hated it and made me take it down. I found it in Mom's papers after she died, in the same box with the portraits of my sister and I that I hated so much. (the portraits are a story for another day)
What I wanted--what I always wanted-- was to be accepted. To be seen and not found wanting when compared to my siblings, cousins, or my mother's friends' children. It never, ever happened.
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were--I have not seen
As others saw--I could not bring
My passions from a common spring--
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow--I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone--
And all I lov’d--I lov’d alone--
On the last day of her life, I sat on the side of her bed, trying to keep her calm so she wouldn't struggle against the oxygen and palliative medications as she had been earlier in the evening. Having been with her every day for 5 years, I had accepted the inevitability of her death. It was different for my brothers.
She had put my brother through the wringer on the late night shift, and his wife had insisted he go home, grab a shower, some breakfast and some sleep while I took the next watch. He was in need of a break
Mom wasn't a warm and fuzzy person in the best of times, and when upset she could be tough to take.
I make dark jokes about it, but this really was our very last conversation.
Me: "You know, Mom, I know I was never the kind of daughter you wanted, but I think in the end I was the kind you needed."
Her response was classic Mom. "You were always so strange. I never understood a goddamn thing about you."
I am 62 years old. My mother died almost exactly 15 years ago. . .just a few days before Mother's Day 2001. The older I get, the more I understand and accept about my mother. She wasn't cruel, but she was distant and demanding. With me. She was probably rather damaged by a tough and unforgiving childhood of her own. As the oldest, and without a consistent presence of her father in her life, she had to grow up much too quickly. Having BEEN her mother's favorite child, she never experienced the feeling that her mother wished she had never been born. And, while she never used those words directly, she would tell young women "have your children when you are young... if you wait too long, it's not good for you or them" So the sadness has never really left me. When I found that poem in the box of papers and photos, I realized that she always knew I felt like an outsider-- but she was unable or unwilling to deal with it. I got over the anger years ago, but around Mother's Day all the missed opportunities and misunderstanding, and unasked and unanswered questions still make me sad.
