Good Job

I volunteer at a local grade school helping third graders learn addition and subtraction. There are several reasons that some of these children need help. For one girl, English is a second language so she needs to work around that. Another child was taught to add by counting on his fingers, and until he breaks that habit he can’t work fast enough to pass a basic 4 plus 5 quiz. Different children, different issues. I’m sure there is some proper way to put this, but let me be blunt instead: some children just need to work harder to accomplish what is simple for others. (Okay that wasn’t as blunt as I could have been.)
I go in for a couple of hours a week, take one child or another who needs help, and go out to a table set up in the hall. Last week I was working with a boy who has trouble learning and focusing, but we keep trying. Sometimes he tries harder, sometimes he tries to distract me into conversation. It was during one of his distraction attempts that a teacher from a different class walked around the corner, recognized him, and said, “Good job.”
No, he wasn’t doing any kind of a job at all. She had no reason to believe that he was. It was just a standard reaction, like saying, “Hello.” Although ‘good job’ should function as encouragement, when we use it constantly and without meaning, it is -worse than meaningless- insulting. Clearly, just the fact the he wasn’t drooling was all that she expected of him.
The incident got me to thinking about politics (what else). Over the last decade our government has failed so badly that we immediately approve of anything that isn’t criminal behavior. I am as optimistic about the Democratic majority as anyone, but that doesn’t mean that they should get a pat on the head for sitting up straight.
Why am I connecting the ‘good job’ with our reaction to the new, improved, honest, decent, hard-working, sincerely-trying Democratic majority? Because twice since the election, I found out that the quickest way to silence a room full of Democrats is to criticize anything that President Obama says or does. Should he get a ‘good job’ just because he doesn’t drool? Or should we stand up and correct him?
I think that my little math buddy needs to know the difference between trying hard to solve a problem and ignoring it. I think President Obama needs the same kind of direction. We saw what happened when the Republicans patted George Bush on the head every time he used distraction to form public policy. Look where that got us. Do we really want to insult President Obama by treating him like a child with an attention deficit disorder? When he is doing something wrong, he needs to be told.
His inability to find women for cabinet positions, his willingness to embrace religious leaders who think that wife-beating is not grounds for divorce, his taking funding for family planning out of a stimulus bill, all of these things are shortcomings that he needs to rethink. When it comes to women’s issues, he does not deserve a ‘good job.’

Nancy Sherer