MAID stalwarts will recall that about a year ago I spent a couple of weeks scoring the first-year writing placement essays of incoming freshpeople at UMass. It is an often tedious but not altogether uninteresting process. Last year I noted that, from handwriting alone, at about a 90% clip I could identify the gender of the authors of these fine blue tomes. Many of the girls have some version of a rounded, curly, gentle, tidy, bubblingly expansive script, while the boys’ handwriting was sloppy, chaotic, sharp-edged, angry, furious, psychotic– (what’s the next level after "psychotic"?).
This year I’m noticing much more that this same tendency extends to content. One of the two prompts the kids are responding to this year has to do with the NSA wiretaps, and asks the students to comment on the legitimacy of the broad powers granted to the agency by the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. act. (Do I really need all those periods at this point, or can I just write “Patriot”? – please advise.).
The boys almost invariably are either aggressively in support of the government, a “powerful unit dedicated to the rights of its citizens” that needs to hunt down terrorists “by any means necessary”; or equally agressively opposed to being spied on by a "Big Brother" that needs to be stopped by those same means. (“For as long as man has lived, he has been forced to surrender his complete and total autonomy to governments.”). Lots o’ the fellas sound like separatist nutjobs.
The girls, well, they write about the fact that “everyone wants to feel safe and know that someone is looking out for them” and that “it’s the government’s job to protect and I think they’re doing a wonderful job” or, conversely, that it’s really not nice to spy on innocent people’s private lives. And a good number of boys and girls echo one young woman’s sentiment that “one who has nothing to hide shouldn’t really mind” the potential intrusion. Of course, there are exceptions – angry young women and gentle, sensitive young men, but they are few and far between.
[Just so you don’t despair, dear readers, I should note that more of these sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds – who were nine and ten on 9/11/01 – as frightened as they still are, are opposed to excessive wire-tapping than favor it.]
As ever, the question arises, is it nature or nurture that makes these kids fit such stereotypical gender norms? Of course, as ever, I’d argue that it’s a combination of the two and, also, as ever, I’d argue that after reading hundreds of essays of the leaders of tomorrow, it might be well worth giving XX-ers the keys to the planet for the next century.
On a somewhat tangential note, I don’t know if I’ve written about it here, but I’ve often wondered what it would be like to have my testosterone level drop about 90% for a month. If there were (is?) a safe way to make that happen, I’d give it a try, just to see. I’ve certainly mellowed with age, and experience what I presume are reduced testosterone levels to that extent, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of what drives these young men is fueled by that chemical, and I’ve read and heard from f-to-m transsexuals of the tremendous rush that they experience from their injections, so I wonder what the opposite of that would be like. But I digress.
Here are a few tidbits from my week of reading. I have learned that “the future is approaching fast,” and that “just taking a sponge to the toilet will not make the whole room sparkling clean.” (referring to reducing greenhouse gases by driving less). I’ve been told that, “As the years go on, more and more people are being killed by others. This issue needs to end.” I’ve been told that “Privacy is a concern for everybody. While some of us choose to cover ourselves completely, others are perfectly content tanning nude at the beach” and that “civilizations” must progress in order to survive the apathetic hands of time.” And I’ve been informed that “adults are all over match.com” and that at one young man differs “from the highly-known but pessimistic global- warming man, Al Gore.”
There are also, of course, a few brilliant essays, and intentional and unintentional poetic gems such as, “She is a mean and serious person,” written by someone whose gender I didn’t note, about an aunt.
***
Here’s some tidbits from the final day of the session:
"Ultraviolent rays" (they cause global warming)
"Speaking as a pessimistic person, I can’t say that optimism would play a positive role in this entire matter." But then the same young sage concludes a page later, that, "Cooperation alone brings optimism, and that optimism could end up being all America needs." (to fight global warming)
"As a foreign face sets foot on American soil . . . "
"The hard-wired telephones of Bandeis day linked people by hardwire back to operators." (god, I’m old)
"Before the advancement in technology, when someone put a wiretap on your phone it could easily be heard by the people on the phone"
left-winged politicians (squawk!)
and finally
"The only thing worse than fear is fear itself"
