Posted on 02/25/2004 5:23:45 AM PST by 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
Sheesh! I thought everyone knew this!
Every chance I get. I can even quote whole snatches of some of his poems by heart.
However, I have never Quizzled, and don't ever intend to.
Had I been that teacher, I would have replied something along the lines of "Actually, it's much more like a constitutional monarchy."
I laugh about In school suspension for a different reason. In the mid 70's a classmate named Tom had done something that got him the choice of a 3-day out or one day in school suspension - don't remember what he had done, but he took the in-school. The principal had him spend the entire day in a medium sized room across from the auditorium where the all of the school play costumes were kept. Tom planned well, perhaps he brought brownies with his lunch, I'm not sure, but let's just say he was very happy all day.
I will never forget when Mike, another friend, and I opened the door to that room to check on Tom. He was in that oversized closet with a huge sombrero on his head "flemencoing" around the room. I don't recall if there was a plastic rose in his teeth or not - there may have been. We were roaring.
It was not a particularly effective punishment.
Actually, I do rather like Hardy, it's just so many of those others: Dickens, Elliot, Trollope, Austin and teh Bronte's: for me they're the 19th century equivalent of "chick flicks".
I have enjoyed some Wilkie Collins, and Thackery is not bad. But, give me the vigor of American or German novels of that period almost any time! While adequate in translation, novelists like Fontane, Kleist, Goethe and Mann are all far better in the original German. (tho' I confess to having had a hard time with the plattdeutsch dialect in Effi Briest -- gives me a new appreciation of the difficulties non-native speakers of English must have with the dialect in Twain)
My sophomore English teacher was over 70 and should have retired a decade before I encountered her. And, as to the college faculty, this was 1963 and the faculty was quite a mixed bag politically -- probably mostly '50s moderate liberals, but at least a few were 'pubbies -- but this was back when most professors still tried to keep their politics out of the classroom: the one who liked the paper best, as a paper, also told me he was concerned I was taking too cynical a view.
The broader point is that teachers should not impose their own political or religious agenda on their students, whether it be a leftist agaenda or a conservative agenda.
Would you extend this to private schools?
For the most part, my point applies primariliy to state supported schools. My personal view is that teachers generally should assist students in learning to think for themselves, rather than inculcate a particular ideology, but I would not restrict the right of those who disagree to offer private ideologically-based instruction assuming they are candid about what they are doing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.