Fifty Shades of Grey

Women are catching up and technology is helping relieve the stress that catching up brings along as its friend. The percentage of women making more money than their husbands/partners is at an all-time high.  Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem must be feeling very proud.  Catching up has come with a price. According to E L James, author of the best selling erotic novel trilogy, Fifty Shades, many women today are exhausted trying to do it all: the kids, the house, the errands, the husband/partner, the job with the demanding boss, the pain in the neck co-workers.  Women want to escape from lives that make them feel like they have to do it all.  


Reading O Magazine is just not cutting it for women today.  Gosh, even Oprah is struggling.  Women, who spend their time nurturing and taking care of others while they hold down stressful jobs, secretly desire a man who will take care of all, and I mean all, their needs.  Welcome Christian Grey!  Grey is the handsome, sexy, 27 year old billionaire in this "mommy porn" trilogy.  Christian lavishes heroine Anna with expensive electronic devices, a $35,000 car, a closet full of designer clothes, shoes and sexy lingere and of course romantic money-is-no-object dinners out several nights a week.  Anna, whose self esteem is fairly intact, questions what such a man finds so irrestistable about a 22 year old virginal recent college graduate.  

Anna works hard not to enjoy all the perks life with a handsome billionaire boyfriend has to offer.  She returns his gifts.  He sends them back.  She prides herself in being an independent woman, he likes domination.  She is worried about his predilection for kinky sex but he is irresistible.  What passes for romance in this sexually graphic novel would make Jane Austin cringe, but readers of this book are not searching for classic literature.  

Sex now comes in a variety of constantly evolving new forms.  Playboy and Penthouse magazines have been replaced by Internet porn, the Sex and the City series has been replaced and updated by the HBO series, Girls, romance novels are written by Shakespearean scholars and women download porn on their ebooks.  Betty and Gloria may be shocked!   


Yes, women have read romance novels secretly and not so secretly for years.  Currently I am reading a delightful book, written by Eloisa James.  This James is an NYT best selling romance novelist and author of the new book, Paris in Love, a memoir about her year in Paris while on sabbatical from her English Literature Professorship at Forham University.  James received her education at Harvard, Oxford and Yale.  She lectures on Shakespeare all over the world and has published in many scholarly journals.   For years James kept the fact that she wrote historical romance novels a secret, using a pen name for fear of being found out thus damaging her scholarly career.  Mary Bly, daughter of poet Robert Bly, aka Eloisa James, came out at a faculty meeting in 2005 and the rest has been hi$tory.  

When I saw the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy interviewed on Dateline last week, it was rather like looking in the mirror.  The author said she is shocked at her success.  I was shocked to see a rather frumpy, chubby, middle aged woman.  In a two week time period she sold 4 million books and she recently landed herself a five million dollar movie deal.  Sex and the City movies were go with your gal-pals movies.  Shades of Grey movies will be go with your lover movies.  


E. L. looked a bit like a deer in headlights while being interviewed by Elizabeth Vargus on Dateline.  She believes her success is due in great part to the fact the women can download the books and no-one needs know about it.  The books are being released in paperback this week for those not as yet Kindled.  (The word kindle started off as a verb after all.)  All the buzz has probably made it easier to snatch a book off the shelf at the bookstore or at the airport without too much  embarrassment.  

James is a Londoner, a television executive, a married mother of two teenage sons who, she says, have not read her books.  (Yeh, right!)  Her husband refuses to travel with her on the book tour, although she admits some of her research on bondage had to be field tested with him.  No wonder he has gone into hiding.


Technology continues to change fundamentally everything about the world we live in, sometimes in unexpected ways.  Partners of tired women who are secretly reading Fifty Shades are not hearing that “I’m too tired tonight honey" excuse so much anymore.  One day last week while I was reading Fifty Shades on my Kindle during a middle school class when everyone was expected to be reading independently one of the students asked me what I was reading.  “Oh, Pride and Prejudice," I said without missing a beat.  Yeh, right!

The Brits, their tea, biscuits and cozies!

This week we ran out of the stash of Girl Scout cookies I had squirreled away in the freezer for the past two months.  Each evening I would take out the cookies I bought from students at the Spanish Immersion School and served them with our tea.  Harry and I have our tea ritual after dinner most evenings and that usually includes a biscuit or two.  Tea without a cookie Harry refers to as dry tea.  I refer to it as terrible!  He brought back several packages of Ringtons' Tea when he was home in January, along with some biscuits, the British word for cookies.  We have not as yet run out of tea but the English biscuits are long gone.

The English have the most marvelous collections of biscuits available in all their grocery stores.  English biscuits are different from the majority of American cookies.  They are not as sugary sweet as American cookies, and you can have two or three and not feel guilty.  I recently learned that the Brits are leaning towards the American style of sweet, high-calorie cookies.  Our obesity rates are similar too.



Tea is an afternoon meal and a ritual for the Brits (and that's without even talking about "high tea').  I remember my Mom, a first generation American of British origins, used to stop and have tea everyday when I was growing up at three pm, even when it was 90 degrees outside.  Most Americans, and especially American restaurants, do not know how to make tea other than to drop a bag in tepid water.  We snack all day long any way these days, so we really don't need a teatime as yet another excuse for more food consumption.  


The proper way to make tea would be tedious to most Americans.  Warming the tea pot, waiting for water to hit a rolling boil,  steeeping the tea, cleaning the tea leaves out of the pot; too much effort.  Why bother?  Just plop a tea bag in your cup, use the mircro wave and call it a cuppa like the Brits do.  Americans like their tea iced (referred to by my husband as "cold tea"), herbal, bubbled, and in bags, not steeped and poured from a pot.  Years back I had a craze of making tea cozies for friends and family.  Harry's mom taught me to make them on one of our trips.  At that time I thought my enthusiasm for making tea the British way would catch fire with them as it had for me.  Maybe the recipients at least use the cozies as a talking point.

My favorite English tea, Ringtons, is made in the north of England in the city of Newcastle, a few miles from Harry's little town of Annfield Plain.   The company has been a family business  since 1907.  They nearly went under during the first and second World Wars but somehow managed to hold on and become a company that will now mail tea and biscuits to every corner of the world.  This year they are featuring Diamond Jubilee tea pots, mugs, and tea caddies. The Rington horse-drawn tea cart used to be a common site in the north of England, but the carts became vans which still have a bit of charm.  Harry's mum used to have a visit from the "tea man" every other week. 


Recently, my 13-year-old nephew, Luke, came for dinner, and he drank several cups of piping hot Ringtons tea: must be the genes.  We are down to our last large bag of tea or I would have sent some home with him.  We have no current plans for a trip to England so I will probably have to go to the Ringtons web site and pay the outrageous shipping price to get my fix of English tea and biscuits.  I promised Luke I would make sure to share when the post delivered my order.  Maybe I should make him a tea cozy?

Swamp People

It can be embarrassing to admit that you watch reality TV.  Last weekend, my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew came for dinner, and afterwards, my nephew asked if we had ever watched Swamp People.  We said we had never heard of the show, but the middle schooler's enthusiasm for the show, matched only by his parents' endorsement, made me immediately curious.  My sister seemed to become increasingly embarrassed as her son and husband excitedly described the premise of the show, and I admit I could not really imagine the appeal of watching men catching gators in a Louisiana swamp.  But I watch the reality show  Bethenny Ever After every week, so I will watch almost anything at least once.  


As proof of this, consider that while in New York visiting my daughter in January, I was sick one night when my daughter was working, so I snuggled down on the couch to watch episode after episode of The Kardashians Take New York.  I had heard talk of the show but had never seen it before.  I ordered Chinese food and a bottle of wine, which were both delivered to the door of her Upper East Side apartment in ten minutes flat, and spent the evening watching this mindless, ridiculous show.  It was great.  It is easy to see why Kim has become the celebrity people love to hate.  

Years ago, in the early days of reality TV, every Thursday night when my husband was off playing racquetball I  watched Donald Trump's The Apprentice.  That year, when I went to NYC to visit my daughter, I bought a bunch of "You're Fired" teeshirts.  I had my 4th graders work in teams helping each other with their classroom assignments.  The team leaders wore the teeshirts and could fire kids who were not pulling their weight for their team.   The winning team was the group which excelled on their class and homework assignments.  Many of the students watched the show each week, and I found the competitive spirit The Donald demonstrated on his show worked for this group of students, who often lacked motivation.  Students who were fired from their teams for slacking off would have to work on my team.  As the weeks went on, the productivity increased and no one was fired from their team.  

My husband and under-appreciated editor has had some heated arguments with me about Bethenny and her two reality shows, Bethenny Getting Married and Bethenny Ever After.  He points out that the show is absurd and that I don't even like her, and I agree, pointing out that Monday Night Raw, the show he watches from time to time (claiming that it is a form of ballet without tutus), is also absurd.  The difference between watching a staged wrestling match with people dressed up in outrageous costumes versus watching Bethenny crying weekly in her shrink's office as she tries to adjust to her sudden rise from broke organic-cookie baker to millionaire skinny girl cocktail tycoon is lost on me.  


We tuned into Swamp People this past week, and even though the hour was late we were hooked, and watched two episodes.  This History Channel program, which follows alligator hunters in America's largest swamp, Louisiana's Atchafalaya, is into its third season.  One of the major characters, Troy, is a direct descendent of the Cajun refugees who where expelled from Canada in the 18th century.  He is very likable and his dialect alone is worth tuning in for.  The competition in the swamp is fierce because the gator season is only one month out of the year.  The bigger the gator, the more money the hunters can make.  I am not sure I will watch all three seasons, but, given my history, I just may.  


Having a middle-school nephew is nice and it keeps you current. While teaching a small group of 5th-grade boys this week, I brought up the fact that I was watching Swamp People, and all the boys turned out to be big fans of the show.  I had created immediate rapport, but the boys could not understand why I was such a latecomer to the program.  I told them I have not as yet watched Dance Moms, which they told me all the girls watch.  "Yuck!"  they said.  "What a dumb show!"  I decided not to tell them about Bethenny Ever After.    

Entitlement vrs. Sharing the Cake

Wealthy school districts usually have good reputations in our country.  I have been substitute teaching in one such district for the last two years.  Many people upon learning of this have said to me; "Oh, that must be great, so easy and nice to work there."  It is true that classrooms in this district have all the latest technology and the majority of their students have all the advantages an upper-middle-class lifestyle brings.  The teacher can scream; "Connor, put away your Kindle/Nook/I-pad right now and pay attention!" rather than "Mohamed, put away that yo-yo and pay attention!"

When I started teaching in the mid-seventies, many of my friends said it was sad I had to teach in the inner city because better jobs in the suburbs were so scarce.  The truth was, had I been given a choice (and I wasn't),  I would have stayed in the inner city.  I liked the poor Mexican school I taught in better than the rich one, and I prefer the other suburban district where I teach without all the fancy technology but with its diverse mix of students.

The realities of education involve money, social class, and, of course, politics.  I experienced this fact in Minneapolis, in Mexico, and now in  two different suburban school districts.  Last week, when Harry and I visited our kids and grandkids in St. Louis, I learned about some education realities, St. Louis style. 

In the lovely University City neighborhood where our grandkids are growing up, our son and daughter-in-law have learned that the majority of the white parents do not send their kids to the neighborhood school.  I had little trouble guessing what the issues involved would be.  The school district consists of two separate neighborhoods, one black, one white, which are adjacent.  The school district boundaries were probably drawn up with the hope of creating integrated schools.

Harry and I walked over one afternoon to this neighborhood school, which was two blocks from the house of our son and daughter in-law.  The school was a beautiful old brick building which had recently been renovated with a new lunch room, playground, tuck pointing, etc. etc.  The high school was directly across the street and it too was physically in great condition.  We wandered over to the playground and in the field nearby we watched as the girls' soccer team finished up their practice.  There were approximately 25 girls in all: two girls were white and the rest were black.  We learned from our daughter-in-law that the elementary school is about two thirds black, one third white, and that the free and reduced lunch percentage is approximately forty percent.  After observing the soccer team one can easily deduce the demographics of the high school population.

If you can afford a Catholic or private school education in this St. Louis suburb, your child can attend an all-white school.  The neighborhood Catholic school is a bargain at $4000, and white parents on the lower end of the upper-middle-class white neighborhood have this as an option.  A nearby non-religious private school can run upwards of $30,000.  (Parents living in Manhattan would find this a steal.)  Or, if you can afford a house starting at the half-million dollar range, you can move to a nearby district and be assured the dominant racial group will be white.

Sending your kids to a good school is the American dream, no matter what your race or religion.  For white people, a good school means one where the children of color are no more than 10 to 15 percent of the school population.  Any more than that and the school is undesirable to whites.   Oh, I forgot to mention that in front of the grandkids' neighborhood school is a sign that says it won a National School Of Excellence Award, which I recall from my teaching days was not easy to obtain.

One of the  current first-ring suburban school districts where I teach does not have a dominant racial or religious group.  The mix of students is like nothing I have experienced in my 35-year-plus teaching career: black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Muslim, Jewish -- the list goes on.  The district does have one predominately white elementary school, a Spanish Immersion School which is right across the highway from our condo.  Once these immersion students get to middle and high school, their fluency in Spanish is nurtured, but these students do not become an elite little school within a school; unlike the kind of school my daughter attended in Minneapolis, where the white kids, including my daughter, enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program and rarely had a class with a student of color.  So much for integration.

The recent open enrollment law passed in Minnesota has encouraged minority students in Minneapolis to attend the other district, richer and less diverse, where I sub.   This wealthy district has a stellar educational reputation and some black parents in the inner city now choose to send their kids across the city boundary to attend schools in this district.  The population of black and other minority students from the inner city attending school in this district has increased over the years, and so has the population of immigrants who live in the limited number of apartments.   I know first-hand the efforts this district has made to adjust to the demographic change which open enrollment has unleashed, because my sister teaches in the district and has been on the front lines fighting for equity.  It is painful to watch the attempts on display to achieve educational equity in a district which knows how to educate white, upper-middle-class students but struggles to learn how to deal with students who are not white and not upper-middle class.  Teachers in the district head off to workshop after workshop to confront educational inequities in the district.  These weary educators return to their classrooms where the majority of students could be described as entitled and the issues of racism for the newcomers abound.

In a perfect world, maybe even in one not so perfect, going to a school that is representative of the culture as a whole could be a good thing.  Growing up in Northeast Minneapolis back in the fifties and sixties meant I had no idea that the world was a lot more diverse and complex than I ever imagined.  This naive, sheltered Minneapolis girI got her first teaching job in the inner city and it was eye-opening.  My career began with a basically black and Native American student population.  Then came the years of wave after wave of immigrants from Asia, Mexico, Central America and Africa that flooded the Minneapolis schools and gave us some great ethnic restaurants in the Twin Cities.

Over the last two decades, the first ring suburbs around Minneapolis have been forced to deal with the realities of changing demographics just as the city schools did in the seventies, eighties and nineties.   As we advance into the 21st century, the new demographic reality, with whites as the minority, will change education and politics in a profound way.  White flight from the city public schools worked pretty well for the population during the last century.  Now, with people of color moving more and more into first ring suburbs and the cost of private school education out of sight for most white families, the failure of many Charter schools means it will become harder and harder to run from the reality of racially diverse schools, unless of course you have lots and lots of money.

My favorite district is ranked #2 in the state, right behind the district nicknamed the "Cake Eaters".  I never thought this was a very flattering nickname, but many students in the district seem to take great pride in it.  I think of Marie Antoinette and the fact that things didn't turn out so well for her in the end: although she had many years where she got to eat as much cake as she liked, she paid a high price for her arrogance and sense of entitlement (though she was on the cutting edge, like the district which perpetuates her reputation!).  It would be nice if all students could be "cake eaters", even those who do not have a lot of money.  Maybe that big piece of cake could be cut up into smaller pieces so everyone has some and gets a head start.  And keeps it.