What if they have Oreos for dessert?
Regards,
Shodan
Do you read threads before commenting in them? Just curious.
Surely the point is that no one of us is center of the universe, and if we assume that what’s familiar to us is familiar to everyone, we’re wrong.
Seems pretty unobjectionable.
Nah, pigs will gobble up bacon too.
And seriously, regatta? What’s that, some sort of fancy party? (Is what I’d imagine most Americans regardless of color, class, or creed would say)
See, that’s the problem with all the reblogging that goes on with news stories. In the original link it says
The way it’s quoted, it sounds like the principal is the one saying PBJ is racist. But she doesn’t say that, the paper does.
And how many kids in any school where some other kid brings a lunch is not going to see them eating a sandwich - or for that matter wouldn’t understand <insert name of filling> sandwich. Any kid in the US school system will learn what a sandwich is, the name of the filling is pretty inessential if they are using it for fractions.
Why do you assume that anybody on this earth who is inundated with American movies, TV programming, books, magazines and newspapers would not understand Thanksgiving Dinner? Charlie Brown, The Addams Family, any random thing set in the end of November, most TV shows … all of them show thanksgiving in some way or another. Once you actually get into the US, even if you don’t speak English, you get inundated on Telemundo commercials, translated movies, translated TV, Mexican oriented radio stations, Puerto Rican based radio stations, hell, Miami is filled with Spanish language advertising about Thanksgiving …
From the original article, underlines mine:
So, apparently this Hispanic person thinks Hispanics are not American and that all Americans eat the same way (“if you’re allergic to peanut, you’re not a true American”?). She schmott.
First, I don’t know how many kids in a typical K-8 school with the demographics described in the article don’t know what a peanut butter and jelly sandwich is. I’d be surprised if that number were zero, though. You kind of acknowledge that by stating that a kid will eventually learn what a sandwich is by watching their classmates. If the lesson came before they learned it by watching a classmate, the lesson will be confusing.
Second, the only relevance that portions of fractions has to do with this is that someone in this thread brought it up as an example of a way that the sandwich could have been used in the lesson at issue. We do not know that that had anything to do with what the principal was talking about. That’s the problem with this outrage. You have to assume that the school is making a big deal about a trivial issue without any reason to believe that the deal was big or the issue was trivial. I guess you could take the inflammatory article’s word for it. But who the hell is the article’s author that their speculation has any more weight than ours?
Privilege lawfully bestowed is not a crime.
When will idiots stop inventing racist and PC issues?
My husband (Andy L) found it. It was the 1947 edition of The Clue in the Old Album. (This plot is not in the updated edition.) It was a sailing regatta, and Nancy and her friends were racing a much newer, fancier boat called Lass, crewed by a bunch of mean girls.
Nancy and her friends won, because of course they did.
I usually agree with you on lots of things, CrazyCatLady, but I think you’re missing the point in this post.
Remember when we were talking about “crudités” and you said that since you learned it way back in middle school home economics class, it’s a perfectly everyday, regular word that everyone should probably know? (I have a good memory. Shoot me.)
Well, just like not everyone took home economics, not everyone was in the Scouts or “got some of those little balsa boats” when they were little kids. The fact that you remember exactly when you first came across those terms indicates that they are closer to “special” than “regular, everyday.”
I’m all for people increasing their vocabulary whenever and wherever they can. But kids shouldn’t be penalized for not having all certain experiences growing up.
I just came in to say that I don’t like peanut butter and so I don’t eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And I’m also not racist.
So, take that for what it’s worth.
No, but when you are testing someone’s knowledge of English vocabulary you shouldn’t just pick easy words that they come across everyday. I will probably die without coming close to a regatta. But somewhere along the way I picked the word up because I read. The same with a lot of other words. And there are plenty of words that I don’t know. Which is one reason why I scored well but not perfect.
Actually, I’m fairly sure I pointed out in both situations that I don’t really remember whether those were my first exposures to the terms or not–just that I for sure was exposed to them in those settings. I read a lot of Nancy Drew books as a kid and may have read the one mentioned earlier (many of them contained similar “Nancy and Crew outclass Snobby Bitches” situations, so it’s hard to say.)* I read a lot of other stuff as a kid and may have run across it in some other book. I might have had it as a spelling or vocabulary word. Then again, I might not have–it was all more than 20 years ago, and it wasn’t exactly a big deal, ya know?
And seriously, the point of the analogies on the SAT is twofold–to test how well you understand relationships, and to test your vocabulary. That’s why they have so many different levels of each on the test, from basic relationships and second-grade vocabulary on up to really obscure relationships and vocabulary you’d need to have eaten a dictionary to know, and they get as many permutations of both in there as they can. (A permutation is a possible way to combine things, in case my cultural bias is showing. 
)
*The only word I can say for sure I learned from Nancy Drew books was “bussed” in the sense of a kiss. The book said one of the guys “bussed her on the cheek” and I was all :eek: “He hit her in the face with a bus?! That can’t be right!”
The idiots are the ones taking a suggestion we make sure we have some awareness of our culturally references, so it doesn’t systematically (if non-intentionally) exclude recent immigrant children from varying cultures, thus impeding their learning.
The idiots are the ones who spun this into “someone called a PBJ racist! How PC!” And who don’t read critically to see how the story was spun.
What the what? What does this have to do with what I wrote?
Edit: wait, do you eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for your Thanksgiving dinner?
dictionary, thesaurus,encyclopedia. all books that I spent a bit of time looking at when I was in grade school. Didn’t read them per se but looked at them quite a bit. To say we we middle class would be just a small stretch I don’t think my mom made that much money. And was suburban not inner city or rural.
Yeesh! I have to wonder what Latino neighborhood the principal is hanging out in. For that matter, what kind of any ethnic neighborhood.
IME, in living in culturally diverse parts of town, food differences are the first things immigrants pick up on, partially because a good share of the first and second generation work in the biz. Teaching involves introducing new concepts to students, not just staying in a very limited-but -familiar area.
Yes, the school system should be aware of cultural differences that may challenge the references used in teaching, but they also should challenge students to expand their horizons.
On a related note how happy would you be to receive this letter from your childs school in the post?
Why are schools such a battleground of competing ideologies? I think part of the problem is that these days schools are expected to not just educate children but to actually raise them in lieu of parents actually doing that traditional job.
But public schools used to commonly practice religion and spank kids, so I don’t know about “these days”. I don’t think you can really separate “raising” from “educating” anyway.