Tag Archives: education

Teaching Opportunity Successfully Avoided

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Because safe spaces are more important than education spaces.

A Virginia school district has “temporarily” banned the classics, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, after a parent complained that her high school-aged son was traumatized by racial slurs used in the books.

Would a trigger warning have helped this snowflake masquerading as a Mom to do her job as a parent?  Probably not:

I keep hearing, “This is a classic, this is a classic[.]”  …  I understand this is a literature classic.  But at some point, I feel that children will not—or do not—truly get the classic part—the literature part, which I’m not disputing.  This is great literature.  But there are racial slurs in there and offensive wording that you can’t get past that.

No, the children can’t.  Not when their parents won’t let them learn how to do so.  And: I read Huck Finn in junior high and Mockingbird as a high school sophomore.  The slurs, aside from being part of the stories—they were, after all, tales of their times, another aspect of this teaching opportunity away from which this school, this “parent,” slunk away—they were minor incidents in the tales.

And: if these minor parts of the tales really are that important to today’s youth, to today’s infantile parents, then how better to teach these children how to deal with the slurs, the racism, the ugliness that still exists, for all the progress we’ve made since those days when I read this stuff without a hazmat suit to protect me, than to do it in a controlled environment where such words can be put in the contexts of their times and then in the context of our times?

The alternative, after all, is that these children will eventually leave their safe space homes and their safe space schools and encounter such behaviors out in the world without having had a chance to learn how to deal with them.  Then these children will learn how badly cheated they’ve been by those whom they thought they could trust because those homes and schools were not even close to safe because of “safe” space shielding.

Racism and Sexism in a Teachers Union

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San Francisco’s public schools have been offered a classroom lesson plan that calls President-elect Donald Trump a racist, sexist man who became president “by pandering to a huge racist and sexist base.”

The union that represents city teachers posted the plan on its website and distributed it via an email newsletter to its more than 6,000 members. The school district has more than 57,000 students.

This is what the United Educators of San Francisco has done.

Union President Lita Blanc said that even House Speaker Paul Ryan had called Trump’s campaign racist and sexist.

This is plainly false and another carefully manufactured union slur.  Ryan did indeed denounce certain of Trump’s remarks as racist and sexist.  But Ryan denounced those remarks; he did not denounce the entire campaign.  Blanc knows this.

It’s not just racism and sexism, it’s hypocritical racism and sexism to manufacture charges of racism and sexism out of the æther, and it’s especially so when the manufacturers do so knowing full well there is no racism or sexism present.

A Measure of Justice

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Recall Rolling Stone‘s article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely that accused a fraternity at the University of Virginia and the university at large of fostering a climate of rape.  The article went on explicitly to accuse the fraternity’s members of participating in the gang rape of a particular woman—a woman whose rape never occurred—and it smeared (now ex-; she’s still employed by UVA, but in a different and lesser capacity) Dean of Students Nicole Eramo as being indifferent to the purported victim’s plight.

Eramo sued Rolling Stone and Erdeley in Federal court for defamation—a charge in which, because of her celebrity status, a status manufactured by Rolling Stone and their press brethren through their publication of the article and repeated of summaries of it, Eramo would have to prove actual malice by the magazine and Erdeley, not that they were merely extremely negligent.  Last Friday, the jury in the case agreed with Eramo.

[T]he…jury found that the magazine and one of its journalists, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was liable for defaming Eramo….

And then:

The jury awarded Eramo $2 million from Erdely and $1 million from Rolling Stone….

Eramo’s attorney noted the vindication:

This was nothing short of a complete repudiation of Rolling Stone and Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s flawed journalism[.]

But only a measure of justice.  Eramo described the long-term destruction inflicted on her during her testimony.

Eramo said that U-Va. reassigned her from her duties counseling students on matters involving sexual violence and that she felt adrift on the campus she had called home for 20 years. Eramo said that she received hundreds of vitriolic email messages….

And

[Eramo said that] she faced threats, lost her ability to pursue her life’s work as a sexual assault prevention advocate, and took a major hit to her professional credibility.

The money award is good in the sense that it sends a clear signal to a dishonest press and the “journalists” within it.  However, money cannot repair the damage the smear has done.

Again, only a measure of justice: UVA promptly on the accusation, but without any investigation of its own and long before the police completed their own investigation, suspended not just the accused fraternity but all fraternities associated with the university.  Further, the university has done nothing since to make those fraternities whole from the school’s smearing suspension.

Given the magazine’s and the pseudo-journalist’s evident disdain for the truth and their willingness to publish anything at all in order to make a sale, it’s an amazement to me that anyone anymore would pay money to read their…stuff.

The smeared fraternity has its own lawsuit in progress.

Education and Unions

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What do teachers unions have against quality schools?

Georgians will be voting on a State Constitution amendment that would create a statewide school district into which failing public schools from any individual school district could be transferred.  This statewide district would have the authority to make any changes to a failing school it deemed necessary—including ridding the school of its union representatives and including further converting the failing school to a charter school or closing it altogether.

Naturally, teachers unions oppose this threat to their core.  The National Education Association alone has dumped over five-and-a-half million dollars into the state to oppose the amendment, because union teachers.  Never mind that there are 68,000 children currently trapped in 127 failing public schools—535 children per failure.  Unionization is more important to teachers unions than the education of the children for which these unions are responsible.

It gets…better: this is what a Clinton administration will allow unions to inflict on our children nationwide, even if the unions lose—and the children win—on the Georgia ballot tomorrow.

Some Lives Are More Equal Than Others

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Cornell University is looking for a Dean of Diversity.  OK, they’re looking for a Dean of Students, but an important part of his DOC is his ability to promote diversity.  But the new Dean mustn’t promote diverse diversity, only the diversity of school-favored groups of students.

…one top candidate, Vijay Pendakur…held a “diversity townhall” with students to persuade them to support his candidacy.

Then he let the cat out of the bag.

If I say, “The dean’s area of focus is diversity and inclusion,” the unspoken thought in response often is, “Oh, so he’s here for only the marginalized students.”  So we need to undo that, because that is a deeply problematic framework.  If we’re going to make progress, it needs to be everyone’s conversation.

Cornell’s Vice President for Diversity of Inclusion, Julia Montejo, chose to be offended by this truth.

I’d like to hear more on how that kind of approach and philosophy still puts the concerns of minority students, students of color, underrepresented students, LGBTQ-identifying students and students with disabilities at the forefront….

Because.

Cornell favors some diversity, but not complete diversity.  Some groups of students should just proceed to the back of the Cornell bus.