Stop doing whatever else you are trying to do at the same time

From Daniel T. Willingham, "Have Technology and Multitasking Rewired How Students Learn?" in American Educator (Summer 2010):

Survey data indicate that younger people do multitask quite often; over half of high school students report that they multitask "most of the time," and about 25 percent report watching television or chatting with friends while they do their homework. Young people report multitasking for more hours per day than older people, and laboratory tests show that younger people are better at multitasking than older people.

In fact, all of us perform tasks best when we do only one at a time. So, when laboratory tests find that younger people are better at multitasking than older people, what that really means is that younger people have less degradation of the speed and accuracy of each task, compared with when each task is done separately.

Young people's advantage in multitasking is not associated with them practicing it more, or enjoying it more, than older people.... The reality is actually somewhat surprising: college students who report being chronic multitaskers tend to be worse at standard cognitive control abilities - like rapidly switching attention between two tasks - that are important to successful multitasking.... It may mean that people who are not very good at mental control choose to multitask more frequently....

So, there is not evidence that the current generation of students "must" multitask. Is multitasking a good idea? Most of the time, no. One of the most stubborn, persistent phenomena of the mind is that when you do two things at once, you don't do either one as well as when you do them one a time.

Beanie's ideas

Not surprisingly, StraightMan and I have produced a Maker of Lists in our daughter. An example of which I include here, from her cubby at school. Note: She has not spoken to me about item number 3.

Henrietta Lacks

This weekend, I finally finished reading science journalist Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The only reason that it took me so long to read it - over the course of two months - is that I taught three courses during the semester, have two kids (ages 3 and 6), and a spouse away at a three-week-long seminar.

It is rather serious a subject, but the narrative has such a pull, that you might need to take the book to the beach. It deservedly has received a number of excellent reviews, which can be read at Skloot's own Web site.

Henrietta Lacks is about a woman whose cancerous cells, removed from her body during a biopsy, became the basis of tissue culture research in the late 20th century. "HeLa" cells, as researchers refer to them, revolutionized medical research, contributing to scientific understanding of the basic biology of cancer and the development of chemotherapies. The story is about how and why the cells could be taken from Lacks - a poor black woman seeking care in the charity hospital at Johns Hopkins during the 1950s - and used for research with her consent or knowledge, or that of her husband or children.

Along the way, the book is also about medical research ethics and their development during the last 50 years, following the Nuremberg trials and the uncovering of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, two grim "milestones" in science. As Skloot writes in her Afterword, the issue is less about compensation - and concerns about the commercialization of tissue culture research are discussed throughout the book - and more about consent. Henrietta Lacks reads as an argument for why individuals ought to be informed at least of the possibility that their tissues might be used for research, even have a say about what kind of research. This book describes the damage that can be done when there is no information and no consent.

As important, the book is also about what happened to Henrietta's family after her death at age 31. While the cells became celebrated as a miracle of science, her children became abandoned, essentially, by their father. When they finally learn about their mother's "contribution" to science, they are ill prepared, emotionally and otherwise, to understand what this means, let alone "appreciate" the good for science and society. For example, one of Deborah's brothers refers to the "rape" of their mother's cells, which they learn - after a lifetime of their own neglect and abuse - have been exposed to nuclear radiation and fallout, HIV, scores of toxins, and other extremes in conditions to "test" their effects on humans.

Knowledge of the HeLa cells esp. devastates Deborah, the fourth of her five children and the only surviving daughter. Deborah becomes the central figure in Henrietta Lacks as she struggles to understand how her mother's cells could have done so much "good," when she herself has suffered so much from her mother's absence. Over and over again, Deborah decries the fact that no one ever bothers really to explain to her what is happening to her mother's cells. Although Skloot admits her occasional impatience with Deborah, she also never condescends to her: Is it any wonder that Deborah is under the impression that clones of her mother are walking around London, given the sensationalism of headlines in the media?

I found gripping, poignant, and difficult to read the chapters that detail the journey of discovery that Skloot and Deborah undertake. They visit a laboratory, at the invitation of the researcher, where Deborah and one of her brothers see their mother's cells under the microscopes and hear from a scientist who has dedicated his entire career to working with "HeLa" cells what they mean to him.

Then Skloot and Deborah look into whatever happened to Deborah's older sister, Elsie, who had been institutionalized as a young child, then forgotten by the family after their mother's death. I found Elsie's story even more disturbing than Lacks' own story. Deborah herself had come to be convinced that Elsie might have been deaf, as she and her brothers also had degrees of congenital deafness, which might have accounted for her apparent "slowness" (not responding to speech) that led to her being certified as an "idiot." Most of the medical records at the institution where Elsie lived and died had been destroyed, but Skloot and Deborah uncover her death certificate, with a rather gruesome photograph attached. Skloot pieces together a story in which it is likely that Elsie, who never reached her teens, had been a subject of medical experiments that might have included surgeries. The news, of course, is almost too much for Deborah to bear.

I can imagine that writing about the breakdown and the ritual of "soul cleansing" that follows were a challenge for Skloot, who rises beautifully to the occasion - I think because she so clearly feels compassion and affection for Deborah and for the other members of Henrietta's family. Indeed, as a cultural anthropologist and a former journalist, I so admired that throughout the almost 10 years that this project took to complete, Skloot respected the fact that this is not her story and that she does not control it. This is critical to how and why she, a young white journalist, gains Deborah's trust.

Initially, I had been thinking I might assign this book in Medical Anthropology or the Anthropology of the United States, but now I am thinking that it just need to be read and discussed widely. Period. It might be ideal for a "Big Read" on a college campus because it addresses important and meaningful concerns about research ethics and science as well as about race and poverty, all of which are not just coincidentally interconnected.

I want to compare this book with Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down in that it boasts careful reporting, clear and compassionate writing, and a story that catches you and knocks you down. I know any number of anthropologists who teach Fadiman's book in their classes. It also is read in book clubs, in community "Big Read" programs, and in classes on "cultural competency" in nursing and medical schools. Henrietta Lacks ought to become required reading in the life sciences.

Doula

Just learned that the wonderful doula who supported StraightMan and me during Beanie's birth has decided to "retire" - at least for the moment.

The reasons that she gives for leaving it aside resonate with me. This just is not the right time for this kind of work. It always struck me as an irony of doula work that the women who esp. feel called to it are exactly in the "right" place to know all the fears and hopes of a woman in labor - so many doulas having been motivated by their own (recent) birth experiences - and also in the "wrong" place in their own lives to drop what they do in order to attend a birth.

Women's lives do not proceed in exactly the "order" of men's lives. To borrow a metaphor from my fiber crafting friends - we knit, we weave, we tangle, we unstitch, we start again, we make do.

Still, I feel loss at doulicia's announcement. She was so much a part of Beanie's birth, which in my mind remains An Especially Special Birth because, after all, it was my first. (Bubbie, your birth, too, is especially special.)

Next week, Beanie "graduates" from kindergarten. Or as she crooned to me, to the tune of "New York, New York," rehearsing a bit from their performance next week: "I want to be a part of it, First Grade, First Grade!"

So, I guess I should just say, good luck in first grade, doulicia!

Linguistic parenthropology

I confess: Sometimes when I ought to be just a parent, I find myself drifting off and looking at the situation like a parenthropologist. Frankly, it is probably to Beanie and Bubbie's benefit b/c detaching like this prevents me from screaming (at least more than I already do - I admit that I am not a paragon of gentle talk and placidity 24 / 7), walking away without looking back, or cackling demonically as I charge my head over and over into the side of the house. Which is having its cedar shakes restained and the window and porch trim repainted, so I might need to charge into something else that is tattier. Like our neighbor's house.

The particular field of study in linguistic anthropology that interests me is language socialization, which describes the ways in which caregivers treat language as both the end and means of "teaching" their children appropriate / proper behavior. Think about the intense interest of American parents in the development of their children's ability to talk. Think also about what parents consider important to teach their children to say - like "please" and "thank you."

A lot of parenting simply is talk. Parenting books offer as much coaching on what to say as on what to "do." For example, StraightMan was raised in a household where "stupid" could refer to actions or things, but not people, including oneself, which is advice I have read elsewhere, and which I find sensible and sensitive, and try to follow. The same goes for "bad": I can say that I do not like Bubbie's behavior, I can tell him that he will eat his supper or else I am putting him to bed right now, I can tell him that he is upsetting, irritating, or annoying me. That is the point, I guess: To raise his awareness about the effects that his behavior has on my (or another person's) perceptions of him and as a result, behavior towards him as well. It all might sound a bit precious, but I think the significance of talk ought not be underestimated in parenting. To sound grandiose for a moment, it might be that we can model in how we talk and listen with our children the kind of social world that is possible to create.

I think a lot about the importance of parents and talk because whatever it is that we teach children, they take with them as they interact with other children and create (or recreate) a social world. Linguistic anthropologist Marjorie Harness Goodwin has written two books on girls' talk among themselves, He-Said-She-Said: Talk as Social Organization among Black Children (1990) and more recently, The Hidden Life of Girls: Games of Stance, Status, and Exclusion (2006), which I recently started skimming.

Here is a passage that especially caught me:

Dispute is an interactional accomplishment, and one of the most important loci for the development of friendships and peer relationships. Neither an aberration nor something to be avoided at all costs, it is, rather, constitutive of children's dealings with one another, establishes group cohesiveness, and provides a primary way that activities are constituted. Despite such recognition of the importance of conflict in everyday life, and in particular among peers, most contemporary feminist scholarship has not only avoided analyzing conflicts between women, but actively promoted a view of women as essentially cooperative (Goodwin 2006:33).

This prompted me to recall an exchange that I overheard during a play date at our house a few months ago. "I'm not mean," I overheard Beanie tell her friend. "You always want to make the rules." Her friend said, "You're hurting my feelings." Beanie said, "You always say that." Then her friend said, "I'm the guest so you have to let me." Stormy silence. I think at this point, I intervened with a snack.

At the time, I think I thought something like, are you playing together, or are you just going to goad each other the whole time? (Probably also something like, this was a mistake...) In fact, Goodwin notes, "Children observed in multiparty participant frameworks display an orientation toward sustaining and promoting rather than dissipating dispute" (33). Goodwin suggests, "Dispute for children provides a way for playing with language, asserting one's position, for displaying affective stance, and consequently, character, sanctioning violators, and rearranging the social order" (33).

Looking, as a parenthropologist, at the exchange I described above as an interactional accomplishment, it is clear that the girls indeed were sustaining and promoting their dispute (neither backing off) to assert their positions (whose rules would guide their play), and making their assertions on the basis of character (being mean) and affective stance (hurt feelings).

That said, I probably could do with less interaction and more accomplishment when I am the parent supervising the play date.

Still, I appreciate the reminder, from Goodwin, that after all, children get along differently than grown-ups do. In part, they still are learning how to get along: Even when they are as interactionally accomplished as Beanie and her friend, they remain novices. As such, they test some of the proprieties that they hear their grown-ups reference. In particular, what I think is interesting is that the idea of "the guest" ends the exchange (along with juice and Goldfish, which I guess could be read as an enactment of hospitality in this context).

Just the other day, during a play date with a different friend, the idea of "the guest" became referenced again, with different effects: This time, the two girls were talking about what their game should be. They had been playing "hamsters," but Bubbie came home and wanted his hamster, which the friend had been holding. The friend suggested that she could find a different stuffed animal for the game. Beanie offered to let her play with her hamster, and she herself would play with another animal. The friend said no. Beanie said, "You're the guest, so you should have it."

Eventually, they agreed that they both would play with other animals. Thus ended the game of "hamsters," and began the game of "puppies." We are talking, after all, about two six-year-old girls.

I guess they learn, these children of ours - and they can learn from each other.

On the bright side

I have been blogging much too seriously as of late. Here is a follow-up to my post from yesterday, an idea whose time might have come, as reported in the nation's finest news source back in March. I still snortle whenever I happen to think about it.

21 percent

This call for papers posted on a blog that I recently started browsing, Feminist Philosophers, notes that "a mere 21% of professional philosophers" (I assume in academia / higher ed in the United States) are women. Not sure whether or not I should be surprised. I guess I am. While it is true that gender equity certainly has not been achieved in anthropology, I think about my department, my teachers and friends in graduate school, and the scholars whose work I most admire - a strong representation of women.

That said, the number of women represented on my "Traditions" syllabi were scarce - Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Nancy Munn. I had to read Audrey Richards, Emily Martin, and Marilyn Strathern on my own time. Also, I find problematic the discourse on the so-called feminization of anthropology - the number of undergraduate majors, the number of graduate students - as it suggests something inherently wrong with there being so many women studying and practicing in the discipline. Not to mention that feminization seems to fade higher in the ranks of the professoriate.

This leads me to throw in my two cents on other posts that I read on the FP blog - see here and here - responding to this column by New York Times columnist John Tierney, which I had missed.

StraightMan, attending a 3-week seminar sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, notes the marginal number both of women at all and of men with young children participating. (The participants include philosophers, economists, historians, and a pair of anthropologists. So, interdisciplinary crosstalk no doubt prevails...)

In fact, there was a kind of scandal with another NEH seminar that had required a female participant, a single mother, to provide evidence that she had arranged full-time child-care, lest she be dropped from the seminar. (Inside Higher Ed reported on it, here, following up on posts on Feminist Philosophers. Way to go, FP!)

Given the demands of the seminars, I cannot see any way that one could participate to one's own satisfaction without full-time child-care: It is a reason that I am here with Beanie and Bubbie, and StraightMan is there.

However. I think it highlights the ways in which opportunities for women become limited. If we "choose" to opt out, then it is because our choices already have been constrained. (I am not a philosopher, but I am certain that cannot really be called a choice then.) For example, I also had considered applying to an NEH seminar, then decided against it. I am the mother of two young children and the wife of a talented scholar about to start his sabbatical. I cannot imagine either being away from them for 3 weeks or alternatively, having them all with me at the seminar.

It also highlights the ways in which men's roles and responsibilities outside the family become emphasized. Why give up the satisfaction, the respect, and the privileges of work in favor of sharing the obligations to young children?

So, if the NEH and other institutions, including colleges and universities, truly are interested in supporting and promoting women in academia / higher ed, then they ought to make available to everyone affordable (I say free) high-quality child-care.

Universal child-care along the lines of universal health-care! Although we see in the United States how much Americans continues to abhor what might benefit them.