Jane Austen, women’s rights and summer school

Andrea Gurwitt
BRIGHT Magazine
Published in
3 min readJul 21, 2017

--

Dear Bright community,

I don’t know about where you are, but here in New York City it’s a humid, energy-sapping 93 degrees. In this kind of heat shorter is better, so I’ll go straight to my picks for this week.

To My Fellow Gambian-Americans: With Great Respect, Let Our Girls Pursue Higher Education

By Bintou Tunkara in Bright

The second in a series about summer written by teenagers, a summer internship with her municipal government has led one high schooler to realize she wants to spend her life fighting for women’s equality and informing new citizens about their rights. A beautiful essay.

Summer School that Feels More Like Fun and Less Like Punishment

By Libby Copeland in Bright

Summer school is undergoing a radical change, from mandatory to voluntary, from grueling to fun. Copeland reports from this new world, in which science and math are mixed with sailing and judo in an attempt to end summer slide and close the achievement gap.

‘Lunch shaming’ and other humiliations: how can we teach our kids about class?

By Alissa Quart in The Guardian

Pointing to the alarming practice of “lunch shaming,” Quart argues for parents and schools to talk openly with students about social class and money. Lunch-shaming “mirrors a whole system of childhood inequality in America — from the bullying children have long endured for wearing cheap, unfashionable clothes to the new low of lunch-shaming by adults; from privileged sports teams mocking their less-privileged opponents to divisions between those who can afford tutoring and those who can’t,” Quart writes.

How the Tour de France Saved My Teaching Career

By Bryan Christopher in Bright

One summer, Christopher was so burned out he considered quitting his teaching job — until he settled in to watch the Tour de France. Something about the marathon-and-sprint quality of the bicycle race reminded him of a teacher’s life. So he took inspiration from the riders’ practice of “active rest,” and everything changed.

Jane Austen is wasted on teenagers. It’s only now I fully appreciate her

By Bidisha in The Guardian

I can’t resist. July 18th marked the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, and that has given everyone another excuse to write about her (to the great delight of Austen fans). When Bidisha was a teenager assigned to read Persuasion, she found the book so boring she could only manage every other chapter. That’s because Austen didn’t write meet-cute rom-coms that appeal to teens, the critic says. Rather, Austen wrote for adults. “A worldly reader is all too aware of the harsh, judgmental and unequal society the characters operate in. There are very few happy couples in Austen’s novels and countless disappointing spouses, would-be lovers, siblings and parents. The lives of Austen’s heroines are marked by boredom, frustration, the threat of poverty and dread of the future,” Bidisha writes.

--

--