two defeats and a victory

[trochee]

So this evening has been a real mixed bag.

trochee blows a meeting
I got distracted at the end of the day (reading phonetics) and forgot to go get on the bus for a committee meeting for the TV studio. Whoops. I feel bad; it's a volunteer operation and I should really show up for meetings. I wrote an email to the Exec Dir apologizing about 15 minutes before the meeting started. I hope she got it.

trochee fails to stop the thieves
So with guilt and heavy heart, I caught the bus home. Halfway there, two young teenage boys get on the bus and rush back to the back corral, where I'm sitting, reading "Principles of Semitic Word-Structure" (see my previous post). They put a backpack on their lap, and proceed to discuss where the best place to get "sick" headphones are (at "Bose", pronounced /'bozi/, heh), and rifle through the contents of the backpack, pulling out bit after bit and holding it up and admiring it. And these items clearly did not belong to these boys: one item was a woman's silver bracelet that incorporates a watch, which one said "oo, I want that, I'll wear it just for the time." The other snaps it around his own wrist and admires the look, and he actually said "dayum, bling bling". I finally couldn't hold it any longer.
"Hey, that backpack can't possibly belong to you guys."
"What! how would you know?" one said belligerently, confirming my suspicions.
"Um. that bracelet really suits you, you know. It looks like it's just your style. The first thing I thought when you got on, you know -- 'that guy, he looks like the kind of guy who always wears women's jewelry." The boy looks at me sideways (is this guy serious?). The other looks at me sullenly, and puts the things back in the backpack. "Where did you get it?" I ask. The first boy joins the second in staring at me darkly, but there are advantages to having more rings in my tree-trunk than the two of them combined, and I continue to look at them openly and directly. But nothing happens. They sit. I finally relent, and point out to the boys that the bus we're on isn't going where they want to go anyway: the bus behind goes downtown, but this one stops on the Hill.
"oh s**t, man, really?" Suddenly, they can both speak. "Oh man, let's go -- ring that bell -- we'll get off here." These guys move fast. After they get off, I walk up to the front of the bus to talk to the driver.
"They didn't steal it on the bus," says the driver, after I explain. "Not much I can do." Feeling a little defeated, I go back and ride the rest of the way home. I'm not much of a hero.

trochee is accepted to a conference
When I got home, I got the news that my abstract was accepted to the Linguistics Society of America conference in San Francisco in January. I'll be presenting in the Computational Linguistics session. (There are keynotes by Ladefoged, Bybee, and Lakoff!) Nice to be recognized in this area. The downside here is that now I have to prepare the talk, not just the abstract. I was prepared to be rejected because I figured they wouldn't know how to use what I'm doing.

Comments

[lapartera.livejournal.com]

People being mean to their kids on the bus -- I see this all the time in my clinic. It looks like meanness, but in reality I think it is often a combination of cultural expectations and a lack of understanding of child development. These are very hard behaviors to change. Even if you can educate folks about what is normal behavior for a toddler (certainly it is not normal for a toddler to sit for hours in the clinic with nothing to do and nothing to eat), you are still up against the norms of the culture. If the person's peers all tell her that kids should be still and quiet in public, and that the appropriate intervention if they are not is hitting, then no matter what child development texts may say, she is unlikely to change her disciplinary techniques.

I usually take the tack of commenting on the child's behavior in a way that might get the caretaker thinking about what is normal and what's not. When a toddler is poking around the exam room, I try to be patient and point out that this is a sign of an active mind and that this must be an intelligent child. When they start getting into the hazardous waste trash, I say, "NO! Dirty! Don't touch!" and physically remove the child from that part of the room. I also try to have some items like magazines to give a child to look at/tear up/whatever while I am examining the caregiver. And with older children who are interested in what is going on, I include them in the visit, showing the parent just what the child is able to do. I often give the kid one of our paper tape measures, for instance. Yesterday, a 2 year old who has been coming to clinic frequently with his 15 year old (sigh) mom, handed me my tape measure just at the point when I needed it. I thanked him and pointed out to his mom just how much this meant -- he had been paying attention and knew what came next in the visit! AND this child, who had been quite distruptive on his first couple of visits, was standing quietly by eager to hear the baby's heartbeat! It was a wondeful moment.

Now what can you do on the bus? I don't know. I would hope the bus driver would intervene in a situation where a caretaker was physically assaulting a child, but usually it's not that severe. Our culture is not at all clear about what is OK to do to a child and what is not. In Atlanta we've had what seems like an epidemic of caretakers killing their charges -- shaking, throwing against walls, etc. Obviously no one thinks that's OK, but short of death and disfigurement, parents and parent substitutes have a pretty wide scope.

I've been doing group prenatal care with young African American women in Atlanta and their beliefs about what is OK to do to kids is so very different from mine, it's tough to hear! Obviously preaching isn't the answer and on the bus you can't do that anyway. If you tried talking about normal child behavior, I'm sure they'd just think you were either nuts or a child molester. In Group we do talk about these issues and I try to give the alternative opinion, without making it sound like I'm the authority. One of the great benefits of Group (and one of the challenges) is that the midwife/facilitator isn't in the majority and while I am clearly the only old white lady there, I'm in such a minority, that they feel comfortable being open about their beliefs. One of the strategies I've tried is getting them to talk about how they were disciplined as children and reflecting on whether it worked. If phycical violence doesn't work as a routine strategy (and I think there's lots of evidence that it doesn't), then maybe there's a space to think about other disciplinary strategies.

Well, this was a long and rambling post, but it's an issue that troubles me greatly!

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your insight. It was an interesting post and I, also, am very troubled by these issues. I do what I can to participate in children protection.
By the way, your son is quite the catch !
;)

[trochee.livejournal.com]

heh -- I wondered if you'd remember who was who after I told you last night. :) I see you remember.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Oh. I remember...