Book Review: Secret Life of Mary Anne Spier

Title: The Secret Life of Mary Anne Spier

Author: Ann M. Martin

Author's web site: https://www.scholastic.com/annmartin/about/

Publisher: Scholastic

Date: 1997

ISBN: 0-590-05992-0

Length: 118 pages

Quote: “Do you mean that the things I bought can wind up costing me more than I paid for them?”

(This review appeared first on Blogjob.)

Some other books that feature Christmas as a theme have appeared on this site as "Sunday Books." Should this one? Meh. It's about Christmas as a shopping season. Mary Anne Spier probably is a Christian but, under Scholastic's new coddle-those-phobics rules, she never really mentions it.

In Baby-Sitters Club regular novel #114, Mary Anne, who is one of the older Baby-Sitters but the one who's appealingly young for her age, feels very grown-up as she does all her Christmas shopping with, for the first time, Daddy's credit card. At thirteen, she's old enough to add up how much she's spending and calculate how soon she'll be able to pay it. She has not, however, been told about credit card charges, because Daddy naively expected Mary Anne to understand spending what she can pay back in cash to mean what she can pay back in cash that day.

So she learns...and parents don't read enough about teenagers like Mary Anne to anticipate what sort of trouble that leads Mary Anne into. Perhaps teenagers themselves can. In relation to her smarter, richer, bolder, more sophisticated, and prettier friends, Mary Anne defines herself as responsible, ethical, honest, and competent. Begging, stealing, or other things the mass media show other teenagers doing when they're desperate for money, are not options for Mary Anne. But what about sneaking out, lying about her age, and taking a job as one of Santa's Elves at the mall?

Not only is that something a girl like Mary Anne would do, it's something that would make a girl like Mary Anne feel so guilty that she's actively looking for special ways to help other people...and sure enough, because it's Christmas, Mary Anne finds a way to help an older, more desperate teenager share some of the magic of Mary Anne's “wonderful life.”(Did I spoil anything? I don't think so. BSC fans know Mary Anne, and with this character the question's not whether she'll find a way to do something nicer than nice, but how.)

The Secret Life of Mary Anne Spier is a very nice, family-friendly, light and frothy story about a very nice teenager doing nice things. If you're in high school, wrap it in brown paper, or in the dust jacket off a grimmer book...or get tough, brazenly display this and other nice kid-friendly books, and tell people you're sharing them with a child and/or a grandparent.

Adults don't have to make excuses for appreciating a thoroughly nice and wholesome story, although 118 pages of large type, including the obligatory “handwriting” graphics and summary of each other Baby-Sitter's curriculum vitae, won't amuse us for very long. Every adult should only have the experience of discovering that when a teenager does start withholding information or even lying about where s/he has been, sneaking around, and displaying guilt about keeping secrets from Mother and Daddy, it's because the kid has taken a completely legal, stupid, low-paid job. For those who've not had the experience, at least there's this cheerful little bubble of a novel.

Book Review: 2 Qt Small Air Fryer Cookbook for One

Title: 2 Qt Small Air Fryer Cookbook for One

Author: no information is given, but it reads like Olivia Graham

Quote: "This book is all about air frying for one."

And so it is. I don't have the new contraption for which this book was written, and can't test the recipes, but they'll fit into a bowl that fits loosely into the two-quart fryer, anyway. 

The recipes are a selection of the snacky kind of thing bachelors and students tend to eat, including egg things for breakfast, fried vegetable snacks, meats, a few trendy alternatives to meat (a cauliflower "steak" cut, mushrooms, tofu), and several desserts. One shortcut to the "lava cake" effect is explained: air-fry a marshmallow and other things in puff pastry. 

This book seems more carefully edited than some others from the same source. Recipes that specify cut carrots or three of something are still accompanied with photos that show whole carrots or six of whatever, but each recipe does seem to be at least adapted from the one photographed. Instructions spell out how to make sure things are done inside--stab a pick or a fork into veg or desserts, a thermometer into meats.

If your approach to cooking for one involves a special device that cooks single servings, this book is for you. Mine tends to involve making full-sized batches of things and eating the leftovers or sharing them with others, including the cats. Cooking single servings is fun and cute but it does involve things like using one slice of the tomato or even half or a quarter of one egg, so you still need a refrigerator, if not a freezer, to use this book. If you have an air fryer and also have friends, you've got it made with this book--just make one of every dish for every person, and you should be able to use up the tomato and the egg while they're still fit to eat. 

If your school allows air fryers to be used in dorm rooms, using this book should guarantee instant friends. Of course most of them are merely hungry, not really compatible, but it's worth doing a little extra work for extra cash to give growing students an alternative to chips and candy anyway.

Book Review: Holding True

Book Review: Holding True

Author: Jill Penrod

Date: 2016

Publisher: Jill Penrod

Quote: "That's my name. True Fischer."

When his parents were newlyweds True's father marvelled, "Is it true? You're pregnant?" and his mother was so amused by that that she named the baby True. True's father later sustained some brain damage; he stutters badly and is prone to seizures. True himself doesn't seem less intelligent than most boys in their late teens, but admittedly that's not saying much. When True falls off the diving board at the pool he blathers as if he's trying to have a brain injury to be like his Dad, but of course that's not his real problem. 

True does some of the dumb kid things he does because he has a real problem. He and his best high school friend were molested by a coach. His friend then died in an accident. The coach has warned him that, if True warns other kids or parents about the coach, the coach can make it look as if True was to blame. 

True has a year of high school left but he helps his parents maintain the apartment buildings they rent out mostly to college students. In this vulnerable summer, he meets some college students who are just his age; what we used to call summer children, "special," "gifted and talented," students offered the chance to take a few freshman courses on the college campus in the summer after or even before grade twelve, without having to be admitted to the college as regular students. As when colleges offer free online courses to anybody, even people who register in the names of their dogs...the stated goal may be to test different teaching methods or just qualify for some sort of government grant, but no points for guessing, the colleges want a lot of these people to register as full-time, full-tuition-paying students next year, ("Summer children" usually got reduced tuition, subsidized by their high schools; at some colleges they may also be subsidized by the State.) 

Summer children aren't supposed to date regular college students; they are, typically, too young to do most of the things college students, typically, want to do on weekends. They don't usually get even student labor jobs. They're supposed to be just adjusting to classes where they really need to study things on their own, instead of having everything read to them by the teacher. A few of them manage to like other summer children to whom they feel attracted. The stereotype used to be that they always formed hopeless crushes on regular college students who either didn't notice them or thought of them as, well, children.

True is not particularly attracted to a couple of cute, blonde, flirty summer girls he calls "the Barbies," whose role in the story is to be all that he and his friends don't want to become, but he is attracted to another pair, Jemma and Aubrey. They have their own teen problems, of course; all eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds are, at best, works in progress. Aubrey has food allergies that haven't even been fully identified yet, which means the primary sensitivity is probably to chemicals whose manufacturers have really leaned on doctors not to test patients for reactions to them, and goes into anaphylactic shock at a party. Jemma has been brought up with "good student" as her primary identity, lets herself be baited into talking as if she thinks everyone else is stupid, and has an emotional crisis when she gets a D on an essay test. 

This is an age-appropriate teen romance: While coping with their teen problems as Christians, True and Jemma slowly reach the point of declaring themselves friends. But it's also a Christian novel: their primary emotional bonds are still with their parents.

As readers can expect from Jill Penrod, this is a thoughtful story where kids face situations beyond the usual cliches of sex (and maybe drugs) with more than the usual level of insight. The characters are believable as eighteen-year-olds, which means they're not easy to like, but they are well written and sympathetic enough that you'll want them to reach a believable happy end-of-this-volume. If you like reading about teenagers, and especially about the damage done to teenagers when people tell them they "are smart" instead of accepting that it's to be expected that their parents' children would have some academic talent, you will like this book. If you are an adult who needs to be reminded that most children have a reasonable amount of intelligence, that the ones whose talents involve writing or math don't need to be made to feel like freaks, that the ones who don't seem to have talents may be coping with things you can't even imagine, and that nothing good comes from telling children they "are smart" if they earn good grads, you need this book. 

New Book Review: If You See Them

NaNoWriMo poem? Why not?

If you see them, you might think they're

Dirty, lazy, sneaky kids,

And they certainly won't tell you

What the situation is--

Steal a cheap roll-on deodorant?

Sleep at friends' house for a week?

Wash their feet in library bathroom?

See the tips of icebergs peek...

I think this study of "them," the neediest kind of homeless teenagers, is one of a half-dozen books of which I received Advance Review Copies from publishers shortly before the storm damage forced me offline; all those books were then lost among the already published Booktober Blitz book, and all I can do about it is try to do better now. I am grateful to Spiegel & Grau for sharing this book with me, and wish I'd come to it sooner...

Title: If You See Them

Author: Vicki Sokolik

Date: 2024

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

ISBN: 978-1-954118-49-2

Quote: "These youth are like youth anywhere who aren't safe in their homes, or who have no homes, and have made difficult choices in order to survive."

That's what some readers will hate about this book. 

Because what I didn't like about this book is stated so clearly at the beginning, let me start praising it with the faint damns. I'm not doing this because I think the book deserves condemnation. I'm doing it because I think the book, and the local program it introduces to readers, are very valuable for some people and need just a bit of improvement to be more valuable for more people.

The characters in this book are generic, reduced to a lowest common denominator and a single storyline. Generic characters are boring. Writers might as well just make their general statements. While Sokolik tells us that these are the stories of real teenagers who worked with the program she runs, succeeded, came back to encourage others, have remained her friends, and gave permission for their real given names to be used, there's a flatness about the stories, as compared with stories about problem students in Jeff Hobbs' Children of the State. 

This is unfortunate. While unconsciously revealing the inadequacies of Sokolik and her program, this program promotion calls attention to a situation that really exists, and deserves attention. That I fell asleep three times while reading this book, even while knitting, calls my attention to a relatively simple shortcoming in a valuable document. It completely erases my kind of people.

Jeff Hobbs and the problem students who told him their stories in vivid, personal, though also blur-able detail, were introverts. Vicki Sokolik and the problem students she was able to help are extroverts. She does not merely show this in describing their conversations. She specifically celebrates their extroversion as if it were a virtue.

Maybe that's consistent with her discussion of a cringeworthy lecture about gender-confused youth, through which everyone apparently was required to sit. Sokolik brought in and apparently managed to listen to a lecturer who told her, her students, and other adult volunteers in her program, how calling people with normal, consistent sex characteristics "cisgender" supposedly "normalizes" gender-confusion and makes people who have it feel included...

Stop it, I think. This is so misguided. Does anybody not know how it feels to be "minoritized," even bullied, because of a medical condition we did nothing to choose or create? If the 9,999 of 10,000 people even in Ireland who happen not to be diagnosed celiacs started introducing themselves with "Hello, my name is Tracy Smith, and I'm gluten-tolerant," what would that do for celiacs? In the long run, probably nothing. In the short run, being told they needed to say that kind of thing might make people resent those who can't participate in food-sharing rituals more than they do. It may be something some of us thought we might want, it may be a kindly intentioned gesture, but it's not actually helping.

Despite the damage undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or glyphosate-aggravated celiac disease does, the celiac trait has good as well as bad qualities. A majority of all celiacs are hardy, healthy people who can be stronger and live longer than average, simply by giving up social eating. Given, for the sake of argument, that gender confusion is also genetic (only some of it really is; never mind) and also has good qualities...gender confusion is, like the celiac trait, primarily a dysfunctional condition. Inability to reproduce is a dysfunctional trait. It doesn't need to have attention called to it--women reacting to the same physical influences in the way that appears first, across species, certainly don't go around proclaiming to the world "I'm barren and I'm proud! Other women need to self-identify as 'breeders' to show due respect to me!"--but, if attention is called to it, no benefit is gained by pretending that the dysfunctional trait is the norm.

But Sokolik subjected her whole organization to an hour or so of terribly trendy blather about how we should all try to pretend that gender confusion is so "normal" that it's natural to invent a special word for the majority and hateful to ask whether people are male or female. I might not mind this being discussed at the length it is, in the book, if it had been matched by equal sensitivity and "inclusiveness" toward introversion, which is a normal, functional, altogether desirable trait. It's not. 

The only specific reference to introverts in this book is mildly disparaging; someone's mother's introversion (as distinct from other people's prejudice against it) is blamed for her general lack of success in life. That by itself wouldn't ruin the book but there's a total lack of awareness that, while the problem students Sokolik found easiest to help may have found it difficult to sleep alone, other students' primary survival needs include at least a room and preferably a garden of their own. There's no mention of a student who has any special talent being helped by the program. There's no mention of how the yappy horde were sensitized to other people's valid, normal, natural needs for quiet, privacy, and personal space. There's no consideration of how the therapy-group exercises Sokolik's program offers teenagers as "classes" can harm some teenagers, or why they've been banned from the regular public school program as constituting Child Abuse in the Classroom.

So, Sokolik has extroversion. That's not something she chose or could help; that's a valid reason why the problem students who bonded with her and were helped most by her all seem to suffer from extroversion too. Extroversion is at least a more common dysfunction than gender confusion, or celiac disease, or cleft palates. It's like cardiovascular disease, or clinical depression; not really part of the majority human experience, but widespread enough that everyone at least knows someone who has it. Most of us even know someone who doesn't have the actual condition but has been miseducated to think person has it. (People used to think that extroversion was the same thing as self-confidence in social situations. It's not.) People tend to bond with, and help, others who are like themselves. When lots of attention is directed to the differences, that may actually help people "reach across the gaps" between young and old, male and female, Black and White. When the differences are poorly understood, the gaps are less likely to be bridged.

Extroversion is a condition produced when the brain fails to develop a clear internal sense of right and wrong, usually also fails to develop a specific talent, may also fail to develop academic intelligence, and, even if academically intelligent, shows a hasty, shallow pattern of thinking and relating to others, which can also cause dysfunctional family life. Extroverts can be described as more or less affected; clearly they're not normal. Still, just as some of the most horrible genetic diseases are caused by inheriting two copies of a gene where one copy provides resistance to other fatal diseases, just as the celiac trait is associated with hardiness and gender-confused people don't overpopulate and people with Downs Syndrome are often described as loving and lovable, mild and well controlled extroversion can be considered an asset for some kinds of jobs. Extroverts don't know when they need to rest and clear their minds from external input, and while this can lead to breakdowns and is the most likely reason for their shorter life expectancy, it can also help them reach out to help one another. It works for the people whose stories are told in this book.

Sokolik presents herself in this book as Tampa's counterpart to Mildred Wolfe in Orlando: an oil-rich Texan who came to Florida, saw a local need, and set about using her money to meet the need. She adopted a homeless adult first and, after putting the young lady and her children in a nice house, had the reward of being told, "You've done so much for us...now go and help someone else." While she was still thinking about that, her teenaged son brought home a school friend who turned out to be homeless. 

The general category of "homeless teenagers" includes runaways who just aren't getting along with their families. Often the best help for them is encouragement to be reconciled with their families; they still have homes. However,  a minority of homeless teenagers fit into a subcategory the government currently calls "unaccompanied homeless youth." In government policy jargon this means that for all practical purposes these teenagers have no parents or homes to go back to. Their parents may be dead, in prisons or hospitals, insane, homeless, or just utterly unwilling to rear them. Sometimes a living parent is married to someone who doesn't want stepchildren. Sometimes a living parent is a drug addict who has used the child as a drug runner or dealer until the child runs to a different city to survive, or an abuser who has raped, prostituted, or violently attacked the child. In one family Sokolik met, the younger children had been placed in foster homes, but the teenager was apparently considered old enough to live on her own, possibly by a newbie social worker who didn't realize that the law considered teenagers differently. In another family the teenager had tried to protect the mother from an abusive stepfather, and the mother had thrown him out in the belief, which nobody else doubted, that the stepfather might kill him.

Even while her parents were losing their wealth, Sokolik tells us, she found her vocation in learning to "see" these teenagers who want very much not to be "seen." She had to warn one youth, "I don't have a money tree in my yard," but she and her husband were blessed with enough money to put the teenagers in apartments until they could renovate and organize a group house.

In the past, truly homeless teenagers could get legitimate part-time jobs and places to stay. As recently mentioned here, my own grandfather was one of those children whose parents wanted to marry people who didn't want stepchildren. Great-Grandfather simply loaded his first wife's children--boy and girl, ages ten and twelve--into the wagon, took them into town, stopped at a street where desperate unskilled laborers looked for jobs, males on one corner and females on another, and set them out on the appropriate corners with orders to find domestic work where they could get room and board as part of their wages. It was common in those days. Little girls sent "out to service" could expect, a hundred years ago, to be hired and supervised by women who spoke to them coldly but not usually unkindly, treated as social inferiors by their employers but free to marry up the ladder if they could; Great-Aunt married well. Grandfather was taken "out west," worked on ranches, qualified as a lawyer, chose to practice horse training rather than law, and had his own farm and family before age thirty. 

Now, thanks to increasing bureaucracy, teenagers in that kind of situation can't get work, may be unable to document their own identity even to get into school, and may be able to stay with friends for a while, but will very likely turn to theft, prostitution, or the illegal drug trade just to feed themselves. In Florida they can sleep outdoors, but they're likely to be robbed of whatever they have, including shoes and socks, and probably also raped. Some of them may feel lucky if they're able to trade sex for room and board...at least until the men who offer such arrangements get tired of them and throw them out. Some may feel successful in their criminal careers. Others feel shamed and defiled by what they've done, whether they've killed rival drug dealers or been caught the first time they stole a box of tampons. 

(Sokolik tells us that, until recently, government handout programs made no provision for personal hygiene supplies--not Kotex, not shaving kits, not even soap. She claims some of the credit for getting Florida public schools authorized to distribute free female hygiene supplies, though not, apparently, the gender-neutral kind. "Poor hygiene" remains at the top of the list she advises adults to look for when looking for "unaccompanied homeless youth." These teenagers go out for school sports teams, whether they're athletic or not, for the showers but a good laundry barter is harder to find than an invitation to sleep over with a school friend for a week.)

So they need homes--not only beds, but people they can trust to reassure them that what's happened to them is not who they are. Of course, it would be too much to expect that Sokolik would be either willing or able to teach these kids about the many reasons to say no to "a thread or a shoe latchet" in federal handouts. She encourages them to take all the handouts they can take. If they could get into foster care and have money sent to someone regularly for offering them a home, she seems to believe, they ought to do that. But of course many of them turn out to have been foster or even adopted children for whom "it didn't work out" with their official parent-substitutes. 

Close to twenty years later, by the end of the book, several of Sokolik's first few rescues are now active "mentors" for other homeless youth in what's become her organization. They're off the streets, off the drugs, off the welfare, employed, married, some with children of their own. 

It's awesome, really. It's a heartwarming true story. You can look up the TV and newspaper stories right here on your computer. There's no shortage of other people publicly saying nicer things about Sokolik than she says about herself. Her message is not "See how wonderful I am" but "What we've done is working. Carry it on!" 

I only wish that, along with if not in place of the story about the teenager who overcame her prejudice against an ethical, monogamous lesbian "mentor," this book had included a story about a teenager who had learned to embrace per own introversion in a satisfactory relationship with an introvert "mentor." 

Book Review: Surfing the Unknown

Title: Surfing the Unknown i

Author: Dodzi Amemado

Date: 2022

Publisher: Baico

Quote: "I knew survival would be my only option."

 This is one of those coming-of-age novels that are probably more autobiography than anything else, even if names are changed. We first see Kainalu, from Vanuatu, feeling attracted to a girl at university in "Loonland" (located north of "Vespuccica"), but determined to be faithful to a girl back at home, even though they hadn't known each other for long and he's not sure that she's being faithful to him. My interest in stories about fickle young men is not great, so it's pleasant to report that Surfing the Unknown is not that sort of story at all. 

Kainalu's mind is soon taken off the search for excuses to cheat by the bureaucracy, which collects a great deal of a foreign student's money while limiting the student's ability to find work. Kainalu finds himself homeless in the depths of the Loonian winter, with temperatures 25 degrees below zero, Celsius. His adviser, Professor Stinez, seems a little too eager to assume he's going to wash out--if Kainalu freezes to death on the street, what's a foreign student more or less? 

We're not told which university Kainalu attends. It doesn't sound like McGill, although enough of the names are French that it might be, because McGill used to be notorious for offering on-campus housing only for a student's first year. By their second year all students were expected to have found lodgings of their own. It was proof of the students' having enough survival intelligence to be worth educating.  Kainalu would apparently have been allowed to stay on campus if he'd had more money. 

Anyway, as students usually do, he meets an older man who lets him work for his rent. This is Loic Rebel. The name is probably chosen to suggest a philosophy that might be called Stoic, the adoption of which is a bit of a rebellion aganst contemporary popular culture. Loic teaches Kainalu to cope with his difficulties in a somewhat Stoic way. 

Stinez will have more respect for Kainalu by the end of the book. So will readers. So, probably, will the classmates who don't know where Vanuatu is but compare campus life with "where you came from" as if they had any idea what things are like there. This might, of course, have taken place before students could look such things up on their mobile phones...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanuatu

For a coming-of-age novel, Surfing the Unknown also has some potential use as a self-help book. If you are a young adult with Problems and all the school "mental health" office seems to want to do is hand out feel-good pills that don't happen to make you feel good, this story may be a better guide to maturity and enlightenment/

Morgan Griffith Addresses High School Concerns

Congressman Griffith's E-Newsletter arrived on Friday. I wasn't at the computer. Two separate concerns of high school students and their parents here: (1) keeping boys out of girls' sports even if they think they're "transitioning," those poor atrazine victims who don't need lawsuits for acting like guys on girls' teams in any case; and (2) helping students who want to get into the U.S. military academies that require a recommendation by a member of Congress. 

From U.S. Representative Morgan Griffith (R-VA-9):

"

Protecting Girls in Sports; Service Academy Day

On April 20^th, I voted to pass H.R. 734, the Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act of 2023, legislation to ensure that women and girls have a fair playing field in sports by guaranteeing that schools adhere to Title IX’s recognition of biology and genetics of an individual at birth.

Title IX was enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972 to prohibit sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government.

This means that when it came to sports, schools were now required to provide equal participation opportunities, athletic scholarships, and benefits and services (facilities, equipment, transportation) for men and women.

Over the past few years, the left has pushed the notion that biological men that have begun transitioning to women are the same as biological women and so they cannot be excluded from participating in women’s sports. We must be inclusive of all, they say, no matter what.

But this trend only does a disservice to women and House Republicans have sought to protect their rights with H.R. 734. To me, this bill is not controversial. In fact, I am an original cosponsored of the bill.

This bill is about fairness. Women fought for years for equal opportunities in sports. Before Title IX, women’s athletic scholarships were basically nonexistent. Now those scholarships and other opportunities are at risk again because they are being given to biological men in the name of inclusiveness.

But why should women have to sacrifice what they deserve?

This bill is also about safety and accepting the reality of biology and genetics. There is a reason there are separate men’s sports and women’s sports. The biological differences between men and women cannot be ignored.

Genetically, men have a clear advantage. For example, they have a higher ratio of muscle mass to body weight, which allows for greater acceleration and speed. They also have larger and longer bones to support more muscle. This is true in most cases even if they have begun transitioning to a woman.

Women athletes have already gotten hurt competing against biological males. Just a few days prior to this column, a North Carolina high school volleyball player spoke at a press conference about suffering long-term physical and mental injuries when she was spiked by a ball in the face by a transgender athlete.

This bill does not even address the other issue of women in some places now being required to share their locker rooms with biological males.

Where does it end?

H.R. 734 is important legislation to protect woman and girls. Will the Senate agree? I don’t know. Ask your Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Warner.

Academy Day

On May 6^th, I am hosting my annual Service Academy Day in Wytheville. This event gives high school students, their parents, and any school staff interested a chance to learn more about the Service Academies and the military.

The event will feature representatives from each of the U.S. Service Academies – U.S. Military Academy, U.S. Naval Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and U.S. Merchant Marine – the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, the Virginia Military Institute, and other Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs.

I encourage all students who may be interested in serving in our military to come on the 6^th as attending of one of these institutions it is a fantastic way to both serve your country and further your education after high school. 

I am also welcoming interested students and parents located in surrounding counties, outside of the Ninth District, to attend so they may also receive information. Though students must be nominated by their own Member of Congress or Senators to the Service Academies, I know that my event’s location may be more convenient for folks in neighboring counties, such as those just over the state line in West Virginia and North Carolina.

For those students in the Ninth District who attend, my staff will also be available to answer questions regarding our process for congressional nominations.

Serving our country in the Armed Forces is an honorable calling. I hope to see you all there.

If you have questions, concerns, or comments, feel free to contact my office. You can call my Abingdon office at 276-525-1405 or my Christiansburg office at 540-381-5671. To reach my office via email, please visit my website at www.morgangriffith.house.gov. Also on my website is the latest material from my office, including information on votes recently taken on the floor of the House of Representatives.

[signed: Morgan Griffith]

" 

New Book Review: Mission Possible Young Readers Edition

Title: Mission Possible Young Readers Edition

Author: Tim Tebow

Date: Today, 7 March 2023

Publisher: Waterbrook

Length: 176 pages

ISBN: 978-0593194072

Quote: "We are each on a mission to make a difference."

And this book addresses readers as young as age ten--usually a pre-spiritual stage of life, but you never know--encouraging them to pay attention when their emotional hearts "ache for the kid in your class who always gets picked on" or feel "touched by a need" when they see TV commercials for charities.

Homeschooled preacher's kid Tim Tebow, best known as a football star, put most of the profits of his first career in sports into his charitable organization, but he launches this book with the story of how he invested time as well as money in proposing to his wife. A focus on the planning and staging, rather than "eww ick, mushy stuff," may keep this story interesting to middle school readers. Know your students.

Homeschoolers tend to push the envelope when it comes to imagining what children may be capable of. It works in the homeschool setting because parents usually have a good idea of how much their children understand. 

I say "usually" because part of the normal human learning process seems to be that adults assume that a child who can do or understand A can also do or understand B, and this usually produces a manageable amount of stress as the child pushes itself to do or understand B. I've often reminisced about the things my father expected my brother and me to do just because I was able to see letters and sound out words at age four: "If the older one could read Disney picture books and Dr. Seuss at four, she ought to be reading news magazines and Bible stories at five, and the younger one ought to be reading picture books at four likewise." We weren't. We had high I.Q.s and loved reading things ahead of "grade level," but Dad had few grown-up friends because of his tendency to expect even adults to learn more new information faster than they could. Then when his audience were thoroughly confused Dad was apt to start berating them for being "stubborn and stupid." So, at least we grew up with a solid role model of how not to teach. And so today, if this web site seems to assume that readers of one post know more than they do and readers of another post don't know as much as they do...I try to keep everything at this post accessible to a bright ten-year-old reader. Some posts will actually interest that ten-year-old reader and some will not. Since it's only a web site I do assume that readers can browse about, find their own level, and look up anything they don't understand. In real life I'd have audience reactions to go by; in writing I have to do the best I can, as all writers do. Tebow's writing a serious evangelical book for very bright ten-year-olds or, more likely, normal fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds is probably a reflection of his own early life, spending most of his time with highly educated, mentally active, adults who might have found in their clever child something they missed in most of their friends their own age. 

This book will work for some middle school sports fans but I would emphasize that there's nothing at all to worry about if your own half-grown football fan prefers books with more pictures of actual games and less talk about missions and God. I'd be more concerned about a child if adults created pressure for the kid to show more interest in "spiritual things," even in Fellowship of Christian Athletes terms ("Celebrate God all day and every day. I mean...revel in Him!"). That generates a rebellious reaction in which "cradle Christian" teenagers seem to want to go out and do something they can repent of. While cultural expectations that this Rumspringe phase will merely bring the young back into the church seem to work for a majority of teenagers in Amish, Seventh-Day Adventist, and Southern Baptist communities, the Rumspringe experience can be dangerous for individual teenagers. 

I would offer this book to any young reader who is interested in now-retired football stars, but I'd probably say something like, "Tebow grew up a bit different from the average kid. You might get more out of this book when you're in high school or college." And let all further discussion of the book begin with the student. Spirituality does not develop on the same schedule as language and math skills or physical growth do. Here I stand to testify that although I was sounding out words in adults' books and magazines at four, although I was the first skinny eleven-year-old to find a use for a bra in grade six, I didn't have an adult spiritual life before my early twenties. My "adult baptism" at sixteen turned out not to be a great mistake, but I wasn't altogether sure whether it was going to be a mistake during my years as a young "adult" church member.

For readers who aren't totally turned off by the story of a man's setting up an elaborate scene to propose marriage, Tebow goes on to share other stories of more interest to kids. As a homeschooler, he tells us, he was encouraged to socialize in a church that had a large youth group and staged lots of activities. The group had enough students to require auditions for their plays and pageants. "Eight-year-old Tim Tebow" was ordered to recite a poem he "mumbled...[s]taring down at my shoelaces" and rush through a rendition of "Jesus Loves Me" in which "Every sound...fumbled out of pitch. When I was done squawking the last line, I speed-walked to the side curtain." After this audition, due to family connections no doubt, he was given a part in the play and a position in the choir. Though "basically taking up space in choir due to my lack of talent," he came to feel real gratitude for the adults who "didn't see me as a one-sided jock" but patiently taught him to sing. 

From such adults he also learned values like integrity ("While it's nice to be rewarded with stuff, it's more fulfilling to please our Heavenly Father"), gratitude ("when I shift to being grateful...the muscles in my neck relax"), and excellence ("Your Work Is Worship"). And he learned that your vocation to work, which may or may not be the job that pays your bills, is "your mission superpower." 

For Tebow's target audience of talented teens...I'm one of the people who routinely use the term "teenagers" to include ten-to-twelve-year-olds who are developing the sense of purpose and ability to concentrate that are normally found in thirteen-to-sixteen-year-olds...it is commonplace to have a strong sense of vocation. A talent was probably noticeable before they were even five years old, though that's not always the case--sometimes kids don't have access to ways to develop and show their talents early in life, or their talents aren't recognized as "real" vocations because adults' prejudices suggest that things like cooking are less "real" vocations than things like teaching. (Grandma Bonnie Peters rebelled in youth against pressure to get a college degree and teach school, because that was the "upscale" thing for young ladies to do with their intelligence. Her vocation first manifested itself as a talent for cooking, and later matured into her vocation for home nursing, nutrition counselling, and life coaching.) Small children may also show a precocious talent that turns out not to be their vocation, as when my natural sister, who was able to sing on key before she was able to speak clearly, lost all ability to hear sounds in the soprano range at age five. 

Most talented young people, however, do know what their talents are, and are ready to have a "first career," even if it's a short one, in middle school. We want them to keep learning and exploring different things but we need to let children use their talents and energy. Sometimes people still show vestiges of an archaic belief that every boy has to be a soldier and every girl has to be a mother, starting as early as possible--why make them wait till they're eighteen, when boys can fight and girls can get pregnant at fourteen! In fact civilized societies flourish when most men never have to go to war and most women never have to give birth. Focus on their other talents is probably best for society as well as for these individuals. Children should "start small" with relatively short work days, if possible, and "safe," well supervised tasks that won't compromise their ability to do other jobs later. There are still countries where giving kids jobs in textiles or machinery is the way nice people keep children from being recruited as pickpockets or prostitutes, but having them work with toxic waste, as has been reported in modern China, is going too far. In the United States we tend to go too far in the opposite direction, nannying at children who are perfectly happy with their first steps toward their vocations: "Put down that book, you read too much. Must you practice your music every day? Normal kids don't ask for math books for birthday presents--you'll never have any friends if you go on like that! You're too little to handle needles or hammers or whatever, you might cut yourself. There'll be plenty of time to sell things for money when you're grown up, don't start that now," and so on.  Tebow encourages kids to take those first small steps into their vocations. Their work is worship. He's right.

He also sides with "Convictions Over Emotions": "[F]eelings come and go. [God's] love for us does not." This detail is important, yet divisive. It hinges on one of those physical differences we're not comfortable even recognizing--probably the only physical difference that needs to make any difference in the way people behave toward one another. "Race" doesn't matter at all when intelligent people want to accomplish something. Age and sex matter less than we might think. Even physical abilities can often be worked around. But the difference between introvert and extrovert brains may remain crucial.

In contemporary American society we often meet people who do have consciences, vocations, the ability to work alone, and even some conspicuous introvert-type talents and perceptions, who believe they are extroverts because they are not shy. This doesn't mean that they are extroverts in the sense that is relevant in the light of recent scientific discoveries, the sense of incomplete neurological development. It means that they're still using an outdated working definition of what appear to be introvert and extrovert behavior, according to which that mythical "balance" between the two is possible. People have either introvert or extrovert brains but a healthy introvert brain normally does develop social poise, especially under the guidance of healthy introvert adults who appreciate a quiet, focussed, talented child. Shyness is typical of adolescents who know they're raw beginners at most of the things they do, of extroverts who have less wealth or "looks" than those around them, and of introverts who've been emotionally abused by extrovert bullies who were not taught to be grateful for the attention they get. When we as a society become more vigilant about training children not to start a bullying relationship, saying things like "You're yapping at someone who wasn't even looking at you? How DARE you? Go to your room until you can get some control of that mouth!", then the stereotype of the socially awkward introvert will probably disappear.

The real difference between introvert and extrovert brains is not always obvious from behavior, but it's permanent and important. Introverts have convictions because, whatever specific talents our brains also develop, we all share the crucial part of the brain that links spirituality to the sense of right and wrong, the conscience, from which we make aesthetic as well as moral judgments. We need to heed and develop our consciences. Extroverts fail to develop the conscience, which is a real disability and needs to be recognized as one. They need help; they need guidance; they do not need a great deal of individual responsibility, because all they have to go on, when making decisions, are the emotions they feel primarily about other people's reactions to them. Because of this difference in the physical brain, extroverts remain stuck at what Kohlberg called a juvenile stage of moral development, while introverts reach what Kohlberg thought was moral maturity. 

This doesn't mean that all introverts always behave well. Anyone can consciously choose wrong, for bad reasons, such as money or social pressure. Introverts do need to learn effective ways to communicate in situations where their moral senses and social senses conflict. Left to ourselves introvert children are likely to want to solve social problems by beating up bullies, thus putting themselves in the position of super-bully or else getting beaten up themselves, or screaming ineffectually at adults, thus usually getting a harsher reception than Greta Thunberg has so far received. We need positive instruction in how to communicate our beliefs, but the kind of "counselling" many adult introverts got in the 1970s and 1980s, which began with "feelings" and "Can you remember when you lost your warm fuzzy feelings toward other people? Who did what to you when you were just a baby or toddler? Was it your mother or your father? Did they actually molest you or did you just feel the way they cleaned your bottom as something like sexual abuse?" does no good at all. Neither did the milder, or New Age, version of "Let's all just go back to a more primitive level of civilization where nobody dared to make value judgments." For one thing that view of history is almost certainly false--when isolated primitive tribes failed to develop a coherent moral law they usually seem to have been dominated by superstitions about what might appease the hostility of their vicious "gods"--and moreover it's counterproductive for individuals and for society. We need to heed the moral judgments of enlightened people.

Tebow discusses what might be seen as the sad end of his first career in this context of where "feelings" fit in the Christian life of a neurologically complete adult, or what is now the objective scientific meaning of the word "introvert." "As I walked around the Star" in the Dallas Cowboys' extravagant complex, "I became swept up in unmet longings...I wish I had a chance to be a player in this facility...God, I wish You had a different plan. Seeing the Cowboys' facilities made me miss football," even though his adult moral sense knew, "My mission that day was to have an impact on a bunch of souls" as a preacher whose football career was over. Nobody can be a professional athlete forever and most athletes would do well to be thinking of their second careers as their adult careers, since most athletic competitions are dominated by the crazy teenage energy that just subsides when the body has stopped growing. Most of the time, Tebow tells us, he knows he's here to preach and "encourage" and raise funds for his charity, but he has moments when he misses football. 

(Eventually, I'd like to encourage him, it settles down into pleasant nostalgia. Pleasant feelings associated with our adult careers displace the older memories of pleasant feelings associated with our earliest successes. This, too, is a physical process. During the process nostalgia can stab like a toothache as easily as it can give pleasure and inspire works of art, later. The challenge is to resist any temptation to "drink to forget" what we lose by growing up.)

For Tebow, whose own emotions must still be making strong waves in his consciousness, "feelings" are like the two wolves in the story he tells. Some readers may need to be reminded that for Native Americans the predatory animals, even the deadly dangerous wolf, bear, and eagle, were symbols of power rather than danger. Humans can tame and train those animals. Legendary heroes of American culture did that. So in the terms they used, it made sense to describe emotional energy as like "two wolves fighting" and one wolf being "good, kind, and generous" while the other was vicious. A wolf who became your friend and protector, like Julie's Amaroq in Julie of the Wolves, would fight off a hostile wolf who might want to eat you. Anyway, our emotions are like the two hypothetical wolves fighting. The one that wins is the one you feed. We can use our moral judgments to choose which emotion to feed our attention to. 

This will not give teenagers, instantly, the power to snap into the emotional mood an emotional abuser might demand that they feel or simulate, Nor should it. Nor should they. Their feelings are their own and they have the right to feel tired, impatient, even frustrated by tasks they've not yet mastered. The rewards go to those who learn to work through those feelings. 

Tebow's phrase is "Embrace the Grind." For every skill we learn there will be times when learning itself is difficult, and times when using what we've learned is boring. Rewards come to those who push through the drudgery to recover the joy and glory of their work.

Adult readers, at least, know where this book is going--the last full-length chapter will call attention back to a beneficiary of Tebow's charity, and the last page will be the Christian Altar Call--but this review leaves a good dozen stories for readers to discover in the book. 

Things Bloggers Are Proud of Doing

From LongAndShortReviews, the survey says bloggers are proud of doing these things:

1. Being writers. Whether they've written bestselling novels, niche-market novels, or just a steady ongoing blog...writing doesn't pay well, so if it weren't a source of great pleasure and pride we wouldn't do it! Six bloggersmentioned this.

2. The children in their lives--natural offspring, foster/adoptive children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews and other young relatives. Five bloggers mentioned this.

3. Teaching or counselling others. Three bloggers mentioned this.

4. Saying no, setting boundaries, and sticking to them. It seems to me as if the tricky part of this life skill is knowing when...there are times to say no and times to say yes. Being able to do both is important. This and the other things below were mentioned by one blogger each.

5. Being a blood donor, That's something to glow about. That's one thing on this list I've not done, because I had "chronic" mononucleosis, with liver infection, before I reached the minimum weight.

6. Tipping off an older person who didn't realize he was being scammed.

7. Learning to knit/crochet/etc. 

8. Staying married. Patrick Prescott could boast of having been married for 43 years.

9. Fostering shelter animals. Marianne Arkins operates one of those animal foster homes we so often read about on Petfinder. 

10. Seeking treatment for a chronic health problem.

Now, about me...I've done most of these things too. I think one reason why I can't think of anything I've felt proud of doing, lately, is that it was so easy to reel off a Top Ten List a few years ago and I've not done anything to top those achievements since.

I have been an achiever in life. I have the sort of curriculum vitae that made older achievers in Washington say things like "Well, young lady, if you ever decide to pick a career and stick to it, you'd be an asset to whichever of those 'odd jobs' you choose." Unfortunately it made employers in my home town turn pale and say "We'll call you," and carefully not say "...if all 200 other applicants any pink-collar job opening attracts, around here, happen to have died." But yes. Dean's List at Berea, professional singer in college, offered a reward if anyone could find a better typing service and never had to pay, etc. 

I haven't felt like an achiever this winter. We lost Grandma Bonnie Peters. two years ago. We lost my Significant Other. We lost Adayahi. We came close to losing both Yona and Lisiwayu. I'm the only member of this web site who's not been in a hospital during the past year. It's been a time of grieving, not a time of achieving. I'm a writer, an aunt, a teacher, a warner about scams, a knitter, an animal rescuer, a  Celiactivist, a faithful wife until I became a widow, and an expert at saying no. Maybe if we'd won a total global glyphosate ban I'd fel proud of being a Celiactivist, even this winter, but so far we've not and I don't.

It's just been a time of feeling "lost and lonely" more than "glad and proud." 

I'll say this, though. There is someone else of whom I feel very proud. "Youth behaving well" is a theme at this web site, though we don't get to use it often...My Significant Other was 6'4". I'm 5'4". The faithful foster son was 6'2". We agreed that the foster son should be free to go his own way and live his own life when he chose, but neither of us wanted to put any pressure on him. But the foster son stayed with his foster father, serving as nurse, chauffeur, cleaner, cook, and yardman whenever needed, for eleven years, 

The Manly Art of Patient Care

Some reminiscences for those of The Nephews who are young men, and for any other men who care to read them...and for mothers of sons...

When I flunked out of university with mononucleosis, Mother was the Queen of Denial. "You're young! You're healthy! You're strong! You should sign up for that geriatric care course at the community college. If we get Great-Uncle Rich-and-Childless's house we'll open it as a private nursing home for just three patients at a time, and they'll get well and go home." The course was so well subsidized we actually got some spending money after enrollment, in order to feed fresh nursing assistants into the horrible state nursing home nearby. We put in practice hours there, the twenty-some students in the class. Every one of us was female. Nobody seemed to take any notice of the fact that I was so jaundiced and haggard I scared the kids I used to baby-sit. The fact that I was single did, however, attract attention. "Since you don't have a husband to practice bathing and shaving, you get to do that for the male patients!" 

The male patients suspected something like that. But, as they were gentlemen and were also hugely outnumbered, all they actually said was "Well, you've got a lot to learn." 

Yes, it's possible to lift a patient who weighs twice as much as you do, if you learn the tricks. One of the tricks is to choose a patient who is either cooperative or unconscious. Another little trick of the nursing trade is to remember that almost all patients can clean their own private parts more efficiently than you can. However sloppy they are, otherwise, they'll feel the dirt there and want to get rid of it. So the female nurse hands the male patient cloth, soap, and basin, and washes his back or feet..

I didn't go to work at the horrible nursing home. My exam scores got me snapped up by a private patient,  female, for whom I worked three weeks before going back to bed. After that, prospective patients and people who knew them said hopefully "You'll be teaching your sister, won't you, and your mother can get back to home nursing?" but the state law, which finally allowed parents to teach their own children, said nothing about sisters, and I watched a lot of NBC, which was still the only television channel we could pick up.

I remember, though, one friend from university who wrote that he was living with a male patient in town, as a caretaker, to save dorm fees. A male nurse! He was a Northerner and was studying to be a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher, and although I loyally disagreed with his claim that he was repulsive I found several other guys more attractive, but the idea of his being willing to sit with a male geriatric patient made him seem a lot more...respectable, anyway. The old gentlemen in the nursing home would have felt better about being bathed by him.

Anyway typing was more fun than nursing, and in those days typing paid well. In a few years, though, the'rents started to grow "old." The Veterans Administration thought Dad's eyes should be checked by a local opthalmologist who was supposed to be good. I suppose he was good, for some of his patients. Maybe it was the copper-colored skin that put him off asking whether Dad was Irish-American. The most popular chemical used to examine the eyes for cataract surgery happens to cause long-term, painful glaucoma in many patients of Irish descent. Dad went in with cataracts and came out blind. Over the years the glaucoma subsided a little; by then the cataracts were past help.

He resigned himself to the idea that an "accessible apartment" was the place for him. As a disabled veteran he got a basement flat with soft northeast light that wouldn't hurt his eyes and enough bedroom space for all of us to have moved in. 

"You," Mother said to me, "are moving into the nurse's room and keeping the place cleaned until he finds his way around it. He'd rather have me, but that's just too bad. I have a job. You don't." So I stayed with Dad and mopped the floors a lot, did part-time and odd jobs, learned songs off the Limbaugh Show. It was a dreary year, but not terrible. I finally had a boyfriend who wasn't scared of Dad, and whom Dad didn't seem to be trying to scare. In fact, though he never would have said it in so many words, Dad seemed downright grateful, not only when Mother or my natural sister visited, but when his brother and cousins did.

I wondered when we'd be seeing the childhood hero who'd become Dad's closest friend. Dad didn't get to Germany until after the war, but Sergeant -- was a Purple Heart veteran of the war with Japan. Among other things he'd been on a ship that was blown up, and had a steel plate in his head. He and Dad, and sometimes a laborer from town he used to pay, had shared an all-organic vegetable farm for several summers. Sergeant -- wasn't afraid of much but, it seemed, he couldn't stand retirement projects. Later I heard that he'd told another old friend he'd gone into the building, once, but before actually ringing Dad's doorbell he decided the whole idea of a basement flat was too depressing.

At the end of the year Dad reckoned he knew the way around, and he wanted to feel free to listen to tapes if he couldn't sleep at night, and he might sleep better if my natural sister weren't alone in the house anyway, and I'd earned enough to pay off what was left of my student loan debt. So that was a good deal all around. 

Not too many years later, when I stopped at the project, Dad was really ill from a reaction to his medication. I had a key, let myself in, and saw that the floors were worse than usual. Dad was in his bedroom. "Go away," he shouted through the door. "I'm not fit for female eyes to see. You can clean the floors if you really want to. Or just tell Cousin -- that he could come and see me, if he wants to. If I have to have a caretaker, which God forbid and fend, it'll be male." 

Cousin -- found Dad lying in a filthy bed. "I wouldn't want my wife to have to see that," Dad told him, cooperating as the cousin threw away linens and scrubbed walls, "and I'd rather die than have my daughters see it. I know Pris has seen worse, having trained at that nursing home, but those patients were not her own father." (Well, actually, of course, he used my real-world name, which is not Priscilla, but never mind.)

Meanwhile my natural sister had eloped with a young man I would have helped Dad scare off if we'd ever got a good look at him. Mother had. "I tried to discourage her. So they eloped," she said. "Well, for one thing, he has a birth defect--he's not expected to live to age forty. She'll have a military widow's pension, at least." She also had children with disabilities. When they reached school age their father went to work in a bigger city, on a bigger-paying job, where the children could be in special school programs.

"Their father's in the hospital again. He might die," Mother said now and then over their growing-up years.

"Fine by me. Er, um, having the children back here, I mean."

But he kept coming home from the hospital and going back to his job. Time passed. The children graduated from high school, not in Virginia, but they obviously learned something. The one whose nearsightedness didn't qualify for a disability pension went down to Chick-fil-A and told the manager about his plans to stay with his frail old father, now close to age fifty, after graduation. How long he'd need to ride to work with a friend who worked at Chick-fil-A until he'd have a car, how much time his father was likely to need, what he'd been learning during the year I was doing all those guest posts about free, cheap, or at least less-overpriced online courses. The manager was impressed. My brilliant nearsighted nephew is now earning his way through university on his salary managing a restaurant, the way older people used to earn their way by washing dishes. I don't expect he'll spend enough time on campus to get his degree from M.I.T. or Georgia Tech, but I believe he could if he wanted to.

Meanwhile I lost my husband to cancer. When he started spending nights in the hospital it was in the cheerful neurology section; I slept with my head on the side of the hospital bed, sitting in a straight-backed chair. Then there was a stay in the urology section. "We can't have women visitors overnight. It makes the other men too uncomfortable. Aren't there any male relatives who could stay with him at night?" There were two; they were called, they made short visits during the daytime, but neither of them stayed with my husband at night. Well. Soon enough he was on the cancer ward and didn't know who was with him any more.

I came home and met a man who was tall, dark, and handsome, at the time. As of this year he also qualifies as old, sick, and rich: best of show in all categories. I met him on a job, liked working with him, liked chatting with him at lunch, and soon started seeing him after work. During the first year I agreed to marry him as soon as his teenaged foster son moved out, because teenaged boys didn't need foster stepmothers.

As regular readers know, the foster son moved out. About a month later, the foster father had Lyme Disease. The foster son came back. Lyme Disease wasn't properly treated in time, and became chronic. Some days my Significant Other has been fit to walk or drive, some days not. When he's not, he's expressed a preference for me to do at least some of the driving, and I went so far as to acquire the sort of big macho-looking truck in which he's comfortable, but mostly the foster son has done the driving, the cleaning, and whatever else needed to be done. 

Sinetunes I think, "I ought to be doing more for him." Then I think about the trick to carrying a patient who is bigger than you are. Anybody can carry anybody, if they have to get out of a burning building, at close to their top speed, without great strain. If the situation is less life-threatening than a burning building, patients hate being carried that way. Having their feet drag on the ground hurts. A 6'3" man can do more for a 6'4" man than a 5'4" woman can do. That's all there is to it.

The only truly practical advantage being male can be said to provide, relative to most of the jobs people do, is size. Male athletes are disproportionately stronger and faster than female athletes. Male hormones can help build more efficient muscles, for as long as the man trains and uses his muscles. Male couch potatoes are neither stronger nor faster than women the same size, but they can still reach further and lift heavier weights. Size should not be underestimated as an advantage in providing nursing care.

But some men, the ones who aren't too lazy or grumpy or perverse to work in human-service jobs, also enjoy a psychological advantage in working with other males. How many times, in adult and supplemental education classes, I've seen a man or boy seem bright, charming, but unable to focus and learn the material. 

Sometimes it's not just any male teacher who can help. I remember telling my husband about a problem student whose real name was Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson had been homeless but he could be described as handsome and thought he was very cool and charming. "The way I see it, Mr. Johnson may never get anywhere with me or the other woman teacher, because he's too busy posing and preening and trying to look attractive. He's not getting anywhere with the two young Black men teachers, because they're younger and he's trying to act 'smarter' than they are. He's not getting anywhere with the older White man, because he's trying to act tough and defensive. I think his only hope of earning that G.E.D. would be to have a tutor who is older and darker-skinned than he is. Then he might possibly think about anything but what kind of impression he was making long enough to learn the multiplication table" My husband came in to tutor, and Mr. Johnson earned his G.E.D. in five weeks.

My husband had a gift. However, it seems generally to boost male students' morale when at least some of their teachers are male. Likewise, male customers are more comfortable buying things in stores that are co-owned by or that at least employ men. Likewise, male patients seem less miserable being cared for by male doctors and nurses. 

So why are there so few males in the health care professions? Men still compete for top positions as doctors, but they're not proportionately represented in other health care fields. Least of all do they seem interested in the lowly nursing assistants' jobs. Doctors and nurses don't even call nursing assistants "Nurse," though patients usually do. In hospitals nursing assistants are paid by the hour and are the ones most likely to bathe patients and clean bedpans. Male patients, who might not mind having women help them bathe when they're healthy, often hate having women help them bathe when they're ill. A good male nurse can always find work, and may be able to choose among private home care jobs with all sorts of unenumerated benefits. A surprising number of men pass up these benefits because:

* they faint at the sight of blood

* they feel sick at the sight of body secretions, generally

* they feel awkward around sick people

* stupid insensitive hospital or nursing home policies might require them to bathe women, which is just too icky for all concerned (this one is true); or

* they find being around sick people unbearably depressing, or frightening, or both.

Do men still believe that "manliness" presupposes fortitude? Fortitude is the solution to at least four of these problems men have with doing the jobs that could get financing their education. 

Nursing is not for just any guy. It does require that a man have grown into his feet and become able to move efficiently in his full-grown body. It requires that he have matured enough not to go into the sort of clown act little boys use when they feel scared or embarrassed. It requires that he cultivate what Christians call the "servant's heart," the gift of humility, necessary to allow him to work with both doctors and patients as superordinates. It requires more strength and stamina, keener perceptivity, and a more robust immune system, than most people think. It requires the ability to treat strangers, for no reason but their illness, as if they were part of your own body--to snap out of a sound sleep and take them to the bathroom, or bring them a basin or bedpan, or whatever, half a dozen times in a night--and then detach from them completely, as they either die or recover, and on to the next one. A good male nurse has to be, in short, a good man. 

But the rewards are great--especially when a fellow can pay back what he owes his father, or father-substitute, in this lifetime.

Book Review: Teen Knitting Club

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Teen Knitting Club

Author: Jennifer Wenger et al.

Date: 2004

Publisher: Artisan

ISBN: 1-57965-244-1

Length: 142 pages

Illustrations: color photos and graphics

Quote: “I like working with my hands. It’s rewarding to finish a project and be able to wear it.”

Here’s another basic knitting book for beginners. How does it stack up next to Melanie Falick’s Kids Knitting, Kathrin Behrens' Primer Libro de Punto, or Angela Wilkes' Knitting?

Size. Of the four, it’s the biggest book. That’s because it’s spiral-bound so the pages lie flat. Beginning knitters will appreciate this feature.

Number of patterns. More than Kids Knitting, fewer than Knitting or Primer Libro de Punto—but also more of the different patterns are for scarves, more are for silly novelty yarns that won’t be in stores (or be missed) in most seasons, and the sweater patterns are more fads rather than classics. All patterns are for teenaged girls. Hats and scarves are actually gender-neutral and some are photographed on boys, but the sweaters, bags, and ponchos are 2004 fashion statements. Experienced knitters can fix the 2004 fad features in the sweater patterns if they really want to knit super-chunky sweaters. Beginners can’t. So the number of patterns the beginning knitter will actually use is probably about even with the number in Kids Knitting. Beginners who want to knit more different classic garments will wish they had Knitting. For those who read Spanish (at all), Primer Libro de Punto offers by far the most usable patterns, but then, some of them are intended to be used after beginners have gained some experience from the dead-easy patterns.

Eye appeal. No comparison: Kids Knitting wins in this category, hands down, with its photos of adorable kids knitting and modelling on a lovely sheep farm. Primer Libro de Punto offers clear, straightforward photos that show the products without an obvious effort to add any extra kind of eye appeal. Knitting is a budget-conscious book, suitable for homeschoolers, with drawings instead of photos. Teen Knitting Club has full-color photos instead of drawings, but some of the photos don’t show the knitted product as clearly as they might. The eye-rolling girl modelling the basic Stockinette Scarf is also modelling a hat (instructions included) and a cardigan (instructions not included), which borders on False Advertising.

Datedness. The more fashion-conscious a pattern collection is, the less appeal it has every season after printing. Here again, no comparison: all three of the other books beat Teen Knitting Club. However, if you update the garments you wear with it, there’s really not much “fashion” about a hat, scarf, or blanket, which is what most of the patterns produce. The pictures look dated but the knitted products can still be used.

Clarity of instructions. Here again, Teen Knitting Club has room for improvement. The authors consider 4 stitches per inch “medium weight” knitting (actually it’s pretty bulky, as knitters will agree if they try wearing it). They recommend using circular needles to knit hats, which some beginners find confusing. You can only learn to make plain and purl stitches once, and those who learned from books rather than from people usually favor the book from which they learned; I think the graphics showing how the stitches are made look clear and simple, but then I learned to make them several years before this book was written.

Informativeness. Primer Libro de Punto rules this category with instructions for making not only different styles of garments, but different pattern stitches in addition to stock and garter stitch. All three of the other books introduce sock and mitten knitting; Teen Knitting Club does not.

Cuteness. All three of the American books outscore Knitting in the “cute and clever” category. I rate Kids Knitting at the top of this category, but then again the focus on middle school kids may be off-putting for teenyboppers who’d rather look at pictures of girls with lipstick and boys with mustaches.

So, which one would I use to teach a knitting class? Umm...there’s a reason why I bought all four, right? For a mixed group, if I had to choose one, I’d choose Knitting; its frugal design packs most information per cubic inch.

Knitting patterns, consisting as they do mostly of pictures and numbers, are surprisingly easy for experienced knitters around the world to read. I’ve heard of knitters who spoke only English figuring out knitting patterns that were written in Japanese! (That I’ve not tried.) Really raw beginners who don’t speak Spanish would probably not be able to use Primer Libro de Punto, but the ones who really learn to knit will be surprised by how soon they will be able to use it. Adults can learn from either Kids Knitting or Teen Knitting Club. Only for a group of terribly age-conscious schoolchildren does the age difference of the models in Kids Knitting and Teen Knitting Club matter—and some teenagers (and adults) would actually prefer wearing the “kid” sizes.

Teenagers using Teen Knitting Club today might feel something close to what I felt, in junior high school, “rapping” by mail with a church Sunday School program written in the cutting-edge slang of 1963. Polite teenagers my age didn’t say to friendly adults, as the teenaged offspring of people my age seem to do, “These worksheets are so out of date it hurts,” but I do remember looking at some of those worksheets and thinking, “Who says that any more? Did anybody ever say that, and if so what did it mean? ‘Rap sheets’ aren’t correspondence, they’re criminal records, and ‘rapping’ isn’t hanging out, it’s like ‘talking blues’ only faster, and I just know those oldies do not want anybody ‘rapping with’ them! Those poor oldies worked so hard to write something that would seem relevant ten or fifteen years ago, and they’ve still got copies on their hands, and the kids they wrote these worksheets for are all selling insurance and driving buses now...”

Then again...I worked through those worksheets, despite pitying the oldies who’d written them, and learned where to find the main “proof texts” in the Bible by using them. And today’s teenagers will probably look at that pullover with the sleeves draping down over the model’s hand and think “Yikes—did people actually wear that?” (The answer is no; fashion victims bought or made sleeves like that, but they rolled them up if they wore the sweaters.) Nevertheless, they can still enjoy making hats, scarves, and blankets as explained in this book.

For a knitting class—I would seriously recommend, if the class meets in a wool shop where there’s room for such things, bringing in the whole collection of how-to-knit books. Some students may actually respond best to the explication of plain and purl stitch in Mildred Graves Ryan's (error-ridden) Knitting for Pleasure—it worked for me—or the one in Knitting Without Tears, and why should students be deprived of Sally Melville’s fabulous Knitting Experience collection? Let students pass them around for reference while making their first sweaty little garter stitch scarves, and choose their own “real projects.” Some are likely to favor the ponchos and cell phone bags in Teen Knitting Club.

Verdict: Teen Knitting Club still has something special to offer high school and college students.

I’m a well-known pattern hoarder, and even I have found it easy to knit through this book and pass it on. But I was too old for it when it was printed. Teen Knitting Club does have merit, not the least of which is the way it suggests ways teen knitters can (still) mingle and have a ton of fun. Knitting is a skill that has many teen-specific applications...relieving stress, meeting people, math, charity, bonding with older people...This book is only one among many that can teach beginners how to knit, but it’s the only one that really tells teenagers why.

And, what to do with that pattern for a super-chunky pullover in which any fashion victim who actually wore it might have fainted from the heat? In view of the current fashion for thin, transparent sweater-oid objects “just for layering,” why not buy some skinny yarn—Michaels often offers good deals on sock yarn—and knit a thin, transparent, lacy version? Bingo, you’d be back at the dizzy, daffy height of fashion. Though whenever I wore anything that was all that fashionable, as a teenager, I always wanted to die of embarrassment.

To buy Teen Knitting Club here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, and $1 per online payment to the appropriate address, as discussed in the Greeting Post, and we'll send $1 to Wenger or a charity of her choice. I've not actually tried to squeeze all four of the basic knitting books compared in this review into a $5 package, but, since Knitting is a thin book and Kids Knitting and Primer Libro de Punto are standard-sized, I think they could all be shipped together for a total of $25 (to Boxholder at P.O. Box 322) or $26 (to the e-mail address you get from salolianigodagewi @ yahoo).