I noticed an item in this morning's paper saying a family is suing a teaching intern who duct-taped a 6th-grader to his chair, also covering his mouth with tape, when he and others were too disruptive during a movie.
Well, first of all, let me make it clear that I don't condone this as a disciplinary measure in school. But I can't help but notice that all -- or at least most -- the stories on this 2005 incident dwell on the teacher's actions. That's probably proper, but a little part of me kept asking: What about the kids? There wasn't a whole lot of discussion of how disruptive they were, or how consistently they were disobeying the teacher, or how frequent such discipline problems are in classrooms today. And few seemed to suggest that the 6th grader might, just might, share a little bit of the responsibility for the incident. By 6th grade, a child certainly should know right from wrong, and should have developed a decent measure of self-control.
Maybe I find myself thinking this because I grew up with a father who took the approach of: "If I hear you got a spanking at school, you'll get another one when you get home." I was expected to behave. His attitude was that if the teacher thought I was stepping out of line, then he'd assume that was indeed what I had done. I never found out if he would follow up on that threat, because I never got spanked at school. But that was the point, wasn't it?
Yes, there's something wrong when a teacher feels such a loss of control over her class that she resorts to duct-taping children to their chairs and shuts them up by duct-taping their mouths. But I also think there's something wrong when parents think they can benefit by going to court over such an incident. And I'm left wondering if, in any way, the child was forced to take responsibility for his misbehavior in the first place.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
TV "Accuracy"
I was just reading a story about medical and legal consultants hired by Hollywood to make sure their television dramas have the air of accuracy. That led me to chuckle about "Grey's Anatomy." I know that show has been popular forever, but I only got hooked on it this year. I started watching it only because it was on between "Ugly Betty" and "Men in Trees."
One of the continuing reactions I have to "Grey's Anatomy" is that those docs have wa-a-a-y too much time. First of all, let's be clear. It's not a medical show; it's a medical soap opera. The show focuses on who is in love with/sleeping with whom at any one point in time. In order to facilitate this soap opera, then, the docs end up spending more time interacting with each other than with their patients.
For example: A show earlier this year featured a ferry crashing, or blowing up, or something of the sort, causing a mass casualty accident for the Seattle hospital. Patients were flooding in with all sorts of injuries. So what do we see? When Meredith is injured, her fellow surgical interns end up lingering outside the door where she is getting treatment, worrying about what would happen to her. Hello? That hospital must be incredibly overstaffed to be able to have a gaggle of doctors loitering in the hallway during a mass casualty incident. Not to mention another intern who spent time going through bodybags to see if he could help identify one of the patients. Hmmm... there were no living patients who needed his attention at the time? Hard to believe.
A more recent incident that raised my eyebrow showed the obstetrical surgeon doing an ultrasound of a pregnant patient. Now, the more likely scenario would be that the doc wouldn't even be in the room, while an ultrasound technician did the test and later delivered the images to the doc. And if, for some unusual reason, the doc urgently wanted to see the results, she might have stood there watching while the technician did the test. But in the world of Grey, docs do everything themselves, from ultrasound tests to searches of body bags for patient identification.
And then there's the story line of the surgeon who oversees the interns starting up a free clinic at the hospital. Yes, that' s very nice... but surgeons generally are too busy doing surgery to run free clinics... Yet this character seems to do it all: surgery, oversight of surgical interns, supervision of the free clinic. So far, at least since I've been watching, she's the only one who hasn't managed to have an affair. At least she's been too busy.
One last quibble: The show has referred to the group of fledgling docs who are the core of the drama as "interns." And they all want to be surgeons. And they spend a lot of time either in surgery or watching surgery. Yet in my glancing familiarity with medical education, an intern is a medical school graduate in the first year of residency. While some may be sure what they want to specialize in, a specialty usually isn't declared in that first year. Instead, interns rotate among a variety of specialties throughout the year. Yet Grey's interns seem to spend most of their time either in the ER or the surgical suite. (When they're not in each others' beds, that is.) (Or interns popping into medical faculty's beds -- or into supply closets. Is that ethical?)
And the faculty, the full-fledged specialists, whether ob-gyn, neurosurgeon or cardiothoracic surgeon, also follow patients all the way from the ER to surgery to post-surgical follow-up. Never mind that, in the real world, trauma docs would be handling patients in the ER while the surgeons would be on another floor, studying CT scans or X-rays or whatever images get sent up, plotting the surgery, scrubbing up, and often not even meeting the patient until they're draped, under anesthesia and practically anonymous. But keeping docs in their specialty niches would make for a pretty choppy story line...
One of the continuing reactions I have to "Grey's Anatomy" is that those docs have wa-a-a-y too much time. First of all, let's be clear. It's not a medical show; it's a medical soap opera. The show focuses on who is in love with/sleeping with whom at any one point in time. In order to facilitate this soap opera, then, the docs end up spending more time interacting with each other than with their patients.
For example: A show earlier this year featured a ferry crashing, or blowing up, or something of the sort, causing a mass casualty accident for the Seattle hospital. Patients were flooding in with all sorts of injuries. So what do we see? When Meredith is injured, her fellow surgical interns end up lingering outside the door where she is getting treatment, worrying about what would happen to her. Hello? That hospital must be incredibly overstaffed to be able to have a gaggle of doctors loitering in the hallway during a mass casualty incident. Not to mention another intern who spent time going through bodybags to see if he could help identify one of the patients. Hmmm... there were no living patients who needed his attention at the time? Hard to believe.
A more recent incident that raised my eyebrow showed the obstetrical surgeon doing an ultrasound of a pregnant patient. Now, the more likely scenario would be that the doc wouldn't even be in the room, while an ultrasound technician did the test and later delivered the images to the doc. And if, for some unusual reason, the doc urgently wanted to see the results, she might have stood there watching while the technician did the test. But in the world of Grey, docs do everything themselves, from ultrasound tests to searches of body bags for patient identification.
And then there's the story line of the surgeon who oversees the interns starting up a free clinic at the hospital. Yes, that' s very nice... but surgeons generally are too busy doing surgery to run free clinics... Yet this character seems to do it all: surgery, oversight of surgical interns, supervision of the free clinic. So far, at least since I've been watching, she's the only one who hasn't managed to have an affair. At least she's been too busy.
One last quibble: The show has referred to the group of fledgling docs who are the core of the drama as "interns." And they all want to be surgeons. And they spend a lot of time either in surgery or watching surgery. Yet in my glancing familiarity with medical education, an intern is a medical school graduate in the first year of residency. While some may be sure what they want to specialize in, a specialty usually isn't declared in that first year. Instead, interns rotate among a variety of specialties throughout the year. Yet Grey's interns seem to spend most of their time either in the ER or the surgical suite. (When they're not in each others' beds, that is.) (Or interns popping into medical faculty's beds -- or into supply closets. Is that ethical?)
And the faculty, the full-fledged specialists, whether ob-gyn, neurosurgeon or cardiothoracic surgeon, also follow patients all the way from the ER to surgery to post-surgical follow-up. Never mind that, in the real world, trauma docs would be handling patients in the ER while the surgeons would be on another floor, studying CT scans or X-rays or whatever images get sent up, plotting the surgery, scrubbing up, and often not even meeting the patient until they're draped, under anesthesia and practically anonymous. But keeping docs in their specialty niches would make for a pretty choppy story line...
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Panaceas
I'm a little behind the curve here. Forgive me. I've been buried in books. But I did want to point out something the Washington Post reported earlier this month. It noted that Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman, had been under a court order since December 2005 for involuntary outpatient mental health treatment. No entity ever followed up. He never got the treatment.
The Post story included this line: "'The system doesn’t work well,'” said Tom Diggs, executive director of the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, which has been studying the state mental health system and will report to the General Assembly next year."
This is something for folks to ponder who have been backing a so-called Kendra's Law in New Mexico for court-ordered outpatient mental health treatment. Passion was aroused for such a law in New Mexico after a man with a mental illness gunned down five people in Albuquerque. Such a law would prevent such killings in the future, supporters argue. Critics warn that the mental health system (and they also might have considered including the court system in this critique) wasn't able to handle demands already facing it, and that the solution was to improve the mental health system, not to hand down court orders.
The events in Virginia certainly give one example of how court-ordered treatment can't prevent tragedies. But a comprehensive mental health system with good coordination with the law enforcement and judicial systems might have. Unfortunately, a law calling for court-ordered treatment is relatively cheap; building a good mental health care system isn't.
The Post story included this line: "'The system doesn’t work well,'” said Tom Diggs, executive director of the Commission on Mental Health Law Reform, which has been studying the state mental health system and will report to the General Assembly next year."
This is something for folks to ponder who have been backing a so-called Kendra's Law in New Mexico for court-ordered outpatient mental health treatment. Passion was aroused for such a law in New Mexico after a man with a mental illness gunned down five people in Albuquerque. Such a law would prevent such killings in the future, supporters argue. Critics warn that the mental health system (and they also might have considered including the court system in this critique) wasn't able to handle demands already facing it, and that the solution was to improve the mental health system, not to hand down court orders.
The events in Virginia certainly give one example of how court-ordered treatment can't prevent tragedies. But a comprehensive mental health system with good coordination with the law enforcement and judicial systems might have. Unfortunately, a law calling for court-ordered treatment is relatively cheap; building a good mental health care system isn't.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Money Talks
Way back in the dim mists of my college years, I wrote a paper for a political science class on national primaries. When I started my research, I was convinced I would find evidence to support my inclination that they were an excellent idea. After all, what better sign of democracy in action? Let the people choose, not those party bosses in smoke-filled rooms.
By the end of my research, though, I wasn't as certain. Those party bosses usually knew the candidates far better than the voters. They knew their personal foibles, their character, their understanding of the issues, their judgment, their willingness to work hard and question the information they get. That doesn't necessarily mean they chose the best candidate, but at least they had some basis on which to make a decision.
And, at one point, the parties actually stood for something, and the voters then could make their decision at least partly on the party platform.
Now, with every state eager to have influence by putting their primaries early in the season, the selection of a candidate is becoming more and more scary. Who gets attention? People who already are known. People who raise a lot of money. And people who tickle the media's fancy. The front-loading of the primaries results in a choice of candidate well before the general election. What if global conditions change such that someone who looked like a good candidate a year before the election suddenly looks inappropriate by the time the general election rolls around? What if new information comes out about their past that makes them unacceptable to the American public? It seems far better if the choice of a candidate truly were set back closer to the general election.
But, the way elections are set up these days, does it even matter? Do we elect someone based on their actual performance or capabilities? Candidates have become a commodity, sold like cars in appeals to image and emotions, with little basis on reality. It's no wonder that Ross Perot and John McCain had briefly engaged the public. Hungry for some sense of genuineness, voters responded happily to the feeling that someone finally was talking common sense, saying what they mean instead of dancing all around a topic, foregoing substance for appearance.
Of course, even "plain talk" can become a carefully-manufactured image. We tread on shaky ground.
Is this what it comes to? We buy a car because the ads assure us we are adventurous, outdoorsy, sexy, environmentally correct or whatever image we're going for. And we buy a candidate because -- well, we're told people voted for Bush because he was the kind of guy they'd like to have a beer with. Polls I saw before the elections showed that, on the majority of the issues, the majority of voters agreed with Bush's opponents. Yet they voted for the guy they'd like to have a beer with, and now we're left judicial appointments and policy changes and a war that most Americans disagree with. And a president with an approval rating below 30 percent.
Maybe next time we should ask, not who we'd like to have a beer with, but who would be better at governing the country. If only we could figure out how to make that judgment.
The ads sell the candidate. Money buys the ads. And the people who give the money hold the influence. No wonder so many American people have turned their backs on the political process in disgust.
By the end of my research, though, I wasn't as certain. Those party bosses usually knew the candidates far better than the voters. They knew their personal foibles, their character, their understanding of the issues, their judgment, their willingness to work hard and question the information they get. That doesn't necessarily mean they chose the best candidate, but at least they had some basis on which to make a decision.
And, at one point, the parties actually stood for something, and the voters then could make their decision at least partly on the party platform.
Now, with every state eager to have influence by putting their primaries early in the season, the selection of a candidate is becoming more and more scary. Who gets attention? People who already are known. People who raise a lot of money. And people who tickle the media's fancy. The front-loading of the primaries results in a choice of candidate well before the general election. What if global conditions change such that someone who looked like a good candidate a year before the election suddenly looks inappropriate by the time the general election rolls around? What if new information comes out about their past that makes them unacceptable to the American public? It seems far better if the choice of a candidate truly were set back closer to the general election.
But, the way elections are set up these days, does it even matter? Do we elect someone based on their actual performance or capabilities? Candidates have become a commodity, sold like cars in appeals to image and emotions, with little basis on reality. It's no wonder that Ross Perot and John McCain had briefly engaged the public. Hungry for some sense of genuineness, voters responded happily to the feeling that someone finally was talking common sense, saying what they mean instead of dancing all around a topic, foregoing substance for appearance.
Of course, even "plain talk" can become a carefully-manufactured image. We tread on shaky ground.
Is this what it comes to? We buy a car because the ads assure us we are adventurous, outdoorsy, sexy, environmentally correct or whatever image we're going for. And we buy a candidate because -- well, we're told people voted for Bush because he was the kind of guy they'd like to have a beer with. Polls I saw before the elections showed that, on the majority of the issues, the majority of voters agreed with Bush's opponents. Yet they voted for the guy they'd like to have a beer with, and now we're left judicial appointments and policy changes and a war that most Americans disagree with. And a president with an approval rating below 30 percent.
Maybe next time we should ask, not who we'd like to have a beer with, but who would be better at governing the country. If only we could figure out how to make that judgment.
The ads sell the candidate. Money buys the ads. And the people who give the money hold the influence. No wonder so many American people have turned their backs on the political process in disgust.
Friday, May 4, 2007
Sex and the Secretary of State
Maybe I'm more sensitized because I just finished reading Maureen Dowd's book, "Are Men Necessary?", but I was taken aback by a profile of Condoleezza Rice in the current Newsweek. Taken from a coming biography by Marcus Mabry, the excerpt in its fourth paragraph gave a semi-sexual reason for Rice's decision to serve in Bush's administration: She likes bad boys. The evidence given was that, of two football player boyfriends she had as a grad student, she seemed to prefer the one who was less deferential to her.
All righty! But further on, it portrayed Rice as incredibly confident and self-assured. If you were going to go for the "bad boy" explanation at all, maybe it would have made more sense to say that she was more attracted to men who were closer to her equal in strength and self-confidence, who were able to resist bending to her steely will. One could argue it's just as logical, while making Rice sound less like a batty love-struck teen.
But does the "bad boy" label even make sense? The profile also says that Rice and Bush see eye-to-eye on many things -- and that, when they met, Bush already had become a teetotaler and shared Rice's strong religious faith. That's the "bad boy" that attracted her?
The profile also includes quotes from her hairdresser speculating that Bush fills the role of a boyfriend in her life, and an explanation from friends of why Rice stayed in the administration was "she just can't say no to that man." Again we get the image of a needy woman in sexual thrall to a man.
If she were a man, what are the chances we'd see these kinds of pseudopsychological explanations for her behavior? It seems more likely the profile would talk about common goals and policy philosophies linking the two. We'd hear the secretary of state talking about how he recognized a gap in the President's foreign policy experience, and wanted to help fill that gap. The writer probably would note the person's sense of duty to country and desire to create a new role for the U.S. in the world.
But no. Condi just "can't say no" to that bad boy.
Consider if the tables were turned. Say a woman -- Hillary, for example -- became president. Would a profile of her secretary of state (assume it's a man) say that he took on the role because he always had been attracted to blondes? After all, he liked his blonde girlfriend better than his brunette girlfriend when he was in college.
And would the profile say he always had been a Mama's boy (calling her at least once a week until she died!), so he was attracted to strong, powerful women, looking for one who would give him guidance and whom he could serve. When foreign policy started to look increasingly like a wreck, he wanted to leave the administration but, pussy-whipped all his life, he caved in to her demands that he stay.
Actually, maybe we would see a profile like that. Maybe we can't stop ourselves from thinking of men and women in primarily sexual terms. Maybe the only way to keep sexual tension -- not to mention sexual stereotypes -- out of any analysis of a relationship is to have the relationship between same-gender, heterosexual individuals.
Please remind me -- what century is this?
All righty! But further on, it portrayed Rice as incredibly confident and self-assured. If you were going to go for the "bad boy" explanation at all, maybe it would have made more sense to say that she was more attracted to men who were closer to her equal in strength and self-confidence, who were able to resist bending to her steely will. One could argue it's just as logical, while making Rice sound less like a batty love-struck teen.
But does the "bad boy" label even make sense? The profile also says that Rice and Bush see eye-to-eye on many things -- and that, when they met, Bush already had become a teetotaler and shared Rice's strong religious faith. That's the "bad boy" that attracted her?
The profile also includes quotes from her hairdresser speculating that Bush fills the role of a boyfriend in her life, and an explanation from friends of why Rice stayed in the administration was "she just can't say no to that man." Again we get the image of a needy woman in sexual thrall to a man.
If she were a man, what are the chances we'd see these kinds of pseudopsychological explanations for her behavior? It seems more likely the profile would talk about common goals and policy philosophies linking the two. We'd hear the secretary of state talking about how he recognized a gap in the President's foreign policy experience, and wanted to help fill that gap. The writer probably would note the person's sense of duty to country and desire to create a new role for the U.S. in the world.
But no. Condi just "can't say no" to that bad boy.
Consider if the tables were turned. Say a woman -- Hillary, for example -- became president. Would a profile of her secretary of state (assume it's a man) say that he took on the role because he always had been attracted to blondes? After all, he liked his blonde girlfriend better than his brunette girlfriend when he was in college.
And would the profile say he always had been a Mama's boy (calling her at least once a week until she died!), so he was attracted to strong, powerful women, looking for one who would give him guidance and whom he could serve. When foreign policy started to look increasingly like a wreck, he wanted to leave the administration but, pussy-whipped all his life, he caved in to her demands that he stay.
Actually, maybe we would see a profile like that. Maybe we can't stop ourselves from thinking of men and women in primarily sexual terms. Maybe the only way to keep sexual tension -- not to mention sexual stereotypes -- out of any analysis of a relationship is to have the relationship between same-gender, heterosexual individuals.
Please remind me -- what century is this?
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