Tag Archives: Fringes

Linky Friday: To Hell In a Handbasket, But With Snakes

Will is out son assignment, but Tod has a bunch of links to stuff! And things! And, um, some other stuff and things!

Satellites

State of the Discussion

3 hours ago

to Maribou

Maribou

+ PS @michele-kerr I'm not trying to belabor with you of examples of dangerous school punishments (official or not; personally, I was mostly talking about non-official [. . .]

PS @michele-kerr I'm not trying to belabor with you of examples of dangerous school punishments (official or not; personally, I was mostly talking about non-official but very effective and, as far as I can tell from comparing experiences with friends, quite common abuses of power for the time period - I have no idea how common they are now), or point out the obvious to a teacher that I would expect to be familiar with said obvious, but since you literally said you disagreed that school punishments used to be dangerous, I'm not sure you do know about these things.

I won't bother to cite all the other contexts in which school punishments have been dangerous, but there are plenty, some far more serious and more intensely systematic than the barrel of mostly at least slightly rotten apples I was faced with. (Again, there were some fabulously perfect, crisp, ripe, wonderful apples in that barrel, as well as some apples that had a bruise or two here or there but were basically sound. Not every teacher was horrible. Not even half of them were. But the system I grew up in reinforced the horrible ones and was hard on the good ones.)

How could you be a teacher, and as self-aware and as critical of the education system as you are, and *not* be aware of these abuses of power going on in the past? I admit I did make the assumption that you would be, which is why I didn't elaborate in my first comment in this subthread.

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When Schools Get Political, What Should Teachers Do?

3 hours ago

to Maribou

Maribou

+ Not to turn this into a litany of f'd up teachers - but just to bring up one other notable experience that shaped my experience [. . .]

Not to turn this into a litany of f'd up teachers - but just to bring up one other notable experience that shaped my experience of school and what the rules actually were -

When I was in 9th grade, my 9th grade math teacher had been the principal of the school, a couple of principals ago. There was a "rumour" going around that he threw an oversized stapler (the big heavy office kind) at a kid's head in a fit of temper, put them in the hospital, and that his "punishment" for that was to be demoted to math teacher. I was a very curious kid, despite my fears, and I wanted to know what I was dealing with in the face of that sort of thing. It seemed over the top, but also he was a terrifying man at times, bellowing at kids, going off on them, calling them names if they got a problem wrong. Which I would've thought would've resulted in someone intervening in our classroom? But somehow never did.

I asked my mom about it (she had taught in that school part-time a few years before) and she said she'd heard the same thing from a colleague there, but she didn't know if it was true or not. "Surely it isn't true! He was always so nice to me!!" Sure mom, and also dad isn't going to keep being terrible and really we just need to treat him better. That made me more suspicious, not less.

Anyway, I'd cultivated the kind of relationship with him where he *thought* I was a good kid, and *thought* I was a teacher's pet of his**. So, I figured I could find out what happened. I drew the story out of him, implying heavily that I felt sympathy for him and he must have been misunderstood. He told me all about it - from his own point of view, mostly about how awful the kid was and how unjust it was that he was demoted, of course - and the so-called rumor was literally what happened. Lost his temper at a smart mouth kid, threw a giant stapler at the kid for making him angry (he made sure to make the size of the stapler clear in the story, as I widened my eyes in faux-amazement), put the kid in hospital, he got demoted to math teacher where (this part he didn't say, but I saw first-hand, on a weekly, sometimes daily basis) he verbally bullied kids who weren't very good at math. Called them stupid, idiot, and (sarcastically) genius. At volume. And no one intervened. I found this out later, so maybe it's not true, but what I was told (speaking of political) is that he had an in with someone fairly high up in the Dept. of Ed. for our province, and thus was more or less able to do whatever the hell he wanted without anyone standing up to him. Some object lessons had been learned, and now no one would do anything about it, or if they were trying behind the scenes, their efforts didn't work.

I wasn't saying things aren't as bad now as you make them out to be, @michele-kerr. I'm saying in plenty of places they were really awful, and yes, literally *dangerous*, already. And that the message I was given (and was no doubt unusually receptive to) is that the way to avoid those dangers was to comply.

** This was mostly useful because it let me a) get him to keep letting me work math homework well in advance of the class while taking tests with the class, a compromise my (very excellent) 8th grade teacher had had to work really hard to get him to accept in the first place, and b) meant i was one of a few kids who could distract him into spending time talking about cars for most of the class period, not something I would normally have done, but it raised my always-tenuous social status with the other kids AND kept him from being abusive toward them, something I really wanted to avoid. I did a lot of unofficial math tutoring that year... and most of the kids in my class didn't need that much teaching to pass the class anyway, because our 8th grade teacher had, as mentioned, been really excellent.

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When Schools Get Political, What Should Teachers Do?

3 hours ago

to LeeEsq

scott the mediocre

+ @LeeEsq, something of a threadjack: I strongly disagree that India is de facto a "weaker federal system" than the USA. Regardless of the formal aspects, [. . .]

@LeeEsq, something of a threadjack:

I strongly disagree that India is de facto a "weaker federal system" than the USA. Regardless of the formal aspects, the multiple locally-dominant languages, especially in the south, e.g. Karnatka, make it much easier to have a solid regional power base (with a varying level of alignment with national-level coalitions, e.g. BJP vs Congress) independent of the federal level. But I suspect you are using "weaker federal system" in a somewhat idiosyncratic way: if you don't mind, please elaborate on how you interpret "weaker".

I assume you do know that India had a quite major realignment of several state boundaries in 1956, adjusting from the historical boundaries of the Raj (largely frozen after 1858) to the best they could manage of boundaries based on semi-homogenous dominant linguistic communities*? That supports your "weaker federal system" argument if and only if one assumes that only in a weaker federal system would federal subjects go along with large scale boundary changes: I can easily imagine regionally-based politicians being perfectly happy to trade territory if the result winds up more conducive to ethnic federal polities.

*It's in frickin' Wikipedia.

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Yes California? #Calexit Returns

4 hours ago

to Michele Kerr

Maribou

+ @michele-kerr I was terrified of my first-grade teacher. Not at all proud of being punished. F'ing terrified. I saw her shove and physically shake kids, [. . .]

@michele-kerr

I was terrified of my first-grade teacher. Not at all proud of being punished. F'ing terrified. I saw her shove and physically shake kids, not too much later, which confirmed it. It shut me down in her classroom. It sent me a message that school was (another) place where you said what people wanted you to say, and did what they wanted you to do, or something bad would happen to you. (For a lot of kids, not just me, getting punished at school wasn't just a matter of getting expelled, or having a mark on our permanent records, it was an excuse for physical or other kinds of abuse at home. Literally, physically, dangerous in some cases, and very miserable in others. In some cases, that was known-but-denied by teachers who would use it against us. "Do you REALLY want me to call your PARENTS about this???" Anyone with a brain must have seen how much more terrified certain kids were from that than others; and yet these folks never stopped using that threat.)

So far it seems that if you respond to someone disagreeing with you in the comments, you are likely to disallow not just their perspective on what you said, but also their own experiences of the world.

I am frustrated by that. Kazzy's experiences, my experiences, are real experiences that we really had. Them not fitting your paradigm is one thing - and it may mean that you disagree with our interpretations as being generally valid - but could you quit asserting that we don't know what the hell we're talking about based on *your* assumptions about what we actually experienced?

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When Schools Get Political, What Should Teachers Do?

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