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LOS ALTOS, Calif. — The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

.       .       .       .       .

“Engagement is about human contact, the contact with the teacher, the contact with their peers,” said Pierre Laurent, 50, who works at a high-tech start-up and formerly worked at Intel and Microsoft. He has three children in Waldorf schools, which so impressed the family that his wife, Monica, joined one as a teacher in 2006.

[W]here advocates for stocking classrooms with technology say children need computer time to compete in the modern world, Waldorf parents counter: what’s the rush, given how easy it is to pick up those skills?

“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” [Alan] Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

That doesn’t mean the Waldorf School approach is cheaper–in fact, I”m sure it’s quite the contrary.  I get it that the “gotcha” here is the fact that so many of the parents in this particular school are highly placed in the tech industry–but I bet that the majority of educators are thinking along the very same lines, and would choose schools like Waldorf if they can afford the price of admission ($17,750 for K-8 and $24,400 for high school!  Yikes.)

As I have argued here before, we know what works.  And as Jonathan Rees constantly argues, technology is being used primarily now to cut corners rather than to improve education.  There are precious few innovations in education at any level of the curriculum that amount to more than a hill of beans beyond good teacher training, reasonable teacher:student ratios, and permitting teachers the liberty to innovate and solve problems on their own. 

The ruling class has always known what works, and they’re still willing to pay the price for it.  Why isn’t it ever good enough for the masses of middle class and poor children in the public schools?

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

How do you like them apples?  That’s Steve Jobs’s great respect for American workers and professionals:  deregulate until this place runs like China, “break” teachers’ unions, and keep those schmucks on the job until 6 p.m. every night year-round.  (I guess he must have felt really poorly served by his elementary school teachers.  How much richer and more successful might he have become if they had stayed at school until after 6 p.m.?) 

Go click on the story and read the whole thing–I didn’t even quote all of the pi$$ing contest-y stuff between Jobs and Obama, if you can believe it!

My understanding was that the increase in paper costs nearly 20 years ago led most academic publishers to switch from footnotes (at the bottom of each page) to endnotes (at the back of the book.)  Somehow, I was informed, this saves paper.  I can remember the last time I read a book with footnotes–ironically, it was Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote:  A Curious History (1997), which I re-read with my graduate seminar a few weeks ago, and which for obvious reasons offers footnotes rather than endnotes.  (Horowitz’s exploration on the life and death of the footnote uses and cites Grafton generously, too.)  But I think when it was published 14 years ago, it was already exotic for having resisted a publisher’s insistence on endnotes.

My foremost concern about e-books–or perhaps more specifically with the Kindle, although I hope those of you in the know will inform me if this is true of other e-readers–is that it makes citations by students unnecessarily annoying.  My students who read their course books on Kindles don’t see page numers, so that when they cite their Kindle editions they give me a bull$hitte “location” that is meaningless and moreover useless to me, a non-Kindle (in fact, anti-Kindle) owner/reader, should I need to check the citation.

What are the rest of you historians and humanities types doing about student citations of e-books?  Would it kill the Kindle to offer the option of reading the book with page numbers included?  Does anyone remember the non-existant “trend” of citing journal articles online by paragraph number, rather than just pulling up a PDF and checking the page number from the print edition?  Who actually enjoys reading articles in HTML?  (I read and cite the PDF, and that’s what how vastly vast majority of books and articles I read now are citing journal articles, although I’m sure their authors are like me and mostly accessing them online.)  Can we hope this Kindle crappiness will fade away from disuse, or is that a bridge too far?  What do all of you think about these questions, both as writers and readers of scholarly notes?

From my perspective, Jobs is an odd person to lionize.  Don’t get me wrong–he helped develop and sell a number of remarkably nifty gadgets, but he wasn’t the inventor.  He was the CEO of Apple–a company that moved most of its manufacturing to China.  So all of the comparisons to Thomas Edison seem way overblown, and quite frankly, I don’t think his business model was as progressive as Henry Ford’s.  Can the Chinese laborers who assemble our i-Pods, i-Pads, and i-Phones afford to buy them themselves, in the way that Ford made sure his employees were well-paid enough to afford cars of their own?  There is all of that River Rouge business, I know, but Jobs didn’t need to call the Pinkertons in to bust up strikes.  He shipped those manufacturing jobs overseas to an authoritarian country where they don’t have to fuss with unions, or strikes, or most of the other tiresome aspects that come with employing human beings.

All new! This time with sparkles!

Do you ever get the impression that there truly is nothing new under the sun in education?  Do you ever think that we end up re-inventing the wheel, year after year?  Well, this American Radio Works documentary “Don’t Lecture Me” won’t disabuse you of those suspicions!

I promise, I sat down Monday night to listen to it with an open mind.  Although it teased me that it would show me how lecturing in college classrooms is a complete waste of time compared to the New! Improved! Revolutionary! way to teach developed by some physicists, I came away with the valuable insight that I’m already doing these things, and I bet you are too.

First of all, did you know that lecturing to your students for 50 or 75 minutes in a monotone voice without permitting any student questions or interaction isn’t the best way to teach your subject?  Amazing.  This is what this program defines as “the traditional college lecture.”  The takeaway point is that there needs to be active learning in the classroom, viz., expecting students to read books outside of class; asking students to write brief responses to their assigned readings in class; asking students to answer questions or solve problems when you are explaining key concepts (or “lecturing”) to them; and asking students to explain key concepts to each other during class.  Did you know that exactly zero percent of college professors in “traditional universities” do this right now?

I’m starting to think that “the traditional college lecture” is, like the “typical professor schedule of working only 6 to 9 hours per week” and the “typical narrow, pointless faculty research agenda” and the “typical six-figure salary for tenured professors,” a myth invoked to trash us and our work with the specific goal of minimizing the importance of having an expert in a field as the instructor of record in most college classes.

Amazingly, no one in this program ever suggests that smaller class sizes and teacher:student ratios might have something to do with learning.  Instead, a physicist at Harvard is described as a veritable pioneer of pedagogy for–hold onto your hats!–using clickers in his large, lecture-hall sized classroom and asking students to “discuss” a problem when there’s some controversy about the right answer and how to go about finding it.  (Those of you who don’t teach at Harvard will probably wonder how effective peer explanations will be at “enhancing” student learning.  I mean no disrespect to most college students–but it seems a little too slam-dunky to set up Harvard undergrads as our test subjects for the effectiveness of peer-to-peer education!  It might be good to try this method at, for example, the University of Massachusetts and Salem State College to test it on a variety of student bodies.  I’m just sayin’! )

This program’s neo-liberal heart becomes crystal-clear when you hear its denigration of research–which everyone knows makes all professors unavailable to students and does nothing whatsoever to enhance their teaching.  Its glowing portrait of the University of Minnesota, Rochester is quite telling:

There are no lecture halls at the University of Minnesota Rochester. There are also no fraternities, no football team, not even a library – everything is online. If you want a book you can order it from one of the other U of M campuses, but only professors request them. Students get all the information they need through their laptops. There are about 100 freshmen and 35 sophomores. The plan is to expand the size of the class each year until there are about 1,000 students.

UMR does have a campus. To get there you enter a downtown shopping mall and take an elevator up. Most of the campus fits into the top two floors of the mall, where a food court and a movie theater used to be. The space has been renovated into offices, a commons area, a tutoring center and state-of-the-art classrooms.

UMR takes classroom design seriously. There is no “front of the room” as there is in a typical lecture hall.

“We removed the front so that we would move away from having one authority who disseminates knowledge,” says vice chancellor Claudia Neuhauser. The goal is to put the focus “much more on the students,” she says.

To see this philosophy in action, I visit a biology class. It starts with an assignment. The students have to write a multiple choice question based on the material they’ve been learning.

“You know you understand something when you can teach somebody else,” says the professor, Kesley Metzger. “So if a student can’t write a question, then it gives them an idea that they don’t fully understand the material.”

The students work in small groups to write the questions. All the furniture is on wheels to allow students to work together like this. Each group has a portable dry-erase board that students use to compose their questions. When they’re done, they hang their boards on the wall so the rest of the class can see.

What a relief to know that there’s nothing in books these students can use, and how little research they’ll be required to do, what with no library!  The new classroom space sounds terrific and probably does permit more innovation in teaching–and lord knows, many of us are stuck with classrooms designed in the 1950s and 1960s.  (And of course I’m completely down with doing away with the free farm club sports teams and fraternities.)  But what’s this about the pointlessness of old-school lecturing?

Professor Metzger stops the class at various points to give explanations of certain topics or ideas, but for most of the class the students are doing the talking, responding to assignments designed to get them thinking and talking about the material they are learning.

All of the classes at UMR are designed to work like this.

“There may be a brief lecture at the beginning,” says chancellor Lehmkuhle, “but then [students] are given problems and they’re working on things together as teams.”

Oh–so there’s still lecturing, but it’s interspersed with stuff the rest of us do, too, in our 1950s and 60s classrooms.  What’s the real goal of this model of higher education?

Metzger circulates around the room throughout class, answering questions and probing students’ understanding. She’s assisted by her co-instructor Andy Petzold. There are 48 students, and the instructors get to all of them during the hour and 40 minute class. Chancellor Lehmkuhle says this model is designed to work in classes with up to 100 students and he expects some classes at UMR will eventually be that size.

“It’s not the size of the class, it’s the contact with the students. That’s what we’re paying attention to,” he says. “You could have a class with 10 students and if the faculty member just lectures and doesn’t really interact with you very much it’s not any different than if you were in a class of 200 students. It’s how interactive you can make the environment.”

Yeah–all of those 10-person seminars with a faculty member who “doesn’t really interact” with the students are complete drags.  Professor Pushbutton to the rescue!

There are also two types of professors at UMR. One group’s only responsibility is to work with students; they’re called “student-based” faculty and they’re not expected to do any research.

Andy Petzold is a student-based faculty member. When he’s not teaching classes, he works in UMR’s tutoring center, which is like a walk-in clinic where students can get help at any time during the day. Petzold says he may eventually pursue a more traditional faculty position, but this job is an opportunity to learn about teaching that he wouldn’t get at other universities.

The other group of professors is called “learning design” faculty. They are expected to do research not just in their discipline but in education as well.

“They’re actually tenured and promoted on their ability to do research on the learning of their students,” says chancellor Lehmkuhle.

That means for example that a biologist has to do research on how people learn – not something biologists traditionally do. But UMR is all about breaking traditions. Perhaps not surprisingly, almost all of the professors here are relatively young; it’s their first or second job out of graduate school. They came to UMR because they want to be part of a new way of doing things.

Actually, my guess is that “they came to UMR because” UMR offered them a job.  And if they never had tenure or a tenure-track job, they’ll never know what they’re missing, will they?

I can’t imagine being expected to to “do research not just in [my] discipline but in education as well.”  Then again, how hard can it be, when we already know pretty much how to design a wheel?  (Add sparkles?  Playing cards in the spokes?  A bell that sounds like a kitty mewing?)  We can laugh–but really, the charlatanism inherent in these hinky schemes should make us cry.  I’m with Jonathan Rees–let’s all take a page out of Lydia Pinkham’s or Madame C.J. Walker’s book and slap a new and improved label on what we’ve been doing all along.  Because, in spite of the limited time and resources the vast majority of us have been struggling with for the past several years, it’s what still works.

Toldyaso! I SO told you so.

Guess what?  Online “academies” for K-12 students?  Not such an awesome idea!  Grace Hood has an alarming report on KUNC radio on the money paid to the for-profit company K12 Inc. to administer “COVA,” the Colorado Virtual Academy (click here to read or listen to it):

At a time when public schools are seeing deep cuts in funding, there’s a growing market for companies running online elementary, middle and high schools. The largest for-profit company overseeing these programs in Colorado is Virginia-based company K12 Inc. While public schools are struggling to survive, K12 Inc.—with the support of state tax dollars—is reporting double digit profits. Meantime, it’s not measuring up to state academic standards.

To be fair, the kinds of students who end up seeking an education online are not those who are having success in traditional schools.  But instead of spending the money on human teachers to teach classes in bricks-and-mortar schools, let’s instead send $22 million a year to Virginia for an “online academy:”

Student enrollment at COVA has grown to about 5,000 thanks in part to marketing by K12. But despite the allure of flexibility and education from home, COVA is finding a relatively high number of students are dropping out. Last year the school reported a 12 percent graduation rate. That’s compared to a 72 percent average for all public high schools statewide.

Let’s try a thought experiment that I saw on Corrente recently in a post by Lambert (sorry–can’t find the exact post):  substitute the words But despite with Because of.  So:  Because of the allure of flexibility and education from home, COVA is finding a relatively high number of students are dropping out.  This I’m sure is obvious to any teacher or professor in the known universe.  Students who do not have the drive, skills, reading ability, or whatever to succeed in traditional mass education classes will not be well served by COVA or any online school.  I’m not saying that those students were all well-served by their schools–far from it, I’m sure.  I’m saying that the answer is clearly not a magical online fairy godteacher.  (What would most of you have done with all of that “flexibility” of “education from home?”  And now the kids these days have the world-wide timewasting pR0n-shilling internets at their disposal, when all we had was Space Invaders, Philip Roth novels, and clove cigarettes! And by the way:  88% is not a relatively high percentage of dropouts–that’s a shockingly high percentage compared to pretty much any dropout rate you can imagine.)  The story continues:

“I’m not going to lie to you about that. We’ve had some downward trends,” says Katherine Knox, director of school improvement for Colorado Virtual Academy. “But we’ve also had individual and small group successes.”

Overall, the state rated COVA academically as a “turnaround” school—the lowest of four academic rankings after it mis-administered statewide assessment tests last year. But after an appeal, COVA is one ranking better, listed as “priority improvement.” However, academically COVA is not alone. More than half of the state’s online multi-district schools are getting poor marks.

So with the state spending $5900 per pupil what are students, parents and taxpayers getting? Is anyone holding online management organizations accountable?

Short answer:  no.  And yet, we have faith that “throwing money at” computers and technology at a for-profit company in Virginia will solve problems that mere human teachers can’t.  In fact, we are rather busy beating up on teachers and underfunding their pensions and health care plans while we in Colorado are sending $22 million dollars a year to Virginia for a graduation rate of twelve percent.  This scandal is a bonus twofer: it’s the old online scama-lama-ding-dong plus the handover of public money for the privatization of public services.

Sing it with me so that they can hear you in Virginia, friends: AWESOME!!!  (And thanks to Grace Hood and KUNC for the excellent report.)

The class, and the Kyrene School Districtas a whole, offer what some see as a utopian vision of education’s future. Classrooms are decked out with laptops, big interactive screens and software that drills students on every basic subject. Under a ballot initiative approved in 2005, the district has invested roughly $33 million in such technologies.

The digital push here aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom, turning the teacher into a guide instead of a lecturer, wandering among students who learn at their own pace on Internet-connected devices.

.       .       .       .      .       .      .       .      

Hope and enthusiasm are soaring here. But not test scores.

Since 2005, scores in readingand math have stagnated in Kyrene, even as statewide scores have risen.

To be sure, test scores can go up or down for many reasons. But to many education experts, something is not adding up — here and across the country. In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.

Read the whole thing, if you haven’t already.  This gets to one of the big issues embedded in the War on Teachers I’ve been railing about here for the past few years.  Whether we’re talking about purchasing standardized testing services or classroom technology, this represents a redirection of school district resources away from teachers (a female-dominated profession) and towards technology (software and hardware engineering and sales are male-dominated).  Lest you think Historiann is broadcasting to you from within a tinfoil-lined chamber and channelling messages she’s getting from her silver fillings–

To some who favor high-tech classrooms, the resource squeeze presents an opportunity. Their thinking is that struggling schools will look for more efficient ways to get the job done, creating an impetus to rethink education entirely.

“Let’s hope the fiscal crisis doesn’t get better too soon. It’ll slow down reform,” said Tom Watkins, the former superintendent for the Michigan schools, and now a consultant to businesses in the education sector.

I’ve been thinking over these issues since talking to a neighbor recently who works as a salesman for a tech company selling standardized testing packages to school districts.  (By the way, he sends his children to a local private school in part because he thinks that the testing frenzy is totally overboard!)  My neighbor noted the ways in which his industry caused money to be redirected out of local school districts and towards corporations that probably don’t employ as many of your friends and neighbors as the local schools do–or used to, anyway.  In addition to the redirection of resources away from local communities, it struck me that there’s an important gender angle to this shift in spending as well, and this story in the New York Times about the Kyrene School District reveals the strikingly different expectations we have for evaluating (mostly women’s) labor in teaching versus (mostly men’s) labor as shillers and hucksters for technology with little to no demonstrated value.  Big surprise, right friends?

(Just an aside here, but sometimes I think the people who pin their hopes on technology actively and willfully ignore the ways in which they themselves use computers, smart phones, and the world-wide non-peer reviewed timewasting internets.  Do children really need to go to school to learn how to use “PowerPoint and educational games?”  Srsly?  How on earth did I ever figure out these complex timewasters all by myself, without ever having taken a single PowerPoint or computer games course?  Or is the state of children’s lives now so free of playtime that we have to schedule time for them to fart around with computers during school hours?) 

What do you think?  What have you seen and heard in your local schools?  Why the free pass on “technology” and only punishment and rebuke for human faculty?

Artwork by Stefani Rossi and Chloe Leisure

Over at The Clutter Museum, Leslie M-B has a great analysis of the moonbeams and sparkleponies of something called “lecture capture.”  What is “lecture capture?”  It sounds like a digital recording of a professor’s lectures that has all of the pitfalls and no advantages beyond old-fashioned video taping, except that the “product” can be posted on proprietary software.  It doesn’t take a technoskeptic like myself to see “lecture capture” as “intellectual capital capture” that can contribute mightily to the further adjunctification of our profession and the dumbing-down of public higher education.  Leslie explains:

This past week I received an e-mail alerting me that, because I teach in a particular classroom, I can have access to lecture capture this fall.  The e-mail, from the campus’s tech folks, reported that of students with access to this technology, 70 percent watched at least one capture per week, and 78 percent of students said they would like more classes to use lecture capture.  The lectures get posted to iTunesU and also to Blackboard (emphasis Historiann’s here.)

Those of you who know me well know that I have been an evangelist for the use of certain kinds of technology in higher ed–particularly blogs, wikis, c0llaborative mapping, and certain uses of mobile devices–but I’m deeply uneasy with lecture capture technology because I think it’s a step backward from the best uses of technology for instruction.

Lecturing and lecture capture are by their nature unidirectional. Yes, both lecturing and lecture capture could be made interactive–lecturing by peppering the class period with questions and activities, and lecture capture by adding some kind of commenting or discussion function wherever the audio and video are posted.  I have yet to see anyone use institutionally sponsored lecture capture in this way.

The lectures can be shared most easily within corporate repositories–Blackboard and iTunesU–rather than to open-source, not-for-profit educational repositories.  Yes, iTunesU has some fabulous stuff on it, but I’m not ready to share there.

It’s also too easy for the university to repurpose content in online courses that could be adjunctified. I’m not sure what the policy is at my current institution, but I signed away a lot of intellectual property rights at my last one.  In an age where people seem to think that education is just a matter of “delivering content” that translates into mad workplace skillz, I’m uneasy about providing the university with any multimedia content that could be aggregated into a enormous-enrollment course taught by a grossly underpaid and underinsured Ph.D.

Just go read the whole thing.  (I would just reprint it all here if it weren’t for my pesky respect for Leslie’s intellectual capital, my disinterest in “capturing” it for my own profit, and for Fair Use doctrine.)  In particular, instructors considering a flirtation with Satan Hirself should read this part:

There also may be a misunderstanding or miscommunication on the part of tech folks and their student workers that faculty should be driving this bus. A colleague was teaching in a classroom where a student was in charge of running the technology. She was going to review answers to a quiz they had taken in class, and she asked the student worker to turn off the lecture capture for that time period.  The student refused, saying she’d need to check with her boss.  Because the lectures can be posted automatically, the instructor wasn’t certain she’d have the opportunity to edit out that portion of the class (nor should she have to, I might add–the lecture capture should be at the instructor’s request).

There definitely was a gap in understanding between me and the technologist with whom I communicated about lecture capture. I asked if the system could capture students’ portions of class discussion, and I was told that the system captures only the instructor’s audio, and thus–and I’m quoting here–”we train faculty to REPEAT all questions before answering them, so that they are on the capture.”

Pony by Stefani Rossi and Chloe Leisure

Ah, yes.  Any technology that must be served rather than serves us seems to me fundamentally corrupt, if not also fundamentally pointless.  In the end, Leslie’s objections boil down to the fact that “lecture capture” feeds the fiction that 1) lecture is simply a delivery of “content,” and 2) that student questions/interactions with faculty are interruptions of that content delivery and are therefore unworthy of being recorded.  I’d like to add another point of objection, namely, that “lecture capture” feeds the popular idea among college students that going to class is optional rather than necessary to a college education. 

Take a look at a key sentence in that first paragraph of Leslie’s that I quoted above:  “The e-mail, from the campus’s tech folks, reported that of students with access to this technology, 70 percent watched at least one capture per week, and 78 percent of students said they would like more classes to use lecture capture.”  Well, 85% of my students think I assign too much reading, 75% resent the weekly essays I make them write, 60% think my grading standards are “ridiculous,” and 90% would prefer that I never asked them questions or demanded answers back during my lectures.  I’m sure your students are pretty much the same, unless you teach at Moonbeam Sparklepony University, where the students think they need to do more critical thinking on their feet, more reading, and more rigorous analysis in more essays throughout the semester, and demand more contact with faculty both in class and in office hours.

Where is the demand by faculty for “lecture capture?”  Why doesn’t that seem to matter to universities and their IT folks?

Here’s what happens: A couple arrives in our valley, young, strong, in love, and full of plans to build an ultra-energy-efficient house out of straw bales, rammed earth, adobe bricks, or, heck, used bottlecaps. They set to work with equal enthusiasm, buying land and setting up temporary quarters in a yurt or a tipi. The weather’s good, the views are great, and the new house is humming along.

But at some point, the weather turns, or the project slows. Or a baby arrives, and everything gets more complicated. For whatever reason, their brio fades, NOMWITTH (“Not one more winter in the tipi, honey.”) sets in, and what was once a joint project becomes a battlefield, XX vs. XY. In mild cases, help is hired, the house gets a roof, and all ends well. In more serious cases, one person — inevitably XX — splits town for a fully-furnished condo with central heating, leaving XY alone with the low-carbon dream.

So why is it always XX who bails out on “the dream?”  Is it that the solar panels can’t power up their hair dryers and curling irons and they miss watching E! and HGTV?  Hardly.  Nijhuis explains that it’s all about the work–the repetitive, indoor, and ephemeral labor that women do, versus the outdoor, public, permanent contributions their male partners make:

Many scholars — notably Ruth Schwartz Cowan, in her classic book More Work for Mother — have pointed out that the early-20th-century revolution in household technology, despite its many promises, didn’t actually save middle-class women any time. Washing machines meant that people hired fewer servants, had larger wardrobes, and washed their clothes more frequently. Vacuum cleaners led to higher standards of carpet cleanliness. Yet these inventions did change the nature of household work, rescuing women of all classes from at least some of its sweaty, undervalued drudgery.

Too often, modern homesteading asks women to return to the toil so many of their grandmothers left behind. No matter how progressive the homesteading couple, the unfamiliarity and the physical demands of DIY living make it easy to fall into traditional gender roles — to retreat to the stereotypically masculine and feminine skills most of us still learn first and best. The result is that in many modern homesteads, despite highly evolved intentions, men build the houses, and women, like their pioneer-era counterparts, cook over the wood stove. Or scrub the floors. Or care for the babies.

This old-fashioned division of labor means that women are often the first to encounter the worst realities of homesteading. While their partners are outside, impressing the neighborhood with their construction skills, women are inside, confronting the cultural invisibility of domestic work and the social isolation of rural life. Both are working hard, but one gets more public props than the other. Put another way, it doesn’t take too many solo rounds of hand-washing dirty diapers to kill the romance of modern homesteading, and bring on critical NOMWITTH.

That’s why cowgirls Just Say No to housework.  Stall-mucking is as indoor as it gets for me out here on the high plains–messy for sure, but at least horses don’t wear diapers!  We steer clear of the kitchen these hot evenings and grill everything that we don’t eat as-is.  You can get your dishes clean with just a compost pile and a garden hose (or if you’re not even that picky, a dog).  And friends:  be sure to teach your daughters some basic construction skills so that they don’t end up in a yurt washing and hanging out poopy diapers when she could be fashioning a cistern for rainwater or installing solar panels on the roof.

I’ve always found that living well is the best revenge!