Posted on 05/10/2008 1:39:23 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
One of the unwritten codes for white teachers teaching in public schools has been that when it comes time to discipline a black student, the task should be left to another black teacher or administrator. This is to avoid the possibility that the student might mistake the discipline for just another display of the Eurocentric-White-Power-That-Rules-the-World-and-Keeps-All-People-of-Color-Enslaved-Hegemony.
Sometimes, however, a white teacher needs to make requests in the classroom, like telling a poor, disadvantaged student to turn off the blaring music on his iPod. There are classes and workshops for teachers on how to do this “sensitively.”
While being interviewed on National Public Radio by Terry Gross in June 2007, Frank Burd, a Philadelphia math teacher, spoke about the issues that “kids” come into the high school classroom with, like having young, single parents. He philosophized that a large part of teaching involves “opening yourself up” and “developing trust.” One can say, “Put the iPod away,” in many different ways. For the benefit of listeners, he demonstrated it as a command, and then in a nice, sensitive way. Ms. Gross, a former teacher herself, agreed that it is important that students know teachers are not “disrespecting” them.
But, some months earlier, when Burd asked a student to turn off his loud iPod, the 60-year-old teacher suffered a broken neck, brain damage, and a shoulder injury, his lesson for not making the request sensitively enough, apparently.
Teachers are also encouraged to display cultural sensitivity in their curriculums. Burd’s colleague, Ed Klein, a music teacher, did this when he refrained from imposing a Eurocentric classical music curriculum on his students and undertook a course of study on the high art form of rap music and incorporated it into his curriculum.
But to Klein’s bemusement, this was not appreciated enough to ward off an attack. For calling in a parent one too many times, the 55-year-old Klein suffered a broken jaw. But that was after the perpetrator had come in two days in a row and sprayed him with a fire extinguisher, then told him on the third day that he would be killed, and on the fourth day, “ain’t nothing you can do about this, cracker.” It was on the fifth day that Klein was beaten.
Ed Klein’s perpetrator was exonerated when two witnesses failed to show up in court.
Terry Gross asked Klein and Burd, both white, about students “testing” teachers, and whether race was a “subtext.” Well, no, said Klein, “aside from the fact that I was referred to as ‘cracker’ numerous times.”
Not surprisingly, Al Sharpton did not show up like a Jack-in-the-Box in front of a TV camera to provide commentary on this “outrage.”
Burd said he missed teaching. He described the outpouring of support from the other students who tried to help (as he was told) and who sent their best wishes to him in the hospital. I have no doubt that many did.
But the notion that students “test” teachers, that teachers have to do a little dance that at one time displays their authority, their sensitivity, and their likeableness, is a notion that comes from the addled minds of Terry Gross and professors of education. In this Orwellian schema roles are reversed. The sensitivity should come in the form of providing alternatives, like McDonald’s or garbage collection.
Burd, who retains his sensitivity more than does Klein (probably because he cannot remember the attack and has also lost his short-term memory), called his ninth-grade attacker a “beautiful looking” kid, but unfortunately a crack baby, who had a bad home environment. As reward for the attack, the “beautiful” perp and his accomplice were sent to a group home of about nine kids, where they are provided an education, shelter, and food until the age of twenty-one.
I do not remember the assault against Klein and Burd making the national news. Instead, they were interviewed on a typical NPR “investigation” of the “challenges” of teaching in an urban school. Klein had been advised by his school district to be quiet about the incident, that he should remember who “buttered his bread.” But when his colleague Burd was attacked shortly after he was, he felt guilty.
Klein called his assault and the many others that take place in his school the “tip of the iceberg.” Indeed, this has been going on for a long time. In 1969, two years after the “Summer of Love,” and at the height of black militancy, Time Magazine ran an article about assaults on teachers. The images in the media of armed radicals taking over college campuses and rioters assaulting innocent whites and their businesses provided role models for the youth. At Benjamin Franklin Junior Senior High School in Rochester, New York, which had begun busing in students, a carnival atmosphere of exuberant defiance filled the air. I was scared to death. It was a free-for-all in most classrooms, with mostly white teachers desperately trying to display their sensitivity to black students and getting back talk and sometimes actual assaults as riots broke out. (Back talk by white students was not handled as sensitively, though.)
Since that time, we have seen many more black teachers come into the public schools—a good thing. But they too come through the schools of education run by the Marxist radicals of Bill Ayers’ stripe, where they are taught to instill a sense of self-esteem into their charges through new multicultural curriculums that denounce such Eurocentric notions as reason, fairness, civility, and order.
In the days of old, schools were still segregated and teachers, black and white, were less versed in sensitivity. Racial determinism, the idea that one’s behavior is the result of society’s injustices, did not take hold, as Shelby Steele points out, until after Civil Rights legislation was enacted. Radical Marxist whites took their black radical stooges down the road of self-destruction. Their utopian ideas were played out violently and in neighborhoods where the white radicals did not live. They left the poor, of both races, to live with the destruction they left behind.
Their vision of equality is being realized.
Now, the footage of a black student tackling her black art teacher in Baltimore, recorded for the delight of the other students by a student on her cell phone, has outraged cable news viewers. And in Atlanta in the case of Sequita Thornton and her mother it was a mother-daughter team attacking a black teacher.
So now it is no longer The Man, incarnated in the white teacher only, who is being attacked. What would have been unheard of in a black school in the days of segregation, now, thanks to the theories of these elite whites, happens in our public schools—even to teachers who are not called “crackers.” Such is the “equal outcome” of Marxist ideology.
I wonder, would the Reverend Jeremiah Wright say that this is “the chickens coming home to roost”?
I graduated in 1983 - we knew there would be punishment for just talking to a classmate during a lecture or study time. And.... to disrespect a teacher? The thought was unheard of not only because of the punishment at school, but most of us knew our parents would nail us to the wall when we got home!
Not only would I hate to be a teacher in this day and time, I’m glad I am not a student and don’t have children in government funded schools.
You send troops in to schools. Drag everyone with a gang affiliation out in the parking lot and shoot them in the head.
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Abolish the public/tax supported school system.
It's not that the teachers were tough, they were not. It's that it simply was unheard of to show disrespect t them and they fully expected us to stay in line. In short we were expected to come to class, sit down, shut up and learn. And that for the most part is exactly what we did.
My belief is that a HS education up thru the early 1960’s is easily equivalent to 4 years of college today and probably more then equivalent given the caliber of youth I have come across these days.
Our future is looking grim.
I don't know, maybe make school attendance in these districts entirely voluntary. The kids who want an education will show up. The ones who don't, won't. Watch how these confrontational parents change their tune when their precious little gang-thug snowflake child hangs around the house all day instead of being somebody else's problem for forty hours a week.
In more ways than one, my FRiend.
In addition to all that, each year more and more people are willing to sell their birthright by demanding a government handout.This year it is “free health care”, who knows what it will be next year. But the point is , once one accepts the King’s coin, the King owns that one.
And each year moer and more people are willing to live as a slave to the politicians in exchange for an existence substance than to live free and be able to make their own decisions on how to live their lives.
I am 65 years old and do not envy the young people coming up now.
I think we have already passed the tipping point of no return. This will only be able to be determined retrospectively, when it is all too clear.
Isn’t this the sort of thing that Michelle Obama wants us to quite our real jobs to do instead?
Man, you're not kidding.
Man, you're not kidding.
“You don’t give an animal trainer a stack of books and a over head projector. You give them a whip and a gun.”
The best and most appropriate post of the thread.
To add to that just a bit:
Doesn’t matter how fancy your sawmill may be - you just can’t cut good lumber from bad timber.
- John
“Entitled morons yes, but too stupid, lazy and indifferent to go vote”
One can only hope.
- John
Threats of violence and disruptive behavior were routine, the administration was worthless and calling troublemakers’ parents (single mother, invariably) only invited more abuse.
Blacks demand that the government provide them “education”, which seems to mean that the government provide some form of babysitting for 19 years after which every black child be given a completely meaningless accreditation and spared any of the inconveniences of having to actually exert themselves intellectually.
I graduated High school 46 years ago in South Carolina. It was much as you described, some of the students wanted to be troublesome but they knew their fathers would be much harder on them than the teachers. In our small school system the DISTRICT superintendent had an office next to the cafeteria and if a student really acted up they would be sent to his office. He was a man in his late forties who looked like Dagwood’s boss Mr. Dithers but was known for his physical strength. There was a story circulating about a boy who got in trouble and was paddled, meaning he met the “BOARD” of education in the district superintendent’s office. It seems he was one of the very rare ones whose father did not agree with the punishment. It was said that the boy’s father, a ropy muscled farmer, walked into the super’s office and called him out to fight. The story was that the super leaned back in his chair and said, “Let me get this straight first, do you want to punch it out, cut it out or shoot it out?” The farmer turned and walked back out the door and never came back.
This is quite an intriguing idea. As a former high school English teacher, I see some merit here. And if those who choose to attend (parents and kids) sign a contract agreeing to certain behaviors, this might really work.
I wonder if anyone would be willing to try it.
“My belief is that a HS education up thru the early 1960’s is easily equivalent to 4 years of college today and probably more then equivalent given the caliber of youth I have come across these days”
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Of that there can be no doubt! If we may judge by Michelle Obama then it is easily equal to a degree from Princeton and one from Harvard law school. I have seen her Princeton thesis and it would not have gotten her INTO high school in South Carolina back in the fifties let alone allowing her to graduate high school and I refer only to the quality of writing and punctuation, not to subject matter.
I don’t say this as a joke, by the way, I am totally serious and I fully believe every word. What passes for education now is often pathetic.
I’m not a teacher, but I can verify that yes, this is a very real situation. My daughter (and by extension myself) just got “treated” to exactly the sort of thuggish behavior described in this article.
“Students” testing and harassing teachers, staff, and bus drivers. Fights, thefts, assaults, drug use in the classroom, you name it - it happened.
And all under the less than concerned eye of a black principal.
Liberalism is a dangerous mental disorder...
And conservatives are enablers. If we don't do what is necessary to save this nation, no one will.
Same as, WHY would ANY DECENT CONSERVATIVE want to run for ANY office??? They BOTH get DESTROYED while trying to do a good thing.
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