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I'm still years (and, I hope, a wedding) away from being a lactater, so I've yet to experience the pressure from other mothers or lactation specialists or medical studies about how to nourish my newborn. But I must say, I'm excited to breast-feed (and, I suppose, pumped to pump). As women, we're so often battling our bodies, cursing the way we put on weight or break out or start menstruating years before we actually want to reproduce, and making all sorts of decisions and purchases to try to counteract those truths. Breast-feeding is this one perfect, incredible thing that our body actually does right. Our breasts know when we have a hungry baby, and they make it food! And not just any food—food that's "better than a mango, even." If my breasts are willing to be so intelligent and industrious, I am eager to put 'em to use.
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Hanna, I'm glad Obama's grand claim to separate politics and ideology from science bothered you, too. It disturbs me when politicians and pundits talk about science as if it's a separate force all its own, somehow divorced from rational decision-making in which moral forces always come to play. There was a line in last year's movie Flash of Genius in which Greg Kinnear's character points out this political deception to his students. He reminds them that it was engineers who did incredible good when they invented the replacement heart valve and also engineers who were responsible for so much evil when they invented the Auschwitz gas chambers. The examples are extreme, but the point is a good one: Just because science gives us the capability to do something—it doesn't make it the best thing to do. Science allows us to destroy human embryos, but it can't answer whether that's right or not.
So, if anything, Obama's choice to lift the ban and begin to fund morally questionable research when science is giving us such promising, noncontroversial alternatives seems like more like a "Flash of Grandstanding" than anything else, but one that has some seriously scary consequences.
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Ann, here is my best guess about the success of the breast-feeding brigade. Some of it is because of external forces, and some is our own inner craziness. The researchers who helped the American Academy of Pediatrics craft its rigid pro-breast-feeding statement came of age during the '70s. They watched formula companies peddle their product in Africa, where the dirty water turned out to be fatal to babies. They also watched hospitals routinely inject mothers with hormones to stop the flow of milk. To them, this is a war, and there's no middle ground.
Now, why do they have a receptive audience? Breast-feeding gets us where we are vulnerable; if you are a working mother, it's the one thing you can do that your nanny can't. Also, it fits in perfectly with this current moment in parenting, where the child is an improvement project, and no amount of tinkering is too much. It is an odd thing, of course, that this intensive form of parenting thrives at exactly the historical moment when women have the least time for it. I'm sure you could shed light on that conundrum, Ann.
I also think the green/farmer's market obsession has something to do with this. Feminists chucked natural childbirth without much guilt long ago, but breast-feeding is riding the tails of the organic food movement. If they could only find a way to make formula look less like Hi-C and smell less like an old tire, we'd be golden.
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I just wanted to chime in in support of Hanna's great Atlantic article. Like Hanna, I happily nursed my first two children for a year. With my second, I had the great luxury of working from home, so I rarely even had to pump. I'm planning to nurse my third. (For one, it's free; for another, it's a lot easier to get back to sleep after those 2 a.m. feedings if you're nursing than if you have to schlep downstairs to the kitchen to make bottles.)
But I think it's crazy for women to guilt one another into breast-feeding, or for women to feel like they have to exclusively breast-feed. Two anecdotes from my older son's first few weeks hammered it home to me. First, while I was still in the hospital, recovering from an emergency C-section and trying to grasp the whole concept of motherhood, the "lactation specialist" visited our room. She handed me a bottle of glucose water and said, "Now, if baby gets hungry, just give him this, not formula." When my nurse saw it, she flipped and ordered me to hand it over. Turns out the lactation specialist hadn't bothered to inquire about my son. I'd had that emergency C-section because he weighed 10 pounds, and the doctors suspected I'd had undiagnosed gestational diabetes, so he was also dealing with blood-sugar issues. Glucose water was the last thing I should give him.
Still in new-mother mode, I tried to avoid formula when we went home, but I still remember the night Brandon cried, and I tried to feed him. And he cried, and I tried to feed him. And so on. Until we gave in and gave him just an ounce or two of formula. And then we all got four hours of sleep.
To me, it seems like breast-feeding is just another front in the "Mommy wars"—whether to work or stay at home, whether to live in the cities or the suburbs. I'm not sure why women feel compelled to guilt one another over such decisions when there is never one right answer that applies to every woman. But consider me Switzerland.
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I've been waiting for your breast-feeding article, Hanna, so thanks for the alert that it's now out in the Atlantic, Emily. The piece is great, and persuades me that nursing isn't the secret to thinner, smarter, healthier babies—certainly not among the well-off set that swears by the practice. It also reminded me of the many reasons nursing isn't exactly the secret to well-rested, maritally contented, productively employed mothers, either. Which leaves me with a question: Why is it that the pro-breast-feeding brigade has had such success peddling its message at precisely the moment when you would think women would be least receptive to it?
Clearly the audience is complicit here: At the turn of the 20th century, the newly scientific experts peddled their intricate formula recipes not because they were better or safer (back then, when cow milk supplies were dicey, they were anything but). They peddled them because they were well-aware that middle-class "modern" mothers were eager not to be tied down all day the way their mothers had been. So how do you read the peculiar eagerness among mothers recently, as they stream into the workforce, to, well, swallow the opposite, highly inconvenient expertise? In the video accompanying your piece, you and your friends touched on this, confirming my sense that nursing isn't about helping our kids to ace their SATs. Isn't it more about helping to reassure ourselves that we mothers really are indispensable?
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A few years ago, Education Next ran a terrific article about how the teachers assigned to Manhattans smartest high-schoolers are there because of seniority rather than expertise. According to that piece, half of the teaching vacancies at Stuyvesant are reserved for teachers seeking transfers from other New York City schools, and those must be "filled solely on the basis of seniority."
As someone who had to suffer through a computer science course taught by a fairly batty, near-retirement woman who seemed to be gazing upon Microsoft Word for the first time, I know how painful it is to be taught by someone whose only qualification is having put in some time. I hope Obama strives not just for getting smarter teachers in the classrooms but for creating a system that encourages them to stay there. Teach For America hasn't quite nailed that. TFA puts smart, motivated, overachiever types straight from their elite college campuses to impoverished school districts, and studies show they are effective. But most of my friends who've done it burn out almost immediately—not a huge surprise, given that they're idealists used to succeeding, having to face their failure not only to change the world, but even to get their students to sit down. What we need are smart teachers who can stick around long enough to get that last stint at Stuyvesant.
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From today's New York Times:
[Gourmet editor Ruth] Reichl would like the White House kitchen to issue regular news releases that describe what the first couple and their daughters are eating. (Then parents across the country could tell their children, "You know, Malia and Sasha were eating salad yesterday ...")
Excellent idea! What 10-year old would not benefit from national news releases detailing the number of calories she consumes daily? Why not release updates on Malia's BMI as well? Then the girls would know that they are eating salad for America.
The Times' article is on Michelle Obama's "Healthful Eating" agenda. I cringe every time Obama slips into domestic goddess mode, and this is no exception. I do not want the first lady's agenda to have anything to do with kitchens or children's libraries. I do not want her to submit recipes to cookbooks or talk about her efforts to make her husband pick up his dirty socks. I realize that Obama is trying to navigate an incredibly backward set of norms (Washington is a conservative place no matter who is in power), and that David Brooks will find her terrifying no matter what she does, but I wish she would resist the impulse to become our Nurturer-in-Chief. (When Hillary Clinton said that she would not "stay home and bake cookies," it was not the caloric content of cookies that concerned her.) The idea of Michelle doing talk shows about how to prepare kid-friendly broccoli dishes while her husband is discussing nuclear armament with Russia makes me want to do a lot of things, and planting a sustainable vegetable garden is not among them.
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Today, the Washington Post features two op-eds criticizing the president's decision to lift the ban on federally funded stem cell research, one from the more libertarian Kathleen Parker and one from the social conservative Michael Gerson. While I disagree with both of them—I'm glad he lifted the ban—I can't say he didn't deserve it. Obama's spin that he was just taking the politics and ideology out of science was coarse, glib, and just short of insulting. (See Slate's own William Saletan's warning against "Winning Smugly.") There are many areas of science President Bush handed over to unqualified political cronies in order to push certain results: Endangered species, drilling, and condoms come to mind. Stem cell research is not one of them. Like abortion, this is a legitimate moral issue with reasonable objections on all sides. The left should have learned something from the abortion debate. Eventually, the feminist movement came to regret talking about fetuses as if they were just another appendage. The left has just swiftly won the stem cell war. But as Saletan warns, "Don't lose your soul."
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Margaret, Marjorie, I've been studiously avoiding reading your posts on The L-Word finale until now. My prosecutor recorded it and—tell me this isn't love—waited until I could watch it with her last night. Finales tend to be disappointing; this one was as well. (And how disappointing that we didn't get to see more of Lucy Lawless as the butch detective, a little wink to her longtime role as lesbian icon in Xena.) But gosh, the show was fun while it lasted. In the last season I enjoyed watching them turn Jenny (possibly the least believable lesbian on the planet, except maybe Erin Daniels as a tennis god—yeah, right) into an all-out bitch who hurts every last friend. I kinda enjoyed how much fun they had making everyone into Jenny's potential murderer; I'll vote for Bette. But the sixth season didn't have nearly enough sex. The fifth season included Tasha and Alice going at it with some excellent hungry heat, which they didn't have this season. And aside from them, there was all kinda kitschy sex: sex on a movie set! Sex in a movie trailer! Prison sex! Car sex! Bridesmaid sex! Adulterous sex! Shane, that hounddog, racing away from angry girls who've just had the best orgasms of their lives! Oh lordy, I laughed so hard at it all. And I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to watch girls do it the way girls really do it—not with long nails, like a porn movie for men, but down and dirty. Straight folks get this in their dramas and comedies all the time—realistic, well-shot heat—but I've never before seen it depicted well so consistently for lesbians. Just that deserves some awards.
And oh, how I loved Pam Grier being rescued from the purgatory of the blaxploitation bin. She should have a show all to herself, somewhere, somehow.
But you both should know that the biggest surprise audience—bigger than straight men, who didn't watch as much as expected—was straight women. They ramped up the clothes in the second season into goofy-looking femme wear specifically to appeal more to that Sex in the City-missing demographic. Thank god for Tasha and Shane, who provided at least a minimum weekly requirement of butch girls, one for whom I could pine. I got more good dyke hit off Rachel Maddow most weeks than off most of The L-Word. Not that I'm complaining! I could have gone on watching dyke drama with those femme gals for years to come.
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Every so often a song appears that is obviously best listened to in pajamas at a slumber party with fake microphone in hand. Kelly Clarkson's "My Life Would Suck Without You" is such a song (it's also the No. 1 single in the country). You've been warned if you decide to put this on in a place where you have to behave like a proper adult because, among other things, it sounds a lot worse when you're sitting still. On the "Like a Prayer" scale (that Madonna song being, at least for a subset of women my age, the track most likely to have inspired juvenile dancing en masse or, in significantly lamer present-day terms, the wedding song most likely to make everyone start hysterically laughing and get on the dance floor), I think it clocks in at about a seven, just a smidge behind Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone." (The two songs sound almost exactly the same. If it ain't broke and all.) Another track off Clarkson's new record, All I Ever Wanted, the awesomely titled "I Do Not Hook Up," is almost as power chord catchy. With this album, Clarkson is burnishing her everygirl cred: Unlike Madonna, but like most everyone else, she tried rebelling and failed. (She released her last record over protestations from music suits who told her the album was a mess—it was, and it flopped.) So she went back to the authority-approved stuff and is now bettering sleepover parties across the nation.
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XX Factor's Hanna Rosin has a fascinating piece in the latest Atlantic on the breast-feeding myth. She writes that after nursing her first two children for a year each, she finds herself longing to free her breast early from the mouth of baby No. 3. Hanna looks at the studies we've been spoon-fed over the years about the incalculable superiority of breast-feeding and finds that when you actually examine the numbers, most fade to statistical insignificance. She is not making a case against breast-feeding (despite the fact that's the title of the piece!): She acknowledges its many benefits, and she is saying there is a rational choice to be made to not breast-feed and those mothers shouldn't be treated as if formula is laced with anthrax. As Hanna points out, a miserable breast-feeding mother is not an optimum mother. I know we all should support whatever good choice women make for themselves (I happily breast fed for a year), but her piece made me think of the alternate phenomenon. I confess something bothers me about when I see mothers who won't stop breast-feeding. These are the women whose 4-year-olds walk up to them and demand a slurp. I always wonder if these mothers are going to be waiting in the wings, nursing bra at the ready, when their kids need a boost during the SATs.
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Obama's practical commitment to education is heartening, Meghan, but I am curious to hear how he plans to measure the efficacy of public school teachers. You quoted Obama saying, "If a teacher is given a chance, or two chances, or three chances, and still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching." Obviously a deadbeat teacher like the lazy Stuyvesant Latin teacher you described, is not what we want for America's youth.
However, I have a friend who teaches in a much less-esteemed New York City public school. She teaches a high-school basic literacy class, and her "improvement" as a teacher (and her school's improvement as an institution) is measured entirely with test scores. She described to me a student whose test scores did not improve over the course of a year, but his comprehension of literary themes and ability to participate actively in discussion of books was far deeper in June than it had been in September. It was something that wouldn't show up on a test, but for that student it was a real victory.
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Obama gave a speech about education yesterday, and I was glad to see he tackled the issue of rewarding better teachers and weeding out bad ones. According to Politico, Obama said,
“Let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance, or two chances, or three chances, and still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching. ... I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”
This notion dovetails with Obama's pragmatism, which I've writen about, and his liking for evidence and results. And siphoning off bad teachers is one of the ways we can most quickly improve our education system. I remember when I first learned, as a teenager, that if you went to public school, you might get a "tenured" teacher. My friend J. who went to Stuyvesant was telling me about one of his, a Latin teacher who was totally checked out and would go around the room calling on students in order to translate. One day, J.'s friend wasn't in class, and this teacher ended up translating the lines for him, attributing the student's "silence" to confusion and failing to notice that he just wasn't there.
Meanwhile, Malcolm Gladwell had an excellent piece about the price of bad teaching and the upside of good teaching in The New Yorker last fall. In it, he observed that an economist at Stanford estimates that, for students, the difference between a very good teacher and a very bad teacher amounts to a year's worth of learning. Here's another key bit from his essay:
Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
No wonder Obama is stressing teaching as the key to improving our education. Of course, the trick is going to be implementing this system, not just talking about it.