Middle Schooler and Professor Face Off Over Irish Discrimination (Teen Wins)

Richard Jensen was an elderly academic who decided Irish discrimination was a myth.
In a 2002 paper, Jensen wrote that the infamous NINA (No Irish Need Apply) signs of the 19th century are an urban legend. After a supposedly exhaustive research endeavor that included combing seventy years worth of New York Times ads for the word Irish, he decided that they either
1. Never existed at all
2. There are so few of them that any Irish Americans who cry out in protest are hate-hungry oppression seekers.
When another academic, University of Missouri history professor Kerby Miller, begged to differ, Jensen accused him of being Irish and Catholic and wrong.
Miller is none of those things.
And we've got a fourteen year old girl to prove it.
Rebecca Fried was an eighth grader with access to google.When her dad brought home Jensen's article, she took to the internet. A short while later she found a whole crop of examples. She made a project out of it, organized her evidence into a thesis, and contacted Miller to read through it.
Oh, and in case you were worried?
She's not Irish.
Just an American kid who cares about discrimination.
Sorry, Jensen.
I've written before about how much I love teenagers who use their after school hours to quietly become experts in something. Fried-yep, I'm calling her by last name here, because she's a scholar-had her thesis, "No Irish Need Deny", printed in last month's Oxford Journal of Social History. From there it spread across the internet. As usual, because she's a teenager who figured something out, she's being hailed as a precocious wunderkind rather than someone who figured something out.
It gets better.
Jensen stumbled across Fried's work over on Irish Central and decided to grace the comment section with his presence. He claims that
1. This photo of a NINA sign used in the article, which I've borrowed for this blog post, is a fake (Keep in mind that even if it is, news sources regularly use stockphotos or similar sources to cut time or expense)
2. Fried doesn't have enough evidence
3. What she does have is the wrong kind of evidence, because for some mind boggling reason, anti-Irish newspaper ads are different than anti-Irish signs
And then Rebecca showed up to the party.
With all the politeness and professionalism teenagers are forced to use when defending their stance against someone older and crankier, she
1. Thanked him for gracing the comment section with his presence
2. Pointed him back to specific pages of her own article that contained tallies of NINA newspaper ads and store window signs
3. Thanked him. Again.
4. Closed with "I respect you and your work".
Can we raise the scoreboard?
Rebecca: 1.
Richard: 0.
In my most humble teenage opinion, I think Rebecca Fried is a savvy scholar who will give more teachers the what's for as she enters high school next month.
But don't take that at face value.
After all, some of my ancestors were Irish.

Why School Doesn't Suck Anymore

"What do smart people think about. Fancy things I suppose. I wish I knew some fancy things alredy."

-Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

"When are we going to use this?"
That was our marching anthem in middle school. I'm not going to be an architect, engineer, or research physicist, so why should I learn this equation? Do I need to know the history of Texas if I'm never going to live in Texas? I'm pretty sure my job won't require me to write anything more complicated than an email. That plant's just a plant whether I know anything about the cell membrane or not. And tell me, senor, why am I learning how to say "Mis bis abuelos viven en un casa no muy lejos de tu casa?" My great grandparents aren't living, let alone living near anyone who speaks Spanish.
By high school our cries dissipated. Not because the teachers gave us answers we liked, but because we found our own. We became part time students, and spent the other part of our time in a vocational training that taught us things engineers, dental hygienists, and cosmetologists actually need to know. We interned at hospitals, aquariums, and publishing companies. When sophomores saw us walking the halls in scrubs or firehouse uniforms, name tags swinging from our necks, they knew we knew where we were going.
And how to get there.
We cut the fluff classes and applied for work release. We graduated early so we could save some money for college already. We went AP or stockpiled concurrent credit hours. And it finally clicked. Maybe we won't use any of our classes in every day life, except for driver's ed and cooking. But all of it's stepping stones to get us where we need to go.

I'm not just spouting this out. After thirteen years of school, I'm four weeks away from college and truly believe this. I couldn't be more excited-or more grateful. I have friends who aren't going to college, either because they can't muster up the confidence to do so or because their families aren't behind them. I thank my parents every day. My still-in-high-school friends are sick of my class chatter. "Did I tell you I got into my waitlisted plant science class? And that BYU offers a class called "Dinosaurs"? Not Dinosaurs 101 or Introduction to Dinosaurs. Just Dinosaurs. If I take that I can run around saying 'Oh crap, I'm late for Dinosaurs!' And I don't need math thanks to that ACT prep class. Oh, and once I get a few more English credits out of the way, I can take folklore!"
Now that I've passed all the stepping stones, I can learn whatever I want. And I've learned a secret:
It's not about the grades.
It's not about the diploma.
It's not about the transcripts.
It's not about the resume.
So far as society's concerned, education's about producing a population that isn't full of idiots, and so far as you are concerned, it's about making your life a little more colorful.
I'm ready, college.
Give me some fancy things to think about.

Abandon Ship: Or, Some Things I've Finally Figured Out About Life

Like many high school seniors, I celebrated my graduation with a "senior trip", although mine was a little different. For one, we left the week after the fourth of July, not immediately after graduation. Also, I was the only senior aboard.


From left to right: Layla (10 months), Natalee (17), Erica (18), Bonnie (12), Hanna (16), Ashlin (16), and Carly (15). Not pictured: Camille (20), who had to leave early

My family owns a 1/6 time share of a houseboat in Lake Powell, a giant freshwater lake in the middle of the Arizona-Utah desert. Our boat has air conditioning, a flat screen TV, a water slide, and two bathrooms. Deal, right? I thought so. But I couldn't get a single one of my senior friends to go.
Since we only have one sixth of the summer, we meet with the other houseboat owners midwinter to assign weeks. Our family's prep and planning for the trip starts a month or two in advance. They needed to know how many friends I had early on, so I started recruiting well before the summer, only to be turned down by literally everyone I counted as a friend throughout high school.
A few of them had legitimate excuses. "I'll be in Montana that week" or  "I'm spending eleven days in Israel for my graduation trip and I won't be able to get more time off."
But most of them didn't. One girl got a fast food job the week before we left and didn't bother asking for time off. The restaurant is so lenient, they let my friend Tessa work just Saturday shifts all through the school year so she could balance homework and lacrosse. If she'd told them "I can start a week from Monday," they would have let her. Another girl told me in May, "I don't plan that far ahead, so let's just go with no." But my favorite is the girl who, when invited in February (this is a July trip), said, "I can't. I'm cleaning my room."
Chirp.
Chirp.
I've been in her room. It's not that big. Plus, she said she needed to "get it ready for college". She's living at home for college.
So I brought four of my neighborhood friends instead. Three of them have stuck by my side since elementary school. One's a newer edition to my neighborhood, but she's been there for me in my darkest hours. My sophomore friend brought her younger sisters along. The more the merrier, right? When we were done, the ages of our party ranged from twelve to twenty.
I talked with my boss weeks in advance to make sure I could get it off. Camille took time off as well, and she had to leave early for a family reunion, but she committed to as much of the week as she possibly could. There's always room when you make it.
The day before we left, one of my fifteen year old brother's friends called us up to say that by some miracle, football practice had been canceled for the next week. Could he tag along? This was my trip, so my brother and parents turned to me for an answer. I almost declined out of petty jealousy. Did he really need a friend? Why should he have this miracle last-minute friend when mine said no six months in advance?
But I let him come. I'm proud of my brother and wish I would've been more like him at his age. Confident, fun loving, and surrounded by friends. All friends bring drama at the worst times, but no friend should bring you loneliness at anytime.
Then the morning of the trip, I had a dream that Hanna called. She said she'd accepted an unpaid job running the tech for a play in a city an hour away from our home. For an hour, I lay in bed, unable to separate dreams and reality. I wondered how the driving arrangements, meal plan, and other details would work with her gone. But most of all I wondered why all of my friends would put absolutely anything before me and my trip.

Hanna, Queen of the Cliffs

I told Hanna about my dream on the way down, and she laughed. The same sort of "that's absurd" laugh people gave when I told them about my friends who bailed. That is, when they're not staring at me in slack jawed stupor or asking if my friends are druggies. She told me she wouldn't miss my trip for the world.
That's when I finally realized the truth: I hung out with derps all through high school. One time I invited six girls to a backyard party. One of them asked me to take a picture of her on our two person swing. The next day, I found it on facebook with the caption, "Nothing says summer alone than being on one of these by yourself."

In the end, I'm glad for the way my trip turned out. The kind of people who can't stand the stress of talking to a boss, leaving Mommy's side for a week, or marking a date on a calendar wouldn't be able to handle jumping off thirty five foot cliffs or hurtling over the water on a jet ski at fifty miles an hour. They'd spend the whole trip lying in our stuff cubby bunks with three foot ceilings. We had our quieter adventures: lying out on the top deck, heart to hearts on the beach, and hiking the desert rocks in search of cell service. But after the best week of  my life, I've decided that I'm not built just for safe harbors.


Life, especially teenage life, is supposed to be enjoyed. I didn't realize that through most of high school. A lot of my older posts talk about how "real" teenage life is actually pretty boring. I now know that I misrepresented teenagers as a whole, that I took my experience and tried to make it universal. Real friends make an effort to see you outside of school more than a few times a year. Normal friends talk to you on a Friday night, not just in class. True friends are there for you in the light, not just your darkest hours.
I am eighteen years old. I laugh without fear of the future. I'm proud of every passion and pain my teenage year brought me, and now I'm a young adult. I have a fabulous, colorful, lovely, adventure filled life ahead of me, and nobody, friend or foe, is going to stop me from living it.


The New Marriage Deal

These are the souvenir earphones my school gave out for Senior Dinner Dance. They're miles beyond our prom key chains that broke a week later, and as a bonus, they come in a commemorative box that could pass for a ring case at a distance.

My friend Matt took full advantage of the fact. While our principals looked on, he knelt down and proposed to the nearest girl, our friend Faith. Sadly, I didn't get any pictures of the looks on their faces."They thought it was real!" We laughed as we made our quick getaway across the parking lot.That's when I realized it could've been. Marriage isn't a joke for us anymore. We laugh the most at things that are forbidden, but now we've crossed that threshold. Soon, Matt will be kneeling down for real.Just maybe not to Faith.

My friend Shelby is already engaged. We were Sterling Scholars together-a departmental award/scholarship competition put on by every school in the state of Utah. I didn't know her at all beforehand, but we posed for pictures and shared a table at the awards banquet. Yesterday I got home from work, clicked on my facebook feed, and the first picture to pop up was Shelby flashing a Diamond ring from a bridge with some boy.We have been out of high school for twenty two days.And she's only the first.My brother came by the computer, glanced at Shelby over my shoulder, and said, "Married by eighteen, divorced by nineteen." But I know that's not true. Some people have the perseverance it takes to get it right the first time.My mother's parents divorced when she was in kindergarten. One of her elementary school teachers fit all the divorced kids at one table. When my grandmother's parents separated, it was Something Polite People Don't Talk About. But when I met with my Sterling Scholar adviser, she scoffed at the sheer number of divorce essays she'd seen for the Hardships I've Overcome prompt. However real their heartbreak, divorced kids don't qualify as sufferers anymore.Divorce is new. Newer than two other marriage delayers, prolonged lifespans and educational pursuit.
Young brides are shamed. I've never had a boyfriend and I'm headed to the top school in Utah. But all I ever hear is "Don't get that MRS degree too fast." Of course, it's worse when you're actually a bride, according to teen bride blogger Natasha Craig. Some of the responses she's heard include:
"You're too young to know what real love is."

"Are you even old enough to sign the marriage certificate?"
"Are you pregnant or something?"
You know what? 
If a young couple gets divorced, they'll do it without your help.
If a young couple turns into an old couple and sit gray haired on their front porch surrounded by grandchildren, they'll do it without your help. And you were never helping in the first place.

Old lovers are just young lovers who grew up.

Modern people, no matter what era they live in, seem to forget they aren't the gold standard for normal. After marriage, the next biggest place I see this is college. Leaving home is the traditional, natural, normal way to attend college. I didn't even know staying home was an option until I was sixteen. I thought all the college kids I saw hanging around the neighborhood must be home for the weekend. My parents never explained it to me. So it still baffles me whenever I say "I'm going to BYU in the fall", and the response is, "Oh, are you living down there?"
Note the going part.

This is going.

This is staying.

I've read years ago about some Indian tribe (Hopis, maybe?) that believes in adding rooms onto existing homes instead of kicking adult children. But besides that, absolutely every culture I've encountered, visited, or read about believes in growing up and moving out. I can't think of a single place or time across the wide expanse of human history where this wasn't the standard. There is no shame in passing a traditional life milestone when your heart says it's time. Let's hear it for Shelby and her soon to be husband Bronson.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Genesis 2:24

I Choose Not to be a Perfect Child

I'm a teenager.
I get grumpy.
Not because my hormones are unbalanced.
Not because I'm a rebel without a cause turning my wrath on the nearest authority figure.
If I don't act happy, it's because I'm not.
I complain when my parents, who have heard me say I'm a vegetarian for twelve years, take me out to a steakhouse.
I complain when my mother, who turns off the modem every night so I won't have internet access, asks me what a modem is.
I complained when my parents take me to my graduation dinner and show up later to pay the bill.
I complain when my dad, who wouldn't let me learn archery the entire summer I was fourteen, teaches my twelve year old brother archery skills after him asking once.
I complain because nothing gets better when you don't.
I don't complain because my parents are some subhuman evil.
I complain because they aren't perfect superhumans.
I complain because I'm human.
And you do to. So don't cast the first stone.

The Vital Importance of the Teenage Selfie

Teenagers need to take selfies. If we don't, history will collapse. As proof, let me present everyone's favorite young outlaw.

This is Billy the Kid. In fact, it is the only photograph ever taken of Billy the Kid. As you can probably tell, Billy was drunk when he decided to stumble into the photographer's studio and get his picture taken. He was near twenty at the time.
If you're making an hour long documentary on Billy the Kid, you can show this photo. Or you can show his Wanted posters that also use this photo. You can use the colorized version of this photo. But your viewers will have nothing to do but look at this photo. For two hours.

Yeah, I'm bored already.

And here we have the only known photo of recluse poet Emily Dickinson. This was taken when Emily was around sixteen years old. Acquaintances claimed it didn't look much like her.

Writing a biography on Emily Dickinson? Here's your cover. New edition of a poetry book? Here you go. Making a PowerPoint report and your teacher wants a different picture on every slide? Yeah, good luck.

Emily and Billy teenagers, or thereabouts, at the time these photos were taken. Every scholar, student, biographer, and documenter wishes they'd posed for more. But they couldn't, because photographs were time consuming, expensive endeavors. If only they'd had smartphones.

               

There you go. I don't know if I'll be Emily Dickinson of Billy the Kid, but there you go. You'll thank me in a hundred and fifty years.

History is only one reason selfies are important. The second is perception of  beauty and body image.

Taylor Swift on the cover of Glamour

Taylor Swift waking up in the morning.

See? Mortal. Don't you feel better now?

Keep in mind that celebrities aren't the only ones taking selfies. Normal teenage girls (and boys) proudly post pictures of themselves looking like normal humans on the internet for all to see. A 2013 Samsung pull found that selfies make up 30% of photos by people aged 18-24. Media critic Jennifer Pozner called selfies a toll for young people to break through "media gatekeepers" and say "I'm great the way I am."

And before you say selfies are a modern craze, here's thirteen year old Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov taking one in 1913.

Here she is decked out in pearls for a formal portrait a year later. Thousands of photographs were taken of Anastasia and her siblings during their short lifetimes. Online archives show her with everything from a cigar to a shaved hear. But this one is the most widely used. As royalty living a few decades later than Billy and Emily, Anastasia had more access to cameras. Romanov fans have all kinds of content that captures her true personality.

As will the fans of another world leader's daughter.

So next time you ridicule the young people around you for taking selifes, remember we're going to go down in history. And we don't care if we look fabulous while doing it.

Take a Number and Live it Up

Never at any point in high school did I take a theater class. I hung out with the theater kids and went to all the shows, but I was always on the sidelines. One of my Senior Bucketlist Items was auditioning for the school musical. I made it, and after closing night, I decided to call it good.

Until the student directed mini plays came around and they talked me into auditioning. So here I was, back on the inside again. In the theater world but not part of the theater world. One day I was sitting around at rehearsal, watching everyone group themselves into cliques, and I felt alone. People talk about sociality is a pyramid or ladder, but I decided it was a continuum numbered one to ten. And I was a one. Then I factored in all the other facets of my social life and decided, "No, I'm more of a six. Is six good?"

So I turned to the girls next to me."Hey Hannah, rate your social life on a scale of one to ten."
"Eight."
"McKenna?"
"I'm a four."
It quickly became a game. We called out to people passing by, who gave us every number from negative three to twelve. Then we started rating people ourselves.
"She's seven."
"Definitely five."
"He's a nine."
"Wait, what? Are you talking about me?""
Nothing, Sam. Just rating your social life."
I've seen people play the same game with physical appearance, so we didn't feel bad in the least.One common thread I noticed: When we asked someone to pick their own number, almost everybody shortchanged themselves. Including me. Here I was, a six sitting with friends in a room full of people I mostly knew by name, and I felt like a zero.

I've kicked off every summer since eighth grade with a homework bonfire. Last year, I invited six friends over, and one of them asked me to take a picture of her on our two person swing. The next day, I found it on facebook with the caption, "Nothing says summer alone like sitting on one of these by yourself." 
Both of her hands were in the picture. It was obviously not a selfie. She spent that night at the first party of the summer and probably her last. If she felt lonely, it was self imposed.
So many people in high school complain about being outcasts. They complain, even as they chose to eat lunch in the choir room, in the art hallways at the back of the school where the lockers don't reach, or behind a trash can on the second floor. Every once in a while, I've run into someone who's helplessly awkward and can't make friends no matter how hard they try. But most of the worlds loners are such because they don't try.

I spent most of my high school career far below a six. I hung out with friends outside of school once a month, if that. Party meant eating Doritos in someone's basement while a Disney movie played on a grainy screen. I thought I was some kind of pariah.
I'm a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps kind of girl, so this year I decided to give my social life an extreme makeover. In the last semester of my senior year:

I convinced a group to play hide and seek in Ikea on a double date.
I asked a boy from another school out to our prom four days before the dance. Prom is boy's choice.
I tracked down a boy at eleven o' clock P.M., chewed him out for dumping my friend the night before that same prom, and had him in a suit the next day.
I've crashed parties and been accepted without a second glance.
I played laser tag with a mix of friends and strangers at 3:00 A.M.
I went out for manicures with a friend instead of curling up and crying the day a bully tore me down in front of a silent room.
I sat and talked for hours with high school royalty I never thought knew my name.
I went shopping in a flapper dress and, without changing, showed up at a church youth meeting designed to set up my age bracket as role models to the younger girls.
I wandered a strange college campus with a girl who'd been there even less than I had.
I snapped photos of a prank proposal while our principal looked on in disbelief.
I sprinted to the getaway car after leaving random plastic cutlery on the porches of various guys I know from school.
I hurled loose change out of my sunroof to pay some guy back for the lighter he bought us to go with the cranberry scented candle we picked out for a mini-memorial service that would take too long to explain.
I added eight extra pages to the back of my yearbook to fit all the people who think I'm smart, funny, pretty, and caring.

And you know what I've figured out through all of that?
Sometimes the best moments happen when you leave a party to watch Netflix until 1:00 A.M. with a heartbroken friend.
Sometimes the best conversations happen when you sit in your friend's driveway for three hours after whatever event got you out of the house in the first place.
Sometimes the most memorable part of a school trip isn't the museums and concerts, but that time you played Uno in the hotel room with a bunch of orchestra girls.
Sometimes it's okay to go on a shopping trip and come home with only a bag of silk fish tank plants.Sometimes the best parties are when you invite fifty people, only three show, and then the rain comes down and you spend the night bailing out a girl's basement instead.
Sometimes you have more fun eating donuts and doing dramatic readings of your diary in a dark park than anyone at the afterparty.
Sometimes you don't need money to have a crazy night, just a friend's employee discount and a cup of cookies and cream flavored ice split four ways.

The key to all this?
Be open to spontaneity.
Be willing to kick something off yourself, even if it doesn't pan out.
Stay true to your friends.
Find friends who will stay true to you.
Don't close your eyes to all the amazing strangers all around you.
Love yourself, so other people will too.
Remember, even the It Boy find himself on the lower end of the popularity continuum sometimes.
It doesn't matter if you spend most Friday nights at home with a book, so long as you make your sometimes the best.