jfish26 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 12:59 pm
JKLivin wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 12:57 pm
defixione wrote: ↑Thu Jul 13, 2023 12:44 pm
I didn't say anything about sharing my beliefs. I'm talking about sharing the beliefs of those involved in the history you're teaching. Most kids leave high school thinking that the settlers treated the indigenous people like family.
I think you can do that without extrapolating to the degree that my older kids' teachers did. You can teach historical facts without telling students how to think about them.
"Historical facts" does a lot of heavy lifting there. For example, there are many who do not think that systemic bias is a "historical fact" in our country's timeline.
Agreed. But the larger question is, then, what to do about it. When teachers start preaching that all White people are, by virtue of the color of their skin, culpable for bias that took place sixty years ago and that they owe something to people of color today because of it, I think that's taking things too far.
Recent scenario: as Department Chair, I fielded multiple student complaints against a Black female professor in my department. She was, by multiple accounts, being verbally abusive hostile to students. When they complained to her, she said that their concerns were not valid because of their "White fragility" and that they were just threatened because she was "a strong, educated Black woman." The irony was that two of the students who came to me with complaints were also Black, and six of the eight were female.
The bottom line is that they wanted to be taught counseling theory - as the name of the course promised they would - and they were instead being given multiple discourses on social justice, racism, White fragility, and chauvinism. When they expressed their concerns, she doubled down and began using class time to berate them, telling the students that she could do whatever she wanted "because I am a protected class." When they said they were going to file a complaint, she told them to go ahead "because Dr. Livin is White and can't do anything about it." When I talked to her about it, she readily admitted doing so said she was justified because of systemic racism.
Too far.
“I wouldn’t sleep with your wife because she would fall in love and your black little heart would be crushed again. And 100% I could beat your ass.” - Overlander