I have some personal connection to GM. My father-in-law and his father were long-time employees of the company. Almost 20 years ago, my fil retired early when the division he worked for was sold off to a French company. 20 years ago, we didn’t think GM was doing all that well. While most of Mr. Geeky’s family drove only GM cars, we drove whatever was inexpensive. Although on occasion that turned out to be a GM car, most of the time it didn’t. We saw, through riding around with various family members the kinds of cars on offer and they certainly didn’t appeal to a young couple on the move. They were grandma cars. We did actually go through an SUV stage, driving two Ford Explorers (consecutively) rather than any of GM’s offerings (one was a hand me down, no choice there really). And now, we’re in a GM brand minivan, which, I have to say, has lasted a long time (122,000 miles and counting) and a fuel-efficient Toyota. Mr. Geeky’s family’s loyalty to the company only made sense for the people who actually worked for them (since they got a discount on the cars they bought). For the aunts and uncles who drove cars they may or may not have like out of a desire to “buy American” or buy within the family, it didn’t make sense to me. Why not buy what you wanted or what you could afford? And, as it turned out, their loyalty didn’t save the company.

Not that long ago, Mr. Geeky and I watched “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” a film that describes how GM was working and actually built an electric-powered car, a car that had potential, but was eliminated from the product line after 3 years. The film makes GM look like it’s in the oil industry’s pocket and that’s been the theory behind their resistance to increases in CAFE standards in addition to their resistance to change manufacturing procedures.

It’s weird, even though I’ve never been a fan of the automakers as they seemed largely to be an industry in denial and out to make a quick buck at the expense of the planet, I feel a strange sense of sadness at the real possibility (probability?) that GM will go the way of the dinosaur. But the whole idea of capitalism is that the best product survives and GM is no longer making the best products across the board. Like any business that’s not doing a good job, it should probably fail. Maybe what I’m feeling is the loss of so many jobs at once. Detroit and Michigan are already at the top of the unemployment list. What will happen if/when GM fails? What will all those people do? What will Michigan look like? It’s a depressing and scary thought.

I have a lot of pet peeves that involve car-related activities. I was just complaining about this one.

Experts are now recommending that teenagers be routinely tested for depression. I think this is an excellent idea. Those of you with teenagers might know why. When your kids become teens, they stop telling you everything. Even the good-natured, non-confrontational ones. So sometimes it’s hard to tell when something is really bothering them. They may be able to put on a good front for you, but inside are agonizing about a friendship gone wrong or being bullied or doing poorly in school. It’s quite disconcerting as a parent to just. not. know. I know I’ve been one of those parents who, while sympathizing with someone’s loss of a child to suicide, have also wondered how they didn’t see it coming. Well, sometimes it’s easy to not see it coming. Although we’ve been lucky to not have to deal with these kinds of mental health issues, I do like the idea that when my kids go for a physical, they might also get screened for their mental health as well. Consdering that many kids’ physical health is affected by mental health through substance abuse, eating disorders, self-harm practices, or suicide, it makes sense to check on mental health at the same time as physical health.

I just got back from my first bike ride in about 20 years, okay maybe 15, but still it’s been more than a while. For my birthday, Mr. Geeky got me a pink Schwinn mountain bike (seen here) that I finally took out for a spin. I had forgotten how fabulous it is to feel the wind in your hair as you coast down a hill. And I’d also forgotten how hard it is to peddle back up those hills.

My first bike was also a pink Schwinn, the kind with the banana seat and basket on the front. I had tassels hanging from the handlebars and those straws you put on the spokes that clicked as the wheels went round and round. Sometimes I tied string to the handlebars as makeshift reins, converting the bike into a horse. On my bike, I ruled the world. I ran with gangs of kids zipping around the neighborhood, riding down to the creek to fish out crawdads and salamanders. We created obstacles courses in the church parking lot across the street from the creek.

When we moved to another neighborhood, I graduated to a larger bike and the whole family biked around the neighborhood. I eventually got a pink bike again in high school and rode around town with my best friend. I took that bike with me to college and rode it to work frequently, riding downtown without a helmet through the projects, where the smell of urine and alcohol mixed together in an overwhelming odor. Still, there was a certain freedom I felt riding past apartments and houses.

There’s something very kid-like in riding a bike. I’m doing the best I can to remain kid-like myself.

People still constantly ask me if I’m happy with my new situation. I am, as my dissertation adviser used to say, guardedly optimistic. In terms of day-to-day life, things are pretty damn good. I do a little bit of work in all the areas I need to–teaching, business, and home life. I don’t feel like a hamster on a wheel, trying to respond to email in the short term and at the same time, make mid and long-term plans. I have time to eat a leisurely lunch if I want. I can even take a bath in the middle of the day. Being able to determine when I work is, quite honestly, heavenly. I end up working about 5-8 hours a day. And I’m increasingly not really paying attention to the number of hours, but to whether what I wanted to get done on a particular day actually did get done.

The guarded part has to do with money. Right now, I have the part-time teaching gig that brings in a tiny, tiny income, but it’s something and it’s something stable. We haven’t completely adjusted budget-wise to the loss of my higher income. In theory, we should be fine. In practice, shit happens. Car repair, taxes, unexpected kid expenses. We have less of a buffer for those in our income. We have savings to draw on, but ideally, we’d leave that alone.

Part of what I do every day is look for work. I have emailed people and I’m working on ways to get business for myself, but it’s slow work, especially when you don’t have much of a budget. I’m pretty flexible at this point about what I’ll do. Consulting has a kind of high-minded sound to it, and certainly I would love to serve as the adviser on a big technology project or be the inspirational speaker at a campus retreat. But, I’m also willing to get my hands dirty and do some of the grunt work that’s often necessary for any educational technology project. And, I’ve done things that are not that related to my business plan just for the money and the experience. And, honestly, the variety is good for me. I like looking at the big picture and getting involved in the details (maybe not at the same time, though). Sometimes it’s nice to be able to work on the innards of a blog site rather than think about blogs more abstractly. To me, the two are related, but it’s a difference between what parts of your brain you use.

I believe eventually, I will find business and that I’ll start getting paid, and I’m not freaking out over the fact that I don’t have a steady paycheck (yet!). I’m enjoying what I’m doing, what I get to think about every day so that the money doesn’t much matter. My satisfaction level would certainly rise to near 100% if I had more steady income, but I think 90% is pretty damn good for now.

Update: Ars Technica has a good rundown of the history of the case.

The NY Times reports this morning that several students are suing the D.A. after he insisted that the teens attend a “10-hour class dealing with pornography and sexual violence.” Classes like these are usually intended for sex offenders, not for teenagers exploring the boundaries of their sexuality. There are several issues here to contend with. First, there’s the issue of teenagers participating in risky behavior by sending each other nude photos. Is this the school’s business to handle or the D.A.’s? In most of these cases, I imagine that the teens have some expectation that only the person they send the photo to is going to see the photo. However, what seems to be happening is that the phones are being confiscated and then “searched” by teachers or principals, which, to me, is a violation of privacy. In fact, ACLU attorneys representing the families in this case, have suggested that it’s a violation of the Fourth Amendment. I believe that parents probably have the right to view the photos on a kid’s phone (after all, they’re probably paying for it), but the school?

Sending a kid to a pornography and sexual violence class would do more harm than good, I think. Are they going to see certain kinds of images in this class? What exactly would they talk about? It just seems like the wrong solution for the problem. Chris Dawson suggests digital safety classes:

Alternatively, is this more of a public health concern? In general, I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. Too many kids are incredibly cavalier about sexting, along with the sorts of photos and comments they post on social networking sites. Educational programs aimed at safety in the digital age have as much merit as drug and alcohol awareness programs, sex education, and even fire safety.

Okay, maybe. But they’ve proven that those drug and alcohol programs don’t work in the same way that abstinence programs don’t work. I’m not sure, exactly, what would work, but it does seem like there needs to be some education here, and not just for the kids. Parents need to know what their kids are doing with their cell phones, online in Facebook or MySpace or elsewhere. They need to understand the same way that their kids do, that these images can last forever, that when they go to apply for a job someday, this nude photo may show up in a search. Too many parents throw up their hands when it comes to technology. So, if schools are going to offer classes, they need to have some for the parents, too. And maybe, it’s a matter, too, of helping them understand what should be private. That is, maybe explain to them how to manage an intimate relationship.

The kids in this case were 13, and the photos were taken at a slumber party, probably a sleep-deprived, silliness-inspired prank that’s resulted in some serious consequences. But there are other cases where it wasn’t a prank, where girlfriends and boyfriends are exchanging photos in part as an expression of affection, testing the boundaries, inspired by raging hormones. We’re probably not going to stop these activities entirely, but we should be aware of them and talk to our kids about why they’re problematic.

Apparently, I missed the memo. I wasn’t supposed to quit my job; I was supposed to be rejoining the workforce. Last week, Judith Warner wrote about the media frenzy of covering the opt-outers having to return to work and give up their 9 a.m. yoga classes. There was actually a Blogging Heads conversation between Rebecca Traister and Emily Bazelon that started with a discussion of the wives of Wall Streeters who were disappointed that their lives weren’t living up to their expectations. Both Warner and these two women point out that at the lower end of the income scale, the pain is worse and the cooperation between the spouses is greater. As Warner says of working class women’s spouses:

But their husbands, very often, are holding their own at home just fine. For while the stereotype has long been that working class men won’t do “women’s work,” Coontz said, the truth is that in recent years they’ve had a better track record than the most high-income men in sharing domestic duties. Twenty percent of these men, in fact, actually do more housework and child care now than their wives. “These people have been doing it for some time and they’re much more ideologically committed to doing it,” she said. “I think your worst offenders” (dirty coffee mug-wise), “are in that top 5 percent.”

That rings true with my own experience in a working-class/middle-class neighborhood where I routinely see men at the grocery store, at parent-teacher meetings, at the soccer field (we have soccer dads too!), and doing their fair share around the house. The Bloggingheads conversation ends with hoping for more equity in the home, but also points out that there’s still a huge pay gap between men and women, which families are going to feel even more of if it’s the woman in the workforce and not the man. Hello? When is the excuse that the man has to support a family and therefore needs a bigger salary going to be shot down. Warner also points out that the focus on the wealthy’s problems takes away attention from the problems of the majority, problems that need to be addressed:

There’s a deeper reason, too: paying attention only to the – real or perceived – “choices” and travails of the top 5 percent hides the experiences of all the rest. And this means that the needs of all the rest never quite rise to the surface of our national debate or emerge at the top of our political priorities.

One can’t help but see a connection between this and the greater debate over bonuses and protecting banks from collapsing. Think about how AIG bonuses are being treated and how the banks are being treated compared to the UAW and the automakers (hat tip to rzklkng).

Yesterday, I listened to this show segment from NPR’s Tell Me More, where several returning to work mothers told their stories of how and why they returned to work. Not all of them fit the label Economommies (bleh, what an insulting term). One mother, for example, had always determined that when all of her kids were school age, she herself would return to school. The story didn’t really add much to the conversation, in my opinion. Sure, it shows how adjustments need to be made, how the spouses and the kids have to contribute more to household work, but this, to me, is an old story.

The Time story (linked to above), on the other hand, is a little more interesting and a little more creepy at the same time. On the one hand, it highlights many businesses that have cropped up that seek to help women onramp back to work by matching them with jobs that have flexible hours and/or providing training and networking opportunities. What shocks me is how out of it some women are in terms of technical and other skills. Even though I’m currently off-ramped, there’s no way I’m letting my skills deteriorate. I didn’t when I was home before and I won’t do it again. I always want to be able to jump back in whenever I need to.
________

When I was reading the article, I was actually thinking about the middle school PTO committee meeting I went to the other day. Working with the PTO or other volunteer organizations is one way to keep up your skills if you do it well. The thing that happens to some women when they’re at home moms is that they get into a comfortable groove of hanging out with certain people and doing certain things. The same people always seem to be running the PTO, for example. They not only do PTO together, but they go to the same church, eat at the same restaurants, and their kids are on the same soccer team. Everone and everything is always familiar and they think that it’s like this for everyone. So, when a new person shows up at their meeting, they don’t think to introduce everyone. Also, they don’t think that people’s time is valuable and they don’t have an agenda for the meeting. Both of these skills (and non-technical ones at that) are ones that one learns in a business environment. A meeting that could have taken an hour at most turned into an almost two-hour nightmare. I’m also participating in an after-school activity at my daughter’s elementary school that is equally disorganized. Also, no introductions at that meeting either. Ugh. Obviously, these women (and they were all women) are smart and capable, but if they were to take these events a little more seriously, a little more professionally, they’d really up the quality of them and be able to chalk this up as good experience should they need it on the job market one day. If they did that, I’d write them a Linked-In recommendation or a paper one to help them out.

I’ve been thinking about this for the last few days. Unfortunately, my interest in technology has puttered along without much inspiration from women. I learned fairly early on to rely mostly on myself. And a lot of the people who helped me along the way were actually men, my husband primary among them. I thought about writing about my friend Lisa Meeden, who is an inspiring woman in CS, but when we first met, I wasn’t yet interested in technology. I also thought about writing about my first real boss, Jennifer Hart, who encouraged me in many ways, but she is mostly a business person. I also thought about Kathy Sierra, whose work has always inspired me, but I wanted someone I actually knew.

So I decided to write about the four women, dubbed the Women of Fear, the Fearless Women, the Fear Crew, after we gave a presentation on Fear 2.0 at ELI in 2008. The women are Leslie Madsen-Brooks, Barbara Ganley, Barbara Sawhill, and Martha Burtis. I first met BG, BS, and Leslie at BlogHer 2006. BG, BS and I gave a talk on Edublogging. We were kind of oddballs among the mommy bloggers and the sex bloggers and the bloggers who wanted to monetize their blogs. But I was so thrilled to meet other women who were as passionate about technology in education as I was. It was exciting to meet people who didn’t think my ideas were crazy and who were fearless about pursuing what they believed in. Now Barbara G. is out of school, pursuing a completely different path. Her ability to strike out on her own in part inspired me to do something different.

Then I met Martha at Faculty Academy in May 2007. I had seen the buzz about Faculty Academy in the blogosphere in 2006 and I knew I wanted to go. Invited by Steve Greenlaw to be on a panel, I made the short trip down and was inspired by all the amazing work the technologists and faculty were doing to incorporate technology into the curriculum. Much of that work was being done under Martha’s leadership. Martha continues to inspire with her thoughtful consideration of the role of technology in teaching and learning.

Leslie has always been somewhat reserved compared to the Barbaras, at least in my mind, but when I think about all she’s done and is doing, I’m constantly amazed. She works in a Teaching and Learning Center, blogs in two different blogs, teaches two (I think) classes, plus takes care of a 3-year-old and a husband. She writes inspiring posts about the nature of academe, the role of technology in education, and the struggle of women to balance work and life and make it in fields where they’re not always welcome.

These women are a touchstone for me, people who push me to do my best, to see things differently, to not be content with the status quo. They constantly push how we think about technology in our lives, struggling against all kinds of tensions. I often reach out to one or all of them when I’m frustrated with something or have a good idea I want to test or just need someone to listen. It might be good to have “famous” heroines one can hold up as inspiration, but I prefer the everyday type of heroine, those that inspire daily.

Last week and this week, my kids are taking the state tests. My son had 4 days of testing this week, while my daughter had 3 last week and has 3 more this week. That’s a lot of time for testing. And they’ve both said that, in the weeks leading up to the tests, the teachers did lots of drills and practice sessions for the tests. E.D. Hirsch points out that some of this prep may not really be helpful. I’ve long disliked these standardized tests. My kids always ace them so it’s not that they’re not doing well, but I also know that there are probably plenty of other reasonably intelligent kids who don’t do well, perhaps for some of the content reasons that Hirsch mentions. It’s also frustrating, of course, that so much time that could be spent on other things is spent on preparing for the tests and then taking the tests. How many more chapters of Social Studies materials could you get through during that time?

I also had a parent-teacher conference last week for Geeky Girl. I appreciate it when the teacher not only explains how my kid is doing, but also explains the philosophy of the curriculum. They send out books that explain this stuff, but I never read it. I know, I know. I should. Although I understand the focus on Math, Reading, and Writing, I can’t help but be disappointed by the lack of time spent on Social Studies and Science. It seems to me that the 3 R’s could easily be taught through a curriculum that deals with current events, history, culture, and science. Why not kill two birds with one stone?

I think what strikes me about the curriculum across the board is its lack of imagination. I know there are individual teachers who are very creative about how they teach, but in general, even at our excellent schools, the curriculum seems to get dispensed in a lock-step fashion. That seems to occur through middle school, though high school looks significantly better from what I’ve seen so far. Of course, by then, many kids have learned to dislike school and learning and so perhaps can’t take advantage or appreciate the creativity and opportunity presented to them.

I’m just a parent of a couple of smart kids, standing on the outside, getting these tiny glimpses into the school life of my kids, and although I’m not horrified, I’m definitely not thrilled by what I’m seeing.

Laura asked last week, I think, how many hours we work. There were a lot of responses to that that indicated people worked 50-60 hours a week. In some cases, I was thinking, when the heck do you sleep? Although I feel like I could do more every week, I like to keep my work, including housework, below 40 hours a week. I need downtime and sleep. I find I’m much more productive if I get plenty of that. I have 3 jobs right now–teaching, consulting, and mothering. For some reason, this week, I’ve kept pretty good track of my hours. On teaching this week, I’ve spent a little over 15 hours. I suspect I’ll be around 18 by the end of the day. Consulting work has gotten the short end of the stick, with only about 7 hours. And then there’s the mothering work, which is really hard to measure. Geeky Girl had a half-day yesterday, so that meant about 5 hours spent intermittently entertaining. Granted, I could probably have worked during that time, but I opted to take a break and get some housework done. I also made dinner every night this week for about 4 hours of work. And I did some laundry, taking about another 4 hours of time. I also attended a PTO meeting that lasted 2 hours. So that’s 15 hours of housework combined with 18 hours of teaching, 7 hours of consulting for a total of 40 hours. I’m not counting in any of this the work that gets done on the weekend, nor the basic reading of materials I do for class–over break, I read two novels and watched a movie in preparation for class.

There’s a real tension I think between the immediate needs and deadlines and the long term work that needs to be done. Consulting, right now, is a longer term prospect with no immediate deadlines for projects, so it’s easy to push it to the back burner. But the marking of papers, the prepping for class, that has to get done. I can’t show up for class without having read the material or planned a discussion around it. Feeding the family is also important and immediate. It’s really hard to balance all of that and sometimes hard to justify spending time on longer term needs. I think my ideal would be for the balance to be shifted so that it’s more like a 12/12/12 even split. I realize that once the semester ends, there won’t be class-related work and the work will need to readjust again. It’s funny to me though how I still feel like there’s so much to do, so much I’m not getting done during the day even though I put in 40 hours a week.