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Worst Week inWashington


The Fix’s By Chris Cillizza


feat. Four years ago, Fenty won the Democratic primary by nearly 30 points. Now, his political fortunes are in reverse, after he lost his reelection bid against D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray in last week’s primary — a loss that even Fen- ty’s staunchest allies acknowledged was preventable. According to a terrific report by my Post colleagues Nikita Stewart and Paul


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Schwartzman, Fenty’s advisers met with the wunderkind mayor way back in June to lay out his political problem in simple terms: People didn’t like him. Fenty’s reaction? He proclaimed himself “proud” of his record and stormed out of the room. Wrong move. The seeds of his loss were sown in that funda- mental miscalculation — that people vote on the policies, not the person. A Washington Post poll a few weeks before the primary vote highlighted Fen- ty’s error. Nearly six in 10 registered voters said the city was moving in the right direction, and nearly two-thirds said Fenty had accomplished a “great deal” or a “good amount” in his four years in office. But that same poll showed him losing to Gray by 13 points! Fenty lost because, while people liked his policies, they disliked his persona


more. In 2006, his disapproval rating among black voters in the District was 17 percent; in 2010, 56 percent of that critical voting bloc felt negatively about the mayor. What Fenty forgot — or ignored — is that politics is about relationships. Be- cause people felt that he didn’t care about them, his policy successes simply didn’t matter in the voting booth. Adrian Fenty, for forgetting a basic rule of Politics 101, you had the Worst Week in Washington. Congrats, or something.


Have a candidate for the Worst Week in Washington? E-mail chris.cillizza@wpost.com with your nominees.


o politician — we repeat, no politician — should ever lose an election when a majority of voters look favorably on what he or she has done in office. Yet on Tuesday, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty accomplished that


LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST Taking on the sexist frat boys of ’08 feminism from B1


breast cancer survivor who has lost a child.” Whew.


By the middle of Chapter 2, Traister’s book felt increasingly like the minutes of the Mean Girls Club — and a waste of this 53-year-old woman’s time. But with age comes patience. Good thing, too. I ended up admiring Traister and loving her book. In its best parts, it is a raw and brave memoir of a journalist who discovered that all is not well for women in America, and a description of how she and other young women are laying claim to their rightful place in the fight. Traister offers a first glimpse into her


JACQUELYN MARTIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS


reluctant but hopeful heart when she de- scribes following Michelle Obama on the campaign trail in late 2007: “It was No- vember in rural Iowa, and between the Hopperesque towns in which we were stopping we drove through farmland, and brittle leaves blew across the road. I had thrown some CDs into my bag, and at some point on the drive to Michelle’s next stump stomp, on a crisp bright day fol- lowing this crisp, bright woman, Bob Dy- lan’s ‘The Times They Are A Changing’ be- gan to play. I was thirty-three years old; I had no memories of the 1960s, in which the modern civil rights movement took hold, or of the 1970s, in which second- wave feminism bloomed. But I felt for a few minutes as though, on some small


highway east of everything urban in Iowa, I was living in the most powerful historic moment of my lifetime, as if the country I’d grown up in, with its rules and limitations and assumptions about who can do what and who can be what, was fi- nally beginning to fulfill Dylan’s decades- old promise.” Traister started out supporting John Ed- wards and opposed even the notion of President Hillary Clinton, but ended up sobbing when Clinton conceded. The au- thor is at her best when she explores the confusion and contradictions swirling


so different, after all, from those of his op- ponent. Hating Hillary had for decades been the provenance of Republican blow- hards, but now men on the left were spew- ing vitriol about her voice, her looks, her presumption — and without realizing it were radicalizing me in my support for Clinton more than the candidate herself ever could have.” Despite the setbacks and disappoint- ments, Traister believes the 2008 presi- dential race breathed new life into the women’s movement, in part because a new generation came to own it. Such a


Traister and other young women are laying claim to their rightful place in the fight.


within — and without. Boldly, she takes on the “frat boys” at MSNBC, as well as the many young, white males on Daily Kosand in the Obama campaign who trafficked in sexist and misogynist attacks on Clinton. “A pattern was emerging in the liberal,


privileged, predominantly white climes in which I worked and lived: young men were starry-eyed about Obama and puffed with outsized antipathy toward Clinton. . . . I was made uncomfortable by the per- sistent note of aggression that marked their reactions to Clinton, and puzzled by the increasingly cult-like devotion to Oba- ma, a man whose policy positions were not


youthful embrace of the women’s work yet to be done is exhilarating — for her generation and for mine. And therein lies my only caveat, which


Traister may see as a matronly repri- mand: Do resist tagging all of us over-50 feminists as dour discards. Your youthful vision is better than our crinkled eyes for navigating the future, but we hold your history in our hearts. We are still in the fight, increasingly with men foolish enough to mistake a woman’s sags for surrender. We were once you, and one day you will be us.


bookworld@washpost.com


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SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010


‘I can’t study today. I didn’t take my meds.’


So over the summer I decided to do by Nancy Schnog H


ere’s a scene that 20 years teaching English never quite prepared me for. It’s 10:00 a.m., the end of a short break between classes


on a bright fall morning. My 11th-graders trickle into literature class, chatting while finishing off peanut butter bars and sugar donuts. In marches a perfectly likable young person who announces to all within ear- shot: “Good morning, Ms. Schnog. Oh, I can’t study today. I didn’t take my meds.” “Ummm,” I utter, before falling mute.


What now? Give a mini-lesson on Benja- min Franklin and the power of the will? Introduce Mary Baker Eddy’s concept of mind over matter? Grin neutrally or dis- approvingly? Ignore this altogether and launch my lesson on Emily Dickinson? Uncertain how to proceed, I intone


something half-baked, sprinkled with cheery uplift. “Of course you can.” Pause and stammer. “Drugs don’t control us.” The less-than-three-minute exchange trails off into an apologetic retreat, as I mumble about my fear of side effects and my wish that we lived in simpler times. There it was: the “teachable moment,” an occasion to bring this student to a pow- erful insight about educational responsi- bility. And I was making a mess of it.


what I tell my students to do when they confront a perplexing question: research it. I realized that though I prefer to let the school nurse or the students’ doctors handle “meds,” medication talk is surfac- ing more frequently in the classroom. If teachers are going to deal with it — rath- er than avoid or squash these exchanges — we need solutions. I started with Judith Warner’s recent


book, “We’ve Got Issues: Parents and Children in the Age of Medication,” which explores the complicated matter of parents’ decisions to medicate their children. (I knew some of this complex- ity personally, having once been told to give my child Ritalin.) Warner shows how parents are buffeted between pro- medication advice and anti-medication warnings. The book helped me accept that, no matter one’s own preferences — mine used to tend toward the anti- medication end of the spectrum — med- ical interventions into learning are here to stay. After reading Warner, I sought the ex-


pertise of Nancy Rappaport, a child-and- adolescent psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School. She said she sees more educators, in both private and public schools, being asked to manage the “emotional and diagnostic world of kids.” For most of them, it’s uncharted territory that can include uncomfortable


moments — like the ones I had experi- enced. “When a student announces, ‘I can’t study today because I didn’t take my meds,’ she’s checkmating the teacher, who was most likely never trained to dis- cuss this issue,” Rappaport explained. She made clear that students deserve


privacy and that it’s not the place of teachers to get involved with — or make judgments about — individual medical challenges. But that doesn’t mean teach- ers can’t do anything. They can respect boundaries and still foster discussions about “the art of self-care.” Sleep, nutri- tion, exercise, relaxation — none of this should be outside their scope. Yet those conversations are typically


the first to be edged out by the long shad- ow of “instructional minutes.” When some teachers must spend every mo- ment preparing students for standard- ized exams, it’s hard to imagine them de- touring into a serious discussion about a good night’s sleep and three square meals a day. Additionally, while some teachers feel comfortable talking with students about life outside the class- room, others do not. I have no problem cutting short my Dickinson lesson to ad- dress my students’ school-inflicted frus- trations, but with a test scheduled for Friday, I might decide to skip that talk. Rappaport understands this. But, she


says, teachers and administrators need to confront today’s medical realities and make time for them in the curriculum. Conversations with students will flow more readily, she believes, as teachers learn more about psychotropic drugs and their side effects and grasp more ful- ly the biases that they may have regard- ing these treatments. “We all have our as- sumptions and reflexive responses to medications,” she stressed. “What is truly important for teachers is that they are fa- miliar enough with major mental health issues — mood, depression, fatigue, fo- cus — so they can better serve as gate- keepers, directing students to the re- sources they need.”


Still, I wondered about the in-the- moment exchange — what to say to the student in front of me whose pill is in the kitchen. Here I got help from Annie Fox, a San Francisco-based school consultant and parent educator who also offers on- line advice to teenagers. She says dis- arming a student’s “I can’t study because I forgot my meds” demands a teacher’s direct response. You have to try to solve the problem and set a precedent for simi- lar exchanges. Fox advises teachers to plan reminder tactics with students — an automatic e-mail or a strategically placed sticky note — and urge personal


LUBA LUKOVA


responsibility (no blaming Mom or Dad). But teachers can go deeper. It is up to them, Fox says, to help students under- stand what they’re capable of, so they can perform daily to the best of their ability. Strengthen their knowledge of an “inner tool set,” Fox says, and you have students who are better able to manage a variety of stressful situations throughout their lives. Still, many families decide to keep children’s medical and psychological in- formation private. What is right for fami- lies, however, can translate into chal- lenges for teachers: another degree of separation from the whole child and an obstacle to making nuanced assessments of the entire class. To better understand the responsibili- ties of teachers facing these murky con- ditions, I turned to William R. Stixrud, a specialist in the evaluation of children with learning disabilities and a lecturer at the George Washington University School of Medicine. Stixrud shifted my focus, drawing connections between kids on medication and adolescents at large. He argues that while schools have been quick to accommodate pharmaceu- tical treatments, they have been slower to address the pressures in teens’ lives that add to the ranks of those seeking medical solutions. “No discussion of medication is complete,” he told me, “without a discussion of the many kids who wouldn’t need them if the lifestyle adults structured wasn’t so brain-un- friendly.” Stixrud’s list of what schools could of- fer to help teens includes later school


start times; homework policies that re- duce assignments at night, when mental efficiency is low; balancing course loads to keep stress manageable; and physical outlets, such as exercise and meditation, that help students manage tension. These changes would, in Stixrud’s words, “make kids happier, learn better and have fewer mental problems.” I agree with his philosophy, although


my wish to see high schools do a better job raising physically and psychologi- cally healthy students doesn’t solve my immediate problem in the classroom. But the insights I garnered from my summer research do help. We’re several weeks into a new school year now, and I’m confident that I’m better prepared for the day I hear another student say: “I can’t study because I didn’t take my meds.” I shouldn’t shy away from that conversation. I’m not going to pry or overstep the bounds of privacy, but I’m not just going to stand there and stam- mer. My summer project has morphed into a project for this fall: designing strat- egies for my students to better under- stand their own study habits and capac- ities for perseverance and resiliency. I am using exploratory exercises such as free-writing assignments and learning diaries to help my students think about how they can do their best work. It’s a good lesson for everyone: learn- ing to be ready to learn, even on the bad days.


Nancy Schnog teaches English at the McLean School in Potomac.


Outlook’s editors welcome comments and suggestions. Write to us at outlook@washpost.com.


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