A thing for my soil peeps, mainly, though the rest of you may chuckle briefly at the deterioration of a once-noble mind. (NB: if your browser doesn’t automatically resize, scroll to the right edge of the drawing to see the thing.)
Archive for September, 2007
I read this article and raised my eyebrows a little bit.
On the one hand, a good friend at work didn’t enroll her fifth-grade son in ‘Family Studies’ this year. “He’s kind of immature for his age,” she explained, “and still at the ‘Ewww, gross!’ stage where he can’t even look at couples kissing in movies. How’s he supposed to cope with condoms and gays and fallopian tubes?” The class is offered for grades four through seven. He’ll probably be taking it in the last possible year, and in the meantime his parents won’t say anything about sex, much less STDs, physiology, the sexual spectrum, or etc etc. The article says it’s not the school’s job to provide ‘morality training,’ but how can parents provide this so-called training if they don’t start with the biological and social basics? You can’t build a house without a foundation, and if you just start off with, “Son, there are families out there with two moms, OK?” he’ll have to go, “Whaa?” So is that the school’s job or the family’s job, if you can’t separate biology and morality in your culture?
On the other hand, a gay friend and I were discussing the education at our backwards little Catholic schools in the heart of Grey Nun country. The topic of sex ed came up and was generally mocked and reviled – how backwards it was, how we were being told ‘Save it for marriage!’ before we had quite figured out what ‘it’ was, or what you were supposed to call the bits covered by your underwear. At my elementary school I think we started sex ed in grade 5. Too early? Too late? What do you have to include for kids that age? And what (more importantly) should you leave out? “It would have meant so much to me if they could have just mentioned homosexuality,” my friend said thoughtfully. “Just mentioned it. I spent most of my education thinking I was the only gay guy in the entire city.” He’s quite right. They didn’t say “Don’t be gay because it says so in the Bible,” or “Don’t be gay or the Pope will come to your house and lay the smackdown.” They simply didn’t say anything at all, good or bad. I must’ve been twelve or thirteen before I figured out what ‘gay’ was (reading a volume of Roman history, I stopped to look up the word ‘catamite’ in our huge old 1938 Oxford dictionary, which was quite explicit, though I had to look up a couple more words after that). So there’s that – if a kid’s parents won’t condone or condemn it, should the schools at least let you know it exists? Is that their job, is that part of their mandate as surrogate parents for eight hours a day?
NB: If I ever have kids, the plan is to let the school take care of the ‘What is gonorrhea?’ part of sex ed, as well as ‘How many ‘i’s are there in ‘epididymis’?' The nice part is, I get to avoid the really disgusting questions while being able to answer the easy ones like ‘What’s gay?’ by pointing to a photo of their ‘uncles’ in one of my albums. Why make things difficult for myself? 
(Stream of consciousness post)
Last night (via a discussion about Swedish Berries, concentrated pear juice, and Sunkist Funfruits) I got to thinking about back-to-school. The main thing I remember about back-to-school ads were stationery products – feltpens and markers. Come late August you’d be seeing ads for Window Writers, Gel Writers, Spider-Writers… markers that vibrated, perfumed the room, glowed, oozed, bent. I remember being in Vital Grandin and begging my parents for a (totally unnecessary) package of those change-colour markers where you could use the ’special’ marker to change brown to orange, blue to yellow… I got it (and loved it) and also scored a pack of those disappearing-colour markers that let you draw really neatly by erasing the scribbly edges of your drawing.
I remember the piercing, chemical smell of the special markers (one per pack, woe betide the kid who lost it and ended up with merely ordinary markers). Magic Markers, Jiffy Markers, Mr. Sketch… a shimmering haze of fumes over the classroom of industrious, slightly-stoned kids who didn’t know why they were colouring in a portrait of John Cabot any more but damned if theirs was going to look stupid compared to the kid in the next row.
Do they still have those ads? For that matter, do they still have those markers? What do kids do nowadays in school, do they still draw and colour? Are there projects to do – on paper, with scissors and handwritten labels? Do kids still get the workbook to colour in around Christmas, with weird drawings of ‘Santa Claus Around the World’? Do kids still make dioramas? Or are they all busy with self-affirmation cards, Googling things about Pluto, kiddy yoga, dyeing their hair, Wiis, and sketchy jelly bracelets? Is the generation gap really so wide? Because I totally can’t find any of those markers in my nearby Grand ‘n Toy.
Says the jetpack robot!
Just got this in my U of A mailbox, which I haven’t checked for a month:
My name is [AMS]. I am working at the Chemistry Department under supervision of Dr. [RC]. We looking for a plasmid named pd2EGFP encodes the d2EGFP destabilized variant of the GFP, we are particularly interested in to get the EGFP gene fused to the mouse ornithine decarboxylase (MODC) at C-terminus ( variant d2EGFP). We will really appreciate is somebody have this vector or another one with the d2EGFP variant and can provide us with some.
I love it. It’s less like the ‘Your are not statisfyling you woman buy V1agra NOW’ and more like ‘Please donarte to my child’s hopsital bills, she has lukemia and we are runing out of muney to pay.’ Which is like, insidious, since it appeals to the sucker in all of us who can’t bear to see an outstretched hand.
Hah. As if he’s getting any of my plasmids. Nice try, spammer.
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