non-commital

For some reason, I'm finding it very difficult to stick with one book until it's finished (except books I have to read for class). Right now, I'm somewhere in the middle of:

• Neon Vernacular - Yusef Komunyakaa
• The Little Book of Guesses - John Gallaher
• Clueless in Academe - Gerald Graff
• The Demon and the Angel - Edward Hirsch
• A Company of Three - Varley O'Connor
• Gathering the Tribes - Carolyn Forche (imagine the accent mark, b/c I don't know how to make one)
• Nickeled and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich

The worst is The Demon and the Angel, which I started sometime in August. I imagine I would be enjoying all of these books a lot more if I would just spend some quality time with each one individually instead of haphazardly grabbing one off my desk when I have time to read.

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I tried to have a discussion with my students about gender roles today. Well, I did have a discussion with them, it just didn't go the way I imagined. I thought it would be pretty standard for people younger than me to have at least borderline feminist thoughts about marriage and gender equality, but they don't. We started off talking about men & women's roles w/in marriage, and probably 2/3rds of my students said a traditional division would be best. Then I asked them about Hilary Clinton, and no one thought America would benefit from having a female president (no mention of her actual qualifications, just her gender). When I asked them why it mattered that Clinton is female, the answer was pretty much "because it does."

Now, I'm not a politically minded person. I don't follow it all as closely as I should and certainly don't get fired up about much. But I was shocked to see that even the few students who were against traditional gender roles in their personal lives thought that a woman president would be bad news. I guess I'm more of a feminist than I thought.