Sea Changes

Sometimes, unscientific observations tell us something.

My uncle, Arthur, remarked, sometime in the early 1960's that the greatest secret in America at the time was that whites are in the minority.  He laughed when he said that. He was not disturbed by it, more amused than anything. He was simply saying that he rode the subway every day, traveled around New York City, from his home in the Bronx to Manhattan and everywhere he looked, from the subway cars to the streets, Blacks and Hispanics were more numerous than whites.

Of course, what he was seeing was the transition in neighborhoods in the south Bronx, along the Grand Concourse as one group replaced another. But that proved to be a look through a keyhole to a bigger demographic shift.

Now demographers are telling us the time is approaching when whites in America will be a minority and as whites in the rust belt states have looked around and made the same observation my uncle made, they have not reacted with the same bemused attitude. They became surly and voted for Donald Trump.

At the big Endocrine Society meeting in Chicago I looked around and realized the young crop of endocrinologists are anything but white. They are smart, energetic, hard working and I'm happy to see them. But it is a change.

In Essex County, Massachusetts, most of the doctors are foreign born or first generation in America. Local Yankees from Methuen, Haverhill, Lawrence, North Andover find themselves in exam rooms with young doctors born in India, South America, or born in America to parents from Pakistan, China, Korea, or Ukraine. 

The professional class of physicians is not derived from Haverhill or Methuen. Kids raised in these towns, for whatever reasons, do not go to medical school.

This may all be just fine, but it is a change. And, like my uncle, I'm impressed by how little noted it is.

Public Schools

Last night, I watched a surprising episode of "Rita" and this morning I walked my dog through town, past the Hampton Academy, and on to Winnacunnet High School.

Hampton Academy

The Academy now has construction on two sides; the town, after many years of rejecting money for the rehabilitation and upgrade of the middle school finally approved it last year. Some of the reason for the refusal of the town's adults to part with their money for the school was, no doubt, the typical Yankee penuriousness but in the case of voting money for schools, which should be a no brainer, I have to believe has to do with the townspeople's own experience in public school. Even Peyton Place was centered on the town school, its students and teachers. 

High School

Walking by the athletic fields of the high school, I saw parents and children sliding down the snowy slopes to the fields. Happy scenes of children and their parents drawn to the school campus, not for any scholarly reasons, but just because it was a fun place to be.

And that got me thinking: What if the schools, the high school in particular, were the most exciting, fun place to be, inside the classroom?

Poor Erik

But then I recalled: I am a long way from knowing anything about adolescents now. In Rita a benign, but definitely uncool teacher finds an inflated plastic naked women suspended from the ceiling of his classroom and while the students smirk and laugh at his loss of composure, he tries to fish it down, fails and flees the classroom. The next day, the students grin at him from their desks but refuse to answer him. He has written "To Kill A Mockingbird" on the blackboard, and you know he has some lesson plan about the significance of the book in illuminating racial conflict in the American South, but he will never be allowed to get to that. The following day, he arrives and all the students have turned around their desks and are facing away from him, their backs to him.

The headmaster calls a meeting of the parents, who are just as vile as their children, and you can see where these children come from. They complain the teacher, Erik, has asked their children to write an essay in longhand. Who writes out anything in longhand any more? Erik is humiliated. And he does not deserve it. He may not be the sharpest blade in the drawer--in fact he is not a blade at all--but he means well and he is trying.

Of course, one of Erik's problems is he is teaching something none of the students or the parents has any interest in. 

Walking by Winnacunnet, I thought about what I would teach.  

Years ago, I tried to interest the faculty of a private school in Washington, D.C. (Sidwell Friends)  about a course I wanted to teach to high school freshmen, a biology course. I figured 14 and 15 year olds were most interested in sex and I could use that to teach a lot of things about hormones, hormone receptors, genes anatomy and physiology. 
I flashed a slide of a naked woman and asked the teachers what struck them as odd. A teacher immediately pointed out the absences of pubic hair, something my medical school classmates and I  had taken much longer to observe. Then I went on to explain about how this woman, who had XY chromosomes and intra-abdominal testicles had complete insensitivity to the hormone testosterone; her testosterone receptors didn't work because of a genetic mutation.

The teachers said it might be good for an "enrichment course" for seniors, but was no way to teach biology because you first had to teach kids what receptors are, what genes are, and build up with all that stultifying, boring stuff to the point where the kids could understand about this androgen receptor insensitivity. I just knew nothing about teaching, or kids that age.

They never called me back. To give them credit, they were willing to hear my pitch, but they were still unable to get past their own training in education, about building from the basics, going from letters to words to sentences. 

But today, I thought, no. I did not get interested in endocrinology because of all the courses I had in genetics or biochemistry. It was seeing those patients that got me. Why not use that shock, to work back to the underlying science, once you've got the fires of questioning burning? Why not start with images of emaciated children, go on to Banting and Best, and the discovery of insulin?

Before Insulin/After Insulin Toronto 1921

Why not teach biology with David Attenborough and Blue Planet and the spider wasp? You don't need to get into evolution and all that; it'll be obvious.

Why not teach civics, sociology and anthropology with "The Wire?"

There are so many sources of material for real education out there. If kids had to get together at home and watch this stuff and use class time to discuss it with someone who might know more than they do (their teacher), would that not be an experience which would have kids just pulling at the leash to get back into the classroom the next day? 

Imagine that: School the most fun place to be.

The Psychology of Jeeps and Guns: Hum Drum v Heroic Life

Mankind cannot bear too much reality.
--T.S. Eliot

A Wall Street Journal review (Dan Neil) of a new Jeep Wrangler which has the power of a small bulldozer was titled "Purposeless Power"  but on line it was called "Superhero looking for a Mission" and it began with this wonderful opening:

 SOME CARS spend their lives waiting to be a hero. The average Lamborghini can go 200 mph but most of the time it just sits there in the garage, reeking depreciation. But on that one special night when you have to get your pregnant wife, or girlfriend, or both, to the ospedale in a hurry, the Lambo stands up like a boss.

Those lift-kit pickups belching diesel smoke and whomping down the highway on 36-inch beadlocks? Useless. But when Houston flooded, hundreds of those explicitly stupid vehicles suddenly looked brilliant, wading filthy waters to rescue stranded residents.

The click and clack brothers of "Car Talk" (Tom and Ray Magliozzi) used to send up a howl whenever anyone would call in with a problem about his Jeep. "Oh, what a beast!" they'd groan. "Why would you want to drive down a road in that? Do you ever go off road?"

Fact is, I lusted after a Jeep for years, for reasons I never examined, but when I actually faced the reality and went into the dealership and test drove it, it was stiff, uncomfortable, noisy and I was hauling kids to wrestling tournaments and a minivan was much more to the point. Never got my Jeep.

The Jeep is all about fantasy, and that fantasy goes back to pre rational years, when I was maybe five or six watching WWII movies and all the soldiers rode around in Jeeps and they were so attached to them, they were like horses, something living, as the famous Bill Mauldin cartoon depicted, showing the weeping GI administering the coup de grace to a dying Jeep.

The same thing is clearly true for gun owners, particularly the guy who owns a small arsenal of AR-15's. They are just waiting for that day they can grab that gun and be a hero, race down to the school and confront the bad guy, take him out, or better yet, be ready to rally with friends and defeat the faceless bad guys in blue helmets descending in black helicopters to take over America.

The TV series "Homeland" has a wonderful sequence where an Alex Jones type character, a radio alt right guy who says things like, "When your sexually ambiguous, transgender friends sipping their five dollar lattes face the hobnail booted armies of the New World Order, marching to the orders of the Deep State, they're gonna be goddamned glad a few red blooded patriots buried some of those AR-15's in their backyards and rallied to the stars and stripes and laid down a field of fire so they could escape," this guy called Brett O'Keefe is holed up in a farmhouse, protected by a gun toting like minded family and when the FBI surrounds the place, gun toting friends arrive to defend freedom and there is a Waco like shoot out. A blaze of glory.
Barack Obama cut a certain clan of American manhood to the quick when he described these white males as "clinging to their guns and their religion" and that juxtaposition was important because what he was saying, is they are pathetic because they are clinging to fantasies, which is what religion is and of what the guns are the most visible emblem.

So that's what this gun thing is all about. The boys are playing super hero and they get really angry when you try to take their guns away and they don't care if the monthly slaughter of innocents in school hallways, movie theaters, shopping malls or concerts continues, because if you take away their fantasies, their secret super hero lives, then what do they have left?

Rita: Danish TV Americans Should Watch

Met a man in Iceland who had taught at the University of Minnesota but returned to his job at the University of Reykjavik and we I asked him if he preferred life in Iceland he said he'd rather live in the US.

Reykjavik 

This surprised me, but he explained life in Iceland is very pleasant--your health needs are met; you can find inexpensive housing; there is easy, available child care; the streets are safe; the whole country is safe with respect to crime; and there is an endless supply of hot water for showers and baths, BUT, like most Scandinavian societies it's all about community, fitting in, not standing out or proclaiming yourself, not showing up other people. And he said he had discovered he is not happy hiding his light under a bushel. He is a big man, and he has a lot to say and he could express all that in America.

So watching "Rita" the wonderful Danish series on Netflix has been great fun. In tonight's episode the school holds a "sports day" and the faculty informs the kids--teenagers--that in the soccer game the winning team can win by no more than 5 goals. If a team ends the game with more than a 5 goal advantage, they lose and the other team wins. All sorts of adolescent mayhem ensues. Rita, the non conformist teacher encourages the student revolt, in no small part because one of her students, who is not much of a scholar, who can read and write only at a fourth grade level in the 10th grade, is great on the soccer field and his father has brought his younger brother to watch the game. So there is an argument for allowing this kid to shine in the one realm where he can shine. 

Throughout the series you follow characters who you see making mistakes, making poor choices, doing dumb and sometimes unkind things but then you see another side of them, and you see they each in their own way have their own crosses to bear. 

Iceland

It's a show of remarkable subtlety and the Scandinavian values are so not American. Gay kids should be accepted and celebrated by their parents; 13 year old girls are encouraged to have sex but discouraged from having babies and if that means abortion, by all means; adolescents who are unhappy with their bodies are told to love themselves to strip down and display themselves to get over their foolish self loathing. 

City troll

It's another world, another way of living and thinking. 
What a wonderful world we live in now in the 21st century, where we can learn from others so easily, at just the push of a remote control button.