Resting

There are four things I love; five I adore. I love four hour long games of Risk (though I don't love being beaten). I love candlelight dinners and the softly illuminated faces of "my people." I love having to add a leaf to table because there are too many of us to fit. I love blackberry pie and earl grey tea at the end of a day of paper writing and intermittent laziness. And I adore watching the six hour version of Pride and Prejudice. I still thrill at the same words, wait tensely at all the appropriate moments, sigh, even, when it is called for. How anyone can endure so many readings and watchings of the same story is beyond me, but, clearly, not above me.

Happy Day After Thanksgiving, folks! (Oh, and, Merry Christmas!) Two weeks 'til the end of the term.

Linking

Wittingshire alerted me a few days ago to this funny homeschooling rant: The Bitter Homeschooler's Wish List. Some of my favorite points on the list:

9 Stop assuming that if we're religious, we must be homeschooling for religious reasons.

20 Stop saying that my kid is shy, outgoing, aggressive, anxious, quiet, boisterous, argumentative, pouty, fidgety, chatty, whiny, or loud because he's homeschooled. It's not fair that all the kids who go to school can be as annoying as they want to without being branded as representative of anything but childhood.

15 Stop asking, "But what about the Prom?" Even if the idea that my kid might not be able to indulge in a night of over-hyped, over-priced revelry was enough to break my heart, plenty of kids who do go to school don't get to go to the Prom. For all you know, I'm one of them. I might still be bitter about it. So go be shallow somewhere else.

Now, I must say that in recent years those dreaded Comments On Homeschooling have become much, much less acerbic. But I still run across them upon occasion. Take, for instance, the professor who told me winter term that I must have come from "a very accelerated homeschooling family." "I mean," she said, "that most homeschoolers just hang out in front of grocery stores." This ambiguous sentence (was it a compliment, or not?) was followed by the equally ambiguous "it must be really hard to be a truancy officer these days." Just how was I supposed to respond to that? (On a humorous side note: my brothers, also homeschooled, were actually hanging out in front of a grocery store that day--doing a service project for Scouts. If only I had known.)

In addition to comments such as these, I've also had my fair share of ye olde "what about Prom?" Q.'s. For some reason this particular point bothers a lot of people. I usually responded by pointing out that I did in fact dance, and on a regular basis--I just did it (mostly) for free, in my backyard, with lots of good friends.

Oh, and not to forget the Great Socialization Question. Markus has a great response to that one also:

2 Learn what the words "socialize" and "socialization" mean, and use the one you really mean instead of mixing them up the way you do now. Socializing means hanging out with other people for fun. Socialization means having acquired the skills necessary to do so successfully and pleasantly. If you're talking to me and my kids, that means that we do in fact go outside now and then to visit the other human beings on the planet, and you can safely assume that we've got a decent grasp of both concepts.

But, like I said, people aren't nearly as suspicious of homeschoolers today. And they're much nicer to us too. Now if only they'd stop appending special "for homeschoolers" requirements to college applications. See here for Secular Homeschooling's nightmare story.

Friday evening bulletin

• Philosophy is even more exciting than it usually is when performed at 11pm.
• My biology paper was not happy that I deserted it for an evening of opera (which was fabulous by the way). But it's getting better. I still maintain, though, that there is absolutely no scope for the imagination in an assignment for which the grading rubric spells out point by point what the paper is to include. There are only a few situations in which I would ever hand out an assignment like this. An honors science class is not one of them. Then again, it does make the writing process easier. Dull, but easier.
• The term is running to a frenetic end. So many projects. So little time.
  
• I will never again go without food from 7:30am to 4:30pm. I got busy over my lunch break editing an English essay. Submitted the essay. Ran to the writing center for said non-negotiable appointment (for poor biology paper). Ran, an hour later, to phl class. And drove, another hour later, desperately home. I told someone earlier in the day that it had been a terrible week (minus the opera). But when I realized, afterwards, that I hadn't eaten since 7:30, everything suddenly bounced into perspective. It was only a hungry day; not a terrible week.

May I just say that . . .

. . . writing three papers at once is no. fun. (At all.) I have a non-negotiable appointment at the writing center on Friday for a biology paper that is less than a third written, an essay due on Friday, and a philosophy project that is calling my name and to which I'm going to be able to devote precious little attention this week. I'm sad about that paper. It's the only one of the three that's really interesting. But it isn't due yet, and so it must bubble on the back burner for a while.

On the bright side (you know there's always a silver lining, don't you?), I'm going to the opera this Thursday. On Saturday I bought a dress, and a lacy wrap, and shoes. The shoes have tall skinny heels, and they make my feet hurt (I rarely wear anything but flats!), but I had to buy them or I was in imminent danger of drowning in the dress. Such are the woes of fashion and a lack of height. For an evening of opera, though, the shoes and dead feet are a fair trade. I'm happy.

But are my papers are going to be thrilled about my absence?

A word on altruism

I was on the edge of a conversation some weeks ago. By "on the edge," I mean "not exactly a part of, but listening more or less passively to the words being exchanged." It was a political conversation between a Republican and a Democrat. One of the members of the conversation made several claims about character type and political affiliations that disturbed me, and that I've been thinking about a lot in the past month. The claim went something like this:

(1) University faculty are traditionally liberal (i.e. Democrats)
(2) University faculty are not in their jobs for the money,
(3) Therefore, Democrats are generally more altruistic than Republicans.

The conclusion of the syllogism was also expanded, to the elucidation of all involved: Democrats want to help people, as opposed to the [robber baron] Republicans who want a free ride at the top of humanity without regards for the rest of the downtrodden world.

Now, I basically agree with (1). I also basically agree with (2): one can't be in the (teaching branch of the) academy for money. Clearly there must be some other incentives. The altruistic desire to impart knowledge and a love of learning to students could be (and certainly is in many cases) one of those incentives. But what about (3)?

A few thoughts: Does it follow from (1) and (2) that Democrats "in general" are more altruistic that Republicans [in general]? Perhaps it follows that liberal university faculty are more altruistic than Republicans, but it does not follow that all Democrats are more altruistic than Republicans (nor does it even follow that all Democrats are altruistic). Actually, I fail to see how Republicans fit into the picture at all. Premises (1) and (2) say nothing about the merits of the Republican relative to those of the Democrat.

Also, I object to the equating of all Republicans with the (most convenient) robber baron stereotype. I know many Republicans who are far from rolling in wealth. I also know many Republicans who have spent their lives working hard (very, very hard) to earn the money that they now have (and enjoy). I would hardly say that they were eager only for free rides.

Also, what does "altruism" mean? In the context of the conversation (and I realize that I didn't really capture this in my watered-down syllogism), I gathered that altruism was something highly political to be worked out in courts of law and new government policies. Perhaps so. But I also think there's something to be said for the definition of altruism that recognizes the agency of the individual person in his or her private life. Altruism can't always be measured by how much (of the government's and other people's) money we're willing to spend on social programs. I know many (Christian) Republicans who regularly give away significant portions of their incomes to various charitable organizations, who regularly volunteer, who regularly and directly give to and serve the people around them. Of course, this is not to say that all Republicans are altruistic, or even that they are generally more altruistic than Democrats. But I do mean to say that there are many Republicans who keep their purse strings loose.

We all love to capture the moral high ground. It's a satisfying, flattering place to be. And if all Democrats are truly more altruistic than Republicans, then something must be going right. But I'm going to need some more convincing. And besides, I've met too many wonderful people--on both sides of spectrum--to see very much value in political stereotyping. I used to think that Democrats were bona fide harbingers of the Apocalypse; God forfend that I call all Republicans robber barons.