minoanmiss | A realization

There's a poem I read, which started as a slam poem performance, where the speaker lists qualifications she wants for president, including having had an abortion, having lived on food stamps, being a lesbian, and so on. It deserves far better than my half recollection.

I found this out because of ridiculous political stunting (some MAGAt found out VP Harris worked at McDonald's as a teen and called her a LYING LIAR for not including that on her current resume) but I realized one ticket is made up of someone who worked at McDonalds' and who fought against sexual abuse and of someone who taught public high school and sponsored a GSA in the 1990s. I kind of like the opportunities for understanding they exposed themselves to.

Besides the other ticket includes someone who went to Yale [1]

[1] This is a self-referential joke, in part to prevent myself from listing all the things I do actually think are faults of Mr. Vance. I can think of few people who made me hate them as quickly as he did.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dissectionist

Working retail, fast food, or child service (being a camp counselor) is actually one of the things I look for when considering student applications for our cancer lab. If you’ve done those jobs, you know how to survive a stressful environment, you know how to work hard, you know how to work with a team at a high level, you know how to cope with tedium, and you know how to eat shit and keep going.

I never want our students’ experience with our lab to involve eating shit, but if they’ve learned that in the past, they know skills like when to concede and how to let things go. That’s crucial when working in a lab with a lot of ambitious high achievers; they’re unavoidably going to step on each others’ toes sometimes, and we don’t want ongoing interpersonal conflicts between the students impeding our ability to help our patients. They need to know how to let things go and become a functioning team again.

So as far as Harris goes, I see her having worked at McDonald’s in the same light as I do for our applicants, which is that you learn a hell of a lot of useful social skills working in an environment like that, and all other things being equal, anyone who’s done it is a better candidate than one who hasn’t.

Edited (realized i left out an important bit) Date: 2024-08-31 06:53 pm (UTC)

From:

amaebi

+1000.

From:

cmcmck

This!

I had a weekend job in a café at Brands Hatch motor racing circuit as a teenager and the social skills I learned there were useful when I became a teacher of kids with special needs!

From:

dissectionist

I’ve sat with this all day because I wasn’t sure I had the energy to weigh into this, and I’m still not sure that I do. But as a disabled person, I’m like a lot of other disabled folks who feel that “special needs” is offensive for a number of reasons, and I’d like to ask you to stop using it. The children you serve are disabled, and that’s fine. There’s nothing shameful about disability and we don’t need to use euphemisms to distance them from it. Also, they don’t have special needs, they just have needs. Their needs take different forms, the same way that any child’s needs take different forms, but they’re still all just needs like any other kid has: the needs to eat, drink, use the toilet, be social, learn, be loved and cared for, and understand their world to the best of their ability.

The pushback against “special needs” from the disability community isn’t new. There’s research from nearly a decade ago showing that “special needs” is more stigmatizing than just identifying kids as disabled. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5256467/ ). And many of us have addressed that disabled people’s needs are the same as anyone else’s. Here’s an article from another disabled person on the topic: https://hellomichelleswan.com/my-needs-are-not-special/ . But if you want to read plenty more, just Google “my needs are not special” - lots of us talk about this, and if you check dates, we’ve been trying to bring awareness to this for a long time.

So please, please consider not using that term anymore. It made my heart sink to see it today, especially from someone in a position of authority over disabled children.

As for a replacement: preferences for “disabled children” (identity-first language) or “children with disabilities” (person-first language) differs by the specific disability community. I don’t know which ones you’re serving. If it’s intellectual disability or Down Syndrome, those communities default to person-first; use that for them, because then you’ll be right the vast majority of the time. If it’s vision disability, hearing disability, or autism, default to identity-first because then you’ll be right the vast majority of the time. There’s never going to be unanimous agreement, so if, for example, a particular autistic person wants you to call them “a person with autism” instead, of course you do that for them. But defaulting to what the majority of a community wants used is the safest way to go in general.

I’m not up-to-date enough on other disability communities to tell you what the people affected (not their parents or caregivers) want used. A good place to start is checking what patient self-advocacy groups for that disability are using.

I specify “not parents/caregivers” because we see this a lot in the autism community, where many allistic (non-autistic) parents/caregivers of autistic children still have a lot of ableism and use distancing like “person with autism” and “on the spectrum” or even “lives with autism” (as if it’s a roommate or something). Autistic folks themselves far prefer “autistic person” - the last study I saw showed an 82% preference for identity-first among autists. So what parents-of-disabled want may not be what the disabled themselves want, and our feelings should be prioritized as to what we’re called. (Of course when talking directly to the parents in your role as a teacher, use whatever won’t get you in trouble.)

From:

minoanmiss

You're absolutely right, and I say this as someone who didn't really do any of those jobs (I did unpaid childcare, but that was more being lent out by my parents). Relatedly I am a pretty touchy person and was quite bad at "letting things go" in my youth. I definitely could have used more practice at it.

From:

dissectionist

Yeah, I did babysitting but taking care of kids 1-2 times a week is definitely different than having responsibility for kids all day every day. I did get a job at an ice-cream place once but then my parents wouldn’t let me take it; it was really frustrating to have gone through the effort of putting in a resume and passing an interview, only to then have to tell the owners that I couldn’t do it after all. (My parents’ view was that my school grades sucked, and school was supposed to be my “job”, so if I couldn’t do school then they weren’t going to let me work.)

From:

med_cat

Well said

From:

lb_lee

I mean, you never know, what's the statistic, 1/4 people have abortions who have the anatomy for it? Harris could have had one and you'd never know.

(Maybe Walz too. You never know, the world is full of mystery and wonder!)

From:

full_metal_ox

It’s a general rule of thumb that you know a lot more (shamed category) than you think you do.

From:

lb_lee

Well said!

From:

full_metal_ox

I mean, where did all this left-handedness suddenly come from once we stopped whacking kids with +5 Steel Rulers of Smiting?

From:

chanter1944

The fact that Mr. Walz sponsored a GSA deliberately and with intent, knowing what it would mean to have a football coach step up in this particular way, earns him major, *major* respect points with me. I say this as someone who grew up closeted queer in a small upper Midwestern town in the '90's and early 2000's.

From:

cellio

In addition, who includes everything on a resume anyway? Career counselors advise against that. That's not lying. The MAGAts are being ridiculous.

But also, as you said, knowing she had that kind of job is a positive for me, not a negative.

Edited Date: 2024-09-01 02:09 am (UTC)

From:

bikergeek

Right? I've been in the workforce for ~40 years. Of course I'm going to leave off the early positions that aren't relevant to my current career path. Nobody cares that I worked pounding a cash register at various retail jobs in the '80s, delivering flowers in 1989-90, or office-temping 1990-92.

From:

med_cat

Exactly, and even after a few years of working in healthcare, I started leaving the lab job I had in college off the resume, because: no longer relevant to the current job search

From:

full_metal_ox

[1] This is a self-referential joke, in part to prevent myself from listing all the things I do actually think are faults of Mr. Vance. I can think of few people who made me hate them as quickly as he did.

Allow me: here’s an example directly relevant to the topic. Mr. Vance, in his inimitable fashion, graces some poor donut shop clerks with his illustrious presence:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M__GVAqEPXM

From:

rachelkg

I have heard that humans enjoy donuts.

Also that asking humans about themselves and pretending to care about the answers fosters a sense of connection and belonging -- what they call "friendly".

"OK good"

There, I did a friendly! see?

From:

minoanmiss

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

From:

full_metal_ox

And I will reassure them that our meeting is going to be fun with a greeting I learned from talk radio. Where you can listen to humans talk.

(“The zoo is coming to town!” is fine coming from a morning drive-time shock jock, but there’s an inherent contradiction in trying to come across as a force of zany chaos to the people you’re proposing to govern.)

Edited Date: 2024-09-06 04:25 am (UTC)