5 posts tagged “arizona”
I went back to my hometown of Prescott, Arizona last week. My usual visits are infrequent and during the torpid winter holidays, so it was a nice departure to be there when the weather was mild and encouraged long walks. My mom and I took a nice stroll through some of the older residential neighborhoods, past those Queen Anne and Craftsman houses the Chamber of Commerce likes to put on its tourist brochures. I wasn't at all surprised to see a few "McCain/Palin" yard signs-- McCain is, after all, the senator for this region-- nor even the lifesize cutout of McCain on somebody's porch. For as long as I can remember, Prescott's been one of those resolutely conservative places where the only good book is the Bible and the only acceptable uses for the surrounding National Forest are hunting, logging, and growing marijuana.
But then we approached this house.
An Obama sign in Prescott?! What, is there some kind of October equivalent to April Fool's Day? This is a joke, right? I grabbed a photo with my Treo to commemorate this weird occasion, and then Mom and I walked a little further. We halted again in front of a house with not just an Obama yard sign, but a homemade Obama yard sign.
It had been, as I would expect, vandalized, but its maker insisted on displaying it in the front yard anyway, as well as a lot of American flags. I got a pic of this one as well, and we continued.
Just around the corner the yards were thick with blue "Obama/Biden" signs. I stopped taking pictures; there was no longer any novelty.
My friends, McCain is losing even in his own backyard.
I returned to Mom's house with my head awhirl. Prescott besotted with Obama? Is Hell freezing over? Then I started feeling grateful to...the Republican Party. Yes, that one-- the elephant in the room. I really want to thank the Republican Party for making this all possible.
Thank you, Republican Party, for changing from the Party of Lincoln to the Party of Rove. Thank you for losing concern about the problems of ordinary people with ordinary incomes, ordinary health problems, and ordinary anxieties about the futures of their children. Thank you for insisting on ruinous deregulation to create an ersatz "free market," long after that principle was assessed as worthless as Ptolemaic cosmology. Thank you for thumping Bibles so loudly that even some of the most pious Christians I know left you out of disgust with your confusing church with state. Thank you for lying so badly. Thank you for snubbing the rest of the world. Thank you for celebrating ignorance. Thank you for handing my hometown to Barack Obama.
I saw the article on the Prescott Daily Courier Web site a couple months ago.
"It has to be," I thought. "Nobody else is named that."
The man in the photo accompanying the upbeat review of his antique shop was gray-haired, but otherwise unchanged from the last time I saw him, which was around 1981. Yes, it was, it had to be: Mr. Leware, one of my junior high school teachers.
Mr. Leware gained an immense advantage by teaching subjects I was already interested in: English and history. Otherwise, our mutual reminisces would probably only be those of how I looked at my plainest and most embattled by puberty. But fret as I did over my orthodontia and my parents' divorce, I was distracted by completing Mr. Leware's assignments. In his classes I learned how to write a bibliography and to diagram a sentence; for homework I wrote an essay on the Seminole Indians and a pseudo-Gothic horror story, "The Falcon of the Dolmen." To this day I place a hyphen in "co-operate," still hearing him derisively pronounce the non-punctuated alternative as "COOOOO-per-ate."
So I really had to stop by his antique store on my recent trip to town.
There was only an hour or two to spend talking in Mr. Leware's tidy store, where the goods were clean, organized, separated out, like the parts of speech in a diagrammed sentence. There were plenty of things I wanted, but which did I need? And, really, how much shelf space should one give to Tiffany glass or Craftsman studio pottery in earthquake country? But I did find something I wanted very much. I wouldn't leave without it.
Not only did he give me the book outright, but he signed it again.
So now I have the Mr. Leware-approved edition of one of my favorite books. It would be hard for an earthquake to damage it. I don't know where I'd get another if one did.
The north-facing view from the house where I grew up.
I think people do what they are rewarded for doing, and I think women realize, whether it’s conscious or unconscious, they are not going to get the rewards. So they put the hours into their families or whatever.
-neurobiologist Dr. Ben Barres in the New York Times, about women as scientists
So far I've read only the newspaper interviews with Dr. Barres, which publicize his commentary in this month's Nature. Infotrac or Academic ASAP will fetch me the full article in a couple of weeks or so.
Barres challenges the noticeably widespread view that the low number of women in the sciences is due to innate differences in female brain functioning. Barres has the uncommon experience of having worked as both a male and a female scientist: after transitioning from female to male mid-career, he noticed remarkable improvement in how his work was perceived and rewarded.
As far as I can tell, he discusses only the treatment of women in the higher levels of science. Perhaps he, or another scientist, will examine in a similarly well-publicized article the treatment of girls in the very lowest levels of science.
I went to a public high school in Arizona where many of the graduates were expected to go directly to college. So it wasn't unusual that half of the twenty or twenty-five students in my physics class were girls; we were all trying to look good on our high school transcripts, and some of us were anticipating science majors as undergraduates.
The course was year-long. By the end of the first semester we knew our teacher was a likeable, dedicated crank: he clearly enjoyed teaching, but was touchy about a couple of things. One was the state's requirement that he teach the Big Bang Theory, which he considered propaganda for "secular humanism."
At the end of the first semester our teacher wrote five names on the blackboard. These, he said, are the top five students in this class, based on homework, exam grades, and class participation. All five of the top students were girls. Our teacher seemed to think this was unappealing: he set to teasing the boys about "catching up."
Among the topics in the second semester were electronics and magnetism. Our teacher decided to use "real life" examples in his lectures to help us learn these topics.
He used examples from model railroading, ham radio operation, and household electrical wiring to illustrate principles of electronics.
At the end of the second semester our teacher wrote again five names on the blackboard. These were, again, the top five students in the class. However, none of the names were the same as those in the first semester. They were, however, all boys' names. Some kind of order must have been restored: our teacher did not tease the girls to "catch up."
What happened? Why had the girls not sustained their high grades? From my own experience, I think it was the introduction of "real life" examples that had no resemblance to my real life. Like many girls I didn't have a childhood of helping Dad install dimmer switches, or of shopping for soldering irons at Radio Shack.
I don't think our teacher really acted from malice, but just ignorance, and then of unconcern. Which is what angers me still: it's not the "C" grade I received, it's that my teacher was unbothered that it had started out an "A."
