Such a miserable story: an all white-school board forces a teacher to remove a Pride flag and a Puerto Rican flag from a classroom.
The teacher, one of the few Latine teachers in a 2/3 Latine district, resigns.
“Schools are a neutral place” explains the superintendent.
And tearing down those flags is neutral?!
https://sahanjournal.com/education/worthington-school-board-votes-remove-lgbtq-puerto-rican-flags/
1/
The word “comfortable” is doing a whole lot of work in public debate about schools these days. And it’s true, education is •full• of discomfort:
Students get uncomfortable when learning a an unfamiliar concept.
Students get uncomfortable when they become aware of problems in the world.
Students get uncomfortable when their assumptions are challenged.
Students get uncomfortable when they feel unsafe.
I don’t think the word “uncomfortable” means the same thing in all those sentences.
2/
As an educator, I’m told — by the same people! — that:
(1) Because of politics, students are “coddled” now and get to speak their opinions in safe spaces without being challenged instead of having to face criticism, and this is a crisis
and
(2) Because of politics, students are uncomfortable to speak their opinions because of fear of being challenged instead of having safe spaces, and this is a crisis
3/
(The apparent contradiction between those two statements vanishes when you realize that, in the complainer’s mind, one applies to marginalized people and the other doesn’t.)
4/
Still, there’s a real tension here: it is my job as an educator both to make students •comfortable• and to make students •uncomfortable•. And by meaning too many different things at once, that word — “comfortable” — complicates the job.
Instead, try breaking comfort/discomfort along different axes:
- seen / unseen
- valued / unvaled
- safe / unsafe
- unchallenged / challenged
- unfrustrated / frustrated
etc.
Doesn’t that make the problem clearer?
5/
As an educator, it’s my job to do my best to make sure that every student is seen, valued, and safe in school •so that it is possible• for them to be challenged, both intellectually, socially, and emotionally.
Flatten that out into that one word, and it’s my job to “make students comfortable so it it possible to be uncomfortable.” And that’s catchy — but it’s nonsense, because we’re not talking about a single dimension here!
6/
That is, to me, a foundational premise of school: every student deserves to be seen, valued, and safe in school •so that it is possible• for them to be challenged, both intellectually, socially, and emotionally.
That’s our starting point. The only students who aren’t welcome in my classroom are the ones who don’t accept that premise (ht Karl Popper).
7/
Back to the OP about the flags being torn down:
There is no “neutral” here. Obviously. This is a fight about who deserves to be seen, valued, and safe in school. Do Puerto Rican students in Worthington, MN deserve to be seen, valued, and safe? Do LGBTQIA students there deserve to be seen, valued, and safe?
Should the schools honor people who will go to any lengths to make sure PR and LGBTQIA students are •not• seen? •not• valued? •not• safe?
There is no neutral position here.
8/
“Just focus on the lesson!“ they cry. “Classrooms are for pedagogy, not politics!”
Oh honey. Oh my poor, dear little bigot muffin. Let me tell you about teaching students to code.
Coding is frustration. Learning to code is •very• frustrating. Nothing on this earth will make you feel as stupid as attempting to program a computer. It’s not you; it’s just the nature of the beast. It’s true for me, an expert of 4 decades; it’s true many times over for a beginner.
9/
Dealing with frustration is one of the most important things I teach as a computer science professor. This is a discipline where “ARRRGH why does it not WORK” is your daily life. Figuring out how to work through that, how to be psychologically healthy with it, how to find •joy• in it, that’s important learning. Hard learning!
Hard enough for anyone.
But for a student who’s legitimately afraid that they’ll be hurt by one of their classmates at any moment?
9/
I won’t attempt to describe what it is to be a queer or a Latine student in Worthington, because I’m not. I recommend that we all try to find and •listen to• some people who are, who can describe their own experience.
All I’ll say is that it’s impossible for me to imagine the kinds of things those students face on a daily basis wouldn’t harm their ability to face the frustration of coding, to “just focus on the lesson.”
Come on. Get real. Have you ever met a human being?
10/
To “just focus on the lesson,” you •have• to focus first and always on the human beings in front of you.
That’s most of teaching, honestly: ••seeing students and meeting them where they’re at••.
That’s it. That’s the work.
11/
The school board of Worthington, MN says “no, you can’t do that work. Whatever harms your students bring into the classroom, you can’t counteract them in any way that visibly diverges from local norms, that makes anything visible that the people in power here aren’t already used to seeing.”
They haven’t taken a neutral position. They’ve taken a •default• position.
The default settings are never neutral.
12/
I’m not expecting to change the mind of anyone on the Worthington School Board. Their actions have a directly, obviously racist and anti-queer impact. I can’t know for sure whether that’s conscious intent on each of their parts, and I don’t think it matters. The proper response to them isn’t reasoning; it’s organizing. Give ‘em hell, Worthington.
13/
In this thread, I’m speaking instead to people who are maybe a degree or two removed from the schools, or maybe in the thick of them, truly wishing to find the good choices here, and honestly tangled up in knots by these tarpit words: “neutral,” “comfortable.”
Neither of those words means exactly what you think it means. Neither means just one thing. Neither is unidimensional. Neither is free of hidden baggage.
If you can sift through all that, it’s not as intractable as it seems.
/end
For the past year or so, I’ve been using and enjoying the search engine Kagi. Its search results are…fine, no worse than others, and it’s ad-free, stated privacy as a primary goal, and seemed to have a better ethical sense than its competitors. Or so I hoped. 1/
@inthehands Thank you so much for this. Long story short, I have gone from being a person who thought politics was a stupid concept that didn't belong anywhere except in official government offices...to being a person who believes that absolutely every single thing we humans do & say and think is political. We can't escape it, and we shouldn't want to.
The moment we try to "take politics out of the classroom" or out of any other human arena, that's the moment when we have harmed the powerless.
@courtcan Well said. Hat tip to a fellow Cantrell.
(Which way does your branch of the family say it: stress on the first syllable or the second? i.e. CAN-trəll or can-TRELL?)
@inthehands Well, it's both, really! It's my husband's family. The relatives in eastern Oklahoma pronounce it CAN-trull. But Ed grew up in Denver saying it can-TRELL, even though his dad was from eastern Oklahoma. His siblings all say/said can-TRELL, but his brother has spent the last 30 years living in eastern Oklahoma and has acquired the CAN-trull pronunciation.
And every so often, if Ed is talking about the eastern Okies collectively, he'll say "CAN-trulls." 😆
How about yours?
@courtcan Solidly CAN-trull, via Pennsylvania. Growing up in Colorado, most people assumed can-TRELL — and that’s how we recognized telemarketers on the phone!
I haven’t figured out what the geographic pattern is, if any.
@inthehands okay, near as I can tell, our Cantrells are descended from a Richard Cantril born in Blakewell, England, in 1630. But I'm not 100% sure somebody didn't fudge their research.
This Richard's grandson, Joseph, was born in Philadelphia!!! in 1695.
Joseph's son, Isaac, a reverend, was born in New Castle, PA, in 1729.
Isaac had two sons, Reuben & Charles, both born in NC.
My husband's line descends from Reuben.
Reuben's great-grandson, Noah, was born in AR in 1883.
Noah moved to OK.
@inthehands At 26, Noah married Ethel, who was only 14. 🤢
Ethel gave birth to Clyde, my husband's grandfather, when she was 15. She died at age 20. 🫤
Noah remarried in 1914, his bride a woman who was 8 years older than his first wife.
@badeline here's the unrolled thread: https://mastoreader.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffedi.engineergam.ing%2Fnotes%2F9opypcjxy19v02hr
Next time, kindly set the visibility to 'Mentioned people only' and mention only me (@mastoreaderio). This ensures we avoid spamming others' timelines and threads unless you intend for others to see the unrolled thread link as well.
Thank you!
@inthehands "seeing students and meeting them where they are."
This really speaks to me. I visit schools with STEM activities. I'm not a teacher, so I've had to learn on the fly how to teach. The key thing I've learned is that I have to meet them where they are.
You can't do that by ignoring, banning, or demonising key parts of who they are.
I'm now wondering what pin badges I should add to my lanyard to go alongside my bi and she/her ones.
@inthehands absolutely!
I typically only see a group of students once for an hour, so I can't do any of the deep connection stuff. But I do try my best with the time I have.
My last visit was very young children, about 4-5yo. I told them about earthworms being boys and girls at the same time. Partly, it was a fun science fact, but it was also an opportunity to plant a seed of doubt around the assumption of a strict and simple male/female division.
"Bigot Muffin" has me laughing
@inthehands
When you try to teach something to a person, and it "doesn't work", you can blame a lot of things: Yourself, the other person, maybe a misunderstanding.
When trying to teach a computer new tricks, and something goes wrong, there is only you to blame.
One one side, this is immensly humbling, but on the other side: If you write something that runs (or "works"), then it's not like someone tells you that a picture you drew looks good or a meal you cooked tastes good.
It's reality itself (in the form of sand we tricked into doing math) telling you that it's "right".
@wakame …either that, or yes, the computer really is doing something broken or wrong or unreasonable — “it’s people all the way day” — in which case you’re encountering the bad assumptions of some other human far a distance, which you likely have no power to change.
Either way, it’s a psychological vortex!
I hate it when someone demands that politics be removed from the classroom. Everything about education, who's in the class, what is being taught, and what resources the schools get, has always been inherently political.
They just don't want to have to justify why they don't like what's happening
I wonder what they thought would happen when intentionally diversifying their population so quickly. What did they want, a labor camp for meat packing families?
I saw the same thing in Cedar Falls w Bosnian meat packers in the 90s. Refugee labor? Awesome. Assimilating families? Not so interested.
Lately I've been telling people bluntly that it doesn't matter if what their child is learning makes them uncomfortable or leads them to have awkward conversations with their kids. It provokes a lot of defensive, angry, sputtering.
Ooh that's good, I need to remember that
@inthehands this contradiction is summed up in the famous Frank Wilhoit quote:
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.”
Paul Cantrell
Don Whiteside
Court Cantrell won't conform
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