Cell Pun Box

Gruntled Son made a cell model for his high school biology class, as thousands of students had before him. But he had a wonderful, terrible idea of how to do it.

I particularly like the two George Clooneys.

Just-In-Time Teaching

One of the things that I enjoy the most about teaching at Centre College is being part of a community of teachers who really care about teaching. Yesterday we had the first in our annual series of "pedagogy lunches." About a quarter of the faculty assembled for lunch, and (partly) paid for the privilege, to hear our colleague, Jason Neiser, talk about his success with "just-in-time teaching."

Before each class, Neiser sends the 60 students in his two sections of introductory physics two "warm up questions" to help them think through the concepts covered in the reading for that day's class. He also has an open-ended question that lets them raise further points they were curious about. These are low-pressure assignments - if they do a bunch over the term, they get a discount on the final. The grading is on a simple scale, and is based not on the correctness of the response but on how well they engaged the material. The J-I-T element comes in the hard part for the professor: he reads all of these responses before each class, and adjusts his teaching accordingly. The students' responses let him know if there are common misconceptions or pressing questions.

The real benefit, he reports, comes in the high level of conversation in the class. The students come in talking. They drive the discussion. He said he does not actually lose any time in teaching content, because they really learned most of the content from the reading and warm ups. And at the end of the term, when students take a concept mastery test that physics professor across the country use, his students show much larger gains than students in traditional lecture classes do.

The best part of the lunch workshop for me was the way that most of the professors there immediately started thinking of how they could apply this in their own classes. I had a thought about how I could adapt a journal assignment I am having my social theory students do this term. Other colleagues in a range of disciplines engaged the details and imagined the possibilities. Many of us will, no doubt, decide that this particular approach does not quite fit what we are doing.

But it is great to be part of a learning community.

Air Force Women Divorce More

The Air Force are more married and less divorced than the general population is - for men. Air Force women are more divorced than the general population - 12.5% vs. 11.6% of American women in general.

Deployments are a big factor in military divorces, for men and women. This has long been known. The surprising finding a new study is that flight nurses - the most female part of the Air Force, and among the most likely to be deployed overseas - have the highest divorce rate, at 11.6%. Combat doctors, who are overwhelmingly men, are only 3.3% divorced. (Officers in general have a much lower divorce rate than the enlisted, at 4.4% overall).

I think I know what this means. Men are most jealous of the possibility that their wives would be sexually unfaithful. Military nurses in combat would be subject to more pressure, and temptation, to sexual infidelity than those same women would be at home, and more pressure and temptation than deployed men would be. Even if deployed female nurses are not, in fact, less faithful than they would be at home, it is reasonable to expect that some of their husbands would suspect that they were. Since another effect of deployment is to make communication much harder, dealing with those suspicions would be hard in that situation. Adding to the problem is the fact, also reported in this study, that non-military husbands at home are much less likely to use the Air Force's marriage support program than non-military wives are, the home husbands of deployed wives are more likely to do things that lead to divorce.

Michelle Obama Decided To Make the Adjustment

An excerpt from Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage by Christopher Andersen has been published in the New York Post As he was building his political career and she had the main responsibility for raising their two daughters, while working herself, Michelle Obama came close to walking away. She wanted more sharing of family responsibilities. He said he was building for all of their futures.

The turning point is described here:

But there was no question that they were a couple and a team. In time, Michelle made the conscious decision that, in fact, she would be the one to adjust to the circumstances he created - and not vice versa.

"This was the epiphany," she said. "What I figured out was that I was pushing to make Barack be something I wanted him to be for me. ... I was depending on him to make me happy. Except it didn't have anything to do with him. I needed support. I didn't necessarily need it from Barack."

Michelle decided to approach the problems in her marriage the way she would approach the problems she faced daily at work. "I had to change," she said. "So how do I stop being mad at him and start problem-solving, and cobble together the resources? I also had to admit that I needed space and I needed time. And the more time that I could get to myself, the less stress I felt."

Michelle Obama made the decision that many women make. The situation is complicated by the fact that they both thought he could change the world in important ways. Still, in most of the cases that I know of, she is the one to make the adjustments to make the family work. There are a few cases that I know of of very high achieving women whose careers depended on husbands who made big career sacrifices. The Thatchers are the best case I can think of.

What happens if one of them doesn't make the adjustment? I think in 99 cases out a 100, neither of them reaches the heights in public life that one of them might have reached. Most parents will judge this worth it. But I think that is a real choice that couples with the potential for stratospheric achievement have to make - one of them has to be the main family makers. And, in my estimate, in at least 8 couples out of 10, she will be the one who chooses to make the adjustment. Not forced. But chooses, all things considered.

Civil Union Commission Rejects Civil Unions, Wimps Out On the Hard Part

The Special Committee to Study Civil Unions and Issues of Marriage of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has just issued its draft report. They spend 30 pages reviewing the issues of marriage and homosexuality familiar to anyone who has been involved with this issue.

In the end, they come to two conclusions:

First, we should stay in covenant relationship with one another in the church despite our disagreements [my paraphrase]. Second, quoting the report,

We find that the compromise suggestion of civil unions/domestic partnerships offers no true solution to the struggle around same-gendered partnerships. Civil unions/domestic partnerships provide neither the state-sanctioned benefits nor the societal acceptance that marriage (expanded or not) offers.

The review of the debate that the committee offers is not bad. The conclusion that we should stay and work with one another, rather than call each other names and leave, is worth saying again. The conclusion that civil unions will not work is a substantive conclusion.

BUT what the committee leaves the church with is this:
You have two hard painful options.
We reject the compromise that is on the table.
We do not choose either option.
We offer no other compromises.
Good luck.

Structured Structure

I have been writing about Bourdieu lately, which means that I have to type phrases like "a structured structure and a structuring structure" often.

I noticed a peculiar, deep-in-the-word-geek-woods pleasure: typing the word structure is fun. It makes an interesting circular pattern in the left hand, especially in the index finger.

If you like that sort of thing, try it a few times. Structure structure structured structuring structure. Oh, and structuration (but that is Giddens and not as much fun to type).

If this is not your kind of thing, just move on. Nothing to see here. (structure structure structure).

No, Secularism Is Not Saving Marriage

Oliver Thomas' religion column in USA Today, "Is secularism saving marriage," is mostly wrongheaded.

Thomas' premise is that marriage should have disappeared in postmodern America, since it is so confining and patriarchal and permanent. Marriage seems to be coming back. How do we explain this mystery, Thomas asks? It must be that men have learned to be more egalitarian and intimate from secular society. Secularism helps people delay marriage without delaying sex, which is healthy. Thus, secularism is saving marriage from religion.

No. Religious people have longer and stronger marriages. Grownups of all kinds, religious and otherwise, know that the greatest social value of marriage is not the intimacy it fosters between adults, but the permanent team it creates between them to raise children. Religious marriages are, on average, more intimate and more mutual. Religious people are more likely to get married in their mid-twenties, the optimal time, rather than delaying for their careers until they are so set in their single ways that it is hard to make a permanent team. The secular emphasis on getting my individual way in all things undermines marriage.

Permissive Families Breed Spontaneous Kids, Authoritarian Families Breed Directed Kids

Some parents are highly supportive of their children, some are highly challenging, some are both, and some are neither. This nifty four-fold division was used by Kevin Rathunde, continuing work of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, to look at how much some talented high school students were involved in their school-related activities. They had students wear pagers through a school week, beeping them several times a day to record what they were doing and how they felt about it.

The researchers were looking for highly engaging "flow" experiences. The students' responses were turned into a -.4 to +.4 scale, with the boring experiences at the -.4 end and the flow experiences at the +.4 end. They also had separate averages for the students' spontaneous activities and their directed activities

Rathunde then compared the average responses of the kids from each of the four kinds of families. The kids from the high support/high challenge families reported the highest average score - almost .35 - for both spontaneous and directed activities. The kids from the other three kinds of families all had average scores at or below zero for both kinds of activities.

What is most interesting to me, though, are the differences in the latter three families in which kinds of school-related activities, spontaneous or directed, went with which kinds of families. Kids from low support/low challenge families reported average scores a little below zero on both spontaneous and directed activities. This is a far cry from the high/high group, but, on the whole, they net out higher than the remaining two. These kids are on their own as far as their families go, so they make their own way with middlin' results.

Kids from high support/low challenge families (what Diana Baumrind, in a similar scheme, calls permissive families) are more satisfied with their spontaneous activities than their directed ones - about -.1 vs -.3. The low support/high challenge families (Baumrind's authoritarians) report the reverse: much higher satisfaction with directed activities (0) than spontaneous (-.4). This mixed finding from the mixed families is in the direction that I expected. I was surprised, though, at how much the permissive kids liked spontaneity and how much the authoritarian kids like direction.

The Global Problem of the Color Line

We have been reading W.E.B. Du Bois' The Souls of Black Folk in our social theory class. Du Bois famously said, at the dawn of the previous century, "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”

I had not fully realized until this reading that he did not just mean that the color line is the main problem of the twentieth century in the United States, but rather, that this is the global problem of the century.

Later in the book he writes “the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples.” When we think about the world in 1900, almost the entire globe was directly ruled by European countries or their colonial heirs. The Europeans and their transplants operated on an explicitly racial theory which held that the white race(s) developed the world. The "undeveloped" peoples were those on the other side of the color line globally.

In the second half of the twentieth century Du Bois' prophecy came true with striking clarity all over the world. We are still working through the aftermath of ending racist and imperialist theories that justified European domination. The problem of the color line is far from over in the global clash of civilizations. But the theory that justified the color line has been subverted.

What Dad's Job is Like Matters More to Kids Than What Mom's Job is Like

I am working with students on the 500 Families study, which surveyed middle-class, dual-career couples on work-family balance. One paper from this study, by Ariel Kalil, Judith Levine, and Kathleen Ziol-Guest, looked at what might make teen boys and girls want to have jobs like their mothers' and fathers' jobs. How much the jobs paid, and how much the parents talked about their work with their kids were not significant factors in whether teens wanted jobs like their parents'. And boys and girls were not very different from one another in their response to their parents, though girls were somewhat more likely to want a job like mom's. For both boys and girls, dad's job seemed more attractive.

Teens, like everyone else, are more attracted to jobs with complex work and freedom to do it. Quite a few of the mothers and fathers in the study had work like that. The surprising finding was this:

When fathers hold jobs that are substantively complex and when they report having higher levels of autonomy at work, adolescents express a greater interest in having a job like their fathers’. Interestingly, these relationships do not apply to interest in having a job like their mothers’.

The authors are not sure why teens are differently attracted to their parents' work in this way, and neither am I. Here is my guess, though. For most mothers, motherhood is the most salient part of their identity to children (and probably to the mothers themselves); mom's job is important, but secondary. For fathers, though, their work is very salient to their being fathers, because how they support their family is a vital part of their identity as fathers. The kids pick up on this, so the qualities of their fathers' jobs are more salient to the children than are the qualities of their mothers' jobs.

Marriage Makes Women More Conservative; Motherhood Makes Them More Liberal

Marriage makes men and women more conservative. Fatherhood also makes men more conservative. But political scientists Steven Greene and Laurel Elder found that mothers were more liberal than non-mothers on war questions. This is true even though those same women are likely to have been more conservative than single women when they first got married.

Far from producing "Security Moms" who vote for the most hawkish candidates to protect their babies, mothers seem to desire to avoid war and protect their own babies from fighting them.

(I thank Steven Greene for generously sharing this paper with me.)

Ditch the Lectionary

My church uses the Common Lectionary, a selection of readings from the Bible that work through the whole text, pretty much, every three years. Each week we have an Old Testament selection, a New Testament selection from the gospels, and a New Testament selection from the other NT books. The pastor normally incorporates one of these selections into the sermon.

I appreciate the intent of the lectionary. Using a lectionary makes certain that the preacher will not just stick to a few favorite texts, but will have to read, and perhaps preach on, the entire Bible.

Still, as a way of actually teaching the Bible, I think the lectionary is a failure. Three unconnected snippets each week are too short and too many to follow. Since, in my experience, it is a rare preacher who tries to integrate all three each week, most of the readings are not developed at all. And even if the preacher does follow one section - the gospel, most likely - for several weeks, it is very hard to hold on to the thread of preaching. Usually, the sequences of sermons are not connected with one another, and often only loosely connected with the text.

I think we would be better off preaching the Word the way the Reformers did: work through a book, or a theme, thoroughly. This does not mean that today's events and concerns could not be incorporated - on the contrary, nearly all of the Bible ties readily to today. But I, as a listener and student, would rather hear one sustained argument for a season that really explicated and connected a text.

The lectionary, it seems to me, makes most of our Scripture reading in the service into a magical act of just saying the words and hoping they have some effect.

Reboot Universe

A delightful prank.

Birth Order Advantages of Chattering Parents.

“The best environment to grow up in is basically two parents who are chattering away at you with fancy words.”

So says Frank Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. Sulloway was quoted in a New York Times story, "Birth Order: Fun to Debate, But How Important?" which I thought mostly missed the point of Sulloway's study.

Sulloway says that there is not a specific character that goes with each birth order position. Rather, the dynamic rule is "first born gets first choice." Normally the first born will gravitate to the things the parents value most, will get the most parental conversation, will seek to work hard, do well in school, and succeed in life, because that is the simplest path to eminence. The later-borns then have to find a different niche, especially when the kids are young and all at home. But if the first-born does not choose that niche, it is available for the second, and so on.

Sulloway cites a recent study of birth order using Norwegian military data. That study found that first borns have a modest but real 3-point IQ advantage over second borns. Sulloway's conclusion from this is the wonderful quote above.

Background, Education, and Effort Matter in About the Right Proportions

In the Social Structure class we are working through the classic studies of social mobility (for SOC nerds that is Blau and Duncan, as modified by Jencks). They look at which factors in your background help predict your likely socioeconomic status (SES).

The basic finding is roughly this:

The class of your family, plus the way that class shapes your schooling, predicts a fifth to a quarter of your ultimate SES.

Your own education predicts another fifth to a quarter.

The other 50 or 60% is due to other factors - including your own effort in getting, keeping, and improving in a job.

As we talked about it, it seemed to me that this is an ethically satisfying distribution. As a parent, I am glad that my efforts to help my children be cultivated and successful do matter. As a teacher I am glad that education adds a sizable hunks to my students' ultimate success. And as a citizen I am glad that there is such ample scope for personal effort to make the biggest difference in one's achievement.

Darwinist Dating Should Not Be A Template, But a Cautionary Tale

Kay Hymowitz has another fine piece on mate selection in City Journal, "Dating in a Time of Darwinism." She gives their due to single men who have been burned and become jaded about dating. They try to be nice guys, but get dumped for bad boys. They try to be chivalrous, but get attacked as sexist. Or try to be egalitarian, and get scorned as inconsiderate. So some men turn to a brutal Darwinian calculus that they will be more successful in their sexual conquests if they are more callous to women. As women's biological clock ticks louder, men can get away with even less consideration. And the saddest part is that many of them are right.

Hymowitz rightly notes that what a Darwinian approach to sexual relations misses the fact that human beings can be cultivated and civilized past their merely biological desires. This goes for women just as much as it does for men. There is a short-term sexual advantage to men in being jerks. Today there are more women with the freedom to do the same. But they are both still being jerks.

What strikes me about this sad state of affairs, which might affect as many as a fifth of single young men and women, is that it is so short-sighted. Most people do want to marry and have kids and stay that way. Nearly all of the pleasure-seeking young women of the New Girl Order harbor the desire for real marriage and a family, and most of the single young men now studying up to be Pick-Up Artists will want that, too.

The smart young men and women, like most of the students I teach, can figure out that if they want something eventually, they will be better off is they start seeking it now. The happiest group of grownups are likely to have married in their mid-twenties and gotten on with a solid, building-up life.

If You Are Ready to Marry in Your Mid-20s, You Will Be No Happier if You Wait

This is the conclusion of a paper by University of Texas sociologist Norval Glenn and colleagues. One of them, Jeremy Uecker, presented the paper at the American Sociological Association meeting in San Francisco. I attended that session.

The Texans cautiously conclude that "it would be premature to conclude that the optimal time for first marriage for most persons is ages 22-25." The bottom line, though, is this:

However, the findings do suggest that most persons have little or nothing to gain in the way of marital success by deliberately postponing marriage beyond the mid twenties.

Lawless Courts Undermine The Legitimacy of the Law

I believe this rule applies to the courts and the law of all kinds of institutions. This Sunday I have in mind the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Presbytery of Boston in their ruling on Rev. Jean Southard performing a same-sex marriage in First Presbyterian Church of Waltham.

Everyone agrees on the facts. Jean Southard, a Presbyterian minister, did perform the usual wedding service in a normal church, joining two women. Everyone involved called it a marriage, both in the civil and in the religious sense. Yet the church's Directory of Worship clearly says that Presbyterian ministers and Presbyterian churches can only assist in the marriage of a man and a woman.

Southard's defense was that the language of the Directory is "merely descriptive" and reflects outdated social conditions. The Boston PJC bought this argument. Or rather, as part of their desire to overturn church law, which has been reaffirmed by the votes of the whole church several times and recently, the judicial commission legislated for the church. Worse, as the dissent of two members of the commission strongly protested, the majority of the commission is ruling that the church law should be determined by the lead of the state law.

The Southard decision follows on the Orwellian reasoning of General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission last spring in the Spahr case. Rev. Jane Spahr had also performed a same-sex marriage (actually two, just to be sure) in order to create a test case. The GA PJC ruled that since the Directory says a marriage can only be between a man and a woman, the thing that Spahr performed, which all present regarded as a marriage, couldn't really be a violation of the Directory since it didn't involve a man and a woman. Case closed.

Such games undermine the whole church. Wrong, wrong.

Eccentric Grownup

I think I need a shirt that says that.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers Support Adoption. People Who Don't Like That Should Start Their Own.

Kathryn Joyce has an article, "Shotgun Adoption" in The Nation that criticizes "crisis pregnancy centers" as a plot to coerce pregnant single women to give up their babies for adoption by conservative Christian parents.

There have been abuses by crisis pregnancy centers. That is wrong and should be treated by the appropriate authorities. But this article goes way beyond legitimate abuses to posit a conspiracy. This is unfair and unbalanced left-wing paranoia. Which I oppose exactly as much as I oppose unfair and unbalanced right-wing paranoia.

Christian crisis pregnancy centers (CPC) try to talk women out of abortion. That is their open and stated purpose. No one has to go to them if they don't want to hear that message. Most Christian crisis pregnancy centers promote the idea that children do best when raised by their two married parents. This is true, as I have often argued on this blog. The best outcome, from the CPC's perspective, would be for the pregnant woman and the father of the child to marry, raise their child together, and join the church. Again, this is all open, above-board, and no one has to listen. Of course, few of the women who come to CPCs are already married, in the church, and ready to raise their child - if they were, they wouldn't be having a crisis.

So the next two options are either that the woman would raise the child herself, or that she would give the child to a married couple who dearly want a child of their own and have the commitment, resources, and desire to raise that child in a stable and loving home. Most Christian CPCs think the latter option is better than the former. Two parents in a stable home beat one mom in crisis. There is solid sociological support for this judgment. Still, the issue could be argued either way. Christian CPCs promote adoption by a married couple as best for the child.

For women who agree with this conclusion, the Christian CPC offers to house, feed, care for, and cover all the medical expenses of the woman as she grows her baby and goes through the process of handing her baby over to the adoptive couple. This handover is painful for most women. That is why such a pregnancy creates a crisis in the first place. If it weren't hard, CPCs would be necessary. Many people, including those not directly involved in the adoption, give charitably to support all of this care to give the best ending to what could be a terrible crisis.

People who believe that the child would be better off raised by a single mother can form their own Crisis Pregnancy Centers. They can offer to house, feed, nurture, and cover all the medical expenses of pregnant women who will then go home with their babies. I can see this as honorable work. I think Kathryn Joyce should be the first to volunteer her house and her bank account to the cause. There could be such things as Secular Single-Mom Support Centers. But I am not holding my breath.