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The median teacher is a normie. Mathematically, this must be true- there are simply too many of them for it not to be.
But to be more specific, teachers are very very conformist women who are at least moderately good at school. If, going through a 'standard' American education system, you uncritically do what the system recommends at every point(and are smart enough to do so, but not smart enough for someone to recruit you out of it), you will probably wind up as a teacher. This is not a recipe for pushing back against retarded activist union bosses or doing hard work that your coworkers doubt the value of.
So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle. It's hard to see how she even could. She took the job because she didn't think the default path pushed on her through very well, would rather go home after her shift than engage in politics but doesn't know how to say no. She probably likes believing that she's helping the kids in her classroom; she certainly likes the kids. She probably doesn't like her admins or union bosses but does whatever they say with no pushback- because she has never pushed back against anything in her life, ever. That the teaching profession is populated, on the 'grunt' level with the normiest, most submissive women in existence may not be good, but it is a failure of all of society rather than of those teachers themselves.
At one point this may have been true. After vaccine mandates and pronoun mandates, the activist have more or less gotten the last of the conscientious objectors out of the profession, and the normies have been indoctrinated.
Yes thé normies are indoctrinated- because they’re, you know, normies.
Ok, so we're back to all teachers being the problem then?
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Unhappily, the most vocal and most online ones are the Mx. Smiths in a polycule who were highly indignant over not being able to tell their eight year old pupils all about their sex life as a queer non-binary folx because some repressive, probably MAGA, parent snitched on them to the administration about what was really being taught instead of readin'/ritin'/'rithmetic.
I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.
(In case you think I'm inventing the polycule teacher, nope, that's a real example from a few years back).
You weren't kidding about that subreddit. Just browsed a thread where they were complaining about having to hand the ten commandments in the classroom, and a commenter literally recommended hanging the 7 tenets of the Satanic 'faith'. You can't make this stuff up. https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1miopbb/its_over/n76x3d5/
I mean, I strongly oppose public school teachers being required, or even permitted, really, to hang the Ten Commandments in a classroom. Public schools should not endorse an establishment of religion.
The point of the Satanic Temple stuff is as a protest against religious impositions on public spaces — you say you’re just endorsing good morals, well here’s ours, how do you like it? It’s a good troll, and I think it makes its point.
You also have to separate the Satanic Temple people — who are trolling atheists, from the LeVeyan Satanism people — who are somewhat more trolly atheists who admire Satan as a literary figure (he brought the light of true choice to man!) while not believing in the literal existence of Satan, from the actual, ritual and sacrifices to Satan people. The latter are considered dangerous even among practicing occultists.
The Satanic Temple stuff is just a more edgy version of the Pastafarians trying to wear pasta strainers in their drivers license photos. I think they need to be careful, because yelling “hail Satan” as they like to do sometimes is both upsetting to normies and spiritually stupid, but based on my experiences with the type they’re just edgy atheists and their personalities aren’t much different.
I don’t like any of them, and my view on existing religious references in public spaces is to roll my eyes at people making a big deal of them, but the teachers have a legitimate constitutional complaint that being required to hang religious texts in their classrooms is inappropriate.
This boils down to banning public schools when you look at it at all. Every school teaches a religion, it just depends what flavor.
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Someone once described the first two groups as people “who worship Satan by pretending to worship Satan.” As an assessment it depends on Satan’s existence, but if you accept that it describes the situation well. It’s still worth distinguishing them from those who deliberately and unironically worship Satan, of course.
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I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, they are a foundational part of our civilization, and it's good for people to know about and consider them, so I would certainly address them in the curriculum at some point. On the other hand, they're kind of appropriate as actual classroom rules.
Clearly inappropriate for American public schools.
I don't think religious people even agree about what this means, and also not appropriate for American public schools.
They get Saturday and Sunday off, anyway. It would be an improvement on playing Roblox all weekend, but not seriously taught in public schools.
Good advice. Public schools like to focus on the dishonorable parents, with messaging like this Mother's Day, think about all the women who are unable to be mothers, or are estranged from their mothers, and how sad they are. This would probably be a net improvement.
Schools are very serious about this one.
Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.
Schools are and should be serious about this.
Schools should be more serious than they are about this.
Inappropriate for children.
Schools should be much more serious about this, and especially about flaunting your goods at your neighbor to try to bait them into covetousness.
So I guess that's half of them, where the Commandments and schools align, though they probably wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder, even.
Well of course, they first have to figure out their gender identity and sexual orientation and position on polyamory before they can even begin to contemplate ethical non-monogamy. How repressive to tell eight year olds that adultery is sinful!
There's little overlap between the schools discussing gender all the time and the schools posting the Ten Commandments.
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IIRC schools in USA keep holding shooting drills intended to make subset of "You shall not murder." harder
(in effect cause more damage than shootings themselves, but that should obviate "wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder" anyway)
Elementary schools are a bit paranoid that someone out there might be a murderer, and might come to their school, but I haven't heard any I've been in suggest that their students themselves might become murderers, and should instead choose not to.
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Except they do not have different morals, they do not believe in the tenets of Satanism, they are trolling? Petulant trolling no less since I would bet they agree with the morality of most of the ten commandments, usually they're just having a 'fuck you dad' reaction to at least one of the first four?
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It's worth remembering how extreme Reddit is when you see stuff like that. For example, the board gaming subreddit is extremely woke (as the forum discussed a few weeks ago), but in real life very few people I have encountered are that way. Similarly, the observation that Reddit teachers are crazy does not necessarily show that the wider group of teachers is that way. They may be, I don't have experience or evidence to say otherwise... I just think one needs more data points than Reddit because of how overall crazy that site's users have become.
Oh, I agree, but the ones most online are the most vociferous, and they that shout the loudest get heard most. So the extreme positions get pushed because the majority are silent or don't know the shenanigans going on until it's too late.
It's also worth noting that the median post on /r/teachers seems to be perfectly ordinary discipline or dealing with admin problems with canned answers that often boil down to 'yeah that sucks'. It's just stuff like 'I had a fight break out in my class' and 'my students won't keep track of which pronouns I use which day of the week' that gets the most attention for reasons that seem obvious.
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I think this is probably largely true. My kid's teachers have all been pleasant types who are passionate about helping kids and who do not seem overly political, but I can't help but be pulled away from your claim every time I pop open Facebook or any social media site and see, on my feed, some of the few random "friends" that I acquired through acquaintances in college (some who are now teachers) start talking about the patriarchy while simultaneously demanding that they and their districts receive more funds. The one thing they have in common is that they are all college educated, middle to upper middle class liberal-progressive white women.
The online world probably skews my perception of reality when it comes to the actual percentage of teachers these types represent, but they are so loud, passionate, and irritating online that it starts to feel like they are the majority simply because they take up the majority of the conversation online. Not sure what can be done about these squeaky wheels other than just waiting for the continued vibe shift brought about by regular people finally having had enough and insisting that these women shut the fuck up and that no one cares about their personal vendetta against the toxic masculine white man.
For me personally though, this group has become the most annoying group on the planet. To clarify, I'm not saying they're the worst people. It's just the combination of them dominating the online conversation and acting offended (either over something that happened to them or on behalf of someone from a marginalized group) while also having the cultural momentum to impose and enforce all of their bullshit rules and policies that makes them exhausting to endure.
I’ve had to unfollow a couple of people I used to be friends with and like well enough in person for this, though I think it may be decreasing. In person they’ll read the body language of people around them, but only positive reactions are allowed on most social media, which was a mistake. There’s probably no solution, women have been spurning each other on moral grounds forever.
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There's about 4 million primary and secondary school teachers in the US, compared to about 260 million adults. That leaves plenty of room for non-normieness among teachers.
It's the teaching colleges and the universities. I saw the same when it came to newly-minted social workers: they had been stuffed to the gills with (slightly outdated by that time) theories of value-neutral, non-judgemental, the rest of it. So completely unprepared to deal with the types who were cunning, gaming the system, and knew exactly what buzzwords to use when spinning a tale to wrap the social worker round their finger and get them to advocate for "more gibs!" (that handy phrase which the job could have used back then) when interacting with authorities on their behalf.
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decades old by this time, and it's still being referenced, for one.
I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.
That's a meaningful improvement over the training some friends of mine went through. Are they still teaching Gardner's multiple intelligences? And a few years ago, the district where I had gone to school adopted a commitment to achieving the same outcomes for all students regardless of their gifts or circumstances.
An acknowledgment that not all children are the same, and that their different gifts cannot be made to produce the same outcomes in the classroom, is actually a big deal.
I haven't heard about the multiple intelligences lately. It's been a lot of Science of Reading, High Quality Instructional Materials (apparently this has a more specific meaning than I had initially assumed), uninterrupted Tier 1 (basic curriculum) minutes in ELA and Math, and interventionists for elementary schoolers, including adding Math Lab, STEM, and SEL (social emotional learning) to the elementary specials rotation.
I have a relative who's starting a licensure program this year, so perhaps I'll find out what the current educational zeitgeist is.
What's your take on this? I remember some pitchforks and torches raised a few years ago by socially conservative parents of grade-school kids that it amounted to a program of socializing students into the teacher's ethics while framing it as a skills thing. I haven't looked into it enough to understand it.
I do remember when a bunch of placards sprang up in my early '90s public elementary school listing all the traits they expected to develop in students. It read like a list of virtues as conceived by a committee of bureaucrats.
My reaction was more or less, "What qualifies you to teach me virtue?" I must have been a very humble child.
My local schools are not as conservative as Mississippi, but they're in that ballpark. Their two main SEL initiatives are associating emotions with colors ("I'm in the red zone" instead of "I'm really angry and freaking out", or "we need to get in the green zone to be ready to learn"), and Character Strong words of the month (kindness, gratitude, courage, etc). I'm not completely sure what they're trying to accomplish with the color zone stuff, I've never heard the kids actually use it that I can recall. The Character Strong words seem fine. Pretty generic. My daughter's SEL teacher gave us a list of books she'll be reading with all the grade levels, I haven't gone through it yet.
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All the "virtue-based" banners and signs in teachers' rooms when I was a schoolchild always struck me as very silly. Lots of transforming "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." into an acronym, lots of "At our school, home of the Bears, we are Based, Effective Altruist, Rationalist, Sapient" or "Everyone here C.A.R.E.S." standing of course for "Courteous, Achieving, Responsible, Excellence, at School on time"... I don't know that any of these did anything, but I'm sure there was some sort of state or federal grant money involved in "teaching ethical citizenship and public service" to children, for which these useless banners played a role.
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Yeah, I think a lot of this is top-down, not grassroots. Unfortunately, the people going through the universities and the training get this imposed on them. So even if they're not progressive themselves, they are being taught "this is how you do it" and not given alternative tools.
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