Susan Muaddi Darraj's Blog, page 4

A Rubric for Your Negative RateMyProfessors Review

Nobody in academia will admit to checking RateMyProfessors, but we all do, secretly, at night, on our smartphones.

I’ve read my reviews, and I can quote some of the lines verbatim, the way I used to memorize poetry in grade school.  My personal favorite is a flippant comment by one student: “Does she like teaching?” (This has actually become a punchline among my friends. When I am cooking, for example, my friends will whisper to each other in my kitchen, “What an attitude. Does she even like cooking?” Or at the playground, when I am reprimanding my kids for throwing sand, my colleague and fellow mom will sarcastically wonder aloud, “Does she even like children?”) One student wrote that I am a terrific professor because I don’t care when people walk in late to my class, which astounds me to have been misread like this. One review stated bluntly, “Buyer beware. Her moods seem to swing.” (I kinda love that one.)

Another student wrote that I “go out of my way” to help students, which makes me feel – honestly – fantastic.  And I’m going to do it now.

Here’s the deal: Negative reviews frustrate me, not because they are attacks on my teaching or that they hurt my feelings.

My real problem is that they’re just not written well.

As a teacher I feel compelled – even at this point, post-semester – to “go out of my way” and to give those students, who are considering writing a negative review, some advice.

So, to my students, here’s a rubric (since you’re always asking for one):

Writing Your Negative RateMyProfessors Review

Your review will be assessed according to the following standards.

The writer has a clear purpose. (worth 10 points)

 

The RateMyProfessors website tells you straight up: “the fate of future students lies in your hands.” You have been to the battlefield and returned alive, and it’s your job to persuade the rest of the troops to march on or retreat. All of your comments should focus on this goal: In a negative review, you must ensure that no student would willingly enroll in this professor’s class. Stick to that purpose – forget it not. You only have 350 characters to use in your review, so include straight-forward comments right at the beginning, such as DON’T TAKE THIS PROFESSOR! (The caps will convey authority.) Or If you’re in this class, drop it now! Don’t wait – drop it! The sense of urgency can be persuasive.

 

The writer successfully conceals his or her identity. (worth 10 points)

What’s the point of writing a negative review that gives away your identity? What if you have to take that professor’s class again, especially considering that you didn’t do so well the first time? (No, your D won’t transfer to the state university, so guess what? You’re back in my class.) Keep your identity secret. Think carefully about the way you speak or write: Are there certain phrases you repeat? Her empathy is lacking. Don’t you remember that you wrote that in your paper on whaling, that the “empathy of the whale hunters is lacking”? You don’t remember? I do.

 

In this vein, don’t mention anything exceptional that happened with that professor. Prof is totally unfair – accused me of plagiarism on my Virginia Wolf paper. Me!  It’s not my fault that I still think “borrowing text” from Sparknotes.com is plagiarism: Don’t  forget that I’m old. But don’t you see how this line gives you away? Because I didn’t catch anyone else using a website meant for high schoolers. This professor thinks like Virginia Wolf is God. Yes, I do. That part is quite true. Virginia Woolf is God.

 

The writer makes sure to mention something blistering about the professor unrelated to his or her teaching. (worth 10 points)

Does your professor dress like a cougar? Or a gypsy? Or like your grandpa?  This is why they don’t get your writing because you are attired in Hollister’s fall line, your feet stuffed in your Ugg boots, and your professor looks like he shops in Goodwill. Mention it. Professor dresses like a weirdo – what’s up with the blazers? Shoulder pads are sooooo 90s. (Actually, they’re from the 80s.) Hello — the 70s called and they want their Birkenstocks back. RateMyProfessors advises you, in its list of tips, to “keep it profesh,” but you can still throw in something like Teacher is a dork who talks about Jane Austen EVERY SINGLE CLASS — that chick died without a husband too! That’ll get her. Let her have it – don’t feel bad… she failed you! You!

 

 

The writer thoroughly reviews all previous RateMyProfessors postings and has successfully refuted the positive ones. (worth 15 points)

 

Do your research. Your goal is to paint a thoroughly horrible portrait of this professor, so make sure nobody has made a claim that could sway the unsuspecting freshman. For example, I don’t know wtf everyone is talking about. She’s the worst. I emailed her 4 times on Saturday night and by Monday morning she still hadn’t gotten back to me. Or how about this: Not sure why everyone says he’s fair. NOT TRUE! He refused to even accept my paper! How was I supposed to know it has to be typed?  It might take time to review all previous posts, but it will be worth it.

 

The writer ensures, after convincing his or her friends to also post negatively about this professor, that they all post on different dates, preferably one week apart. (worth 5 points)

 

Your friends have never had my class, but they’re loyal. Make sure you are strategic in exploiting their enthusiasm. Nothing gives you away more than having 10 negative reviews posted on the same date as yours, which might also be one day after grades come out. Offer a timeline to your friends. Carrington, you post on Monday, and then Bryce, you wait until Thursday. Got it? Take charge of the situation and make a schedule.

Also, make sure they don’t repeat the same complaints – vary them slightly. If everyone uses the same wording, as in Professor has a bit of an attitude, that indicates that all ten reviews had the same author. Not everyone uses the phrase “a bit of an attitude” – see? (Refer to #2 on the rubric, about concealing your identity.)

 

The writer successfully pretends that he or she was very interested in the class. (worth 20 points)

 

This is essential. Nothing speaks more about bad teaching than a teacher who completely ruined and destroyed a student’s genuine enthusiasm for a course. I was so excited to take this class because I love reading Shakespeare. But this professor ruined me forever for English lit. I swear I now suffer PTSD when I open any book at all. Just don’t take this one too far, or you’ll give yourself away. Nobody will believe that you were excited about English 101 or Intro to Physics.

 

The writer successfully and regularly uses slang and emoticons to express ideas that can also be better and perhaps more simply expressed in actual words. (worth 5 points)

 

Show that you know and understand your audience. UGH!!!! He’s horrible!!!!!! ☹ ☹ ☹

 

The writer reveals information selectively. (worth 5 points)

 

Mention several times that the professor was not helpful to you. So unhelpful – she doesn’t even care about her students and wants us all to fail. Do not mention that you only came to class every other week, and that when you did approach the professor for help the week of finals, she did not know who you were.

 

The writer clarifies that no student can realistically achieve an A in this class. (worth 10 points)

 

It’s true, right? You didn’t take a survey or anything, but nobody who sat in the back row with you got an A, so you know for a fact that the prof doesn’t give them out. The kid with the glasses, who sat in the front and wears Old Navy probably did, but he’s a geek anyway. He’s wearing Old Navy.

 

The writer suggests that the professor should retire. (worth 10 points)

 

That’ll really burn them up.

 

 

Susan Muaddi Darraj is a college English professor who genuinely loves her students (well, 99.5% of them). Her book, A Curious Land, won the AWP Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction. She is proud to have two separate RateMyProfessor ratings because students cannot seem to spell her last name.

 

 

 

 

Words That Have Haunted Me

I was a college sophomore when I signed up for a course in Middle East history at Rutgers University. The professor was a nice enough man, but one who was not willing to talk much outside of his lectures, or who stared blankly at you when you tried to extend a conversation started in class. He taught us the basics: the rise of Islam in the Arabian peninsula, the emergence of the Ottoman empire, the impact of World War II.

And then we got to Palestine.

This was most exciting to me – I was in this class to learn about my own history, beyond the stories my parents told me, beyond the West Bank village where we vacationed in the summer, beyond the yellowed photographs my mother kept in an album.

But the professor, standing behind his lectern, said, clearly, reading right from his notes, “There was no Palestine, and there were no Palestinians.”

I raised my hand to disagree. And my nineteen-year-old self said, “But I’m Palestinian – my parents came from Palestine.”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head and chuckling, as if he were about to tell a little kid that Santa Claus didn’t really exist. “Your parents are actually Jordanian – the Palestinians didn’t have an identity until the Israel question arose.”

I protested further, but he needed to move on. The lecture had to be delivered. And of course, he wasn’t really willing to talk much after class. Attempting to engage him in future classes was useless – I realized quickly that I annoyed him.

But his words haunted me for a long time. I felt erased, not just by him, but by the whole of academia – he spoke in such an assured and confident tone: “There were no Palestinians.” As a first generation college student, who already felt out of place on a college campus in many ways, his words added to my feelings of inadequacy.

It was most devastating because it had always been difficult, as a Palestinian-American, growing up in the United States, to talk about my ethnicity. Most people didn’t really know what Palestine was, and it’s not like I could show it to them on a map. The people who did have a glimmer of what “Palestinian” meant usually also had some negative associations with the term: terrorism, bombs, oppressed women. Those were the people who typically looked twice at me and said, “I would have never guessed you were Palestinian,” as if I were somehow the exception.

There have been other troubling words.

During a conversation about our parents, a good friend of mine once casually asked, “Aren’t Arab fathers very controlling of their daughters, and just… you know… dominating?”

Once, someone asked me “Did you convert?” when learning that my family is Christian, and then shrugged and said, “Oh right,” when I reminded them Jesus Christ was born in Palestine.

There have been comments expressing shock that my mother worked. That my father was a really nice guy. The earnest advice to “please be careful” when learning I was about to travel to the Middle East. The references to “over there.”

These words, small as they are, haunt me.

They are the outgrowth of the deeply entrenched myth in the Western mindset that Palestine was a desert, uninhabited, uncultivated, just waiting for someone to come along and make it bloom. That the Arabs who were there were a backwards people, who didn’t value life, who adhered to old, barbaric codes of living.

There have been other words, from historic figures, that have haunted me. Golda Meir’s famous comments that “There were no Palestinians…. They simply didn’t exist,” confirmed the fable that Palestinian was a made-up identity, conjured up for political purposes. Then there is her often quoted “There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us,” which is horrifyingly racist.

Last week, my book, A Curious Land, was finally published. When I initially set out to write it, eight years ago, I tried to simply tell some good stories. As I created the characters and wrote the individual stories, as I wove them together, I realized that I was speaking back to the words that had haunted me for so long.

I was testifying to the existence of the Palestinian people, in Palestine, over the course of a century.

In contrast to what Golda Meir said decades ago, there will be peace only when we all learn to listen to one another’s stories and to acknowledge one another’s victories, defeats, and struggles. Words can haunt you, or they can put you in a place where you can willingly understand.

 

Winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction

AWP has announced that Susan Muaddi Darraj’s book of short stories, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, has won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction.

Here’s what judge Jaime Manrique had to say about A Curious Land, which is set in both the Palestinian West Bank and in the United States: “These linked stories about the people of the village of Tel al-Hilou, and their descendants in today’s United States of America, span over a century. The author’s empathy for the large cast of embattled characters is miraculous. In particular, we get to know the quietly heroic Palestinian women in these stories as intimately as we know the people closest to us. Astonishingly, this collection is, above all, about the transformative powers of love.”

A Curious Land: Stories from Home will be published in 2015 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Solstice Magazine — Finalist

Susan Muaddi Darraj’s story, “The Fall,” has been named a finalist a short fiction contest by Solstice Literary Magazine: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. The story will appear in the Summer issue of the magazine.

Informed Compassion: Reflection on the events of July 16, 2014

On July 16, 2014, I was sitting in the library of Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, reading and writing while waiting for my three children, who are attending a summer camp here. It’s a lovely campus, and last week, I enjoyed telling my children how this beautiful college was one of the first to offer serious programs of study for American women.

“So why couldn’t girls go to school?” my six-year-old son had asked before the camp started, after their orientation and campus tour.

“It was a different time, but things changed,” I told him. “They’re a lot better now.”

I even tried to make the connection to faith. We’ve been attending, as a family, a Quaker meeting back home in Baltimore, and I shared with my kids that Bryn Mawr College was founded by a Quaker. Last week in First Day School, they’d learned about Lucretia Mott and had even made little candles as they talked about her vision and ideas.

Fairness. Justice. And especially – compassion. All the things my husband and I try to emphasize to our kids. The world is better when we all show compassion.

So on July 16, I sent them off to their classes with their teachers, sat in the library and started writing. A few hours later, I took a Facebook break and saw my newsfeed filled with the latest headline out of Gaza.

Four boys, aged 9-11, all cousins, playing soccer on the beach.The beach is supposed to be a safe area. There aren’t many nice places in Gaza for kids to play and enjoy the summer sun, but the beach was supposed to be safe.

On July 16th, it wasn’t.

A shell hits an area close to the boys. It kills one. The other three begin running towards the al-Deira hotel, where journalists, who frequently stay there, yell uselessly at the gunner, “They’re only children!”

The gunner is unseen, but he can see. And seconds later, another shell explodes right behind these boys. It kills them, disfiguring their bodies in ways that most people hesitate to share on social media and others refuse to look at.

And still others have the nerve to ask, “Are these photos real? So many aren’t.” Such a comment was made when Anthony Bourdain, in his own expression of compassion, tweeted a photo of one of the boys, lying dead in the sand, his legs twisted horribly around his body.

People won’t look at these pictures. I know some of my friends have been annoyed with how frequently I have posted about this latest atrocity in Gaza.

The murder of children disquiets everyone. People want to demonstrate compassion, but they want news that makes them feel good. People respond when you post a picture of Jews and Arabs breaking their fast together. It’s an evening news headline, to round out the update on the “exchange” of fire between Israel and some nation called Hamas.

Say that you are praying “for both sides” and they will affirm. Say that you feel for “Israeli and Palestinian children alike” and they will agree.

I’m no longer interested in this kind of verbal pat-on-the-back.

I’ve been asked to speak at an event to raise awareness and to do some peace-building.

I refused.

Because here’s what I’m not able, this time, to do: I am not able to be the representative Palestinian, to sit beside a representative Israeli, and to talk about compassion in an general way.

I don’t want to hear nice things, about how “we all just need to get along,” and how the Jews and Arabs are really so much alike.

“We’re cousins, for God’s sake. Our cultures are so similar.” They will nod.

“Both sides need to just stop the killing.” Yes.

And someone will inevitably say, “Salaam and shalom are really derived from the same Semitic root word for peace.”

I don’t care anymore about this “feel good” approach.

Here’s what I am interested in saying:

Israel’s government is trying to eliminate the Palestinian people, its infrastructure, its history and its culture.

That’s what colonialism means – to take over someone’s land, exploit his resources, and then erase any memory of his presence in it. And while you erase him, you tell yourself that he deserves it.

So, no, thank you. I’m not going to be speaking as part of a panel that is more concerned with representing “both sides” than with sharing factual information. Because if I leave that safe platform, and if I talk about the unequal death rates, and the stifling blockade of Gaza, and the occupation that has lasted six decades, people feel queasy.

They don’t want to get “too political.”

I’m interested in saying that no child deserves to die: Palestinian. Israeli. Syrian. Iraqi. No child anywhere. Nothing political about that.

I want to say: I’ve been telling my children that the world has changed. Things are so much better now.

And yet that’s not true.

Here’s what is true: Someone saw these little boys running, running for their lives.

Someone saw Ahed Atef Bakr, Zakaria Ahed Bakr, Mohamed Ramez Bakr, and Ismael Mohamed Bakr abandon the soccer ball and run. And this culture of hate – this product of years of occupation and colonialism – allowed that person to press the trigger anyway, to blow them out of the sand, out of their clothes, out of their skin.

A culture that brews hate is not a culture that will thrive. Pretty words and feel-good gestures will not bandage this ugliness.

We need compassion that is informed.

The world, and every child in it, deserves better.

 

 

 

“A Curious Land” Makes the Pressgang Prize Shortlist

My new short story collection, A Curious Land: Stories from Home, has made the shortlist for Butler University’s Pressgang Prize. The winner, to be announced in August 2014, will receive publication and a reading at Butler University.

Some Thoughts on Parents of “Only One” Child

Last month, a friend of mine, who happens to be serving on a work committee, offered to do a bigger share of the workload. “It’s okay,” he insisted, when I protested. “You have three kids. I have only one.”

 

At the grocery store, where my children were causing havoc in the cereal aisle, a mother with a toddler sitting in the cart and sucking on a bottle, smiled sympathetically at me and said, “I don’t know how you do it with three. I can barely manage and I have only one.”

 

Sometimes, when I’m venting with friends about how difficult my mornings are (waking up the kids, making sure everyone’s dressed, preparing their breakfasts while yelling at them to brush their teeth, the chaos of shoes, bookbags, hats – okay, I’ll stop), those with a single tot at home will shake their heads and say, “Wow, I mean, I think I have a hard time, but I have only one.”

 

I know they’re offering their support, their respect. These words are intended to be the parental version of a fist bump. And I’m grateful to be surrounded by fellow parents who are sympathetic and supportive, rather than judgmental and competitive (because I’ve been around that crowd too, and they’re complete jerks).

 

But it bothers me that they’re somehow downplaying their own experiences, that it somehow makes you more of a parent if you have more kids (because by that logic, Jon and Kate Gosselin would be child-rearing experts). So that’s why I’ve started to reply, in this way, “Whether you have one or five, it’s always a challenge.”

 

Because parents of “only one” child have known the trauma of waking up to find a crib splattered with vomit.

 

You’ve seen your toddler’s face flushed red with fever, watched that thermometer creep up to 102 and been launched into a state of total, drive-to-the-ER panic.

 

You’ve had to deal with the drama of self-esteem and risk-taking that is potty training.

 

They’ve smiled convincingly at a kid who’s tasting pureed green beans for the first time.

 

You’ve hushed and consoled a preschooler who’s just been given four vaccinations at once and is outraged at such a low-down trick.

 

And you’ve had to grapple with the stuff, the endless stuff you need to foray into the world with a child – the stroller, the carseat, the diaper bag, the sling, the juice bottle, the sippy cup and its stupid valve that pops out whenever the thing falls and hits the ground.

 

These experiences are minor when considered individually, but they accumulate, like grains of rice, until you are startled to realize that you have a sack filled with parenting wisdom.

 

These experiences are valid. They do not lose legitimacy because they have happened only once.

 

My own mornings and evenings and drop-offs at daycare and storytimes at the library are not more legitimate because I am juggling the needs of three. I asked for this situation and even on those days – those days, when I’m looking to the heavens to drop some patience on me – I know that I have been blessed.

 

I am also blessed to be friends with parents who give me props, who salute my efforts. All I’m saying is this: don’t dismiss your own efforts, or shrug off the value of your own parenting experiences. Because we’re all in it together.

 

And you’re doing a fantastic job.

Poetry for Mother’s Day

On this Mother’s Day, I am grateful for a beautifully-produced, slim volume of poems by my friend, Lalita Noronha. The book is dedicated to her own mother, Agnes Mary Noronha, who passed away in 2006.

Her Skin Phyllo-Thin describes the relationship between mother and daughter, strained over time, stretched across an ocean, but resilient. It is also a book that celebrates the strength of women across generations. In one poem, “Across Bones,” Noronha writes:

But when, on moonless nights,

I start to cry,

my grandmother reaches far

across my mother’s bones,

gathers my tears. […]

I inhale her breath,

and her mother’s mother’s breath,

vapors of ten thousand years,

and years before that.

When today becomes yesterday,

and days before that,

she knows I will stretch across

my daughter’s bones,

touch my granddaughter’s cheek…

Noronha, a native of India, a scientist and fiction writer, is also a gifted poet, who finds inspiration for her verse in her “search between continents, between sky and sky, between then and now for home.” She folds other themes – immigration, new worlds, marriage, family – into her poems, and many of her images are stunning in her accuracy. In “Sponge Bath,” she describes her mother’s hair, “a silver puff of dandelion”; in the same poem, we have the image that titles the collection. Several poems in this volume are also inspired by artwork housed at the Baltimore Museum of Art, by Gauguin and Rodin and others.

Her Skin Phyllo-Thin is a lovely gift from Noronha to her own mother, illuminating all the roles that mothers play and the tragedies they bear, as well as portraying how layered and complicated mother-daughter relationships can be.

Editor’s Note, Barrelhouse Online Issue: “Superheroes”

The theme of this – the first online issue of Barrelhouse – is superheroes, and I feel obliged to explain why this is so.

The History: Of course, Wonder Woman was my favorite superhero when I was a kid, growing up in a South Philadelphia rowhouse with three brothers. She had to be, because she was the only regular, worthy and female superhero available to me.  When Saturday morning cartoons were over and the local news came on, my brothers and I re-enacted whatever battles we’d seen, as I assume most impressionable children did, and Wonder Woman could seriously do some damage to her enemies, who were all men. She could also be a valued team member, because her strength and her lasso were legit. Her bracelets? Fashion and strength, in one package? Oh my god. Nobody wanted to mess with her.

The Confusion: For years, I remember thinking she was an Arab woman. I’m not sure why I thought this, but I do distinctly recall that I believed it for a very long time. And this confusion did lead me to dress up in a Wonder Woman costume when I was seven. I was proud of it, despite being horribly uncomfortable in the thin, plastic one-piece over my sweatpants and sweatshirt, my face sweating under the plastic mask with the nose holes and the rubber band stapled to the sides. Maybe I thought she was an Arab because she often said “Hera, give me strength.” Growing up in a bilingual household, I remember that I heard this as “Allah, give me strength,” which is just the dramatic type of thing an Arab woman might say.  Plus, she could pass for an Arab woman, with that black hair and that attitude. And those eyebrows! Or maybe it was just because there were no Arab heroes on television when I was growing up  (there still aren’t.) and I really longed for one.

The Legacy: Since then, I’ve loved the whole superhero culture. Even after clarifying that Wonder Woman’s ethnic identity is Amazonian-American. Having three brothers facilitated this interest nicely – we often discussed our favorite superheroes in detail, compared their powers and their weaknesses.

I developed a theory, still in the early stages, that most people have some kind of definable superpower. My power was realized when I got to college and discerned that I was ethnically malleable. This is an amazing power to have. Nobody knew “what I was,” but as a friend once told me, “I know you’re something.” It was like being a ghost who could pass through walls; I could hang out with the Latino kids on campus, then phase out and reappear with the African American students, or join in a discussion with the Indians and be totally accepted every time.

Frankly, I loved it, felt empowered and welcomed, even though I was often struck by the strangeness of the experience. It was akin to being that fourth kid on Barney – there was the obligatory White kid, around whom the story usually centered (he was the one lost in the woods, or it was her grandmother’s house they were all going to). There was the obligatory Black kid, as well as the Asian kid who could occasionally be swapped out for a kid with a physical disability. But that fourth child … that fourth one was ethnically ambiguous: was she Latina? Greek? Black? Pakistani? Who knew? But she satisfied the producer’s wacky quota and need to appeal to a wide, and misunderstood, viewing audience.

Anyway, here I am, editing my first issue as Barrelhouse’s online editor. I’ve joined the ranks of some of the best writers and editors I know, whose goal it is to demonstrate that pop culture is no small thing, that good literature is not an elitist enterprise. If I may wring this metaphor out some more, I view this mission as one well-suited for superheroes. And I contribute whatever powers I may have to it. Allah, give me strength.

Surviving Mommy-ville

Last week, I attended a conference on teaching pedagogy and strategy, which was generally uneventful and filled with such in-the-box phrases as “thinking outside the box” and “we must empower students.” During one panel, a tutoring center director spoke passionately and earnestly about college students who are “at risk” – presumably, they are at risk of failure, of flunking out of college, of spending their lives working at Target or living in their parents’ basements.

But this woman intrigued me. I was impressed by her lovely, multi-slide PowerPoint, filled with dense text and colorful graphics, but even moreso by her slinky black outfit and patriot-red lipstick. (Wow. I mean, I hope that I can look like that when I’m 60 too. Hell, I’d like to look like that when I’m 40.)

But I digress.

She described these at-risk students as kids who typically “lack a stick-to-it-iveness” (swear to God). They are also “non-persisters.” She was far too polished and professional to have typed “lazy fools” into her glittery PPT, so instead she wrote that they demonstrate a “tendency not to follow through with assignments and appointments.” That’s the next bullet point.

By the time her presentation ended (she cleverly allotted 20 minutes for Q&A – I almost asked her if she does pilates? Zumba?), every college professor in the room is in full complaint and distress mode. These poor students, these lost children of Generation Y, these Millenials who were never stimulated in high school and who were pushed through anyway, these kids who are struggling with part-time jobs and uncertainty about academic majors – what can we do to help them? I have a theory that almost every college professor, at least the ones in the Humanities – well, at least the ones in the Humanities whom I know – are Catholic school survivors. We’re always obsessed with how we are responsible for everything wrong in the world.

I keep quiet during the Q&A. I don’t want to rain on everyone’s liturgy. But in my head, I’m thinking: we’re a little late to save this essay. The paper deserves an F. you can get it to a C. Maybe. But not to an A. Because the only thing that could have done that, could have made sure that the non-persisters developed a “stick-to-it-iveness”, is solid parenting.

Oh, you’ve heard this one before? Well, let me explain my perspective. Humor me.

Let me say, though, that I’m not a Tiger Mom.  Remember her? Professor-I-Hired-a-Violin-Teacher-on-a-Family-Vacation-Thereby-Disrupting-Vacation? (Yes, I read the entire memoir, instead of just gasping about it. It took about four hours.) But, a confession: I thought, in the end, that she really was a dedicated mom, not a tyrant.  She wanted to make sure her kids were achievers, and that they understood that success is the result of hard work, not natural genius.

Here’s the opposite of the Tiger Mom, someone that many of you will recognize as a typical “mommy”: a few years ago, I walked into Borders Bookstore (God, do I miss Borders), and held the door open for a young mother pushing a baby stroller. An older boy, maybe 4 or 5, held onto her shirt. She perkily thanked me, and we exchanged that weary “Boy, isn’t mothering hard work!” look.

But then, as she entered a pool of sunshine on the sidewalk, she turned to her older boy and said, “Oooh! Look!  Look! Our friend the sun! Say hello to the sun, honey!”

Yes, I know.

And yet, seemingly used to obeying such bizarre demands, her boy dutifully called out, “Hello sun!” And he giggled. She giggled too, missing the fact that he never looked up into the clouds at his pal the sun. “Good job, sweetie,” she said.

What did he learn, then, from his attentive mom? That being cute is enough. Effort not required. It’s an example in action of the current mantra in American parenting and education, that “trying is half the effort.”

The problem is that, of course, it’s not true. “Knowing” is actually half the battle (according to what I learned from GI Joe cartoons as a kid).  Trying is nice. It’s necessary. But it’s the eventual knowledge and success that counts.

Kids are cute. They also try to get away with the craziest things. My son, who knows that the Wii is only played on Saturday mornings in our house, once tricked me: he turned off the volume and shut the door to the playroom while I was upstairs cooking dinner. I caught him and reprimanded him. He did it again the next day. The third time he did it, the Wii disappeared for a month.

Harsh? But that month was harder for me than it was for him, believe me. I had to hear, the first Saturday, that initial scream of disbelief: “What!? But… but… Mawwwwm! Pwease!”

Pause for ten seconds, then repeat.

My steady, soothing stream of replies included things like: Here’s a puzzle.  Here’s a ball and bat. Here’s your bike helmet. Have fun doing something else. But no Wii. This is called a consequence, honey: c-o-n-s-e-q-u-e-n-c-e.

He hated me. His five-year-old mind found me completely revolting and horrible. I wasn’t happy about that, but as I pitched him the ball and we talked, he was fine. At least, for an hour or so. But after a mere six days, he barely talked about it.  He’s followed the rules ever since. He will grow up, I hope, to be a persister.

My children do not say hello to the sun. Instead, they look at it to try to figure out what time of day it is based on its position in the sky – they think that the ancient way of telling time is “super cool.” I think it’s super cool that they think it’s super cool.

But then, of course, all children are intrigued by learning. To them, the coolest thing of all is whatever their parents are doing in that moment – if mommy is talking on the phone, they want in on the action. If dad is gardening, they want to yank out some weeds too.  If mom and dad struggle with something, but keep at it until they succeed, that becomes a habit too. Rewards for “effort” or accolades for being cute result in young adults who are “at risk” for coping with reality.