Character

It's always good to know you've had an impact on the world. Mine thus far consists, in part of course, of being cited on a college-admissions-coaching website. One with the optimistic name, "The Ivy Coach," located in the snow-heap that is De Blasio's neglected Upper East Side.

Anyway! The people who will get your child into HarvardYalePrinceton appear to have missed that my objection to holistic admissions was based on the argument that colleges can't actually make them. Not shouldn't - can't. "What on earth is wrong with judging personality and character?," asks the Coach. Nothing - but how on that same earth could people who only have access to admissions materials - and that may include notes from an interview - do anything of the kind?

But then it gets interesting. Their defense of holistic admissions centers on... the Unabomber. "Some admissions officer(s) at Harvard mistakenly judged the character of Ted Kaczynski and offered him admission to their university." The post is illustrated with a photo of Kaczynski in handcuffs. College should judge character, I *think* the argument goes, because if not, they'll get Unabombers. Or even if so, they may misjudge (or, like, fail to predict the behavior of an applicant many years after graduation), but they should still try. After all, ever since the Unabomber, Harvard's stock has plummeted, right? But really - how could schools spot future Unabombers? Wouldn't this mean going down a potentially dangerous path of stigmatizing those with certain mental illnesses or radical political viewpoints? Was the Unabomber's issue really one of character?

(The post goes on to make a comparison with dating - the very comparison that most demonstrates the problem of "holistic" in an admissions context. "If you don’t feel it, you just don’t feel it. It’s that simple." Yes, on a date. But what does an admissions committee "feel"?)

What does it say, though, that an Upper East Side tutoring firm is so devoted to holistic? For one thing, it suggests that holistic is - as I've suspected - more about benefitting the academically-mediocre children of the rich than it is about serving as a cover for quota-based affirmative action, or recognizing achievement in the face of obstacles. It could also be that for a place like this to get customers, it needs students (parents) to believe that anything's possible. That your child - who you, of course, think is special - is special, and will be recognized as such by any college that gets to know them.

On the hazzing of sads

Silently judging your winter fashion choices.

OK, the riled-ness begins. I was impatient, expecting instantaneous fury. It can take a moment. So:

Some commenters defend teacher overshare on the basis of students who make mistakes deserving to be shamed. Also: students who make the kinds of mistakes that get shared are (apparently? huh?) the ones who don't care about school... which somehow translates to, who wouldn't care about being insulted by their teachers. Never mind how many of these mistakes aren't actual errors having to do with course-related material that's being examined, but random things/terms students themselves bring up without quite understanding. No! say these commenters (sometimes in all-caps). Being mocked by your teachers builds character!

More broadly, they're saying that to be hurt when insulted is to show weakness. If this were just a few commenters in one place once, whatever, but this is, in a sense, true of much online activity, from Gawker (well, the old Gawker) to the Petey comments here. The what-was-once-called-blogosphere seems split (somewhat but not entirely along gender lines) between hyper-earnestness and a kind of snark absolutism, where the greatest good is showing that one's feathers can't be ruffled. (Haz a sad, tiny violins, etc.)

It seems as though it should be possible to say that gratuitous hurt shouldn't be inflicted, without this in any way contradicting additional advice on what to do if you find that, say, your teacher has mocked you on Facebook. Yes, as life advice, 'choose your battles' is a classic, as is 'never let them see you sweat.' Unless you're going to go the full-on Outrage approach and all-out flip a snark conversation into an earnestness one, whatever it is, you have to laugh it off. (Are there any more clichés I might summon to address this?) Decompensation is generally a bad idea. That doesn't mean the initial nastiness was justified.

What strikes me in this case is that it's just so obvious nothing positive comes of knowing your teacher is laughing at you. Do you, the naive 18-year-old, suddenly become a well-read, world-weary 45-year-old? We can have a reasonable conversation about a certain amount of setbacks in youth - those early days of finding one's own friends, and the quasi-bullying that goes with that life stage - building character. Or about whether whichever newfangled whosawhatsit (grade inflation, hand-holding, the proverbial everyone-gets-a-medal) is perhaps detrimental to whichever pedagogical aims. There are times when the hazzing of a sad serves some larger purpose. But what aim is addressed by teachers acting unprofessionally?

Student scrappiness as class signifier

A little while back, the NYT ran an exposé about today's spoiled college students. How spoiled? So spoiled that in anticipation of beginning their freshman year, they bought shower caddies at Target. Sorry, their parents bought them stuff at Target. So fancy! Also: so schmancy.

I had trouble reacting with appropriate horror to these trips to big-box stores, given the scale of the cost of college and the drop in a bucket this represents. Also given how unremarkable if not modest this kind of spending would be if done by adults for themselves or their under-18 children. People buy towels and stuff. Curtains are now sometimes a part of "stuff"? Yeah, fine, not when I was that age, but so it goes.

But a shrug was clearly not the response one was meant to have. Which, to some extent, fair enough. I mean, outrage - or at least annoyance - seems a fair response if your parents weren't able or willing to put a cent towards shower caddies, upon realizing that your roommate's parents had gone all out. Still, it seemed a bit disingenuous for a NYT lifestyle article. There are no doubt kids being shipped off with $300 shower gel. Was this the best target for generalized rage?

It's for whatever reason easier to rage at more middle-class decadence. Maybe because that's meant to signal a generational shift - this might be kids-these-days, in a way that the schmanciest 0.01% are not. Or maybe it's because there's a certain amount of respect granted to those who spend gobs, but not at a place as shabby as Target, because that's supposed to be chic. It's that second possibility that concerns me.

*****

We now meet the similarly fancy and schmancy students of the University of Missouri, Columbia, who live in "luxury" apartments. What is luxury, though, in this context? Luxury is, these are apartments, not dorms. They actually cost less than the dorms, but are nicer. Key paragraph commenters seem not all that keen on reading:

The monthly rates for the modern units in Columbia generally start at $700 per student for a spot in an apartment, about twice the cost of older housing in the area. Yet they are on par with the price of on-campus housing, which equates to about $1,000 a month per bed, meals included.

So this does sound kind of steep either way. (Dorm food: world's biggest rip-off, unless Alice Waters is somehow involved.) Fascinating, really, that people are paying more to live in Missouri off-campus housing, however luxurious, than one could not that long ago to live in Greater Park Slope.

These apartments are "luxury," though, because they have flat-screen TVs, instead of professors giving lectures. Which is... apparently something we're to believe is a normal thing that happens in a dorm? I went to a somewhat intellectual college (understatement) and lived in its dorms. No one was giving any lectures, unless you count the occasional midnight mansplaining among the undergrads.

"Luxury," though, seems to be mostly code for things that weren't ubiquitous back in the day, but have become so. Or things that didn't exist, period. College students today are mighty luxurious with their smartphones, but note the lack of record players, records/tapes/CDs, video cameras, regular cameras, address books... Similarly, various accoutrements of an earlier age that haven't been replaced with smartphones are also obsolete. How much formalwear are students bringing to college, for example, and no, we don't just get to compare this with whichever peak of hippieishness from the 1970s.

The article inspired what might well be the most mean-spirited comment in newspaper comment history. One college student is interviewed and explains that she's covering some of the cost of living in one of these evil luxury buildings herself, and is not - as the journalist clearly wants to portray her as - a brat. Which gets this response:

Ironic that the bearer of such an infamously aspirational, tacky and upwardly-mobile-stock-broker-fave name as "Courtney" would dispute the notion that student residents of these upscale off-campus resize denies are entitled and spoiled jerks. 

And when she says "I wouldn't say I'm spoiled by any means," methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Charming!

Further complicating things from an amateur-sociology perspective: there are a) the dorms, which sound like the biggest rip-off, but which have some kind of implied academic atmosphere, and b) the new "luxury" housing, with their "stainless steel appliances, granite countertops and balconies," but there is also c) the Niedermeyer Building, which is apparently old, quaint, and in far better taste than dorms with their own tanning salons. The Niedermeyer Building - furnished, one imagines, by Karl Farbman himself - is clearly for a better class of person. A recent grad who lives there refers to Option B as "mass-produced, soulless luxury." So is it that some students are too poor for in-house tanning, or that some are sufficiently lowbrow as to seek this out? (Both?)

And another commenter has this to say:

My own kids go to top colleges and stay in dorms that are austere and basic. [....] I'd be interested in finding out if there is a direct inverse relationship between the status of the college academically and the luxury housing and other perks they feel compelled to offer. If you are secure in your status, you don't need bells and whistles.

Never mind that it's not the college offering all this. But this commenter may have a point. Student scrappiness is its own class signifier - sometimes the result of a badly-funded school with working-class students, but sometimes the very height of posh. (If you want to make this international, check out the dorms at Sartre's alma mater in Paris.) Maybe those raging against the One Percent would want to look somewhere other than at state-school kids in Missouri, granite-countertop-having or otherwise.

Middle school and the neurosis of narcissism

As I sit waiting for commenter Caryatis's mystery "suggestion about" my "writing style" (about which I'm of course extra-self-conscious as the dissertation deadline looms), I will risk inflicting it, in all its passive-voiced, parenthetical-filled, insufficiently-concise-unless-I've-read-it-over-and-if-it's-on-WWPD-chances-are-I-have-not glory (along with whichever mystery quality everyone but me is aware of but that all until Caryatis, including professional editors, have been too polite to point out, gah!!!) on you, my constructively-critical readers. If you wish to put this post into a word doc and return it to me with track changes, by all means. (Consider me 15% serious.)

Self-consciousness is really the right state of mind to be in for this post, which is about middle school.

So. The book of the moment is Emily Bazelon's much-publicized one on bullying. (Will I read it? Will I get around to seeing if anyone wants me to review it? Or - realistically - will I be too focused on wrapping up The Thing, by which I mean a certain bloated research project which, if I de-bloat it, could theoretically culminate in an advanced degree.*)

Bullying, of course, has been topic du jour since Dan Savage launched the It Gets Better Project. What began as a sudden awareness that the rate at which LGBT kids are bullied (at school and online, but also at home and at church) surely relates to the rate of suicide and self-destructive behavior in that population has, it seemed, morphed into a more general sense that the cruelty of childhood is not something we should just accept.

And it used to be more than just accepted. Some of what we now view as bullying would, in the past, have been seen as character-building. We might have pitied home-schooled kids precisely for not having gotten made fun of by their peers, an experience that thickens the skin and prepares one for adulthood. But today, that view seems out of date. We must not only remember that there's nothing wrong with being gender-non-conforming, but also that the annoying kid perhaps has a disorder of some kind. The idea that one's quirks should be lessened via socialization... persists, but has become controversial.

I'm 29, and so the last of the pre-enlightened generation. Though born smack in the middle of the milieu that now does this, I was not helicopter-parented. I took the public bus alone starting at 10, the subway at 14. I hung around with friends after school in the pre-smartphone era, thank goodness. My cohort's first unsupervised parties, first romantic entanglements, remain - by contemporary standards - virtually undocumented. And - and this I'm not so nostalgic about - we were horrible to one another. Not in high school - either we were already too old, or I went to a weird high school - but middle school was the worst. The worst!

In conjunction with Bazelon's book, Slate, where she's an editor, is posting first-hand accounts of having been a bully. Thus far, all three have been accounts of middle-school cruelty. Middle school, especially for girls (?), is awful. Awful everywhere, not just in Manhattan, where it might be its own unique brand of awful. But is it awful because of bullying? Bazelon asks in her NYT op-ed that we not call all nasty behavior among kids bullying. And... thinking back to my own experience at that age, I remember immense nastiness, but not bullying. I remember what was effectively a class-wide low-grade eating disorder (and there's a "Seinfeld" reference about how this is the result of bullying among girls, as vs. wedgies for boys), but then again, this was the Upper East Side - those who didn't make it out are probably still removing the doughy part of their bagels and filling the shell with low-carb salad. I think that was just an initiation into a certain kind of adulthood. This was, after all, the same school Gwyneth no-carbs Paltrow went to.

In the spirit of delving into the dark ages, I tried my best to remember those years, and failed to recall any bullying - of or by me, of or by anyone else. I spent those years in or dramatically excluded from then re-included in a clique of the sort that, if I passed such girls on the street today, I'd feel vaguely intimidated. (Think that commercial - possibly for car insurance? - where a pudgy middle-aged dude is followed around by "the popular girls from the local middle school," who shame him into eating less.) I was middle-schoolishly narcissistic and felt it was all about whether everyone liked me, not realizing that everyone else was wondering the same thing.

These years weren't entirely awful. I made closer - well, perhaps not closer, but more intense - female friendships than I've had since. There were no boys at the school, and we were at any rate too young to be dating, so nearly all drama (yes, some girls like girls) centered on female friendships. And it was fun to kind of discover the world with peers, in a way you really can't once you're older and not as easily surprised. It was fun to finally emerge from the confines of my family and whichever parents'-friends'-kids were my 'friends' and actually make friends of my own, ones whose values might not be exactly the ones I was being raised with. But it was, for the most part, a miserable few years, with cruelty the norm. If it had been bullying, perhaps it might have been addressed. But it was just some combination of that age and a peculiar subculture. The school might have taught self-acceptance, for all I know (my memory of this time being thankfully largely repressed) they tried.

Did the nastiness build character? I'm not sure. I suppose I learned, in those years, about caring whether I was cool, and what I looked like... only to care exponentially less from high school on. My sense is that those who don't go through this at 12 or so end up facing it later in life, sometimes well into adulthood. I know it's supposed to be better to be a dork as a kid, and cool as an adult, but I think there's something to be said for not caring if you're hip, not worrying about being spectacularly good-looking, when you're 25, 45...

And much of the cruelty of middle school is simply a first glimpse at life's unfairnesses. Once you reach the age of making your own friends and not just playing with whomever, you're confronted with evidence that some people are better-looking and more likable than others, that some people you like won't reciprocate. But it's not just rejection. It's at this age that you first learn that people you don't especially like or give much thought to probably don't much like or think about you, either. This, when you first learn it, can be jarring.

Even if it isn't expressed particularly cruelly, dislike or apathy, when it's a new experience, stings in a way it never will moving forward. Not getting invited to a sleepover can, in the moment, feel like a tragedy. This makes middle-school students seem like horrible, neurotic people with no sense of proportion,** but if you look at as a developmental stage, you don't condemn the individual. And people do, as a rule, grow out of this. With age, certainly with Facebook, you realize that people are hanging out without you, that this doesn't mean these people hate you but rather that they give as little thought to you as you do to them unless prompted. You realize that the world does not end if you're not the most beautiful and most popular - that no one's attractive to everyone and liked by all. You will still have dates, friends. Maybe it's helpful to experience blunt rejection as a kid in order to be more easygoing later in life?

I am, you will notice, leaving this post with the essential unresolved: can/should middle school be non-horrible? I tend to think efforts in this area should be made, but am not sure a) that it's possible, and b) that a certain amount of pain - but not past whichever threshold - does indeed build character.

*Note that this post has two levels - the reliving of middle-school neurosis, and the current almost-done-isn't-done dissertation panic. I may not care (enough, alas) what I look like, but I sure do care what Chapter Seven does.

**This is one very important reason why I'm against parental overshare. Kids, till a certain age, lack perspective, and that's normal, but it's difficult to see that when reading an essay, and readers will come to associate that particular individual with vapid, selfish, massively neurotic behavior.

Electricity, snooping

First, the lights came back on. Last night, just over four full days since they'd gone out. It was unreal. Then, a few hours later, the wireless returned. Heat and hot water must have happened overnight, so this morning was one of those post-camping-trip-type showers. Wonderful.

So, on a more traditional WWPD note, on the theme of parents sharing their kids' dirty laundry, the NYT (sorry, Sigivald) is quite literally inviting parents to do this. In what universe is it socially acceptable to go into a teenager's bedroom, photograph it, and send said photo to a national newspaper?

On this week's titillating Dear Prudence

Yet another reason why college room-sharing is a terrible idea. Prudie's advice - "Just think of this as one of those 'out of classroom' learning experiences admissions officers are always touting." - doesn't really add up, because under what other circumstances later in life might this happen and not constitute massively inappropriate - criminal, even - behavior? Yes, it's a life lesson to pretend not to hear what's going on behind closed doors (including, as Prudie notes came up in an earlier column, behind bathroom doors), but a within a room is a different story. Even aside from anything explicitly intimate, it's natural as well as socially expected to have an on-off switch when it comes to what's public and what's private. How is it supposed to be a good thing to transcend that impulse/expectation?

Such a chore

There was evidently some study, coming out of UCLA, that shows that American middle-class kids are brats, while their Samoan equivalents are not as bratty. Without knowing a thing about Samoa, we might assume that this is correct. French and Chinese kids are better-behaved. Why would any other non-U.S. locale whose child-rearing practices are profiled in the WSJ be different? Slate and the NYT parenting blog are also on the case. At the latter, KJ Dell'Antonia asks if kids need more chores. What do you think the commenters will respond?

We of course hear from those who were expected to do all the chores growing up, and who are, we can assume, amazing people, or who expected this of their kids, all of whom are currently happily married and immensely professionally successful.

My own gratuitously contrarian thoughts on the matter, which I see overlap with some of the comments:

-It would seem that a child raised without having to do chores would grow up to think chores are something parents do, not that he, the child-as-adult, will always have people waiting on him. I do plenty of chores now that I was never asked to do, never thought to do, as a kid, and never expect that someone will, say, swoop in and buy me my groceries. (But if so, I'll email you the weekly list.)

-The difference is when you bring gender into the mix - if mom does all the chores, and dad none, even if none of the kids do chores, the boys will grow up thinking chores are for the wife, etc.

-On the other hand, if one parent stays at home, whichever parent that is, it becomes more difficult to justify chores as something that everyone has to pitch in with after school or work. If one parent gets home at seven, wiped out, and doesn't have to do anything, why should Junior, who already had school and soccer practice and three hours of homework, have to do the vacuuming?

-Probably also awkward: what if there's a housekeeper? While my only personal experience of this was time spent at a German scientist guest-house last summer, I'm aware of a phenomenon of adults hiring others to clean their toilets for them. Artificial, I'd imagine, in such a situation, to tell your kid to start scrubbing.

-While bathrooms do need regular cleaning, as do kitchens, lots of "chores" are make-work, whether for a June Cleaver or a put-upon 5th-grader. Bed-making, for example. Dusting. Even essential chores can be more or less of a fuss - laundry will happen more often if you insist on washing jeans after every wear, food prep at dinner need not reach back-of-Michelin-starred-restaurant proportions, etc. Unless you're doing serious entertaining, and often, there's something to be said for learning to live with a little mess.

-Whereas there are life skills, like how to deal with money, or how to cook, that parents too frequently ignore. That whole "but what if Junior never learns how to do his laundry?" argument is overrated. Junior will dye precisely one load of white wash pink, his first month of college, will ruin a few crappy t-shirts from high school, and the world will not end.

-The "builds character" argument is predicated on the idea that kids need to learn to do things they wouldn't have wanted to do. Yet for most kids, on most days, such activities as "soccer practice" and "school" fall into that category. A kid who goes to school - and homeschooling might not accomplish this, at least without all kinds of outside effort - learns that it's a wide world that does not* revolve around him. That is the life lesson. Why teach kids that they need to keep their rooms tidy, only to watch them grow up and spend ages 18-25 living in intentional squalor, after they realize that tidiness is not in fact necessary?

-Requisite class angle: maybe it's better to schedule ballet and Mandarin lessons for Junior than to make him fold laundry. But if parents are, or a single parent is, exhausted from three jobs, or not academically-inclined, not wealthy or plugged-in enough to get these activities for their kids, or otherwise not a refugee of the Upper West Side now living in Park Slope, and it's a choice between uninterrupted vegging out and an interruption that involves folding laundry? Could be.

-When I think back to kids I knew who were truly self-sufficient, it was generally for fairly tragic reasons involving absentee parents. As with our society's bizarre insistence on having college freshmen share bedrooms, there's a point at which character-building switches over into something less innocuous.

-If poodles could do chores. That's all.

*Typo fixed.