The New York Times had an interesting article about cursive handwriting on Wednesday: The Case for Cursive. Go read it. I'll wait. But if you hit the paywall, well, I'm sorry. And if you hit the paywall and really, really want to read it, email me and I'll send you the article!
Unsurprisingly, but apparently still newsworthy, the art of cursive handwriting is going down the drain as we all rely more and more on computers. In addition, the education system's current focus on standardized testing means that teachers are dedicating as much time as they can to topics covered by those tests, leaving very little time for handwriting classes.
I'm a little torn on how I feel about this. I remember being so excited about learning to write in cursive in second grade. And I remember being quite smug about how good my cursive was and the amount of praise I got from my second grade teacher for my handwriting. I continued to use cursive most of the time up until probably sometime in middle school. (I would give you an exact year, but sadly, my old yearbooks are stashed in my parents' house so I can't say for sure when I transitioned back to printing. Sad, right?) But since then? Printing all the way. And now that I'm not taking notes in class anymore, even my printing suffers on occasion.
Something about cursive still appeals to me though. It's pretty and fancy in a way that my printing will never be. And I like the fact that it looks a little old-fashioned to my modern sensibilities. And I chose to address all of our wedding invitations in cursive for both of those reasons and also because it felt proper to me--like my grandmother would have approved.
Despite the fact that I like the way it looks, it's not a skill that I need in everyday life, so I guess I'd be hard pressed to say that I think it's a terribly crucial skill for children to learn. The article does raise some interesting points though, particularly that kids who don't learn to write well in cursive have difficulty reading cursive, including important historical documents. This sounds a little crazy to me, until I remember that cursive writing looked like a mysterious secret code to me when I was in first grade. Will cursive handwriting become a skill that history students study in college in order to read primary sources?
Do you typically use cursive or printing? Do you think cursive is a skill that matters? Are you shrugging or appalled by the idea of the next generation not having cursive signatures?
Showing posts with label news commentary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news commentary. Show all posts
Friday, April 29, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
The Value of Talk
I have a New York Times widget on my smartphone. It allows me to amuse myself in the excessive amount of time I spend on public transportation, by reading the most e-mailed articles. At the top of today's list this morning was Talk Doesn't Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy. I have undergraduate and graduate degrees in psychology, and I work in social services, so this article should clearly appeal to me. Except all it did was annoy me.
The article implies that the troubled patients come in seeking help and are unjustly sent away with nothing. "Hold it. I'm not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don't think that's appropriate." What's wrong with that? Talk to your therapist, that's what he or she is there for. Oh, you don't have a therapist? "So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved." Okay, so call the referral. Is this the first time you've ever asked someone to help you with something and been told that someone else was better suited to help you and therefore you should get your help from them?
"Competition from psychologists and social workers — who unlike psychiatrists do not attend medical school, so they can often afford to charge less — is the reason that talk therapy is priced at a lower rate." There's so much wrong with this sentence I don't even know where to start. Maybe I'm projecting the condescension on the phrase "do not attend medical school," but I doubt it. Medical school is hard, doctors learn mountains of valuable information in medical school. But nothing about medical school is training anyone to be a competent therapist. You know what is? Psychology degrees. Social work school. Supervision in jobs and internships doing therapy. And the cost of medical school has nothing to do with reimbursement rates. The only thing it has anything to do with is the value that insurance companies and society put on medication management. The price of those degrees depends on whether your institution is public or private and whether you have assistantship funding (in the case of psychologists, for PhD vs. PsyD, both of which are psychologists).
Two years of an MSW at a private school will cost you about $68,000 (based on NYU, but it's all pretty similar), while four years of medical school at a private school will cost you about $185,000 (based both on NYU, and what about.com tells me is the AMA's statement of the average). According to payscale.com a fairly generous average pay for social workers is $45,000, while this NYTimes article claims $190,000 for psychiatrists. Soo... a little math. The education cost difference is about $117,000, social workers' favor. The pay difference is about $145,000, psychiatrists' favor. Even throwing in a generous bit for lost wages in two extra years of school and student loan interest, I give it about two years to pay off. I guess the other 38 years of your career are just a bonus. I don't have time to look up the costs and payscales for PsyDs and PhDs, but trust me that the math won't look that different. And once you throw in the public vs. private divide this whole paragraph will be pointless anyways.
"Dr. Levin has found the transition [from talk therapy psychiatry to medication management psychiatry] difficult." Okay, I understand. Your career changed mid-life. You're doing something different than what you anticipated spending your career doing. That can be disappointing. It must be very depressing to sit in your cushy office with "matching leather chairs, and African masks and a moose head on the wall." Also, "the median annual compensation for psychiatrists was about $191,000" and I can pretty much bet that an experienced psychiatrist in New York City makes a hell of a lot more than that. So forgive me for being a bit doubtful when the psychiatrists moan that taking a pay cut to do talk therapy "was no longer economically viable." You're making a choice. That's a fine choice, and I don't have a problem with it. But just own it, you want the higher paycheck, you take the medication management career.
"Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago." This is not because psychiatrists do not do talk therapy. This is because marginally effective psychiatric medication with not completely debilitating side effects now exists and because people want a quick fix and because insurance companies limit access to social workers and psychologists. Twenty years ago lengthy Freudian psychoanalysis was all we had to offer depressed patients, so that's what they got. Yes, Prozac, widely accepted as the first SSRI (though it was not quite, technically), was approved by the FDA in December 1987. Nostalgia for that era in mental health is like nostalgia for HIV/AIDS treatment of the early 90's.
I mean, it's an interesting story of this man's life, but it says so little about the actual state of mental health treatment and what it does say it says poorly. Really, New York Times? I expect better.
The article implies that the troubled patients come in seeking help and are unjustly sent away with nothing. "Hold it. I'm not your therapist. I could adjust your medications, but I don't think that's appropriate." What's wrong with that? Talk to your therapist, that's what he or she is there for. Oh, you don't have a therapist? "So Dr. Levin sent the man away with a referral to a less costly therapist and a personal crisis unexplored and unresolved." Okay, so call the referral. Is this the first time you've ever asked someone to help you with something and been told that someone else was better suited to help you and therefore you should get your help from them?
"Competition from psychologists and social workers — who unlike psychiatrists do not attend medical school, so they can often afford to charge less — is the reason that talk therapy is priced at a lower rate." There's so much wrong with this sentence I don't even know where to start. Maybe I'm projecting the condescension on the phrase "do not attend medical school," but I doubt it. Medical school is hard, doctors learn mountains of valuable information in medical school. But nothing about medical school is training anyone to be a competent therapist. You know what is? Psychology degrees. Social work school. Supervision in jobs and internships doing therapy. And the cost of medical school has nothing to do with reimbursement rates. The only thing it has anything to do with is the value that insurance companies and society put on medication management. The price of those degrees depends on whether your institution is public or private and whether you have assistantship funding (in the case of psychologists, for PhD vs. PsyD, both of which are psychologists).
Two years of an MSW at a private school will cost you about $68,000 (based on NYU, but it's all pretty similar), while four years of medical school at a private school will cost you about $185,000 (based both on NYU, and what about.com tells me is the AMA's statement of the average). According to payscale.com a fairly generous average pay for social workers is $45,000, while this NYTimes article claims $190,000 for psychiatrists. Soo... a little math. The education cost difference is about $117,000, social workers' favor. The pay difference is about $145,000, psychiatrists' favor. Even throwing in a generous bit for lost wages in two extra years of school and student loan interest, I give it about two years to pay off. I guess the other 38 years of your career are just a bonus. I don't have time to look up the costs and payscales for PsyDs and PhDs, but trust me that the math won't look that different. And once you throw in the public vs. private divide this whole paragraph will be pointless anyways.
"Dr. Levin has found the transition [from talk therapy psychiatry to medication management psychiatry] difficult." Okay, I understand. Your career changed mid-life. You're doing something different than what you anticipated spending your career doing. That can be disappointing. It must be very depressing to sit in your cushy office with "matching leather chairs, and African masks and a moose head on the wall." Also, "the median annual compensation for psychiatrists was about $191,000" and I can pretty much bet that an experienced psychiatrist in New York City makes a hell of a lot more than that. So forgive me for being a bit doubtful when the psychiatrists moan that taking a pay cut to do talk therapy "was no longer economically viable." You're making a choice. That's a fine choice, and I don't have a problem with it. But just own it, you want the higher paycheck, you take the medication management career.
"Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago." This is not because psychiatrists do not do talk therapy. This is because marginally effective psychiatric medication with not completely debilitating side effects now exists and because people want a quick fix and because insurance companies limit access to social workers and psychologists. Twenty years ago lengthy Freudian psychoanalysis was all we had to offer depressed patients, so that's what they got. Yes, Prozac, widely accepted as the first SSRI (though it was not quite, technically), was approved by the FDA in December 1987. Nostalgia for that era in mental health is like nostalgia for HIV/AIDS treatment of the early 90's.
I mean, it's an interesting story of this man's life, but it says so little about the actual state of mental health treatment and what it does say it says poorly. Really, New York Times? I expect better.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Judgy Internet Commentators
As I have started to watch people close to me get pregnant or consider pregnancy, and we have started contemplating a future pregnancy, I’ve thought a lot about babies and pregnancy. Between the internet and real life I’ve gotten to know the stories of many people who have started families with varying degrees of medical assistance. And, as someone in a same-sex relationship, I’ve thought a lot about conception, pregnancy, and parenting with the added complications of fertility treatment, donor sperm, and a judgmental society.
A conversation I had today sent me hunting for this article that I stumbled upon at some point in the past. Apparently, in the UK at least, there are women who go through the whole process of IVF and then decide to have abortions. The article alleges that many of these abortions are elective and not inspired by health concerns or viability of the pregnancies. On a basic emotional level this sounds confusing and disturbing. Why would women pour so much money and time and emotional energy into becoming pregnant only to change their minds? A doctor quoted in the article calls each abortion a “tragedy” and some anonymous group of opinionated “family campaigners” apparently accused the “women of treating babies like ‘designer goods’.” The comments, like comments on many online articles, are mostly angry and judgmental.
It makes me crazy how one-dimensional and uninformed people, particularly on the internet, are about issues like this. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. I am pro-choice, but I admit that I have hesitations about abortion, and I can’t imagine ever having one myself (even in the case of an accidental pregnancy, although that obviously is not a concern where I am in life now.) But Nicholas Kristof informs me that worldwide allowing 100 selectively aborted female fetuses would prevent the deaths of 15 infant girls per year. And I've met several women who do not regret their decisions to have abortions (not sex-selective or after IVF, but in general). Of course there are a lot of difficult issues that need to be addressed concerning fertility treatments, and more so as the procedures get more invasive. Of course new family compositions require adjustment in unexpected ways.
But just because I would not make the same decision as you, it does not mean that whatever you want to do is nonsensical or should be illegal. Sometimes we need to be comfortable with “I don’t know” and with big grey areas where a solution is right in the case of one particular family but wrong in the case of another similar particular family. In some ways we need to lower our expectations of women to not expect new moms or potential new moms to have all of their complex emotions worked out. And in other ways we need to raise our expectations of women to accept that new moms and potential new moms are uniquely situated to sort out the emotional complexity of their own life situations. And when the reality is in the middle, and those moms need to have their emotions worked out in order to make life changing decisions but aren’t there yet, we as friends, sisters, social workers, doctors, etc. need to step up with services and support, not criticism.
A conversation I had today sent me hunting for this article that I stumbled upon at some point in the past. Apparently, in the UK at least, there are women who go through the whole process of IVF and then decide to have abortions. The article alleges that many of these abortions are elective and not inspired by health concerns or viability of the pregnancies. On a basic emotional level this sounds confusing and disturbing. Why would women pour so much money and time and emotional energy into becoming pregnant only to change their minds? A doctor quoted in the article calls each abortion a “tragedy” and some anonymous group of opinionated “family campaigners” apparently accused the “women of treating babies like ‘designer goods’.” The comments, like comments on many online articles, are mostly angry and judgmental.
It makes me crazy how one-dimensional and uninformed people, particularly on the internet, are about issues like this. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. I am pro-choice, but I admit that I have hesitations about abortion, and I can’t imagine ever having one myself (even in the case of an accidental pregnancy, although that obviously is not a concern where I am in life now.) But Nicholas Kristof informs me that worldwide allowing 100 selectively aborted female fetuses would prevent the deaths of 15 infant girls per year. And I've met several women who do not regret their decisions to have abortions (not sex-selective or after IVF, but in general). Of course there are a lot of difficult issues that need to be addressed concerning fertility treatments, and more so as the procedures get more invasive. Of course new family compositions require adjustment in unexpected ways.
But just because I would not make the same decision as you, it does not mean that whatever you want to do is nonsensical or should be illegal. Sometimes we need to be comfortable with “I don’t know” and with big grey areas where a solution is right in the case of one particular family but wrong in the case of another similar particular family. In some ways we need to lower our expectations of women to not expect new moms or potential new moms to have all of their complex emotions worked out. And in other ways we need to raise our expectations of women to accept that new moms and potential new moms are uniquely situated to sort out the emotional complexity of their own life situations. And when the reality is in the middle, and those moms need to have their emotions worked out in order to make life changing decisions but aren’t there yet, we as friends, sisters, social workers, doctors, etc. need to step up with services and support, not criticism.
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