Oh.
What was I thinking?
Of course my sweeping comment was sweeping, and of course it was not true in every instance. If you read my comment as a prediction that praise for the man would be universal, then either I didn’t do a good job writing it or you didn’t do a good job reading it. You, personally, are someone who approaches issues with a nuanced view, and my comment is inaccurate when applied to you. Obviously, I myself am part of the “SDMB audience” and my comment is also inaccurate when applied to me.
So, yes - it was a prejudicial and sweeping generalization, accurate in general tone and feeling but certainly not accurate in specific cases and not intended to apply literally to all members of the audience.
Don’t move the goalposts. Did tomndebb “cheer this teacher for his cogent analysis of Bush’s similarity to Hitler”? Did Evil Captor cheer the teacher’s “cogent analysis”, or “agree with him that capitalism is at odds with human rights”? Hell, did Cliffy say one damn word indicating that he agreed with the teacher’s position?
Or are you seriously equating support for the teacher’s right to be wrong with support for the teacher’s views?
Well, to believe that, though, you’d have to believe either that no student or his/her parents would be offended if the teacher went off on a right wing rant (which I’m sure at least one student/parent would), or that upon receiving a complaint that a teacher went off on a right wing rant, the school authorities wouldn’t investigate it and put the teacher on leave (which I’m pretty sure they would).
Public schools are very sensitive to controversy, especially political controversy. When I was trying to get a teaching certificate (before I realized how much I hated kids), it was stressed over and over about how sensitive you had to be in your lesson plans to make sure you didn’t say anything controversial or that might offend somebody.
You were thinking that people would:
None of those guys did that, not even Elvis. And certainly not tom.
And… for all you people saying that we let right-wing commentary from teachers pass without incident all the time… cite? Prove your claim.
In the Christmas thread, I got rightly pummelled for not being able to present specific examples of what I was claiming, and ultimately had to withdraw my initial claims.
Now let’s apply that same love of rigor to these claims, please. Just where are the teachers spouting equivalent right-wing indoctrination and being ignored by officialdom? Cite, please.
Come on, Bricker.
You weren’t, or it would have occurred to you how easily I could pull up the REST of my quote:
Doesn’t sound so unbalanced, does it? :rolleyes:
Also:
It’s “accurate in general tone and feeling” that the SDMB, by and large, hates capitalism and thinks Israelis are terrorists? I repeat: come on. Really.
Or, in fact, any instance you can point to.
The fact that you meant it sincerely does not help your position at all, in fact it’s even more self-incriminating.
Who did you mean refer to, then? Is there anyone you’d be willing to mention by name?
So what is your intent here? Simply to try to get a rise out of all those reflexive, mindless Bush-haters who infest this board?
Maybe I should been more explicit in the OP.
I expect the usual crowd here to privately cheer this teacher for his cogent analysis of Bush’s similarity to Hitler, and privately agree with him that capitalism is at odds with human rights, and publicly support him without explicitly endorsing those particular claims.
That. Is awesome. Absolutely, one hundred percent irrefutable.
Genius.
You mad, mad, beautiful man.
Care to explain what you meant by that?
So would I, but I asked if you would be willing to suspend such teachers on both ends of the political and religious spectra and you avoided providing a serious answer.
While I agree that I have encountered several extremist teachers on the Left and the Right who would mark down students for challenging the propaganda they spouted, Your humble opinion is based on nothing more than your own apparent desire to believer that is the case, here. (Unless there is further evidence that has not yet been provided in this thread.) I have also been taught by extreme partisans on the Right and the Left who graded quite fairly and allowed negative responses in class.
Punishing this guy because you have a preconceived notion of how he might behave is simple prejudice on your part. It also avoids the issue of whether we need to put some sort of gag on all teachers at all times (or is it only when they tilt Left?).
Who gets to determine what is balanced and what is “fair” (at least to “our” side)?
According to an actual review of the tape, the teacher accepted questions and challenges from the students. He never once belittled any kid who challenged him, even complimenting the two kids (that I could hear) that did challenge his assertions.
He also wound up the talk with a repeated statement that he did not have the answers, that the kids did not have to accept his perspective, and that he was not even sure that he was right. Hardly the sort of suppression of “opposing viewpoints” that might justify the suspension.
Now, I might agree that this guy should have been suspended if he was insisting that everything he stated was absolute truth or demanding that it be followed on tests. There is no evidence in that single recording that such is the case.
As presented in the OP, however, I suspect that a teacher who promoted Manifest Destiny as a Good Thing would not be reprimanded and that a teacher who taught that the possessions that the U.S. took from Spain in 1898 were not taken to build an empire would be under no similar threat of suspension. I suspect that there are teachers who present all the U.S. interventions in Latin America as “necessary” who are under no threat of sanctions.
I suspect that any number of teachers are out there claiming that the U.S. “had” to invade Iraq to “defend” the country without endangering their careers.
I was more troubled by some of his errors in details, but his overall presentation was based on views that are widely held in some groups that are mainstream–even if currently out of power.
Indeed you should.
*Still * nobody you’d care to mention by name?
i had a similar case when my daughter came home from school one day in 10th? grade and told me she thought the world would be a bettter place if everyone had a guarenteed income. then people would go into medicine if they wanted to, not because it paid more money. it was immediately apparent to me that her teacher was expressing these views in their social studies class.
rather than blowing a gasket, i asked her if a family acquantance we knew, who had never worked and had been on welfare for 30 years would ever work, and how was this fair to people who worked? i explained to her that it would be a natural tendancy for more and more people to stop working, till the whole thing fell apart. i told her that the situation as we know it has been quite successful, but there were problems and that IN MY OPINION the move in that direction would be very bad for everyone involved.
i think it is healthy for people to be exposed to this type of person, and many other types as well, and talk about it. btw, i never contacted the school, i didn’t really see the need. people will expose themselves as not being able to think critically, if they were just encouraged to express their views more freely.
rick
I think we need to know a little more about the context. On its fact, it looks bad. This is not an area that a high school geography teacher should be getting into. Perhaps, however, it was part of an overall class discussion that had naturally deviated from the subject at hand? Maybe they were having some downtime and it came up as part of the conversation?
If it’s a regular thing then he should be reprimanded.
The answer is yes – if a teacher trod out the gangplank as far in the other direction as Bennish did here, I would absolutely be in favor of suspension.
Well, your suspicions are certainly important, but as I suggested above, MY suspicions in the Christmas thread were dismissed and I was forced to provide cites. And a good thing it was – I had to re-evaluate my claims when I discovered I could not provide cites.
Perhaps I’ll learn something again, today, when you provide some cites to buttress your suspicions. Or, perhaps you will.
Jon Stewart: Do you know who was just like Hitler? Hitler.
Jon Stewart: The Nazis worked really really really hard at being the most evil people on the planet. Let’s not denigrate their hard work by comparing just anybody to them.
I think it’s quite possible to say that Bush is a terrible leader with views that will be absolutely reviled in a generation as Strom Thurmond is today. That doesn’t equate him with government sanctioned thugs in the street vandalizing opposition buildings and loading people onto boxcars and T4 and genocidal ambitions, and I may be naive but I think that the VAST majority of left-of-center Dopers would agree and those who wouldn’t are fanatics and would be called so by most left-of-center Dopers. These aren’t the PETA or Nader discussion boards after all. It was an offensive and by all appearance deliberately incendiary comment.
Like one Hitler would make.
Okay, I didn’t really mean the last part.
Your post was the the closest to validating his claim, but still did not actually do so.
Why, what else could you have possible think I meant? 