Kicking (by baby) and learning (by us)

The baby has been kicking up a storm lately during his/her active periods, especially in the evenings. It's pretty amazing -- all I can do is shriek with glee and giggle in response.

The best was when I went to bed after Stephanie because I was working on finishing up grading from this past quarter. Stephanie had just gotten up to pee and then went back to sleep, but I was holding her stomach and the baby was kicking, and it was just this amazing moment of realizing that there were two awake people on the bed, not just one.

In other news, I totally, as predicted, was the reigning Hermione Granger of our childbirth class over the past two weekends.


Unfortunately, our instructor was rather an epic failure. In particular, she was not especially able to treat non-caucasian people as intelligent beings, which was just creepy and wrong, especially since the other person who was in the running for Overprepared And Thoroughly-Researched Hermione of Birthing Partners was Hispanic. It's always inappropriate to talk down to people based on their appearance, but it was even more incredibly bonus inappropriate for her to be talking down to him given how well-informed he clearly was. Overall, it was really just incredibly uncomfortable to be in the classroom, the plus side of which is that it made me really aware of the amount of power that I as a teacher wield in my own classroom. Our instructor was an older lady so I get that she's from another generation, but seriously, there are limits to how much that will excuse if you are making your living at this.

More minor complaint-wise, her teaching techniques were not very dynamic. She totally failed at Socratic method, because she wouldn't call on people but she would theaten to ace bandage my mouth if I kept answering her questions. Total failure to control the classroom on her part... and then if she didn't know the answer to something someone asked, she'd specifically ask me in a belligerent sort of way to try to call me out.

Lastly, she had a very very anti-medication, pro-natural-childbirth bias which was really inappropriate given that it was a general childbirth class targeted at people who were giving birth in a hospital setting. It might be the bias that I have as well, but still, it was a bit inappropriate (though on a totally different scale than the aforementioned racist-type inappropriate). I think it's important for teachers not to overstep their bounds from presenting information to interpreting the ethical repercussions of that information for the students. The instructor should definitely have been careful to avoid preaching, especially since she's a doula as well and thus she's supposed to be professionally neutral on this topic.

The class also focused heavily on things like nutrition in pregnancy and avoiding STDs and other topics related to pregnancy but not specifically to the supposed topic of Childbirth and Delivery, and only very little of it was actually spent doing exercises. The actual exercises we did were really helpful, the rest of the class less so... all in all, not really sure it was worth the cost, though I do feel much more confident in my preparation now.

I am really looking forward to the reunion, though, and I especially hope Mr. Hermione and his wife show up even though they didn't come to the second session, because they seemed like really cool people who responded to pregnancy by rushing to the library in the same way we did.

We do have another free class on infant care and breastfeeding at our hospital, which I think will be really useful, and also a class in Managing Labor Pain that is taught by a different instructor and will hopefully contain more exercises and less preaching.