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Tales of a Public School Nothing

Friday

Friday

Bazinga!
Various and sundry bits of verbiage encountered whilst attempting to educate today's youth:

Student: "I'm glad Obama won. I get to keep my foodstamps." (Indicative of the popular attitude at my place of employment)

Language Arts Teacher: "This is going to be the Social Justice Unit".

Excuse me? The WHAT unit? You are licensed to teach language arts, not to indoctrinate. This is why most of your students are failing your course, Chickie (they actually are). Concentrate more on teaching them to critically interpret a piece of literature, and less on twisting that piece of literature to fit your agenda.

Speaking of which....

This same teacher gave O Henry's "After 20 Years" as a reading assignment. The story is about these two friends who haven't seen each other in 20 years, meeting up at a predetermined rendezvous. One of the friends becomes a cop, the other a criminal. The cop recognizes the criminal from wanted posters. The criminal does not recognize the cop. The cop cannot turn his old friend in, so he sends a colleague in his place, along with a note of apology to the criminal. Very twisty ending, very much O Henry.

One of the questions in her assignment was: Who was the antagonist in this story? The answer is, of course, the criminal, for not taking the right path in life.

A lot of her students said the cop was the antagonist, and the teacher insisted on accepting that answer. Why? She claimed "cultural bias." In her culture, the cop would be labelled a "snitch", and would be outcast from the community.

Bullshit. The cop was just doing his duty, and lived his life on the side of right. No antagonistic characteristics there at all. It took all of the willpower I could muster to just sit in that classroom and not speak my mind.

Number_6 would have blown a gasket.
 
I don't use racial slurs to describe my colleagues. But yes, she is black, and a radical feminist to boot.
 
Come to think of it...

She gives a whole population of students a "pass" because of what she considers "cultural bias", but she couldn't give my autistic student a "pass" because he didn't complete a homework assignment exactly as she wanted (he used visual aids which helped him understand the concept, but she made him do it over because it wasn't "her way")?

Y'know, I changed my mind. The woman is a bitch.
 
Friday said:
I don't use racial slurs to describe my colleagues. But yes, she is black, and a radical feminist to boot.
Click to expand...

Ya know... I predicted your answer even as I was posting. I knew you'd make some dipshit remark about racial slurs and then confirm she was a boog.
 
CU, you're a smart man. I would be honored if you dropped the persona and added something worthwhile to the discussion.
 
Well alright bitch... riddle me this: how did I figure out you were talking about a nigger? What cultural clues did you give that tipped me off?

Strangely enough, stereotypes work roughly 75% of the time.
 
When I first meet someone, they come with a clean slate. It is their actions that give me a glimpse into their character.

That being said, I find that most who exhibit stereotypical behavior are, indeed, those who you would think would exhibit that behavior. In other words, you are right, CU. I hear young black teens refer to their female classmates as "baby mama", I see pants sagging down asses all day, I hear students say, "I don't care 'bout no "F" ", and in fact, I sit in on a Science class where only 7 students out of 23 are passing. The remainder have "F"'s, and are doing nothing to raise their grade. I work in a school with an 80% black student population, yet in Academic Awards assemblies every quarter, 90% of those receiving awards are White or Asian.

Apathy and laziness rule. Quite frankly, I'm getting to the point where I'm damned tired of putting more energy into these students' education than they are willing to put in themselves.
 
And these students absolutely do not need a person of authority validating their warped street code. That is irresponsible, at best; dangerous, at worst.
 
What do you think is the source of their apathy? Peer influence? Parental indifference? Technological distraction (ie. Youtube videos vs. actually reading a book)?

One job I could never do is teach. I think I'd throw up my hands in despair after the first hour. I can't imagine your frustration with this teacher, no matter what her race or ethnicity.
 
In all cultures and races there are those who will strive for more, who are goal oriented, who have the fire in the belly. They are few. The rest coast along giving in to peer pressure, herd followers, content with the group they've aligned themselves with and look for someone else to blame for their lot in life.
 
For the record, no words are "bad".

This idea of a politically correct society is exemplary of a weak society that enables niggardly tendencies (apathy and laziness).

Words are descriptive. If a person is not OK with the description at hand, maybe they shouldn't be guilty of it in the first place.

And lastly, the meanings of words change and adapt. The term nigger is beginning to lose it's tie to "racial" in some cultures. Personally, I use the term nigger to describe many colors of people.

I love language. Even the "bad" words.

Mainly because I'm not a pussy. Sticks and stones, ya know?

In regards to the OP, that teacher does more harm than good and should consider a different career.
 
Skin color does not equal culture adherence. I deal with white kids who act like black kids and black kids who act like white kids and asians who act like lations and latinos who... well... latinos mainly stick to one stereotype. More specifically, the dominicans. I'm cool with a lot of 'ricans, but the dominicans are the terribly lazy and annoying ones.

Furthermore, it's the culture you should be biased against, not the color of the skin. This ignorant, apathetic, entitled second-hand society is leading us down a path to the movie "Idiocracy".
 
Conchaga--I wholeheartedly agree. I hold the same disdain for entitled white "princesses" that I do for "gangstas".

To survive teaching, I need to find those rare moments that make it worthwhile, otherwise I'd go insane. Last year I had one gangsta in my class. We butt heads at first. However, after months of me telling him to calm down and think before he acts, he comes to me after school and says, "Ms. Friday, I almost got into a really bad fight yesterday, but I remembered what you said about calming down and thinking, and that's what I did. I thought about why I wanted to fight, and I didn't think it was worth it. I walked away instead."

Did I change that kid's life forever? Hardly. But I changed his life *that day*, and that is good enough for me.

Jibbles--as far as nigger is concerned, I view that word as derogatory and disrespectful when used as CU used it. I am not attempting to stop him from dropping it whenever he feels like it, but I just choose not to.

kaonashi.shinu--It's hard to pinpoint the source of their apathy. It's partly parental, definitely. Kids become what they are shown. One of my colleagues in grade school had 3 iPads and 1 MacBook Pro stolen out of her classroom. They caught the fourth grader who did it. The parent was called in, and when asked where she thought her child obtained the computers, her answer was, "Well, he told me he bought them at the school store." Yeah, Lady, either you're dumb as shit or you're teaching your son to commit grand larceny at a young age.

Peer pressure is certainly a factor. Students don't like to stand out from the crowd, so they'll hold themselves back to hang with their homies.

I truly do fear the future. At least in the U.S, we really are raising a generation of idiots.
 
Oh, and apparently we will be reading The Diary of Anne Frank in Language Arts. That in itself isn't bad, but our favorite English teacher began by showing a video allegory of the holocaust (The Terrible Things), then went on to proclaim that it is wrong to stay silent in the face of oppression.

Kumbaya, people, Kumbaya....
 
You should do what my younger brother did and teach science. When a science teacher tries to foist cultural or personal (or, more often, religious) bias on a curriculum, it's a lot easier to laugh them out of the room --and in some cases, out of a job.
 
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