FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
from Colonial times to the late
20th century, Beauman charts a
fascinating course from the first
known personal ad (placed in the
Boston Evening Post in 1759) to
their current equivalents (Match,
OkCupid, Tinder and other dat-
ing sites). Like the stigma-filled
early days of online dating, those
placing and responding to per-
sonal ads would only do so
anonymously, lest word get out
that they were seeking love in
this way. “Advertising for a mate
was so unconventional — to
some, so shocking — that the
advertiser reassures interested
parties that ‘profound secrecy
will be observ’d,’ adding that ‘no
trifling answers will be regard-
ed,’ ” Beauman writes.
The newspapers publishing
these ads tried to normalize the
practice. In 1840, Beauman
BOOK WORLD FROM C1 writes, Philadelphia’s Public Led-
ger published an editorial argu-
ing that “advertising for wives is
becoming every day more and
more usual, and is viewed with
less and less prejudice. The plain
truth is that there is no better
mode to procure a good partner.”
In explicating the language
commonly used in personal ads,
Beauman finds “shyness” to be
the most common reason given
for placing one. By taking out an
ad, a single man wouldn’t have to
approach strangers or try to de-
termine who’s looking and who’s
not. This is still a common reason
for seeking love in modern per-
sonals, a.k.a. online dating.
The comparisons between past
and present compound when
readers take in Beauman’s words
in the middle of a pandemic,
which has seen online dating
traf fic skyrocket. These days,
much of dating is also done at a
distance, progressing slowly to
an eventual in-person meeting.
Another time in American his-
tory when courtship was pro-
longed? During the Civil War,
when Northern and Southern
soldiers would place personal ads
and the women replying to them
were seen not as foolish, but as
engaging in “an act of profound
patriotism,” Beauman writes.
The high stakes — and the pros-
pect of death — suddenly eroded
the stigma involved in seeking
love in this fashion. “Have lost a
leg, but expect to get a cork one,”
one soldier’s ad read in an 1862
newspaper. “Have a useless arm,
but will be called brave for it; was
once good-looking, but am now
scarred all over.”
Such raw and straightforward
prose differs greatly from con-
temporary singles’ dating pro-
files, created out of highly filtered
selfies and pop culture referenc-es, but the goal is the same: Even
in a difficult time, the search for
companionship doesn’t end;
rather it intensifies.
Of course, not everyone is as
direct as that soldier. Beaumann
catalogues one deceitful ex-
change between Mary Ward
Beecher, the niece of “Uncle
Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and a major in
the Northern army who was
recovering in a hospital. Both
Beecher, who had placed the ad,
and her pen pal lied to each other
— she about owning homes in
Cuba and he of relatives who had
passed away. Also, he turned out
to be married, an ending that’s all
too common in courtship today,
too.
One of Beauman’s most com-
pelling tales of personal ad fraud
involves a woman in the early
20th century who lured multiple
men of means to her farm inIndiana; the suitors didn’t last
long. It’s a f rightening scheme
that reminds readers to be care-
ful out there. Dating strangers
always involves risk; even more
so in the days before you could
Google a first date.
In sparse and information-
packed prose, Beauman draws a
clear line from the personal ads
of the American Revolution to
the hasty left and right swipes
today. For those feeling adrift or
frustrated in their search for love,
her deep dive into the history of
personal ads does provide some
solace, even if only to say: Ameri-
cans have been trying and failing
— but also succeeding! — at this
method for centuries. Good luck
out there.
[email protected]Lisa Bonos writes about dating and
relationships for The Washington
Post.From Colonial personal ads to Tinder, a history you’ll want to swipe right on
CURTIS BROWN“Matrimony, Inc.” author
Francesca Beauman.kid on tests or asking a teacher to
refrain from drinking beverages
near their laptop so that their
own child doesn’t attempt to do
the same.
It’s no secret that everyone
involved in distance learning is
stressed out. Teachers are strug-
gling to get to know students and
families they’ve never met in real
life. Students haven’t seen their
school friends in months. And
according to a Pew Research Cen-
ter study released in October,
68 percent of parents whose kids
are learning online reported be-
ing concerned about their chil-
dren falling behind, 12 percent-
age points more than parents
whose kids are learning in per-
son. But one powerful determi-
nant of a student’s success is the
quality of the relationship be-
tween teacher and parent or
guardian — a nd as that relation-
ship has gone virtual, it has often
been strained.
Teachers have had to adjust to
class instruction being fully visi-
ble to parents at all times, and
parents have had to shoulder
more responsibility for the devel-
opment of their children’s habits
and behaviors, often while fulfill-
ing their work responsibilities.
As a r esult, parents and teachers
have had to learn new ways to
collaborate for the sake of the
kids in their shared care.
“The quality of the parent-
teacher relationship is really a
pretty significant driver of some
of the outcomes that we hope to
see in children as they progress
through school,” said Susan
Sheridan, director of the Nebras-
ka Center for Research on Chil-
dren, Youth, Families and Schools
at the University of Nebraska,
adding that a strong parent-
teacher relationship creates a
sense of security and stability for
the child.
Plus, children are incredibly
observant, Sheridan added. So
the adults in their lives should
“be careful about what we’re
modeling for them. They pick up
on the types of communications
and messages that parents and
teachers send, both verbal and
nonverbal, about how they view
each other, and how they view
each other’s roles in supporting
that child for whom they both
bear some responsibility.”
In virtual learning, the usual
roles have been altered dramati-
cally. Teachers have fewer tools at
their disposal to hold students
accountable now that teachers
and pupils don’t share a physical
space. Natasha, a 36-year-old
high school science teacher in
Nashville, pointed out that she
used to have a say in whether a
student slept through class or
not. She doesn’t anymore.
“Since the kids aren’t in the
classroom, [we’ve had] to rely on
the parents,” said Natasha, who
asked to be identified only by her
first name to protect her career.
She said it can be difficult for
teachers to know whether kids
are working. “If a student doesn’t
have their camera on, I don’t
know if they’re taking notes, if
they’re laying across the bed
asleep.”
In other words, it is always an
adult’s job to enforce the rules.
Now that students are learning in
their homes, enforcement has
fallen to parents, and not every
parent is prepared — or available
— to do it. “As parents, when we
send our kids to school, we feel
assured that, you know, [teachers
are] professionals and they’re go-
ing to get the job done,” Natasha
said. “But now, a lot of things that
typically parents don’t have to be
concerned about in the education
process, they now do h ave to deal
with.”
That also means parents are
now getting an unprecedented
SCHOOL FROM C1
real-time look at their children’s
education. Sometimes, this pro-
vides parents with a humanizing
glimpse at how hamstrung teach-
ers really are. Other times, it
offers them the chance to inter-
vene when they don’t like what
they’re seeing.
Lauren, 23, an elementary
school teacher near Gary, Ind.,
has been teaching in person and
online simultaneously all year.
Early this fall, Lauren, who asked
to be identified only by her first
name to avoid unwanted public-
ity for her school or colleagues,
downloaded a phonics lesson she
hadn’t taught before and as-
signed it to her remote students.
The assignment involved match-
ing simple words to illustrations.
A cartoon of an overweight per-
son was to be paired with the
word “fat.”
“One of the parents got really
upset about that,” Lauren said.
Soon, the parent was trying to get
Lauren’s attention on Zoom
while Lauren checked on her
in-person students, and “she was
talking to other parents in the
chat, like, ‘Oh, that’s so mean,’ ”
Lauren said. By the time Lauren
returned to her computer, other
parents had chimed in to agree,
and the first parent “basically
called me out in front of every-
one,” Lauren said. “It was embar-
rassing.”
But she knows she’s not alone.
Other teachers she knows have
been confronted by angry par-
ents when their interactive
whiteboards have malfunc-
tioned, she said, and one teacher
she knows got a call from a parent
who simply wanted her to know
that, from what he had seen, he
wasn’t impressed.
Morgan Jackson, a 27-year-old
high school English teacher in
Philadelphia, recently had a simi-
lar experience. On the second day
of school, as a getting-acquainted
exercise, she invited her students
to fill out an identity-chart work-sheet that asked about ethnicity,
race, first language, disabilities
and abilities, and religious or
spiritual affiliations, among oth-
er things, as well as sex and
gender.
The students were to fill out
the worksheet and share it with
Jackson. But after a student
asked her the difference between
sex and gender, her phone began
to ring while she was teaching. “I
called back on my break,” she
said, and an angry parent “pro-
ceeded to yell at me and tell me I
was going against everything
Muslims believed in.”
Since then, Jackson has made
changes to how she teaches. She
skipped, for example, a lesson she
had planned about an overdose
scene in “Fahrenheit 451.” “Typi-
cally, because Philadelphia is so
rife with overdoses and drug
issues, I would have had an in-
depth discussion and read an
article about that. But because it’s
such a controversial topic and
some parents don’t want their
kids knowing about that side of
Philly, I kind of cut that out,” she
said. “I feel more monitored nowthan I did when we were in class.”
So how to alleviate some of the
strain on the teacher-parent rela-
tionship? For starters, Sheridan
advises parents who’ve over-
heard something they find objec-
tionable to speak to the teacher
one-on-one, away from students
and outside of class time. She also
advises teachers to set ground
rules for onlooking parents: For
example, parents are encouragedto stay nearby to make sure their
kids are participating but
shouldn’t butt in on the video
feed unless there’s an emergency.
“That’s the kind of thing that I
think needs to happen really ear-
ly on,” she said, “not in the
context of a parent acting out in
the middle of a Zoom class.”
Above all, however, she advises
teachers and parents to remem-
ber that they share responsibili-
ties for remote learning but have
different roles in promoting it:
Parents make sure their kids are
present, awake and paying atten-
tion, and teachers plan and pro-
vide the instruction.
Rocio Caballero-Gill, 40, a pa-
leoceanographer and paleoclima-
tologist and a co-founder of the
organization GeoLatinas, has a
first-grader who has been dis-
tance learning since spring. In
the first few weeks of the 2020-
2021 school year, Caballero-Gill,
who has a background in aca-
demia, thought about how over-
whelmed her son’s teacher must
feel. Her son’s kindergarten
teacher had gotten to know stu-
dents and their parents in personbefore school went virtual last
spring. But his first-grade teach-
er, who was starting a new school
year remotely, would now be
working with students and par-
ents she might never get any
in-person interaction with. “I
knew she might need some sup-
port from a caring parent,” Cabal-
lero-Gill said.
Recently, Caballero-Gill and
her son’s teacher had a virtual
one-on-one meeting to discuss
how they could work more col-
laboratively. The question at
hand, she said, was how to keep
her son busy and learning after
he finished his classwork. Ulti-
mately, they worked together to
develop additional reading activ-
ities for him to do, to reduce the
risk of his wandering away.
The check-in was useful, Ca-
ballero-Gill said. But the most
important thing that conversa-
tion provided was an opportunity
for the two to encourage each
other, get on the same page and
reduce stress. “She’s doing good,”
Caballero-Gill said, “and we don’t
want the teachers more stressed.”
[email protected]Ups and downs of parents observing teachers in real time
DAYNA SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTOCTAVIO JONES FOR THE WASHINGTON POST DAYNA SMITH FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: Rocio Caballero-Gill with son Giordon, a first-grader, at home in Ashburn, Va. ABOVE RIGHT: Giordon does his schoolwork at
home this month. His mother and teacher came up with a plan to give him more reading activities, to keep him engaged after he finished
his classwork. ABOVE LEFT: Renee Enyart of Winter Haven, Fla., had an unmuted moment of frustration with her daughter’s teacher.Education expert Susan
Sheridan a dvises
teachers and parents to
remember that they
share responsibilities for
remote learning but
have different roles in
promoting it.