No but you are anti-pig.
Per my own reading of the article, the principal didn’t object to any and all mentions of the existence of PB&J sandwiches during lessons. It was merely an example of something that a teacher used during a lesson, probably without a second thought, that teachers might want to give a second thought to.
It’s food for thought is all (heh).
Poppycock! I love pig! Roasted pig, grilled pig, barbecued pic, smoked pig, ground pig, SPAM[sup]®[/sup], pigs in a blanket…
According to the original article that the more-than-a-year-old article linked to in the OP referred to, 50% of the students in the school are Hispanic and about 25% are white. With numbers like that, it does seem likely that a significant number of the students would not be familiar with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
I think what’s important is that the principal was referring to a specific incident that occurred the previous year and wasn’t just pulling peanut butter and jelly out of the air as problematic. And the questions the principal proposed a teacher ask makes me think that the issue wasn’t handled appropriately at the time. I’m imagining something much like the analogy examples mentioned above. There might have been a test question that had kids order the steps in making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the teacher didn’t explain it adequately or make accommodations for to the kids who’d never seen one.
But I’m just filling in context that’s obviously missing from the article. I think my invented scenario is much more likely to match what happened over a year ago than a school administration deciding that sandwiches are inherently racist, though.
Reading that article, I don’t see Gutierrez saying that PB&J is racist. It’s a little difficult to know what she does say because she seems to be expressing herself in the typical bleeding-heart venting way that is unsurprising of people who are so niggardly when it comes to giving the benefit of the doubt on some issues and are really into raising awareness (#18 Awareness | Stuff White People Like).
What she does seem to be saying is that we shouldn’t presume that what is common to us is common to others which can be a problem. I get the impression that female teachers and principals are very likely to score as XSFJ on the MBTI and perhaps the idea that “what you’re used to might seem obvious and universal to you but it need not be the case” is a novel, enlightening idea to them.*
Perhaps the juxtaposition of these two paragraphs:
"According to the Portland Tribune, Verenice Gutierrez, principal of Harvey Scott K-8 School, “picks up on the subtle language of racism” on a daily basis.
“Take the peanut butter sandwich, a seemingly innocent example a teacher used in a lesson last school year,” the Tribune said."
makes it sound like Gutierrez is saying that PB&J is racist but that could be due to the Tribune’s doing.
*Yes, I’m an MBTIist.
When I was in elementary school, I read a Nancy Drew novel in which she enters a regatta (and that is the word used) with a boat called “Whip the Wind”. I can’t remember which one, though. I’ll try to find out, though.
I bet the library books have all the pictures of zebras cut out.
It’s racist for you to assume that we don’t know what Jin Leed is!
Or maybe for you to assume that we do know what Kleina is. I can’t decide.
I never heard of either.
Actually, I don’t even see an objection to PB&J, or to its use in a lesson. The Examiner is an incredibly annoying (and annoyingly-written) website., but here’s what it says:
The objection, such as it is, is to teaching a lesson of some sort using only PB&J as an example, without using other lunch items.
And that’s a totally fair objection. If you’re trying to teach fractions, for example, you’d like kids to be focused on that particular concept. For a kid who’s eaten a ton of PB&J sandwiches, they don’t have to spend any cognitive power on figuring out what a PB&J is; they can focus their mental energy on seeing how you can cut the sandwich in different ways and still get two halves.
But a kid who’s unfamiliar with PB&J’s will spend part of their brainpower on figuring out what the sandwich is. They’re learning about the sandwich at the same time that they learn about fractions. It’s a fluency issue, and it can distract them from the math, especially if the teacher doesn’t explicitly explain what’s going on in the sandwich.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well, but as a teacher I try to be aware of issues like this in my classroom. You can’t assume that an experience is universal, and if kids need to understand an idea in order to grok the lesson, you explain that idea, even if it’s something as “innocent” as what a PB&J is.
Fact is, the story at the OP’s link is garbled, unclear, and probably deliberately obfuscatory. (And the link within that to what what was presumably the original story in a local paper doesn’t work.) It looks to me as though a teacher used the example of a pb&j sandwich in class as an example of something very familiar to American children that children in other parts of the world might not have. In other words the teacher said something completely true, appropriate and sensible, possibly in the course of a lesson about racism or inequality around the world. Then, some right-wing nutcase who objects to children knowing that things like racism or inequality exist, seizes on this example, because with a suitable amount of lying and distortion it can be made to sound ridiculous, for use in the ongoing propaganda war against the teaching profession (because public schools=socialism=gulags) and anyone who might believe both racism and severe economic inequality are bad things.
All the stuff about test questions, let alone regattas, is irrelevant. The key fact is that the OP is (perhaps innocently) almost certainly spreading a lie.
Cripes, people are STILL using that alleged “regatta” question as proof of the SAT’s racism? I first heard that complaint DECADES ago. If the SAT were as culturally and ethnically biased as some claim, wouldn’t there be more numerous and more RECENT examples?
I graduated from high school in 1979, and even THEN it was laughably obvious that the test writers were trying hard to come up with questions that would make various ethnic groups and crusading liberals happy. I’d see ridiculous questions on the Verbal portion of the SAT phrased like so:
**"What is wrong with the following sentence:
Mr. Lopez, the Mexican-American grocer, strongly supports his nieghborhood school’s free lunch program.
a) There’s a double negative
b) There’s a dangling modifier
c) “Nieghborhood” is not spelled correctly
d) “Mexican-American” should not be capitalized"**
Or, in the reading comprehension section, we’d be reading passages celebrating the poetry of Langston Hughes and the heroism of Sojourner Truth.
I’ve yet to see any evidence that this helped boost the scores of minority test takes.
Me, I grew up in Archie Bunker’s neighborhood, literally. Nobody in my neighborhood went sculling or owned a yacht. SOMEHOW I knew what a regatta was anyway. Heck, I’m a middle-class straight Catholic white guy who even knows what a quinceanera is, what a a yarmulke is, what a dashiki is, what a tandoori is, what “living on the down low” means, what the Hejira was, … and I sure wouldn’t have whined if any or all of those phrases had been on the SAT.
All that said, CAN there be times when a teacher should be told, “Listen, your attempts to reach the kids with certain analogies just aren’t working.”
For instance, in SOME schools, if a teacher was trying to explain the concept of a “Pyrrhic victory,” he might use a sports metaphor. He might say, “The Patriot beat the Jets last night, but Tom Brady broke his leg and is out for the season. THAT’S a Pyrrhic Victory.” For American boys who are heavily into sports, that’s a GREAT metaphor. But if my class consisted largely of, say, Indian and Chinese girls, they might have no idea who Tom Brady or the Patriots are, and the metaphor wouldn’t help them at all.
So, it wouldn’t be wrong to tell that well-meaning teacher, “Try to use metaphors that THESE kids will grasp.” And MAYBE that’s all the educator was getting at by mentioning peanut butter and jelly. The point MAY just have been, “Don’t assume that what seem like simple metaphors to YOU actually make sense to all kids in a diverse classroom.”
Any well-written test is going to contain questions not every student will necessarily know. If it didn’t, everyone in the class would get 100% every time, and you’d have no way to distinguish levels of material mastery.
Also, I grew up in a rural area of a completely landlocked state and still knew what a regatta was. My Scout troop got some of those little balsa boats from the local Boy Scouts when they had theirs, but I can’t remember if I knew the word before then or not.
You’d better be Jewish, only we can use that word.
I think that it isn’t just about the single example of the PB&J sandwich but the assumptions of the whole lesson plan. If the teacher is white and more than half of her students are latino, using peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as the norm for all discussions about lunch food, and turkey dinners as the norm for Thanksgiving meals, and Barbie dolls as the norm for toys, might make those students for which this is not the norm feel as though their lifestyle wasn’t up to snuff. There is nothing wrong with including PB&J just that it would be better to mix it up a bit so that all students can feel included.
Javier has 5 tacos. He gives 2 of his tacos to Juan. How many tacos does Javier have left?
Well that’s just racist! Why do they have to be eating tacos? Because they’re Hispanic? Such stereotyping! I guess that’s all that Hispanics eat - they don’t know about anything else? Why couldn’t they be eating something different, like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Because racism!
Sometimes you just can’t win. The important thing is for people to have something to complain about.
You’re missing the point: the question is not ABOUT mastery of runners, marathons, oarsmen or regattas. It’s about mastery of relationships. Confusing students into a wrong guess by using words they do not understand accomplishes nothing.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that the analogy SAT questions are geared to test vocabulary.
ETA: I found the original article, its not much more helpful that the one in the OP but probably a little less preachy
Well these Courageous Conversation sessions do sound a bit like the public self-criticism sessions the Communists were so fond of.
*never had a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich in my life
Peanut butter and jelly is NOT racist.
Rowing in a Regatta? hmmmph I suppose that is all good an fine for those preparing for a life of manual labor. Our Regattas were sailing, bending the power of nature to be used for our mere amusement and all that.