Re: Gay Marriage: an Oxymoron



Don Tuite wrote:

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 16:39:33 GMT, smw <smwei@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
....

OK, but not the same anecdote I had been thinking of.

Fifty years ago. Parochial school. High student-teacher ratio.
(Worst was 60 7th-graders, one nun.)

Paying attention seemed very important, but I'm not sure the real goal
wasn't disciplined behavior, as the alternative was chaos.

In my experience with largish classrooms, what's important (to the teacher) is that the kids shut up. It's interesting that lately, the medical-industrial complex has started to focus on girls. Used to be ADD/HD was diagnosed boy/girl 4/1 or thereabouts, which left a huge market untapped. Of course, there aren't enough hyperactive girls to make up the difference, so the symptoms have been expanded to "daydreaming." Not to mention other fine innovations -- used to be that ADD was expected to disappear in late puberty, now it's become a life-long affliction (which requires, of course, life-long medication). Can't count the number of friends anymore who've lately informed me that they suffer or suspect to suffer from ADD. Of course, unlike other psych meds, Ritalin and cousins work to improve pretty much everybody's concentration (I know a screenwriter who takes it every time she's upon a deadline, and they've become popular SAT drugs -- in fact, the rate of kids who have prescriptions and of kids who have at least once abused Ritalin is nearly identical).
....>
At the start of the year, we were arranged alphabetically, but the
drill was that Sr Margaret would go down the row asking questions
about the day's lessons and if you answered correctly, you stayed put.
If you did not answer correctly, she continued down the row until a
child did give the correct response. Then that child moved to the
spot in line ahead of you. This continued for both terms, with a
reset after Christmas break.

This constant shuffle had two results. One was a real-time physical
representation of each pupil's class standing. The other was an
indication (manifested in the number of kids who got it wrong or
couldn't answer) of any pedigogical problems. The woman was a
brilliant improviser.

I'll say. Seems especially that she understood (or intuited) the need for kids to move around. I'm flabbergasted at the amount of break my kids get in school -- often, there's none until lunch, which lasts for 25 minutes. We had twenty minutes every two school hours, and were done by 1pm.

The scheme worked because there was zero tolerance for attention
deficit. A few of the kids were inclined that way, but had most of it
conditioned out of them by their seventh year in parochial school. It
was a demonstration that Skinnerian methods are an alternative to
pharmacology. (At no telling what emotional cost.)

Why are you calling this attention deficit? What exactly was there a zero tolerance of? Note that you don't need to pay a lot of attention to get the answers right to elementary school questions.

Now you tell me more about your article. Is a focus on paying
attention a latter-day phenomenon or something retrograde like the
Church's attempt, reported yesterday ,to stuff the Vatican II
vernacular genie back into the bottle? Or something else entirely?

There are lots of aspects to that, of course. The main one, in this context, would be mandatory schooling to begin with. In a culture where most work is agricultural, hyperactivity isn't much of a problem. Another one is the praise of attention as introspection, which appears to balloon in the late 18th century. You have a growing bourgeois culture that isn't centered on physical activity. Later, there's the rise of office and factory jobs -- i.e. you have a steadily rising demand for people who can sit still. The industry loves to point to Struwwelpeter, 1845 (ShockHeaded Peter?) to demonstrate how early on ADD kids got noticed and literarized. From our perspective, 1845 seems incredibly late.

Needless to say, the capacity to pay at least some attention is universal, and I have no doubt that some kids (and adults) have an absolutely miserable time due to distractabilities they can't control--the issue can only be one of degree. I'm fond of the recent genetic research that points to a gene cluster linked to risk-taking, strong sexual drive, and ADD -- apparently a recent mutation (50,000), and interesting for the fact that it didn't supercede the previous incarnation but appears to hold steady at about 30%. Speculative reading from the geneticists that both risk-taking and risk-avoiding behavior will get your genes reproduced, and groups appear to have use for both in combination. At a time where the default junior biography includes 16 years of sit-in-your-chair schooling, this may no longer be true.

Possibly related tidbits -- symptoms of giftedness and symptoms of ADD overlap extensively, and the German school system has actually begun to read ADD symptoms as signs of giftedness and to set up special schools. Seems they suspect that kids who don't pay attention do so for cause...

Well, etc.

.

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