they have a new goal

US is 63% of the readership

he was awesome in Roots

> teach about human nature and relationships.Sure, in part the goal of my imagined ‘Girls 101 for Dummies — Boys’, but super tough to teach, especially in a public school where everything has to be politically correct and even Darwin is not welcome. Mostly such is part of ‘psychological or social capital’ learned, like a lot of other important lessons, mostly at home or not at all at least for a long time.Remember: Already in the crib, the girls are paying attention to people and boys, to things. So, the girls were smiling, making eye contact, paying attention to tones of voice, etc. and I was trying to hack the latch on the crib and get to the firetruck on the floor. On your subject, boys start out way behind, usually concentrate on things that do not help them catch up, and, really, have much less natural sensitivity and, thus, talent.For now, try ‘Psychology Today’, which has a lot of chaff with its wheat, or my favorite, E. Fromm, ‘The Art of Loving’. Can also make progress with D. Tannen, ‘You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation’. But neither are currently politically correct since both emphasize that human males and females are not 100%, totally, exactly the same in every respect — astounding, obviously a subversive, seditious concept! :-)!Can see also Erving Goffman, ‘The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life’. To me, it was tough reading, dense, challenging, too tough. My wife found it simple, obvious, and easy reading. But then she read H. James, ‘The Golden Bowl’ for something easy and relaxing for fun. She was genuinely brilliant. My brother remarked that Henry James wrote novels like psychology, and his brother William wrote psychology like novels. Maybe try both and see which you like.Tannen liked Goffman. Get a copy of Goffman and see if you can get something from it.Apparently Tannen dug into Goffman, etc. after her first marriage failed and she wanted to know why. So, she made finding out why a research project and much of her career as a prof, at least long, at Georgetown. So, even Tannen at first was a bit short on understanding. Maybe someone gave her a toy firetruck and otherwise didn’t pay attention to her!For more, try to dig into the literature from clinical psychology. In an important sense, Fromm is an example.Shortest lesson: Try to detect, often even from seemingly subtle clues, and then track and figure out what the heck the other person is thinking and feeling and why and then make what you say and do appropriate responses. So, this way you have to watch both sides of the conversation, not just your own, and the mental effort can become severe.Since a lot of thoughts and feelings are fairly standard, not every instance need start with just a blank slate; often can make a decent maximum likelihood guess from a list of more common possibilities; and years of practice can ease the effort.Some girls in middle school are already pretty good at it — no doubt it helps that the girls get a lot of practice from their propensity to gossip. My wife and her mother were brilliant at it, but that brilliance did my wife no good, and the mother was basically so nasty only luck ever saved her.There were times in my life, K-12, college, and for some years afterward, that this little piece of advice would have done me a LOT of good.Don’t miss the T. Brazelton remark in ‘What Every Baby Knows’: When a child is rejected by its peers, the reason is always that the child has some anxieties and these show and make the peers feel uncomfortable. Not just children!But for such things, human males and females are farther apart in talent, interest, ability, etc. than Mars and Venus.Sorry, Donna, right, I’m being “sexist” again. :-)!

Essentially that same stuff was going on in Memphis when I was there, and I wanted nothing to do with it and HATED it. I still HATE it.My father was from a little south of Buffalo, NY and met my mother when he was in college at Ohio State University in Columbus where Dad had an uncle — my parents wanted nothing to do with that Old South stuff.My father’s job took him to a little north of Memphis, so he went. So, as I spent time there, I learned more and more about that Old South stuff.Since Dad had a good job, and Mom was a high end secretary and, thus, quickly on first name basis with much of the Memphis elite, we did okay, but the Old South stuff was never very far away. Mom did have a house keeper one day a week and was good enough to make the Social Security contributions which were usually neglected.My neighborhood was pretty, happy, very safe (we never locked the doors). My school had to be one of the best in the country: The year I graduated, MIT came recruiting. The year before me, three guys went to Princeton and ran against each other and some poor fourth guy for President of the Freshman Class. My SAT scores were fine. My math background was, comparatively, right up there: I easily taught myself freshman calculus and in college started on sophomore calculus with the same book Harvard used and did fine. So, I was not supposed to complain.But, in my school, we used a new book for four years at which time it was falling apart. Then the book got sent to South Memphis, the ‘other’ Memphis, the one from the Old South. Ugly situation.As soon as I could, I got the heck out of Memphis and was glad to be gone from the Old South.A few years later I got a call to return to Memphis to help start FedEx and was assured that in Memphis finally the Civil War and the Old South were gone with the wind. So, I joined, rented a room in Memphis, used the FedEx WATTS line to call my wife, still back in Maryland, each evening, and each few weeks rode jump seat on the FedEx planes (officially and also in part in reality as an observer of flight operations) home for a few days. Nope: The Civil War and the Old South were both fully alive and well.Although my work in computing and applied math literally, single-handedly saved FedEx from going out of business twice, the FedEx promises of stock didn’t come through, and without stock in hand or in a rock solid legal document, no way did I want to drag my wife out of her Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins to bring her to Memphis so left FedEx and went to Hopkins for my Ph.D. Again I was glad to be out of the Old South of Memphis.A few months ago I looked into what had happened to a girlfriend I’d had in high school, happened to get an update on Memphis, and had to conclude that the place is still the Old South fighting the Civil War.One Saturday when I was 15, I was invited to come see my girlfriend at the house of her cousin. So, I rode on my bicycle, and part of the trip was on a busy, four lane street with a lot of fast traffic, economic activity, and street lights. But there was no place for a bicycle, and the ride was the most dangerous of the years of bicycle riding I’d done.So, on the way home, I tried another street, parallel to the busy one and one block south. Right: No traffic. No people. No economic activity. Unpretty houses, mostly completely dark. No street lights. Big holes in the road. Just one block south and parallel but straight out of the Old South. After a mile or two I was back to a road along a country club, right, wide road, smooth, perfect, lots of street lights, low traffic.Did I mention, I HATE that old stuff?Once that stuff gets started, it’s super, super, super difficult to reverse, clean up, ‘melt’, correct, or stop.More generally, and a current concern, I hate the strong, cynical, deliberate efforts to create another exploited underclass in the US. It’s a bummer; it violates both the letter and spirit of both a lot of very clear laws and much of the commendable history of immigration into the US; it is deliberately attempting to create class conflict and does and will; it’s just pissing on the cultural strength of the US; it’s a big mistake; we should NOT be doing it; and I hate it. We should STOP it. And a solution will take much more than a Kickstarter campaign.Of COURSE we need ‘Reading Rainbow’ and much, much more; but that is all just as it was long and still deliberately planned to be. And there is not much hope we will get the much, much more for a very long time, where 150 years is not very long.

me too…

You’re saying you think that they should still teach Latin in schools? I’d rather have them use that time to teach about human nature and relationships. (To me, more important than band practice and school plays.) If anything school curriculum probably has to be reevaluated a to z to bring it up to date.

Ha!