Yes!
It puts women in an odd position, too. One year, I was so irritated at the men AND BOYS (what, they're too exhausted from working all week?) sitting on their rear ends watching football while their mothers, sisters, an grandmothers cleaned up the meal we had cooked, that I sat down on the couch, too, thinking that my presence there would point out the absurdity. Ummmm...no. And I felt too guilty at everyone else cleaning up to stick with it, so I got up and fulfilled my gender role.
No one wants to start an argument with relatives on Thanksgiving.

This is timely, since this was EXACTLY what I planned to say at a presentation I'm giving on Friday! Well, maybe not exactly.

The "Shift Happens" videos, among other forces, put educators in the strange position of being judged and criticized for failing to be clairvoyant. No other profession is expected to know what the world will be like 15 years hence and adjust our practices accordingly. Still, we have to try to pack students' suitcases for a place we have never been and may never arrive at ourselves. What should be in that suitcase? As you say: critical thinking, problem solving, all kinds of literacies. But probably not the Edtech Flavor Du Jour, which seldom lasts longer than a few years. We truly have to teach what is timeless, if we can figure out what that is.

More of my thoughts on this here: http://perfectwhole.wordpress.com/2012/07/15/teac...

Thanks for a thought-provoking post.

Good advice. I'm going to try the pinging sites you mentioned.

Here's another trick: if your post is related to anything in the news, make comments about the story on relevant news sites and add a link to your take on it. I still get hits from essays I posted links to months ago on newspaper and magazine sites.

I have had very little success with Twitter, though. Not sure why, as I get lots of traffic from Facebook and other sources.