Happy Post Equinox, Welcome Spring

I bunnies in my yard and deer browsing and snoozing, especially young ones. Saw two woodchucks along the Thruway today, probably Chuck and Charlotte. Hawks in migration honkers landing at the pond nearby. Next will be bugs!

Thinking about the Gender, Identity article. What is described as an evolution seems pretty revolutionary to me. I wonder how things will be different for the kids coming up the pike just behind mine (who are 18 and 20 soon). Maybe generation gaps will become bleeps every 2 or 3 years. The current middle schoolers are growing up in a very different social environment than my kids did.

I wonder if emoticons may be used more commonly by boys because words escape them. Some of my mom friends tell me that boys move into a phase in adolescence in which they stop communicating, at least with their moms. Emoticons are pleasantly ambiguous so a kid may feel freer to use them because it's not like SAYING I love you, for instance. They are more suggestive instead of committing to a particular meaning.

Also wonder if the evenness of gender distribution is indicative of the profile of kids who blog rather than the population at large. In other words if you are a kid who is somewhat out-going and somewhat self-confident and you blog then the same things apply to both boys and girls. This may not be indicative of the population at large. Also, I wonder if the generalizations sound awfully WHITE to other people and what the socio-economic ramifications are?

The self-centeredness of girls as expressed by their greater likihood to have personal web pages, which is to say 'it's all about me' doesn't surprise me. Girls used to try out different presentations of who they are with or without make-up, hair color, clothes, blogs are another medium to try. Each of these are ways to see how they are perceived and how they feel. I wondered how many people had more than one blog?

As a librarian one of the current hot topics is information literacy. With such an overwhelming amount of information available, kids need to be taught how to find and evaluate information. What's credible, what's reliable, what has value and how do you tell the difference. Kids think they know more than they do. Not everything can be Googled (although it's amazing what can be, have you googled yourself lately, someone else may have!) They mistake their technological abiliity to use the hardware with the judgment they need to develop, when to use a database instead of a search engine, popular instead of peer-reviewed journals, etc. I have taught Information Literacy classes at a local college and it's very interesting to see WHAT STUDENTS DON'T KNOW THAT THEY DON'T KNOW!!!!!

With the way adolescence is revolving (revolution + evolving?) what 's next in 3 years or 5?