TerpDad

I bet you she was pleased to get that salary increase! Not to mention that great real estate deal ! And let's not forget her fortuitous, privileged higher education! God Bless America!

edvest1

doctormom50, you've got to be kidding...
Borrowing from YW's post #78, point #4: the Rev Wright is too content with leaving it at "different but not deficient" - that way they won't think too much for themselves and canbe more easily led, by someone like Wright.

interesteddad

No. No. No. For the Obama family, it's God damn America...

interesteddad

Yeah. What a coincidence, huh? The same week her husband got promoted from state senate to US Senate. Six figure increase wasn't it?

Gotta love Chicago politics.

Mr Payne

From the NYT in 2003:

That was *before* the big raise for Michelle. Kind of makes you wonder how she got the job in the first place, right?

mercymom

doctormom50 -

I missed most of Wright's Sun. nite speech. The only part I caught was the part about right brain/left brain, logic vs. creative. Oh, I also heard some stuff about diagnosing learning disabilities and too much ritalin. I certainly do agree that there seems to be an overdiagnosing problem going on, as well as an overmedication problem. My kids have been in both public school and catholic school and the school office seems to double as a health clinic where half the school lines up daily to receive their meds. There was a tv special a few weeks ago about giving children antipsychotic drugs for depression and such that was heartbreaking. One boy looked like his brain had been permanently fried by age 13. I think that's awful.

dke

I just can't see Obama fighting his way out of a paper bag. He doesn't seem scrappy enough. I don't like Hillary either, but at least she seems like she has cajones.

mercymom

docmom -

I don't know if it's cause I grew up in New Orleans, but we played singing/dancing/rhythm games at my catholic school prior to desegregation. Of course, we were segregated by sex, so my playground experience was all girls. The bldg had one wing for the boys and one for the girls; we even had two lunch rooms and two playgrounds. So I don't know what the boys did at recess.

Anyway, think about what that right brain/left brain analysis actually meant. It seemed like Wright was saying black kids were not capable of logical thinking, and white kids are not creative. I can't imagine that an entire race is incapable of using 1/2 its mental capacity. Individual children may be oriented more one way or another but not an entire race.

The other thing is it reminded me of the painful experience I've had getting my three kids, two of whom are girls, through the NCTM fuzzy math onslaught that I found in both their public and private schools. The whole fuzzy math thing is predicated on an assumption that girls and minorities are incapable of logical thinking and must be taught a watered down version of mathematics or else they can't learn it. Now I don't want to start a "math wars" discussion, but you just cannot imagine how frustrating it is to have girls with high math ability be forced to endure this approach and have the teacher tell you how neccessary it is cause girls can't learn math the traditional way. Plus they impose this foolishness on the boys cause the whole class gets taught the same way even though the method was supposedly designed for the girls.

At my sex segregated catholic school, we were all taught the same way even though the classrooms were all girls or all boys, and everyone learned. Maybe it was the nuns, I don't know, but we all did well. We were separated for reasons of discipline (i guess that was their thinking back then), but not because anybody thought there were things girls couldn't learn.

Sorry, I apoligize if anyone thinks this is an unattractive rant. Most of the black kids my kids know they met in a public school GT program or at college; I know their parents, and I have black friends who are professionals, mostly lawyers or accountants, and they are some of the smartest, most logical thinking, right brained people I know. It just offends me that someone thinks that an analytical brain is determined by your race or your gender. OK. I'll stop now.

mercymom

Well, everything is open to individual interpretation. Here is an anaylsis of Wright's comments by Mark Liberman, a professor of linquistics at U. Penn., as posted on his lanquage log he runs from the Insitute for Research in Cognitive Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He seems to agree more with me than with you:

Language Log Wright on language and linguistics

Of particular note is his interpretation of Wright's comments on the research of Dr. Hale:


"This strikes me as a caricature, at best, of the ideas of Dr. Janice Hale. What she presented as cultural generalizations, Rev. Wright puts forward as essential racial characteristics of all “African and African-American children”. In my opinion, it’s insulting to them to suggest that they’re incapable of being “logical and analytical”, and insulting to “European and European-American children” to suggest that they’re incapable of being “creative and intuitive”. "



Dr. Liberman's analysis also touches on Wright's comments about the Kennedy accent, and well, pretty much the whole linquistic, learning style discussion that took place that night. His concluding paragraph is pretty interesting too.

bluebayou

Posts 297-298

ALL children, regardless of color/ethnicity, have hemispherical learning issues, commonly called Spatial-Temporal. It is extremely important to train both halves of the brain to work with each other, and visually is even better. Such learning is required for higher level math (unlearned halves results in "I hate math"), and the reasoning problems of the SAT. When one visualizes a 'difficult' SAT problem, it becomes extremely easy to solve in less than 30 seconds. That is why the Xiggi method works so well -- his recommendations are nothing more than Spatial-Temporal-Visual learning.

Back to your regularly scheduled programs.

mercymom

Exactly, bluebayou. Here's the next paragraph of Liberman's remarks concerning logic/intuitive:

"And Rev. Wright’s version of the left brain vs. right brain dichotomy is exaggerated, as most talk about the cerebral hemispheres is, but it’s also idiosyncratic. The usual exaggerated (not to say fabricated) functional opposition does oppose logic and intuition, but it also generally lines up language in the left brain vs. vision in the right brain, rather than Rev. Wright’s left-hemisphere “object oriented” vs. right-hemisphere “subject” or “person” oriented. In fact, there’s plenty of object-related neural processing that tends to be right-lateralized, such as visualization of mental rotation; and plenty of person-related neural processing that tends to be left-lateralized, such as the ability to speak."


docmom, I think you agree it's more complex than Wright presented it, but I also think you're ascribing a greater understanding of the issues to Wright, either than he actually has, or at least greater than he presented in his talk.

mercymom

And I agree 100% with what he said about overdiagnosing learning diabilities and overuse of drugs like Ritalin (and worse) on young children. Wright was spot on with that. Teachers are all too quick to label behavior that is just kids being kids as a disorder that needs "treatment" or medicine. A good friend of mine is dyslexic, and when she was 8 years old and couldn't read her teacher told her mother she was retarded and needed to be put in a "special school". Fortunately (they were living in Ithaca, NY) a prof at Cornell helped her mom teach her to read with phonics. Imagine if her mom had accepted a teacher's diagnosis of mental retardation instead. There was compelling truth in Wright's analysis on that score.

bz2010

The photo of her in the campaign literature for the primary in our state showed the most angry looking expression I have ever seen! No kidding! Scary! For the life of me, I can't understand why on Earth they would use that picture!

Yeah, but if a sports commentator in ANY way called attention to differences between the races regarding athleticism he would be fired, chastised and ostracised from the profession!

All this time, certain segments of society have fought hard for equality & integration - now people like Rev. Wright assert that we muct recognize and cater to their DIFFERENCES!

I guess someone finally figured out that you can't push for eguality & integration and continue to receive preferential treatment (i.e. affirmative action, quotas, etc.).

Can't be "the same" and "special/different" at the same time.

interesteddad

New Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll yesterday:

Who would Clinton supporters vote for in November with an Obama/McCain matchup:

Obama 47%
McCain 32%
Don't know 20%

That kind of exodus among mainstream Democratic party voters (including women) spells D-U-K-A-K-I-S in November and, probably the end of the Democratic Party given the impact on downticket races. I don't where the DNC would start picking up the pieces.

Hondu

Interestedad, where is the Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll on what Obama supporters would do if the Superdelegates steal the nomination for Hillary?