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School Diary: How to Anger a Budding SJW
A small eruption of social justice warfare erupted today at the start of class. Thoughts, critiques, suggestions, etc…all warmly welcomed.My class was waiting to begin when a chatty Hispanic student- call her K- said: “well, I read this article in the Washington Post…but I shouldn’t talk about it now…”
K has been my student for a year and a half so I should have known better than to take the bait. Most of her tuition is paid by a fund that sends “promising” students from public schools to independent/private schools in the state. We know this because she speaks about it constantly, to everyone. She’s generally cheerful, inarticulate, and uninformed (“Ok, so this Helen Keller person… I don’t really know who she was, but anyhoo, so… my sister said that she was blind and deaf. And she couldn’t talk either? But how… like I don’t wanna be mean or, like….well mean I guess but I mean how is that possible? Like at the same time?”)
However I said absentmindedly, “Give us an idea of the theme and we can tell you if we can address it briefly.” I will paraphrase: “So basically, I’m just coasting in school because I have certain advantages… I don’t have to work very hard to be able to, you know…” I cut her off here because I was shocked (and she was floundering). To use the term, “coasting”, I cut in, suggests that K is willing to accept advantages that she doesn’t deserve (I pointed out that K had stated that she does very little work) when others work harder and receive no recognition. That didn’t seem fair to me. There was a ripple in the classroom that I ignored because I was aware of how otherwise silent the room had become.
K was furious and hotly responded that her poor and unprivileged background (i.e. her ancestral background!), which I would never be expected to understand (it was implied that I probably would never think of trying either), entitled her to extra consideration and that colleges did not see the difference between the effort she put in and that of another peer who might be more “privileged”.
With the vivid image of a train shooting off the tracks, I decided to bring the heated exchange to a close. I said firmly that I understood her point but terms like “coasting” were a poor choice for such a sensitive topic because it implied carelessness and passivity. In conversations like these, I went on, it was important to pick one’s words more sensitively. K was very displeased with this conclusion and sulked in her chair. The exchange lasted 3-4 rapid-fire minutes. I felt my knees knocking together under my desk and I swear my stomach tied itself into knots. The room was silent for the rest of the period. I immediately emailed my principal to tell him exactly what happened so he would be looped in.
At the end of class, I asked K to stay for a few moments. I wanted to see if I could clarify how we had communicated at the very least. With a curtain of hair in her face, I explained that while students are free to discuss politics at school, I try to be as neutral as possible though challenging students is important- she sniffed. I understood her interest in today’s topic, but that our class was not the appropriate forum to have such a large-ranging discussion. Hopefully she would understand my intent, as I had understood hers and feel comfortable in my classroom still? She looked at me without blinking and then snapped, “I have to go to crew. Bye.”
I find aspects of this haunting. I know the principal said it would be alright and that K has been provocative with other teachers and administrators too. But I’m aware of the other students’ expressions, how students start to talk, how word spreads about an interaction. The horror of a confrontation with an angry mob of SJWs. K’s words today were offensive and prejudiced in the extreme. How many deserving students cannot come to our school because they are ineligible for financial aid or scholarship programs like K’s? How many would come with such programs and work hard to be deserving of such opportunities?
I feel disconcerted by the episode and there’s nothing to do about it. I couldn’t say more than I did, I didn’t want to say less than I did and I didn’t want to apologize for anything I did say.
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Oops, Guess I shouldn’t have said $hit in my comment above. Maybe Cr@p would be Ok.
The fear of lawsuits drives most everything these days, especially in education. That accounts for the dearth of discipline.
I don’t know anyone who was every afraid of being sued. But for many educators student disputes are tiresome and emotionally draining. You don’t want to get bad reviews at the end of the year either. But it isn’t lawsuits. Ultimately I think at some point educators will have to accept that some students won’t like them and just live with it. It’s the only way. A hard pill to swallow but at some point we all need to just be that person who is known for never changing grades or suffering a fool.
Well I think there would be definite blowback from wealthy parents if their child had initiated the conversation. Certainly the principal would have tried to get a detailed overview of the event and I would have heard about subsequent talks with parents. But a with K it won’t go that far. She’s a tedious one-woman band until she stirs up the other SJWs.
This points out my biggest problem with the equity narrative; the fact that it encourages minorities to feel they don’t have to work hard to get what they want. The fact is everyone needs to work hard to get ahead. Therefore we are teaching them to fail. Truly an evil thing to do.
I don’t mind being known for being hard or not changing grades. When that is known as the norm, it’s fine. What is hard are the parental squabbles that are blown out of proportion. I’ve been yelled at in public and I’ve been chewed out at a teacher conference when I attempted to address poor behavior in the child (17 years old). Not being able to defend yourself against screaming parents because you have no union in a private school with a customer service model is quietly humiliating and takes a certain toll. The student reviews are rough but it’s to be expected that they would not try to be empathetic in their comments.
Easy for me to say, here, now, but I think that as soon as I heard the student say she was coasting, I would ask her to repeat this, loudly, so everyone can hear. Then just let the words hang in the air.
Better than my other, equally belated ideas. Hearing she’d read something in the Washington Post, I might quip, “You’ve heard the expression ‘Beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick’? Well, that’s not always true.” This might draw a laugh from the gallery, but nowadays anyone who admits to reading any newspaper at all has got to be defensive about it. One’s humorous sally may wind up eliciting an even longer speech full of vague discontent.
Another possibility is to say anything at all knowledgeable about Latin America. Professional Hispanics don’t know anything about the place. They’ve never been to it. (Ordinary Hispanics wisely do not care to go, or pretend any interest. It’s no more their country than it is mine.) I have found that whenever I mention some actuality of geography about anyplace south of the Rio Grande, things go quiet real fast.
It doesn’t even have to be about some personal sighting of this or that. It can be something in Spanish. In fact, it can be just one word in Spanish. Like the time I helped out a coworker at a group lunch in a restaurant, who had been asked by a staffer in Spanish about something and she couldn’t remember the word for garlic. I told her what it was. This occasioned awe. I gracefully declined to add, “Spanish may be a foreign language. It is not a secret code.”
I don’t know what class you were teaching, but maybe a general lecture on entropy followed by description of the benefits of a work ethic would be good. And then maybe one on “coasting” and the Plymouth Bay Colony, in which shared work failed due to unequal participation, and individual responsibility and individual gain saved lives.
Explain this to the class in a general way and let the class draw their own conclusions.
I’m a language teacher so it would be fairly off topic for us…but it’s not a bad suggestion!
But if you know something “Hispanic” that some actual “Hispanic” person doesn’t know, aren’t you guilty of cultural appropriation?
But don’t mention that Rush used to tell that story every Thanksgiving…
Diff EQ! Easy ‘A’!
Gut course. Easy peasy.
The cost to the child to get you in deep trouble is zero and is often rewarded, whether true or not. The potential cost to get you out of trouble is often insurmountable.
This is a dynamic that needs to change.
As of today, the line is that K is attention seeking and nothing will come of it. I either haven’t seen the other students or talked to them at length so I have no idea what their take is. But someone should talk to K from admin and put her firmly in her place about these kinds of outbursts. Yes, the dynamic must change.
I have corrected her Spanish often with the little Spanish that I know which has led to titters and her melodramatic, “ok so I’m not perfect!” “Wow I should know know that.” She has yet to discover/use the full term “cultural appropriation”. I dread the day when it is weaponized against me.
“Diversity is our strength.”
A teenaged girl, you say.
Coulda knocked ME over with a feather!
I have a nice conservative colleague who I go to for advice and he said, “I hear you…but remember she’s just a child. Everything comes through that lens.” and I know that, but this is part of the growing issue now that a teenaged girl’s tantrum in class can go unpunished and her teacher does not have the moral authority to put her in her place. Admin might dismiss her as a petulant irritation, but how much of that is fear of provoking her because they might say the wrong thing (according to the teenager?)
I have another Hispanic student who is one of the strongest, hardest-working students I’ve ever had and I wonder what she made of the whole thing. She didn’t say a word. I find it terrible how those students pretend they speak for everyone.
“I didn’t come here for this,” might be her response. It’s all quite a bit of foolishness. You ought to steer clear of that young lady because you won’t win if she escalates.
I’m a bit confused about this, and specifically about what K meant by “coasting.” Did she mean that she’s “coasting” because she’s so smart that she doesn’t have to work, or that she’s “coasting” because of her special Hispanic Privilege?
These two paragraphs seem contradictory. I realize that this is probably because K was contradicting herself. First, she says that she’s “coasting,” then seems to complain that colleges wouldn’t see how hard she had worked.
It does seem that the “White Privilege” game is mostly deployed to excuse the underperformance of certain minority individuals, who are either not trying or not very bright (or both).
K meant she could get away with doing little because of her Hispanic background. Her comments were contradictory because she expressed herself poorly (writing the post was hard because her comments had been expressed so incoherently).
As to her comment about colleges, I think she meant the following: if she earned an A in a class, she personally would attribute it to “coasting” because she has been claiming that she is barely doing work, etc. But if another peer who worked extremely hard also got an A, it would be impossible for colleges to tell on the face of it who had worked hard and who had not. But based on the color of her skin, she went on to say, she deserved to get ahead.
I think you should stop making statements in public about this incident so that they aren’t used against you in a civil court case.
I am starting to learn than being a teacher in a public school today is like being an Army infantry lieutenant in 1967. Good luck Gui. Hope you survive.
Write what he said in a diary. In any court proceeding you can ask to ‘refer to your notes’ which means your version will be closer to the event, and will be rightly awarded more legitimacy, particularly if you quote words and say, ‘these were so strange I had to write them down’.
We often shrug off the little voice in our heads that says, ‘this seems hinky’. Maybe it isn’t hinky.
But people get thrown under the bus every day and schools have a lot of buses.
That’s probably given more credence if the diary is being kept generally. Some people do that, some don’t. If someone has a “diary” but the only event recorded is something like this, seems unlikely to be given much weight.
Would the entire diary be subject to discovery?
I’ve seen at least some TV shows about that, from what I remember the entire diary can be examined, perhaps by the judge, to help decide its overall reliability; but only portions relevant to the matter at hand are presented to the jury etc.