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 know several teachers and/or principals. ALL in the Pittsburgh Public Schools. I think they technically removed the word “public” from their name recently, to appear less bad. The system is about 65-70% black. ALL of the teachers I know are white, and the principal is black (he has since moved on to a Philly area school...) One thing I’ve noticed over the years is the amount of talk about “special needs” kids. Many of them, I will bet, are just thugs by another name. The principal had a junior high kid urinate on him. If I had kids, I’d put them in Catholic schools, and said so even when I was a liberal. The fights and the sexual acts from what I gather are a near daily occurence. The real issue is that thugs, because they are black, are allowed to cause havoc. While black leaders imply the KKK is just around the corner, ready to lynch someone, the real threat is within. The black family is in crisis, and teachers have to deal with it. It is a tragedy beyond belief.
The distinguishing difference between your experience in the 1950's and now, is that I would guess that most of your male teachers and principals were military veterans of WW2 or Korea.
I think the only thing that would be likely to work would be to entirely replace the faculty of inner city schools with retired Army and Marine Drill Instructors, preferably combat veterans
Abolish welfare. Entirely. Root and branch.
If inner city girls knew they would have to support any kids entirely by themselves, they would not get pregnant
Unless the kid blind sided the teacher, the teacher shoulda beat the crap out of him. Period. A few more teachers doing this and some of this crap might subside.
“Depressing. What can we do? I fear for the future of our country.”
I don’t think we should do anything more blacks. They don’t vote Republican.
Let them work out their own destiny for themselves. If they beat a liberal white now and then, so what.
If they riot in their neighborhood, ok with me. If the spill over to mine, I’d shoot em.
I was thinking more a nation of Drooges
actually we almost have that now
educated middle class folks of most races have been feminized into puppy men
and the rest hoodies except a few country boys in rural areas...precious few in numbers
one day maybe folks will wake up
we used to know what time it was culturally
I like your idea of ex military as school teachers. I also think that if they were truly allowed to have a free hand their would be a truly stunning difference in what the schools turned out versus the crap we are getting now.
The problem of these barely sentient thugs assaulting teachers is one that requires great thought and effort to end.
The answer is as simple as BANG.
Repeat as necessary.
Did you mean: Kill Your Teacher: Cooperation And Racism in Los Angeles City Schools
I had to laugh. I guess corruption and racism should not be used togather.
And amazon says the book is unavailable and they don’t know when it will be available again. Go figure.
“Depressing. What can we do? I fear for the future of our country.”
See my tag line... there is the answer.
I live in a township that is 8% black, but they make up 35% of the school district, as 1. many of the white folks in my area are affluent, and choose to send their kids to many of the outstanding (nonsectarian) private schools and 2. we are right next to Trenton, so many (black) Trenton parents illegally register their kids at schools in Lawrence Township.
By the next cycle [2012] all the amnesty laws for the illegals will be passed giving them the vote and they will vote for the party which will promise them the most freebies, the Democrat Party. Also the number of "Americans" who are more than willing to surrender their freedom and sovereignty to the government bureaucrats increases drastically each day.
I’m afraid you’re right.
Crap like this is fueled by the race-baiters (Sharpton, Jackson) and the “I’m entitled” to live my culture. What the media and hip hop portrays as “black culture” is destrying our great nation. One of the first things students need to learn is respect for the rule of law and order.
We need more principals like Joe Clark.
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.