FG, I’m just saying some of the reactions are less well considered than yours or Debaser’s. By a wide margin, and I suspect you’re not impressed by some of the responses either. I don’t stand by all aspects of my deliberately provocative ‘theory’, but I do think anyone worth a damn is going to ask themselves “Does that resemble me in any way?” before they tell me “Hey xeno, your theory is shit.” And then ruthlessly prove it to me by evaluating the argument and shoving reasonable objections in my face.
But I didn’t pull the ‘fear of losing white privilege’ aspect out of my ass. That’s a thing, and some posters here exhibit all the desperate symptoms of it. They have the same opportunity to prove me wrong that you did. But these guys will stop at the “your theory is shit” part. And then hyperventilate.
Why you little… um, actually I agree. With both points.
I think our remaining disagreement is our interpretation of what the goal of what I’ve been calling the cultural sensitivity program actually is. I honestly don’t think Gutierrez or any of the people trying to implement the changes want to cram ‘cultural awareness’ or what-have-you into every single lesson. I think they’d definitely want it to be an overt and self-conscious consideration of the teachers when constructing every lesson plan, but I believe they want it to be pretty much invisible to the students. Done correctly, I believe, it should just look like really determined teacher-student engagement in the subject.
You only hear that kind of inane horse shit in schools and college campuses.
Why?
Because those are institutions by and for children. The real world doesn’t have time for whatever left-wing “check your privilege” twaddle the enlightened academic elite can drum up today.
(By the way, I went to one of the most liberal colleges in the country, took those classes in “multicultural integration,” where everyone spoke their little 2 cents on the prejudice going on in everyone else’s minds, blah blah blah. Then, I got to the real world and nobody wanted to hear any of that shit.)
Walk into a normal place of business and start rattling off your schtick on perceived prejudices, entitlement of normative culturalization, how PB&J’s are discriminatory, and you will get laughed at as your ass is kicked out the door. It’s a dead end; a way to see evil in everybody and to scold them for their (in)actions.
Not responding to the rest of the word vomit, but I’m just going to share my perspective after decades of workshop and office employment in various “normal” places of business.
The good companies try very very hard to eliminate institutional biases. Part of ‘trying hard’ is to look hard for those biases, most of which are not consciously exerted, and then take action to eliminate them, through policy, through training, through a process of dialogue with employees and management.
If you’re saying that’s not the case, I suggest that I’m not the one with a schtick up his ass.
…and to me, given the hook (PB&J) in the article, she is failing at that. If what you are saying is true, sure, but I have my doubts. As an intelligent professional educator trying establish a “revolutionary” approach as you are suggesting, this PB&J thing is a shit example to hang your hat on to the public, at large.
Well, I’m pretty sure Gutierrez didn’t have editorial control over that article. I’ll try and find out if there are any public relations statement from the Portland school system about this. That’s what I’d go by instead of the Tribune article.
Well, I’m quickly discovering that a lot of ground has been covered since the 1990’s on what’s called “culturally relevant pedagogy”, or sometime responsive teaching. Here’s a Wikipedia article. Here’s the website for the Oregon Center for Educational Equity. Here’s a link to the National Equity Project, which (I believe) provides the “Coaching for Educational Equity” course that Ms. Gutierrez attended.
There’s no direct link I can find to a typical lesson plan, but looking through the principles involved in the links I’ve provided, I’m more confident that I’ve portrayed the concerns more or less correctly (though quite incompletely). It’s not a simple-minded agenda.
I’m a teacher, and while I can’t speak for all teachers here, this is my take on the pb&j lesson debate:
Of course, it’s important and beneficial for educators to be culturally sensitive and inclusive, but unless you’re dealing with teachers who haven’t had an original thought since they got tenured 20 years ago, they already know this. We have this thing where we assess and get to know our students at the beginning of every school year. But this Principal (Ms Guttierrez) embodies the all too common insularity and (well intentioned) cluelessness of today’s education administrators and consultants. She must imagine that people in their respective countries are all wearing their national costumes and eating their national food, waving flags and singing Disney’s It’s a Small World.
Try and find a child in the US Public School system who doesn’t know what a pb&j sandwich is. Heck, try and find a kid anywhere who doesn’t know what a sandwich is. Sandwiches have been around since ancient times, as has bread, nut butters, and fruit preserves. Kids in Pakistan know what a pb&j sandwich is. You walk out of the airport in Karachi and the first thing you see is a McDonalds. You cannot escape Western culture if you try.
“We have peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. What do you have?” :rolleyes:
Yeah, kids love to be condescended to. And who’s we? Isn’t that exclusionary? Why assume that all American born children are eating pb&j sandwiches? They’re just as likely to be eating foods from another culture, or be gluten free, or have a peanut allergy.
Which is another thing: No one brings a jar of peanut butter into a school anymore, because of the allergy problem. I learned the hard way that it’s best to avoid using any real food as props in lessons that aren’t about food. The kids will scarf down anything and be distracted from following the lesson plan; the only thing they won’t eat is the crap they serve in the cafeteria.
Again, cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness is an important part of teaching. But you can’t be culturally sensitive if you aren’t culturally aware. These people need to get out more and get a better idea of what kids today are really like.
Just to drive my point home about this woman’s success record, here’s a quote from the article:
And she has this to say about it:
That’s what’s so exciting about teaching in today’s school system.
Sorry for the rant. I feel better now.
As far as the subject of this thread: There’s nothing wrong with the intention behind PC. It’s the people who take it upon themselves to be the PC hall monitors that ruin it. Just about anyone will agree with you that it’s good to be polite and try not to hurt other people, but somehow it’s turned into a political pissing contest, especially on the internet.
I’m willing to bet that the people bitching about PC on the internet are perfectly polite and treating people decently in real life. They just enjoy pissing off the so called offenderati. And let’s face it, these social warriors like nothing better than piling on a transgressor. Did someone post something that evens hints at bigotry or sexism? They start salivating. Let’s face it, some people enjoy the fight so much they lose sight of the solution. What will they do when the war’s over?
Good post, camille, thank you for responding as a teacher. I appreciate your points about good teaching requiring the teacher to learn his/her students in any case.
I also think the PB&J thing sounds condescending, but I’m also acknowledging that was a quotable scrap of what had to be a much longer discussion and was included in the printed article for its heavy controversy-stirring potential. When I was looking for information about this, I found a lot of public commentary from white parents who were outraged about the “charge” Ms. Gutierrez had made that “pb&j is racist”. (There were also many complaints about “whiteness being shoved down our throats” in the community coaching and conversations about equity.)
The pb&j thing was, I think, just a convenient talking example used in a much longer discussion. But because people are really eager to portray ideas that are uncomfortable to them in a negative light, it was latched onto as a key component of the program by people inclined to scoff at the approach in the first place.
I also think the ‘excitement’ about being a focus school was just typical political rhetoric putting a good face on an uncomfortable condition. The article, by the way, cites dramatic progress in test scores after Gutierrez assumed her role, so I don’t think we can reasonably snipe at her “success record” based on the school’s performance within the state.
I want to clarify something, because on reading my own post above, it looks like I’m arguing against camille’s experiences as a teacher. That’s not my intention, and I’m not qualified to do that anyway.
But I think people are using (in this thread and IRL in Portland) the unfortunate PB&J example as a way to falsely portray the whole ‘cultural awareness’ educational equity program as political-correctness-run-amok liberal woo. Because that was the example chosen to illustrate one particular concept in a highly developed educational approach doesn’t mean that’s what the approach is about; doesn’t even make ‘take care with cultural references’ a key concept in that approach.
It’s a cheap rhetorical tactic to reduce a school system program down to “don’t say pb&j, that’s racist.” The program is light years away from “don’t say ‘niggardly’”. Hell, it’s not in the same pedagogic universe.
I didn’t take it that way, and I wouldn’t even mind arguing about it. There are many teachers who would disagree with some of my opinions. But I think they would all be familiar with the type of out of touch administrator I described. They take a good idea, and find the most ridiculous ways to implement it. They’ve been out of the classroom for too long, assuming they’ve even spent any significant time at all actually teaching.
To be fair, the situation in Portland might not be the same as where I teach (NYC). The student body is diverse, but from the photos in the article it appears that the staff is not. I’m white (although multicultural), but I’m the minority in the faculties I work with. It could be that those teachers would need this type of training.
So you guys actually mix peanut butter and jelly in between two loaves of white bread and call it food? Even give it to idiotic kids too stupid to know what’s good for them?! No wonder you’re so fucking fat. Anyway, when even the Salon thinks PC is problematic I think it’s fair to conclude we have gone way beyond normal politeness It’s worse than Jerry Seinfeld says: PC is undermining free speech, expression, liberties
Yes, you did pull it out of your ass. You pulled it out of your collective liberal/progressive ass. You can “claim” it’s a thing but since you haven’t made a convincing case for your claim, I don’t recognize your claim. I believe it’s a “thing” that was created to attack and weaken people you don’t like, based solely on the color of their skin. Which kinda makes you the racist, doesn’t it?
I have a few comments about this issue in general:
(1) It’s very hard to discuss this issue because no one can agree on what is or is not PC. For instance, zero tolerance policies for guns at schools. What’s “PC” about that? It certainly has nothing at all to do with avoiding offending disadvantaged minority groups, and has nothing to do with language at all. And you will in fact find very few supporters of zero tolerance policies here on the very liberal (and presumably pro-PC) SDMB.
(2) Things are frequently not understood at all. What exactly happened with the principal and the PB&Js? I honestly have no idea, and I doubt anyone else in this thread does either. Is it possible that what actually happened, what was actually said and done with real teachers in real life, was stupid? Sure, it’s possible. People do stupid things all the time, whether motivated by good intentions or not. But it’s also very very possible that what was done was entirely reasonable, but terribly misrepresented by the coverage it got. For instance, there was a big flap awhile ago about schools somewhere (I think in California) officially recognizing Ebonics (ie, black English) as a language, and people thought this meant that kids were going to be taught in Ebonics, and Ebonics was going to be just as accepted as English, further ghettoizing black kids, etc. My understanding, however, is that what actually happened is that there’s some administrative stuff which lets teachers indicate which languages they speak other than English, which is useful to know when assigning non-English-speaking students to classes. So one teacher might speak German and another might speak Tagalog. This was just adding Ebonics to that list, so that a teacher who was familiar with Ebonics would then be more likely to have students speaking Ebonics assigned to their classroom, which would presumably do nothing but HELP the student continue to learn, because they’d have a teacher who could communicate with them better (while presumably teaching them “proper” English). Now, whether or not that’s a good idea is, I suppose, arguable. But it’s certainly quite different in actuality from how it was usually discussed and joked about.
(3) Extreme or narrow examples are discussed as if they are mainstream. Are there some people somewhere in the world who have seriously recommended using the term “differently abled”? Probably. But I’m certain that that term is used far more often to make fun of PC-ness than it is used in actual normal conversation. And there’s also a big difference between someone suggesting in all seriousness that “differently abled” is a better and less offensive term than “disabled”; and someone actually being offended and getting huffy about the term “disabled” being used. For a semi-real example, pretty much every mainstream media source uses “African-American” to refer to black Americans. Does that mean that using the word “black” in a not-obviously-offensive fashion (ie, “Barack Obama is our first black president”) will get you LYNCHED by the OFFENDERATI who can not BELIEVE that you still use that horrible racist term? Of course not. The vast, VAST majority of black people, even black liberals, are perfectly happy with the term “black”. Does that mean it’s a bit silly that people use “African-American”, which of course has all sorts of bizarre side effects (and is six syllables too long)? Sure, it’s a bit silly. But “a bit silly” and “some fundamental problem that shows how idiotic the PC movement is and liberals and I’m being censored” are not at all the same thing.
What it really comes down to for me is this: PC language and ideas exist in order to solve problems. Real problems, that still exist, that make the world a worse place. I’m sure there are some examples where PC has gone too far and done bad things. But anyone who looks at the world and thinks “wow, what’s really wrong with this world is that there’s too much PCness” has their head screwed on severely backwards. It’s like looking at society and saying “wow, what we really need to fix, what really needs to be focused on, is the problem of false rape accusations”. Yes, that’s a real issue (much more real than nearly all problems-caused-by-PC), and yes it can do real damage to real people. But when THAT is what jumps out at you as the thing that needs primarily needs to be talked about and fixed, something is very wrong with you.
You defended the PB&J horse shit. You discredit your own cause.
Some of us do conscientiously strive to avoid prejudice in our daily interactions. We go about our business without treating individuals differently based on things out of their control.
We are normal; your kind are the shrill spawn of hell.
For the record, I work a lot with the disability community and generally preferred terms are person-first terms—e.g., person with a disability. (A big exception is the Autistic community where “Autistic person” is sometimes/often/usually preferred to “person with autism.” I think in the Deaf community, similar identity-first terms might be preferable.)
I defended the ‘careful with your cultural references’ aspect using the awful example I was given. That you are not able to see the distinction says literally nothing about my “cause.”
All of which is well and good… but the question is, if someone in a fairly normal context (ie, not in the midst of super-formal writing) makes an otherwise well-meaning comment about a “disabled person” rather than a “person with disabilities”, is the response:
(a) absolutely nothing, because everyone recognizes that no offense was meant
(b) a gentle "we prefer ‘person with disabilities’ to ‘disabled person’ "
(c) actually getting upset or taking offense
