Category: Health

Finding our Best Selves

Posted on by Suki

I was ruminating on why so many people feel that parenting made them “better” people all around, and it occurred to me that parenting allows us to access our “best selves” in a way that is fully rewarding and not (usually) life-threatening.

By “best self” I mean that part of us that is fully engaged with being good and helpful without regard to any mitigating factors.

Our best selves sometimes lead us to do things that aren’t in our own self-interest.

It was a veteran’s best self that led him to enter a burning house, save some members of a family, and then perish trying to save more.

It was that best self that led Gandhi not to sit on a stagecoach floor, one of his first acts of nonviolent resistance.

When a New York secretary amassed a fortune, it was her best self that told her to live simply and leave the money for college scholarships.

We save our best selves…for good reason

This best self is one most of us don’t want to activate all the time: there are clearly situations where that self is willing to sacrifice everything when our logical brains will tell us not to.

Parenting gives us an easy way into accessing our best selves. More than any other people in the world, our children compel us to use our best selves even when it might hurt.

Why do we become parents?

My mother did research for her PhD on childbirth in medieval Europe. As a teenager, I had to wonder why women agreed to marry at all!

In Medieval Europe, most women had two choices: join the church as a nun, or become a wife and—hopefully—mother.

But marriage was hardly an appealing option. The consequences of marriage were often death: from childbearing, during childbirth, or death from childbirth-caused conditions like fistula. Wives were legally owned by their husbands, who were legally allowed to treat them as they saw fit.

Not an appealing future, and no wonder that many women, as my teenage self would have advised, went to the convent instead.

Because children are worth the trouble!

We access our best selves…except maybe sometimes when we’ve had enough!

Yet, here we are, the human race that has survived because so many women chose to make that sacrifice. Most modern women don’t enter a hospital fearing, as historical diaries confessed, that they are likely not to come home.

Parenting offers us a chance to access our best selves. It’s perhaps not a reason that most people consider when they decide to have children, but I believe it’s the reason why this difficult, often thankless task is one we repeat over and over.

Tabitha
Pets, too! Those big kitten eyes look at us, and we’ll do pretty much anything!

When Online Communities Work

Posted on by Suki

This autumn we got devastating news about our new kitten: she had a previously incurable, almost certainly fatal disease. Our vet couldn’t treat her, but did mention to us that there was an experimental drug.Thus started my first foray into the world of experimental drug procurement.

We noticed something unusual about one of Tabitha’s eyes and took her to the vet. It turned out that we caught her disease right at the beginning, which gave her a fighting chance.

But I didn’t do it alone.

I joined a Facebook group of nearly 15,000 members who were in the same boat. The members, typical of Facebook groups, range from the frantic pet owner asking pretty crazy-sounding questions to seasoned veterans reassuring and supporting newbies.

Usually, a group like this would descend into the chaos that we’re seeing all over Facebook, with fake news, name-calling, and dark conspiracy theories. But this group is a shining example of how the Internet can work to bring us together. What makes this group work?

1. Committed moderators

Americans typically yearn to be fully independent, often believe that groups don’t need leaders, sometimes think that other humans are, in fact, the problem.

But the fact is, well-functioning groups have leaders, and those leaders make decisions. In this group, committed moderators scan each and every post within minutes and respond, if only with a click of the “like” button to confirm.

2. Real participants

The promise of the Internet was that anonymity would free us to pursue truth and fairness. Unfortunately, it’s also freed us to express the ugliest parts of human nature, including lies and bullying.

In this group, when a new participant joins, they are assigned a personal moderator who lives in their vicinity. No anonymity, no chance that participants will feel free to be abusive, dismissive, or ugly. Conspiracy theories are quashed immediately. Participants are encouraged by their moderators to share appropriately.

3. Crossing into IRL

Finally, the best-functioning groups I’ve been part of are like this one, where members acknowledge and support the real humans behind the posts and smiley faces. When my family ran low on medication, one of the group members met me on the street outside of the radio station where I do a show to hand me enough medicine to get through while we wait for our shipment.

No questions asked, no ID needed. She knows who I am; I know who she is. We will have no trouble finding each other IRL. The trust of this stranger that I would repay her was extremely touching.

Our beautiful, healthy kitty at 7 months. Without the group, we would have lost her 3 months ago.

How can we get control of this beast that is the Internet?

I believe that groups like this are a blueprint for how things can and should work. But it will be up to us, the users of the Internet, to make it happen. How?

  • Don’t join anonymous groups unless you really want all that goes with anonymity.
  • If you want to keep a group positive and functional, be prepared to offer your time when needed.
  • Be supportive of the hard (usually unpaid) job that moderators have, and post within a group’s guidelines.
  • Exert political and financial pressure as you can. If we make it clear to companies that we want sites to have moderation and verification of users, it will happen.

Image Roulette

Posted on by Suki

I am enchantress, witch
I am somebody mortal, a soul
I am a widow woman
an adult female, individual

I am skeptic, sceptic, doubter
I am somebody, someone, a soul
I am a face
I am mortal

I am an anomaly, an unusual person
An individual, a person, a mortal soul
I am a rester, a slumberer
I am a person

An individual

A somebody

A soul,
mortal

What the Internet has done to us.

My hacker husband pointed me toward a website that will probably be defunct by the time you get to it, if you try to go. In the words of the website’s creators:

[Imagenet] uses a neural network trained on the “Person” categories from the ImageNet dataset which has over 2,500 labels used to classify images of people.

Warning: ImageNet Roulette regularly returns racist, misogynistic and cruel results.
That is because of the underlying data set it is drawing on, which is ImageNet’s ‘Person’ categories. ImageNet is one of the most influential training sets in AI. This is a tool designed to show some of the underlying problems with how AI is classifying people.

I don’t think the returns on my various webcam captures were particularly misogynistic or racist, but they were…fascinating. They inspired the poem above. Here is what a machine thinks I am.

Ah, finally a photo that doesn’t highlight the fact that I’m having a really bad hair day!

If it’s before Friday, September 27, 2019, you can find out for yourself what a machine might think you are.

2e: Twice Exceptional Movie Review

Posted on by Suki

2e: Twice Exceptional is a low-budget documentary with heart. There’s nothing fancy about this peek into the lives of twice-exceptional teens, their parents, and their teachers.

But just the existence of this documentary is revolutionary enough.

2e?

The average reader’s first question is obvious: 2e? What’s that? I wrote a long discourse on the topic which you can access here. However, the short answer is that a twice-exceptional child is both gifted and has a disability. That disability could be physical, emotional, neurological. But no matter what the disability, the end result is that the disability often masks the giftedness.

There have been some movies made about 2e people without identifying them as such. The most prominent that comes to mind is My Left Foot, about a child so physically compromised, he couldn’t communicate what was happening in his very active brain. It is a dramatic and beautiful movie.

In contrast, this documentary focuses in on real, everyday teens fighting the battle between their intellect and the issues that compromise their ability to access education, communicate, and achieve. There’s not a lot of drama here, just a clear look at the hard work of supporting these students into adulthood.

What you’ll see

This one-hour documentary is long on direct interviews. Parents explain their journey from thinking they were raising typical kids to being plunged into the chaos of raising a child with special needs. Teachers talk about their experiences working with this difficult, but rewarding, population.

The focus, however, is on the kids themselves. And in this movie, they make a compelling argument for why we need more educational flexibility. Many of these students argue that without their 2e-dedicated school (Bridges Academy in Los Angeles), they would have been lost in a system not equipped to handle them.

The drama centers on Pi Day, when the students compete to memorize Pi to the furthest amount of digits. Punctuated with students struggling to perform the digits they have memorized, we hear from the students themselves about their challenges and their dreams.

Limits exposed

The limits of this documentary mirror our society as a whole. With its dense population and surfeit of wealthy donors, L.A. is the sort of place where such a school can exist. In most places, such as my county where our only school serving 2e students just closed, there is neither the large number of 2e students nor the concentration of wealth to support such a school.

The limits of this documentary point out the limits in our society as a whole. In most places in this country, a 2e student is lucky to get a couple of teachers throughout their school years who understand and connect with them. It’s hard enough for gifted students to find teachers trained in the special needs of giftedness. (Most teacher trainings do not require study of gifted learners.)

But most teachers have absolutely no training in how to serve the needs of gifted students with disabilities.

Awareness is key

Documentaries like this one can help by spreading awareness of these students’ existence, their great potential, and their educational needs. By the end of the movie, it’s clear how much these kids have to offer society. Many similar kids, spread around the world, are not receiving the support they need. They are languishing in special education programs that do not support their academic needs. They are bullied and emotionally harmed by fellow students and teachers in regular education. Their parents are told they need medication and therapy.

The teachers in the documentary make a strong case for an educational approach that is sadly rare in our society: instead of focusing on these students’ deficits, they focus on their strengths and interests. This is messy, complicated education. It’s expensive and the payoff is sometimes not obvious. It’s very hard to quantify.

But when you see these students move past their disabilities as they shine in their abilities, you can see that it’s all worth the trouble.

Learn more:

Visit the film’s homepage to learn more, join their email list, and find out about screenings.

What are your kids watching?

Posted on by Suki

Do you know?

Do you know what your kids are reading?

Do you know who they are chatting with?

Do you know what the kids they are chatting with are watching and reading?

I’m not asking these questions because I think you’re a bad parent.

I’m not asking these questions because I think any parent can stay on top of everything their child does.

I’m asking these questions because I’m a teacher. Not only that but I’m a teacher of creative writing.

Lately, I’ve become a little concerned about your kids.

In one teaching year, I’ve had more conferences with students, notes to students’ parents, times when I’ve had to stop class and speak sternly…

Not more than other years. I’ve had more than I’ve ever had. Cumulative. My whole life.

This one school year, I have had more students referencing violent memes, more students taking part in destructive and deceptive communities, more students writing about violent fantasies.

It’s not just good, clean fun.

One student wrote a piece in which a murderer was interviewed by police while tied up, listening to other people in the police station being tortured.

Multiple students are ardent followers of quasi-religious online groups that take part in something akin to mass hysteria.

A student wrote a story based on a popular Internet meme about a child murderer and a sexual offender.

A group of students invented a world in which everyone had evil “dark sides,” and then their “dark sides” started attending classes with them, typing nasty things into the chat window.

Today, a few days after a mass murderer referenced a popular Internet meme while murdering people in a house of worship, one of my students referenced that meme in class.

It’s not just my online students.

I’ve asked around. Kids are coming to schools with all sorts of inappropriate materials. Kids are aware of things that you and I didn’t even know existed when we were that age.

It’s not ‘just stories’.

The stories we tell with our children important. Stories shape their worldview. Violence in children’s stories is not new. But despair and hopelessness in media for children is new. It’s harming our kids. It’s harming their psyches.

Have you checked out the most recent teen suicide statistics?

Have you considered what your child might be accessing that could lead them to despair?

I know this is harsh, but I’m worried about your kids. Humans have faced war, famine, volcanoes, mass migration, and drought. But I think the Internet is, perhaps, a bigger long term challenge to the health of the human race.

Your kids are great. Please take care of them. Please sit down and express interest in what they are doing online. Ask them what interests them. Be there for them to express their fears to.

And make sure they know that there is hope.

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