My Daughter, the Blogger-exposed teacher for mistreating her to the whole cyberworld

FrontPageMagazine.com | February 25, 2004 | Catherine Seipp

[SJackson]

How my 14-year-old exposed her teacher for mistreating her -- to the whole cyberworld.

My 14-year-old daughter's blog now gets more hits and links than mine, I'm happy to say. In fact at one point she and I together occupied nine out of the top 10 spaces in Journalspace traffic, and the day of her Instalanche she alone brought in 1/3 of all Journalspace hits. All because of her blog entry earlier this month about how her English teacher had ridiculed her in front of the class for writing an un-p.c. paper.

I've heard what happens when the mighty Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds links you but never seen it up close, and it really is amazing: From 100 hits a day (typical for a teenager's blog) to 100 an hour, with links to dozens of other blogs and around 300 posted comments from Edinburgh to Aukland. (The post counter reads 96 when I last checked , but that's because once this comments server reaches 200 it begins counting backwards.)

For anyone who's interested in the continuing story of Cecile at school, here's an excerpt from a recent entry:

"Background checks--needed. In sixth grade, I had a nice coach who shared my passion for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But there was something peculiar in him. He always seemed to enjoy flirting with some blonde high school students. And by February of that school year, he was in jail awaiting trial for statuatory rape.

"In seventh grade, I had a nice but airheaded history teacher who decided to teach us less than a month of Roman Empire history and more than three months of African and Islamic History. She also repetitively told us the many ways Israeli troops were ruthless. On a project on the middle east, I compiled countless sources including pamphlets by David Horowitz and articles from National Review and Weekly Standard. Unsurprisingly, she called me to her desk once and basically said, 'I don't like your attitude'....Thankfully, the next year, she went abroad to 'save Tibet.'"

Samizdata's Brian Micklethwait, who originally linked Cecile's post, noted last week on his own education blog that he's starting to feel sorry for the English teacher: "I realise that she's probably her own worst enemy, but Cecile runs her a close second. What the old USSR used to call the "correlation of forces" has definitely tilted in that relationship."

Anyway, the back story: My daughter, whose nom de blog is Cecile DuBois, wrote a paper about Mary Wollstonecraft arguing that modern American women have achieved equal rights, and also that the pioneering feminist would have frowned upon contemporary concerns like "banal women's studies classes." The teacher was shocked, began a discussion of affirmative action for women and minorities, and described Cecile as racist not only in front of the whole class but also (according to reports from other kids later) to all the classes she taught that day.

By the way, this is not to say that I think my daughter's paper was above criticism. As Cecile put it on her blog: "Since I was stuck on the spot with my futile attempts to convince the class I was not racist and mentally sane, I moved on to the second parapraph of my 'paper' that even my mother said had weak arguments...afterwards [the teacher] thanked me casually, as if I were heretical, for sharing my 'interesting opinions.'"

Samizdata, a group blog of British libertarians, immediately began a Support Cecile DuBois campaign, along with our blogger friend Jackie D, a young American living in the U.K. who'd introduced us to the Samizdaters when we were in London over Christmas. A day later Instapundit picked up the story, and the outpouring of already sizeable support Cecile had gotten via Samizdata quadrupled.

I suppose that tales of students humiliated by teachers for dissenting from the prevailing groupthink always touch a chord. As Michael Jennings, another Samizdata contributor, observed on his own blog: "I think the moral of this story may be that there are a great many people in the blogosphere whose lives really sucked when they were 14 and in high school." That's certainly true. But there are a few other morals as well in this story of a Los Angeles teenager whose bad day at school on Friday got the attention of a bunch of London libertarians and a Nashville, Tenn. law professor by Sunday.

One is that the Internet really has folded certain corners of the planet into the small town of Blogville, Planet Earth; conversely, the traditonally small, closed world of high school can no longer be so small and closed - not when any kid can find countless informed opinions that differ from what the teacher thinks with just a few mouse clicks.

This can be difficult for schools, which I suspect often are entrenched in conventional leftist wisdom simply because they are institutions. A fondness for instructing and improving (in other words, teaching) might be another reason why pedagogy and the left seem to have a natural affinity. In any case, while there are of course many left-of-center bloggers, the rightward tilt of some of the biggest (Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Eugene Volokh, proto-blogger Matt Drudge, etc.) has been noticed - and complained about - from the beginning. Especially by traditional media, another institution not unsympathetic to liberal orthodoxy.

Blogging is essentially an unregulated, free-agent activity, and that can drive people who prefer rules and regulations and decision-by-committee crazy. From its earliest days, I noticed a tone of disapproval towards bloggers that reminded me of school, what with all the carping from magazines like the Nation and the American Prospect about the blogging world's sorry lack of supervision. The tongue-clucking made me think of the teacher's pet constantly raising a hand to protest: "Miss Jones! Miss Jones! Johnny's reading ahead again! Unsupervised!"

I imagine many teachers go into the profession because they want to be inspiring figures who open students' minds, like Sidney Poitier in "To Sir, With Love." That's great when the teacher actually is like Sidney Poitier (and the students are like the underprivileged little know-nothings in the movie.) But what happens when a student's brain has a few ideas in it already and is not simply waiting to be filled with every opinion the teacher has? Well, if the teacher is the exact opposite of the "To Sir, With Love" type, she can try humiliating the student in class. And in the old days, that probably would have worked, because high school pretty much was a student's whole world and such an incident would have seemed like the end of it.

But a teenager with a blog is a teenager whose world has already expanded, sans help from Sidney Poitier wannabes. Much has been written about the dangers of the Internet to teens; I've seen how it can be a safe outlet. Cecile often feels frustrated by what kids her own age want to talk about, and she likes discussing politics and other topics online with various people (law students, soldiers, retired accountants) she's not going to meet in the school cafeteria. I doubt they'd want a 14-year-old in one of their real life hangouts, but on blogs she's a welcome constant commenter.

So even if she hadn't received such an outpouring of support, I think Cecile's regular stops in the blogsophere would have served as an antidote to what happened at school this past Friday. Certainly if a teacher implies a student is a racist idiot one day, and by the next some 200 smart and articulate adults have said she's not and here's why, that rather counteracts the original lesson plan. Now that so many teens have blogs, concerns about doctrinaire teachers may be passe. Our sons and our daughters are beyond their control.

Here are the relevant post links:

http://ceciledubois89.journalspace.com

http://www.brianmicklethwait.com/education/archives/001012.htm

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/005458.html

http://ceciledubois89.journalspace.com/?entryid=840

http://www.jackieblogs.com/archives/001886.html

http://www.instapundit.com/archives/013842.php

http://michaeljennings.blogspot.com

[zook]

bump for later

[PBRSTREETGANG]

...and the day of her Instalanche she alone brought in 1/3 of all Journalspace hits.

What is the appropriate gift for a 14-year-old girl's "day of Instalanche"?

[sneakers]

bump

[Chad Fairbanks]

A package of Oreos ;0)

[Born Conservative]

the Internet really has folded certain corners of the planet into the small town of Blogville, Planet Earth; conversely, the traditonally small, closed world of high school can no longer be so small and closed - not when any kid can find countless informed opinions that differ from what the teacher thinks with just a few mouse clicks.

As I've said before; the internet is a conservative's best friend...

[TSgt]

"In seventh grade, I had a nice but airheaded history teacher who decided to teach us less than a month of Roman Empire history and more than three months of African and Islamic History."

Brings back memories of my High School years. My AP Engrish teacher had us reading Maya Angelou, Bigger, Why the Caged Bird Sings and so on until I thought only black authors existed.

So much for Macbeth, Grapes of Wrath, etc.,etc..

[ladylib]

Put that un-pc failing paper up on the web and let others judge its merits.

I love it.

[mhking]

[OldBlondBabe]

bump

[JimRed]

Thankfully, the next year, she went abroad to 'save Tibet.'"

Tranlation: to help the Maoist rebels take over.

[Chad Fairbanks]

I remember being in 9th grade - my Spanish class. The teacher passed out the bookcovers for our books. The bookcovers were supplied by the local army recruiters, and so they had a camo pattern on them.

She immediately told the class that she did not want to see the camo pattern, but rather we should have the blank side facing outward instead because she was "offended" by the "militaristic" bookcovers...

Of course, being a punk kid I had to do the exact opposite of what she wanted, and the following day when I showed up in class she came to my desk, angrily ripped the cover off, and sent me to the office for "insubordination".

In-school suspension for that one. Followed by many in-school suspension days during the remainder of the year for wearing such things as field jackets, t-shirts that read "Let me win your hearts and minds, or I'll burn your damn huts down" and "Hey! I just stepped in some Shiite!" and "Hippies Suck"...

Ahhhh high school. What a fun time, full of great memories... ;0)

[eno_]

My daughter already says "Yeah, another didactic Newberry Award winning piece of white guilt." when I ask her what book she was assigned to read at school.

[ladylib]

The kids get it. There is hope.

[CatoRenasci]

And when I was in high school in the early 1960s, we were stuck with the likes of Silas Marner... which set in me a prejudice against female novelists that took years to shake.

Then, sadly, other than in history where liberalism reigned, the political correctness was conservative. As a sophomore, I had an English teacher who downgraded any work she found inconsistent with her own very fundamentalist religious position. I could understand her not wanting us to read Lawrence Ferlinghetti's quasi-erotic Beat poetry, e.g. The Coney Island of the Mind, which was, however, in my view rather tame and harmless, but, with her, even Theodore Dreiser and H.L. Mencken were taboo. At any rate, I became annoyed when she gave me a "C" on an essay I thought was good, but took a decidedly Menckensian line. So, I took it to the local state college where I knew the head of the English department. He circulated the paper to the department as a college paper, and the comments all came back positive, with no less than an "A-" On my next essary for the old bat, I wrote a purposely bad essay which took positions I knew she would like. Of course, she gave me an "A", while the state college English department thought it, at best, a "D-" effort. I then dropped copies of both papers with the college professors' comments on her desk, and on the principal's.

Fun was had by all.

[happygrl]

the traditonally small, closed world of high school can no longer be so small and closed - not when any kid can find countless informed opinions that differ from what the teacher thinks with just a few mouse clicks.

This can be difficult for schools, which I suspect often are entrenched in conventional leftist wisdom simply because they are institutions

What's the antidote to Bad Free Speech ?

More Free Speech.

[netmilsmom]

>>"Let me win your hearts and minds, or I'll burn your damn huts down" and "Hey! I just stepped in some Shiite!" and "Hippies Suck"... <<

LOL! And she thought the camo cover would offend her!

[The Enlightener]

When I was in middle school(8th grade), my science teacher taught from a textbook that turned out to be primarily about how the world was going to fill up with trash, and how we should all recycle. One day I asked an embarrassing question(embarrassing to him, obviously): if recycling was such a good idea why don't companies mine old trash dumps for valuable materials to recycle? The next thing you know I was put in the back of the class next to the door, all by myself.

I spent the rest of that year asking questions like that of the teacher and pretty much making him look like a fool when he had no answer or his answer contradicted the book. I had no idea at the time I was a conservative; I was just taking the information given to me and trying to make sense out of it by asking questions. I ended up getting a B in the class. I had aced every test by putting down the answers I knew he wanted, so when I asked why I got a B, he said I lost points due to lack of class participation in discussions! LOL. Apparently only politically correct responses counted towards those points.

[TheBigB]

My own similar story doesn;t have to do with any type of political stuff; but back in 9th grade my history teacher, Mr. Vinson, was a great guy. But it was history; I mean, all I had to do was read the book and aced every test. 90% of my time in class was spent turned around talking to my friend Verlin. When our report cards came out, I had an A+ and the comment, "Does not pay attention." I tried to convince my parents why the contradiction. :)