4A
Friday, March 15, 1996
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
Poor grades are earned math TAs aren't to blame
Some students find it easier to blame anyone but themselves when it comes to their performance in school.
This is the case for many students enrolled in Math 002 and Math 101, which are taught by undergraduate and graduate teaching assistants. Contrary to what these unsuccessful students may want to believe, the TAs assigned to supervise their classes are qualified to instruct them.And the only differences between a TA and a GTA are the age and salary differences.
Carol Lucas, director of the Kansas algebra program, said TAs and GTAs were more than qualified to be teaching the students.
She said that TAs had been successful in putting forth extra effort to help students by organizing review sessions before tests. Lucas also said she felt that TAs cared about their students and did more than was expected.
TAs undergo a training
THE ISSUE:
Math TAs
process prior to the beginning of the semester, and they attend weekly meetings once the semester has started. To be eligible to be a TA, one must have completed Calculus II and have maintained A's and B's throughout.
Lucas interviews the TAs. In the interview they must demonstrate their abilities to conduct a personable class and exhibit their knowledge of various math problems given at random.
Although it is easy to attribute bad grades to a poorly run math department, it is unjust. The math department offers outside help for students six days a week. It is the responsibility of the student to go seek help when needed.
Instead of blaming the math department for their own bad grades, students should point their fingers somewhere else, such as a mirror.
SARAH PRESTON FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD.
Candidates prove their worth by getting students' signatures
As Student Senate elections approach, prospective candidates are trying to collect the 50 signatures required to receive the nomination for a Senate seat.
However, any candidate can avoid going through this process. Candidates have the option of paying a $10 fee instead of gathering the signatures. Such an option should not be available. Someone who cannot take the initiative to get a minimum of 50 signatures has no business being a candidate.
Shawn Henessee, election commissioner, said the fee was to help pay part of the total cost of the elections, which is about $4,000.
Henessee said he had not yet completed the paperwork for organizing the election, so he did not know how many candidates in this year's election had chosen to pay the fee.
Potential candidates should have to gather a minimum of 50 signatures before being allowed to run for Senate. These signatures simply are proof that the candidates can find at
THE ISSUE:
Senate elections
least 50 supporters.
Paying a fee instead of having to gather signatures shows how money can corrupt the democratic system. Students who pay the fee are buying their way onto the ballot to challenge those candidates who made the effort to get students to sign a petition.
Not all candidates may have the time to ask for students' signatures, especially if they have a job or a heavy class schedule.
However, requiring candidates to ask for 50 signatures is a good test to see how much time they are willing to put into a senator position. If someone does not have the time to gather 50 signatures, will he or she have the time to attend Senate meetings and fulfill his or her duties as a student representative?
The petition to have one's name on the ballot should be the first step to prove the candidate is willing to make the commitment to be a senator.
HENRI BLANC FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Shawn Trimble/KANSAN
Clinton prevails through shifting Republican winds
Republicans have lots of people to worry about these days. Only one of them is a Democrat.
Departing from their usual trademark unity, Republican presidential candidates have been chewing at each other's legs like mad dogs. Front-runner status has jumped from Bob Dole to Pat Buchanan to Steve Forbes and back to Dole. Discouraging words like "disarray" and "muddled" constantly crop up in descriptions of the field.
Meanwhile, President Clinton has tried not to smirk as he kidnaps winning conservative themes. In recent days, he has denounced sex and violence on television and called for school uniforms and other dress codes in public schools. He convened television network bigwigs to the White House where they supported a new rating system and the making of the V-chip standard in all new television.
At the same time, he skillfully moved back to his left-progressive base, to dance with those who brought him to his present employment, on crucial issues such as school vouchers, welfare reform and abortion rights.
After announcing momentously that "the era of big government is over," Clinton had similar kind
Although he had kind words to say about vouchers as governor of Arkansas, Clinton's loyalties to teachers unions spurred a White House announcement that he would veto a Republican-backed bill that would provide vouchers to enable District of Columbia parents to put their children in private schools.
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
words for the governors who offered a bipartisan proposal to return welfare and Medicaid powers to the states last month.
But his Health and Human Services Secretary, Donna Shalala, said Clinton would vow that, too, unoffice Congress included federal mandates to prevent states from engaging in a "race to the bottom" in cutting aid.
Clinton also enraged opponents by saying he would veto a bill that bans late-term abortions, if such legislation intruded in the private relationship between women and their doctors.
Polls indicate voters love it when Clinton talks tough. Barring any major Whitewater disclosures, it looks like he has little to fear but overconfidence.
What accounts for these unexpected turns in political fortunes? E.J. Dionne Jr. offers some provoking thoughts in his new book, They Only Look Dead, ambitiously subtitled, Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era.
To Dionne, a Washington Post columnist and award-winning author of Why Americans Hate Politics, the nation's often-ambiguously stated yearning for "leadership" in government results from frustration involving four crises — in economics, in politics, in morality and in the United States changing role in the post-Cold War world.
While news media focus on the contest between political partisans, the real contest is one of fundamentally different responses to these crises, Dionne writes.
I would have rounded out his list with an additional crisis: race relations.
Racial tension is perhaps our nation's thorniest, longest-running crisis.
The crisis in race relations is easily masked by other crises, such as the growing divide between rich and poor.
But it is always there.
Dole responds to the crisis reflexively, like the Washington inside player that he is, as when he turned against affirmative action last year after years of supporting it, going along with political winds.
Buchanan responds with scapegoats — liberals, immigrants, foreign trade, affirmative action and women in the Citadel, among others.
By contrast, Clinton responds to the crises by cutting through the false debate that kept Democrats unresponsive to growing middle-class anxieties about their futures for too long.
With no primary challengers to debate, Clinton can afford to pick and choose positions that seem less concerned with what is politically correct with the right or the left than with what works for everyone.
Clarence Page is a columnist at the Chicago Tribune.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
University needs a recycling program
Midterms may be dragging down the attitude of many students, but we can all get a good laugh out of the campus recycling program — Am I mistaken, or does one really not exist?
ing the public of their progress, but when the University of Kansas cannot even provide the fundamental needs of recycling for the student body, I believe that it should not even begin to argue that it is in fact a bastion of progress and good will.
How embarrassing it is for a public university in 1996 to not even have a comprehensive recycling program.
Long ago, the University should have implemented a program that was accessible, convenient and included the support of students, faculty and administration alike.
Universities always are remind-
The University should set a goal of having the best operative recy
cling program in the Big 12, surpassing that of even the University of Colorado, which was the recipient of the most outstanding campus recycling program in 1995.
Until then, may the pathetic cries of students like me provide condolences for a student body and faculty in desperate need of a comprehensive recycling program.
Jeremy Lind
Jeremy Lind Overland Park sophomore
Gender feminists should not strive toward androgyny
Pat, the world's most famous androgynous person, is making a comeback. Her or his return is not occurring on Saturday Night Live but in the modern feminist movement.
Noted feminist writer James Sterba writes, "The point feminists have been making is simply that failure to achieve the ideal of androgyny translates into a failure to guarantee equal opportunity to both women and men."
This thinking is a symptom of the androgynous strain — an intellectual virus that is infecting some modern feminists. Those in-fected are known as gender feminists who believe the only significant difference between the sexes is anatomical. To the gender feminist, the notion of masculine
and feminine traits is sexist nonsense.
Traditional or equity feminists, on the other hand, want to secure equal opportunities for women while recognizing that men and women are fundamentally different.
Gender feminists argue that gender roles are relative to each culture and are not determined by any inherent feminine or masculine traits.
However, a more objective look at anthropological evidence proves just the opposite.
Although each culture expresses gender roles in a unique manner, there are far more similarities in gender roles around the world than differences.
Numerous studies, including Corinne Hutt's book Males and Females, indicate that across cultures males generally are more aggressive than females. Also, on average, females have a greater verbal ability than males. Recent brain research supports this theory.
The similarity of masculine and feminine traits among cultures that developed independent of one another suggest that traditional gender roles did not arise arbitrarily, but grew out of intrinsic differences differences that gender feminists want to pass off as an illusion.
Acknowledging gender differences inevitably sets off sexist-stereotype alarms among some feminists, which is sad. It is ironic that many at our multicultural University are quick to celebrate differences among cultures but want to eliminate differences between the sexes.
As men and women we should celebrate our differences, not stifle them. Women don't need to become like men, nor do men need to become like women. Instead, we should embrace the qualities that make us uniquely masculine or feminine.
As the University of Kansas celebrates Women's History Month, we should rethink our definitions of equality.
Equality is a function of worth, not sameness.
Pat was funny for a while. She or he should be remembered, not resurrected.
John Hart is a Shawnee graduate student in journalism.
How to submit letters
Letters: Should be double-spaced, typed and fewer than 200 words. Letters must include the author's signature, name, address and telephone number plus class and hometown if a University student. Faculty or staff must identify their positions.
All letter should be submitted to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Staufer-Flint Hall.
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