Here's what I did this week!

I started Summer Session B this week - trying to cram in my required courses so that there's not too much to think about when I start my student teaching in September. I am taking Youth Cultures, which sounded fun, and Education and the Aesthetic Experience, which sounded...impenetrable. Apparently, the title also confuses my professor - a crazy Italian phd student: we spent nearly the entire two-hour class period last night discussing the definitions of the words "education" and "experience." If we ever get through "and" and "aesthetic," I'll let you know what the class is about.

Youth Cultures might get fun once we slog through all the Piaget and other old-timey theorists of adolescence (of yore). Or it might remain boring. Even though we have, so far, had the great pleasure of watching both a Katy Perry music video and a clip of High School Musical in class, this class mostly blows it vast potential for awesomeness by serving as a forum for our mumbly old British professor's proofs that he is cool. He namechecks people like Joanna Newsom and talks a lot about Twilight (like, a lot. He even made us read a chapter for homework - much more painful than the theory reading.).

Like I said, I have faith this class will improve: our midterm is to write a one-page paper analyzing a tween show. For now, though, the most fun I've had was writing a "reaction" to our first set of assigned readings. We had about 200 pages to do for the first class (hello, dude - Summer Session!), including an article called "Nation of Wimps," which basically whined and moaned about how Boomer parents are all like this, except, you know, with children and not weimaraners. I have excerpted below because I think what I wrote is kind of funny and I'm really lazy:

And then we get to today’s youth: mollycoddled, weak, depressed, unable to grow up because parents won’t let them. Where is the dashing, roguish youth of our past? Where are there witticisms and their wild schemes? Why do we have to worry more about depression now than masturbation? And why do we keep teaching them in much the same way, even when parenting and childhood are “evolving” at alarming rates?

I put “evolving” in quotations because writer of “Nation of Wimps” seemed under the impression that these changes were RENDING THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY (dun dun dunnnnn). And, sure, I am as annoyed by those “but I’m a hip parent”-parents, or, worse, “but I’m still a kid”-parents, as anyone. And, yes, I do think kids have a much more skewed vision (and version) of reality than I did growing up. They do need to fail and fall down and feel sad every once in a while, but I think most will figure out how to do that eventually, no matter how much hothouse parenting they are subjected to.

It may take longer - stretching into that horrible thing called “extended adolescence,” which is really just “30 year-olds wearing cargo shorts and binge drinking instead of GETTING IT TOGETHER ALREADY BECAUSE OMG YOU ARE 30 AND MY PARENTS HAD 2 KIDS AND REAL JOBS BY THE TIME THEY WERE YOUR AGE.” (Like, does anyone else just flip out every time they see that Verizon commercial that starts out, “Today you went from dude to dad,” because I always yell at my TV that you should probably stop being a “dude” and start being a “responsible man” way before an actual, living, breathing thing pops out of your lover’s womb.) Anywayyyy, most kids, as I think the article pointed out, are aware of being over-parented and don’t like it, so we have to have faith that they will, sooner or later, rebel - i.e., figure out how to fail and grow on their own.

And if kids and childhood are forever changed - if they don’t entirely bounce back - well, maybe that’s okay too. Our society doesn’t attribute the same values to the same life skills as it once did. We still want to see assertiveness and leadership, but we are also in a decade of cooperation, groupthink and mash-up. When the article complains that children are more “herd-minded,” I think, well, why can’t we call it “hive-minded”? The ability to go with the flow and work as a team isn’t a weakness.

And then I go on and on about how it's probably okay that we're not raising, like, Warrior-Kings of Blood Vengeance because that's not really how the world works anymore. And my whole class probably thinks I'm a crazypants annoying person because I bashed out 3 pages on readings that none of the cool kids even did. I really wanted to write a disclaimer at the top to let them know I have a really long commute and forgot to bring anything else to do, but I thought that would probably make me sound even crazier.

The upside to cultivating a persona as "class crazyperson" is that I can yell at the professor about his lameness and probably also talk a lot about Adventure Time - because there is nothing crazier than that show. I'm thinking about writing my midterm about it, so you'll probably see my analysis up here when I once more get too lazy to post original writings.