Now, it's hard for most law schools to teach people how to teach students how to be specific kinds of lawyers. Law schools send students everywhere across the country, and you can't teach state-specific practice for everyone - or even, in some cases, the majority of your students (take schools like Duke or Michigan, which send the overwhelming majority of their students out of state).
The piece does a good job at pointing out an underlying problem with law schools as they're currently structured: you borrow a lot of money for three years to come out knowing incredibly little about how to practice law. However, I'm not sure that the problem is necessarily what law schools teach; instead, I think the problem is that law schools teach it for so long.
During my third year of law school, I was the managing editor of a journal, I was co-chair of an organization that funded first year students doing summer public interest work, I was on our moot court board. At some point, I went to class. Even in the subjects I was engaged in, there was just a sense of fatigue with the entire process. Real life doesn't involve four-hour exams. Real life doesn't involve the gradual progression of topics through the lens of appellate decisions. It's time do some law here, people.
The first year of law school is a shock. You get thrown into reading cases despite not understanding procedural history or the important operative facts; because you're reading appellate decisions, you probably have no idea how the case got there. You probably think the important point is whether the plaintiff won or lost, when what you're supposed to learn is that, procedurally, you must state a claim for relief in your initial pleading. You stop thinking in one dimension, and start thinking across multiple dimensions.
The second year of law school is an adaptation of what you learned the first year, but without the handholding. The third year is...there. It's long, and it's boring, and it's a good way to spend $50,000 waiting to take the bar exam. (This isn't to say the first or second years are pedagogically perfect. It's simply to say they serve a purpose that the third year doesn't.)
The third year of law school, if it's to be kept (and there's a good argument for not keeping it, given the way law schools are currently structured), should focus on teaching, at least generally, the ins and outs of legal practice. You take a course on it your first year, but at many schools it's not graded. The message you get is that it's the least important part of the curriculum, and so you churn out a terrible couple of motions, learn a few Bluebook rules and take your pass with all the pride you'd assign to an $8,000 certificate commemorating your minimal effort at citing four cases.
Law schools will invariably tell you that their mission is to teach you how to think like a lawyer. At some point, however, you've learned how to think like a lawyer, and the mission should switch to thinking like a lawyer. The first part is valuable, but the second part is what you're ostensibly doing with the rest of your professional life. Graduating from law school requires a third year (and $30-50,000) spent learning and doing the same things you spent the prior two years doing, and doesn't seem to produce appreciably better legal minds than the first two years do.
Update: Now, I'm not naive. I knew that there would be epic levels of butthurt in response to this post. People don't like either being reminded that things are changing (and they're aging), nor do they like the idea that any part of their upbringing was less than perfect, which they take to mean they are less than perfect. (It's not true! You're all perfect human beings, flaw-free and needing no improvements.) But please, I beg you to avoid one strawman when being butthurt. In no way did I say kids shouldn't be taught to use pens and paper. That would be stupid. I just think printing is good enough, and something, in case you haven't noticed, like 75% of adults are already using. Half the butthurt in this comment thread is based on the assumption that I was suggesting kids shouldn't learn to write with their hands. I just said "cursive", a fancy and outdated way of writing with your hands that is used by such a rare group of people that anyone who feels some compulsion to learn it should do so in college, alongside their basket-weaving courses.
That age-old writing method you might never have used since fourth grade will no longer be taught in Indiana schools come fall, thanks to a memo from school officials. Instead, students will be expected to become proficient in keyboard use.
A lot of educational standards are things that continue on only because bitter adults don't want kids today to avoid having to suffer the same bullshit we had to go through. I'd put multiplication tables, spelling/vocabulary lists and just general rote memorization up there. My skills in these things were for shit after memorizing them; you learn far better by doing than memorizing something just long enough to get through the test. The low grade sadism that's pointed at children for the crime of being young when we're not isn't justification enough for this nonsense.
Newsweek has released its list of America's best high schools, which reveal one startling key to a great high school: selectively screening all but the highest achieving children.
This is not a lamentation on bias towards smart kids - that's pretty much the last problem you'd ever find with these rankings. Instead, the issue is the idea that there's anything useful to be gained from a ranking system that penalizes schools for providing state-mandated education to all members of the community.
If American high schools could screen for students with high rates of academic success, high likelihood of going to college and home environments that encouraged both of those qualities, then we'd have the best high school system in the world...coupled with a permanent underclass even less mobile than it currently is. While it's great that there are environments for select smart kids to thrive and prosper, the vast majority of American high schools don't have the luxury of refusing to let in students who might mess with the good thing they've got going on.
The nominal purpose of this ranking list is to "highlight solutions" in terms of preparing secondary students for life in the real world. How can you possibly draw any conclusions from a sample of high schools whose entire purpose is to not have to deal with the problems you're attempting to solve?
Julie Sunday, writing for RH Reality Check, reports on a piece of legislation that passed the Texas House and will probably become law because Republicans have a super-majority. The law would require any university that has a “gender and sexuality center” to also have a “traditional values center” as a form of counter-programming.
What I like about this is how nakedly obvious it is. Gender and sexuality centers at universities are there to promote what really should be non-controversial ideas: that women/gay/transgender people are full human beings, that human sexuality is a natural part of life, that rape and domestic violence are bad things, and that people have a right to be healthy regardless of gender or sexual status. Counter-programming then, I have to assume, is pro-rape, pro-domestic violence and bullyin, anti-health, and anti-woman. Not a big surprise to those of us who’ve been paying attention and know that the conservative movement does in fact oppose anti-rape efforts, sex education, gay rights, anti-domestic violence efforts, and health care for anyone who has dared experience sexual pleasure, especially outside of their strict rules (which include not just being married, but being the right race and wealthy enough to pay out of pocket for all expenses related to sexual health care).
On that last link, I want to point out that the implication behind the misleading obsession with mammograms on the right carries with it the implication that anyone who dies of cervical cancer—-which Planned Parenthood does screen for in office—-had it coming and deserves to die. Because she touched a penis. In theory, virgins can get breast cancer, so they’re hard-pressed to oppose screening for it, though I suppose if you released statistics showing that 99.9% of breast cancer patients have had sex at some point, they’d probably go ahead and round that one up to a had-it-coming disease.
What is fascinating about this particular story is how blatant this is. Usually there’s an attempt to pretend that anti-woman efforts are somehow pro-woman—-Susan B. Anthony would want women to die of cervical cancer, we swear!—-though of course, no such effort is expended in the game of pretending they care if queer people live or die. In this case, though, it’s just straightforward. Gender and sexuality centers offer health and anti-violence information, and that needs counter-programming. I’m curious what kind of “traditional values” programming we can expect to see. For instance, if gender and sexuality centers organize a Take Back the Night Rally, will the anti-feminist centers organize a Bitches Stay In Or You Deserve To Be Raped Rally? If a gender and sexuality center has a seminar on avoiding or escaping violent relationships, will the “traditional values” center have a seminar explaining that men only hit because they love too much? If you think about it, it seems that this move might be a tad counterproductive, except that it creates more jobs for professional anti-feminists.
I mean, we all knew that, since the people most likely to blather on about “strengthening the family” are also the least likely to support those things that actually strengthen the family, such as delaying marriage and childbirth with the help of contraception and sex education, expanding educational opportunities, and expanding the middle class. But it’s nice to get a straightforward reminder that conservative talk about “family” is strictly about restricting women’s freedom and opportunities. In Frederick County, Maryland, the Board of County Commissioners is slashing funding for Head Start and the reason is that women need to get back in the kitchen.
COMMISSIONER C. PAUL SMITH (R): I think its very significant that we did make this marriage week announcement today, because that is the best long-term way to help our children, as marriage is strengthened in our community. As many of you know, I had a lot of kids, and my wife stayed home, at significant sacrifice, during those early years, because she knew she had to be with those kids at that critical age. I know everybody isn’t able to survive doing that, but clearly, as we can strengthen marriage we can decrease the children that we have to reach.
COMMISSIONER KIRBY DELAUTER (R): My wife, college educated, could go out and get a very good job. She gave that up for 18 years so she could stay home with our kids, we had to give up a lot to do that. I agree again with Commissioner Smith, you know, the marriage thing is very important. I mean, education of your kids starts at home, okay? I never relied on anyone else to guarantee the education of my kids.
I particularly like how Delauter characterizes his wife as being literally no one. To say “I never relied on anyone else”, when in fact you relied on your wife, i.e. the woman who gave birth to those children? That’s some ballsy erasing of women’s contributions right there, fuckwit.
I enjoy this peek into the workday wingnut version of “logic”. Staying at home is a sacrifice, and therefore women should be forced into it. I thought sacrifices were, by definition, something you gave up willingly. But more than that, it’s clear that they’re saying women choosing to work somehow weakens the family. Like divorce is generally a matter of men saying, “That’s it! I can’t stand that you have a job and our family is better off financially than if I was the sole source of support. I’d rather eat dirt than have a wife who works every day.” Maybe back in the 50s, but things have changed dramatically. And even if some men are still like this, the people weakening the family are those making the inhumane, stupid demands, not those who refuse to comply with them.
But obviously, this isn’t about “strengthening the family”. This is about having a single, very narrow model of what constitutes an acceptable family, one built around female subservience and dependence. And making sure that anyone who veers from that path is punished severely. Even—-and especially, I’d say—-in cases where they don’t have a choice, which is true of most working mothers who need the income, full stop. Republicans, as those who didn’t realize before are quickly learning, really enjoy the idea of adding more burdens to the already burdened to punish them for the sin of not being rich.
Although the big news out of this story is that Sarah Palin believes that teaching kids about nutrition is the rough equivalent of marching them towards an enviro-friendly gulag, this is what stood out to me:
She was the guest speaker last night at a fundraiser at Plumstead Christian School in Plumstead Township.
[...]
School officials hope her appearance in the end will bring in several hundred dollars. Palin’s appearance fee, thought to be $75,000, was reportedly covered by private donors.
You know, sometimes you have to spend money to make a lot less money.
So, let’s make this clear. Private donors raise $75,000 to bring a woman who likely earns three separate paychecks just for breathing. (Or, more likely, having an employee breathe under her name.) The fundraiser she appears at earns several hundred dollars. If you, like me, wonder why the donors didn’t just donate the $75,000 to the school and skip over Palin getting pissed about the lack of nacho cheese fountains in sixth grade, well…I heard there’s nothing to uplift the soul like Sarah Palin’s nasal whine cutting through a school cafeteria.
For today’s entry in the “it doesn’t matter how evil/stupid/intellectually dishonest it is, if it pisses off the liberals, it’s gold” genre, I bring you Tucker Carlson defending the nutbar-dominated Texas School Board for their particular spin on the “everyone let’s hate Muslims now” frenzy. Some school board members are claiming, and this is so loony that I’m having trouble typing it, that the textbook industry is being taken over by a cabal of “Middle Easterners” that are using the textbooks to push Islam and denounce Christianity. (Please no one tell them that there are even more religions than these two in the world; they’ll lose it completely.) They claim that there’s bias against the Crusaders (!) and that the books spend more time detailing Islam than Christianity (probably because they assume the audience is familiar with Christianity). To make it even worse, what little “evidence” they have is from textbooks that aren’t in use.
Obviously, the real concern the members have is that boring old social studies textbooks that document world history might have factual information in them that might incline astute readers to wonder if Muslims aren’t human beings, or that Middle Eastern history is more complex than “a bunch of people sat in caves eating babies for thousands of years”, as right wingers might have you believe. They may even learn disturbingly humanizing information about the cultural innovations and traditions of many Muslim countries that might incline them to be (gasp!) less racist. After all, one of the most common habits of white supremacists it to pretend to be the member of a ill-defined tribe of white people that they claim invented pretty much everything. That way, even though they themselves are dumb fucks, they can believe that they’re superior just by being a member of this distinguished tribe. Learning that much of the Middle East was going through a cultural renaissance while Europe was still stuck in medieval thinking is the sort of information that can destabilize pat white supremacist beliefs about how Europeans are better at everything by virtue of genetics. They may even learn why we call our number notation system “Arabic numerals”, or why their math class after history has that awfully Arabic-sounding name “algebra”.
Anyway, reality, much less basic humanity, is no competition in Tucker Carlson’s eyes when there are liberals to piss off. He claims that there’s “studies” showing that textbooks are promoting Islam and denouncing Christianity:
The whining about the Crusades is particularly egregious, because the concern here is that students are learning the truth. And the truth is that Christians started it. Right wingers want to nit pick and claim this number of casualties or that, and it’s all an attempt to distract from the larger, more important point, which is that European coalitions repeatedly invaded Muslim lands in order to conquer the Holy Land. If the Christians had said, nah, we’re going to do our laundry instead, this wouldn’t have happened. That those who were in the defensive crouch won a couple of battles doesn’t mean that they suddenly became the aggressors in this. This is all dooking around in order to distract from basic realities. In fact, I would argue that it’s a kind of denialism, much like Holocaust denialism, except that it doesn’t seem as awful because the events that the wingnuts are obsessing over denying happened so long ago.
I’m not pointing this out to say that Christians are more or less bloodthirsty than Muslims. I reject the term “bloodthirsty” when applied across the board to entire groups of people as a natural state of being. Modern Christians didn’t conduct the Crusades any more than most Muslims support terrorism, and I don’t hold them responsible for them. I don’t think a bunch of high school kids are going to read about the Crusades and think, “Oh my god, all modern Christians are evil people!”
What this is about is a group of people who think the Crusades were a great thing and that we should still be fighting them, because they hate Muslims. Full stop. They want to rewrite history so that the Crusades seem more appealing in order to get more people to buy into that premise, because right now, most rational people tend to think of the Crusades and they think “unjust war of aggression”. You know, the truth. The wingnuts also have a side order of wanting to pretend that Muslim terrorists are soldiers in a battle that hasn’t ever really ended, and are just as much Crusaders as the medieval people who ransacked Jerusalem. Never mind that there’s no reason to believe that the 9/11 terrorists were yelling, “Remember 1099!”, or that’s widespread support for that sentiment. This is all about establishing the notion that we can engage in an endless war against various Middle Eastern countries, because we’ve always been at war with Islam. It’s very “1984”.
Julea Ward was a counseling student at Eastern Michigan University, and a devout Christian. The requirements of the program she entered complied with the American Counseling Association’s Code of Ethics. In part, a counselor is required to engage with clients who may possess values, whether cultural or religious, that differ from theirs. (PDF Link, Sections A.4.b and C.5.)
The short version of this story is that Ward didn’t want to counsel a gay client because it made her feel uncomfortable, and the school responded by expelling her:
The dispute that led to the litigation started in 2009, when Ward was enrolled in the practicum in which she was to engage in actual counseling. Faced with an appointment with a client whose file indicated past discussion of a gay relationship, Ward asked to refer the candidate to another counselor rather than engage in any counseling that could “affirm the client’s homosexual behavior.” Since this was two hours before the appointment, the supervising counselor canceled the appointment, but set off disciplinary hearings that eventually led to Ward being kicked out of the program.
Eastern Michigan’s counseling program—like many others—requires its students to practice in ways that are consistent with the counseling association’s ethics code, including requirements that bar behavior that reflects an “inability to tolerate different points of view,” “imposing values” on clients or discrimination based on a number of factors, including sexual orientation. The counseling association does permit referrals, but they are supposed to be for the good of the client, not for the comfort of the counselor. Typically, a referral that would be seen as legitimate might involve a counselor referring someone to a colleague with expertise on a particular problem.
A federal judge upheld the expulsion, which but for the religious aspect would have been largely uncontroversial. Of course, she’s a.) a conservative Christian; b.) represented by the Alliance Defense Fund; and c.) the government is involved, which means that it’s time to start wailing about the end of religious freedom as we know it.
Hot Air (discussing a similar case in Georgia where a conservative Christian student was asked to be sensitive to the needs of gay clients):
It sounds to me like the ACA wants a “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule for religion. That runs square into the First Amendment, especially for a state-run school. The ACA’s idea of who comes first doesn’t get to trump the restriction on freedom of religious exercise. If clients get off-put by Keeton’s approach to counseling, they can look for another counselor. Now, the ACA can decide not to certify her; as a private organization, they have that prerogative. If they do that explicitly based on her religious belief, however, they may have a problem with that in court, especially as it will block Keeton’s ability to make a living.
Well, here’s the problem. Professional certification guidelines are, generally, constitutional. One of the requirements of the degree both the Georgia and Michigan students are pursuing is that they treat clients equally and respectfully, and don’t impose their personal beliefs on their clients. It has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the requirements of the job they voluntarily pursued. Sorry that they don’t want to do the job because of their religion, but it’s really not the school’s problem.
Erick “Everyone’s Fucking Goats But Me, Really” Erickson has the following to say:
In Michigan, a federal judge has upheld the expulsion of a graduate school student for believing homosexuality is morally wrong.
No. That’s not what happened. You have a First Amendment right to believe what you want without the government barring you from believing it or forcing you to believe something else. You don’t have a First Amendment right to grant yourself a blanket exemption from the religion-neutral requirements of the professional degree you voluntarily chose to pursue.
I understand why conservative Christians push these suits - it’s an effort to dominate and define the culture around their needs. But what’s telling is that these students chose to go into a profession whose requirements were readily accessible before they ever set foot in a classroom. You can read the ACA’s Code of Ethics, you can talk to counselors about their jobs. They shouldn’t be confronted or expelled because of their religious beliefs; they should be confronted or expelled because they went in intending to be bad counselors and are shocked - shocked!!! - when they’re treated accordingly.
UPDATE: Julea Ward would probably have a stronger case if she could, you know, keep her story straight. More below.
The schools profiled have anywhere from seven to ninety-four - yes, ninety-four - valedictorians. Although the crux of the article focuses on the controversy over giving multiple people an honor usually reserved for a single person, the odd part about this is that these schools have essentially initiated a cum laude system; they simply label each person who’s received honors a “valedictorian”, which is sort of like naming a Pro Bowl team in the NFL and then simultaneously declaring every qualified player the MVP.
I’m not sure what the problem is, other than tradition (which at this point has been firmly broken with since the system is now gamed to get as many people as possible the highest grades possible). If you’re determined to make sure that every person in a given academic system who meets a certain set of requirements receives the highest honor, there’s already a system in place that won’t leave people feeling all butthurt about the fact that the 5.2918 GPA kid isn’t the sole valedictorian over the 5.2916 GPA kid.
I posted some on this at Double X, but I thought it would be interesting to expand on here. This article in the LA Times is about when it’s okay to let your kids quit an activity, but what really jumped out at me about it was how much children’s sports are portrayed as this miserable hellhole of competition where only the toughest survive.
But the intensity of the conditioning was unlike anything Bob had experienced. The boys did up-downs until their faces turned purple. They were forced to run laps holding hands as a punishment. While there was an emphasis on teamwork — in theory, football is supposed to be the ultimate team sport — there was a profound absence of positive reinforcement.
So after 13 weeks, and just before the season ended, my son did what his gut told him to do: He quit.
“It’s not fun,” he said wearily. “And I’m tired of the coaches making me feel badly about myself.”
Awesome, I thought. Bob’s chances just shot up of being allergic to athletic activity for the rest of his life because of these associations. Maybe he’ll get lucky and this experience won’t sour him on his own image of his body as an athletic entity. But if he’s like many to most Americans who had negative experiences with jock culture as young people, his insecurity about not being perfect out of the gate will hound him, and make all future attempts to pick up exercise feel futile and disheartening. When his doctor tells him he better pick up some exercise routine or else, he’ll join a gym or try bicycling, but exposure to the jocks in that environment will dredge up the same negative associations and feelings of inadequacy, and he’s quite likely to give up. Or, if he’s lucky, he’ll fall in with people who see working out as a competition only with yourself, and who see sports mainly as a way to relax and have fun, and he’ll be able to get into the groove. But he’ll always be a little behind where he wished he’d be, where someone who’d spent his whole life doing athletic things would be.
Sorry to sound so bleak, but few things can create mental blocks for people like being labeled as children—-it often takes decades for adults to realize that they actually aren’t bad at math or incapable of being athletic, as they were told as children. If they ever learn. Which is exactly what the LA Times writer discovered.
The results of the study also send a strong message to coaches who humiliate children: The things they do and say can turn a child off from team sports for years.
Although the study was designed to examine how instructors made sports fun for kids, the responses focused more on what coaches did wrong. Strean, in fact, says he was shocked by the emotional responses he received.
“The so-called physical education that I received as a kid robbed me of the joy of physical activity for many years,” one participant wrote. “It did nothing whatever to establish habits of balance in life between the cerebral and the physical. Instead, the focus seemed to be on achieving excellence in a competitive setting. It destroyed my physical confidence.”
And these pee wee coaches acting like they’re coaching the fucking NFL isn’t doing anyone any favors.
The super hard core right wing takeover of the Texas State School Board has been completed. Under the guise of eradicating liberal bias, the school board created a set of standards that require schools to teach factually incorrect right wing propaganda in lieu of history. And it’s bad:
Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favoured separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the “significant contributions” of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.
The new curriculum asserts that “the right to keep and bear arms” is an important element of a democratic society. Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favour of examining scientific advances through military technology.
There is also a suggestion that the anti-communist witch-hunt by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s may have been justified.
Some of that is to be expected—-their anti-modernist, pro-paranoid worldview isn’t a surprise anymore. But even I was surprised to see that someone appears to have a vendetta against the theory of gravity, and that the school board has decided to indulge it. Pro-science liberals are often joking that the attacks on the theory of evolution are the equivalent of attacking the theory of gravity, but that’s because we foolishly thought they’d never go that far. But I guess we’re wrong—-if it’s going to piss a liberal off, I suppose at least some wingnuts are going to deny the theory of gravity. Perhaps believing in gravity is the top of a slippery slope towards believing in evolution? Or maybe they just want to discourage kids from believing that science itself exists outside of the realm of weapons development? Who fucking knows?
But it gets worse! They’ve set new records in denialism of American slavery.
The education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous “Atlantic triangular trade”, and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism.
I will say that this gets to the heart of the mode of thought that’s best described as “slavery denialism”—-anything from denying that the Civil War was fought because of slavery to minimizing the horror of slavery. I think the initial assumption about slavery denialists is that they’re in denial because they don’t want to admit that America has such an ugly history, and so they minimize it. But what I’ve learned about denialists is that it’s usually something a bit different—-they want to sow confusion about an issue mostly because they either aren’t down on horrible thing X or they actually kind of dig the idea of of horrible thing X or they share attitudes with the perpetrators of horrible thing X. Minimizing is part of this, because it’s about implying that people with attitudes like theirs aren’t so bad, but part of it is always perpetrating the attitudes that caused horrible thing X.
You definitely see that going on with this euphemism for the slave trade. “Atlantic triangular trade” reduces the human beings that were forced into slavery to commodities like tobacco or sugar. To use this euphemism is to implicitly agree with slave owners that enslaved people don’t count as human beings. What seems on the surface to be minimizing is, if you look a little deeper, actually agreeing with the ideology underpinning slavery and making excuses for it.
While visiting Kate’s folks down in Alabama this past weekend, I discussed all sorts of things, including the state of education there, but this novel method of teaching geometry definitely never came up. (Birmingham News):
A Jefferson County teacher picked the wrong example when he used assassinating President Bar ack Obama as a way to teach angles to his geome try students. Someone alerted authorities and the Corner High School math teacher was questioned by the Secret Service, but was not taken into custody or charged with any crime.
...The teacher was apparently teaching his geometry students about parallel lines and angles, officials said. He used the example of where to stand and aim if shooting Obama. “He was talking about angles and said, ‘If you’re in this building, you would need to take this angle to shoot the president,’ ” said Joseph Brown, a senior in the geometry class.
Efforts to reach the teacher for comment Monday were unsuccessful.Superintendent Phil Hammonds said the teacher remains at work, and there are no plans for termination. “We are going to have a long conversation with him about what’s appropriate,” Hammonds said. “It was extremely poor judgment on his part, and a poor choice of words.”
Wait. This wasn’t about a poor choice of words. It was a flipping LESSON PLAN. He didn’t just say this off the cuff. A few comments at the site for you:
And what exactly does that mean? I grew up in Alabama and in no way does what this teacher said even seem remotely OK…..
We are not all “good ole boys” just because we grew up in the great state of Alabama. Inappropriate comment? Alert us.
There’s nothing wrong with being a “good ole boy”
The “good ole boys” that I know would have given this teacher a light smack across the head for being an idiot.
Its hard to get good help these days. The person should have been fired on the spot. What does this tell you about the people teaching your children.
Some teachers believe it is okay to use their podiums/classrooms to indoctrinate students to their way of thinking. We went through this with both of our children in both high school and college. Who do these people think they are? This teacher should first off, at the very least, be suspended and then should be instructed to keep his focus on teaching his subject and not injecting his personal political views onto his students; that is NOT what he is being paid to do.
Right, he’s paid to teach about abortion, sex education, evolution, environmentalism, and all the rest of the state religion.
This guy is a math teacher…..he should be teaching math….not commenting on government issues. Ever wonder why our kids math and science scores are so low in this state? Maybe it’s because the math teachers secretly covet the social studies job….
Some teachers believe it is okay to use their podiums/classrooms to indoctrinate students to their way of thinking. We went through this with both of our children in both high school and college. Who do these people think they are? This teacher should first off, at the very least, be suspended and then should be instructed to keep his focus on teaching his subject and not injecting his personal political views onto his students; that is NOT what he is being paid to do. Inappropriate comment? Alert us.
And it was ok to have a class sing a song and praise the prez, I remember the chorus line Barack Hussien Obama,,,,mmmm,,,,,mmm,,,,,mmm This was a form of a teacher using their poduim to indoctrinate students was it not??????? Don’t us doulbe standards
No, it was not okay. I am actually not an Obama supporter and the indoctrination I was referring to concerning my children was of the left-wing variety. I don’t believe public school teachers should be indoctrinating their students with their political views AT ALL.
And you wonder why our education system is so jacked up. This is just plain dumb.
And I’m sure some of the kids have heard this kind of talk at home. What has this State become?
Now, some might say, “Oh, they didn’t ban all ethnic studies classes from schools, just the ones that promote ethnic solidarity or resentment.” That would be totally cool, except that the bill as passed is so vague that you pretty much can’t mention a (non-white) ethnicity in the classroom, lest you hurt someone’s fee-fees. What the bill bans:
Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:
Ø Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
Ø Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
Ø Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
Ø Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.
Here’s how this will (inevitably) play out: it’s [Insert Minority Ethnic Group] History Month. Students are taught about all the wonderful things people in that group did. However, inevitably, someone in that minority group who’s particularly famous will have, at some point, clashed with white people about something or other related to race. Perhaps it’s Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps it’s Cesar Chavez, perhaps it’s the story of ol’ Bill Johnson who went down to Ace Hardware and wondered why he got a worse deal on his grill than the young white women who flashed cleavage at the cashier. But the discussion will come up, and it’s at that point that the law will step in and put the hammer down. There is no reason you should be discussing racial conflict or identity in this country, because this is America, and everyone in this country is an individual - together.
If it’s so important that these kids learn about their heritage, let them take classes on it outside of the schools or here’s a novel idea: Let their parents teach them about it. Nobody taught me anything about my cultural heritage in school. I learned it from my family and reading about it myself.
I don’t know this Fool. But I’m assuming from years of reading said Fool that he is white. Which, of course, means that in the American diaspora, Fool has been routinely educated about his cultural heritage in classes called “History” and “Social Studies” and “English”.
You might wonder (correctly) if the inevitable effect of this law runs both ways - can minority students say that the teaching of standard, majority-focused narratives would allow them to raise a stink about ethnic solidarity and the like? Of course not! White administrators and white legislators will just say that’s history and tell those silly illegals to sit down and shut up before they’re asked for their papers.
I just can’t wait until the Arizona state legislature bans refried beans as a preventative measure against Latino supremacy. That’s going to be a great day.
(Taking a break from exam studying right now. Sigh.)
If you haven’t heard about the story of Stephanie Grace, the Harvard 3L who wrote an e-mail about not wanting to rule out that blacks could genetically be prone to be less intelligent than whites, you can catch up on the whole thing here. But I wanted to respond briefly to Eugene Volokh’s post on the matter, because it perfectly (yet unintentionally) sums up the troubling racial undertones of the above proposition.
Whether there are genetic differences among racial and ethnic groups in intelligence is a question of scientific fact. Either there are, or there aren’t (or, more precisely, either there are such differences under some plausible definitions of the relevant groups and of intelligence, or there aren’t). The question is not the moral question about what we should do about those differences, if they exist. It’s not a question about what we would like the facts to be. The facts are what they are, whether we like them or not.
That’s perfectly fine as a matter of scientific inquiry (now, whether or not we can satisfactorily define “intelligence” is another matter altogether). Although what, exactly, we’d do with that which wouldn’t be inherently racist, I don’t know. But, different question for a different debate.
Given this, it seems to me that the proper approach to this question is precisely the same as the proper approach to other questions of scientific fact. One absolutely should not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent.
[...]
One should also obviously be willing to be convinced by evidence that shows that, by controlling for the right variables, we would see that those groups are, in fact, identical to other groups under the same circumstances.
[...]
That’s why it seems to me that the author’s statement that “I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent” — or a similar statement, as I suggested, about Jews, or whites, or the irreligious [none of these examples, mind you, were about intelligence - ed.] — is perfectly proper, and in fact is the way that people should approach scientific questions of all sort.
Here’s why this is completely and totally fucking wrong, and indicative of deeply problematic racial bias.
If you are going to lead a scientific inquiry about the relative intelligence of racial groups (assuming all definitional problems are solved and that “intelligence” is a single variable), then there are three potential outcomes, generally speaking:
1.) W (whites) are more intelligent than B (blacks).
2.) W and B are equally intelligent.
3.) W are less intelligent than B.
Whenever this tired old debate is brought up, the only propositions that are ever introduced are 1 and 2. Grace never mentioned 3. Volokh never mentioned 3. Nobody I’ve ever had this debate with has ever mentioned 3. It’s because the debate that you’re having isn’t about science’s ability to measure racial intelligence as a genetic factor - it’s about the defense of racial stereotypes as something you can’t disprove and therefore shouldn’t be so damned sensitive about.
It’s simply not a good faith debate, and it can’t be approached as such. This isn’t idle intellectual curiosity leading to potentially uncomfortable truths; this is goading the forces of “PC” into madness through use of a false and racist binary.
And yes, this is as calmly and rationally as this contention needs to be addressed. If you don’t like it, I’m sure we could test people who say ignorant things for a genetic predisposition to thin skin.
I posted on this when it broke awhile back, so I thought it was a good time to update. Now that they’re facing a lawsuit and and FBI investigation, the Lower Merion School District has decided to come clean and hand over 56,000 photos it took of students by remotely activating the webcams in the laptops issued to the students. However, I’m suspicious of this whole coming clean thing. There’s holes in the story, at least from what I can tell from the Philadelphia Inquirer reporting.
For one thing, the cameras got pictures like the one above, of a student sleeping. (His family released the photo to the press; I’m not violating his privacy by posting it.) But the school district is adamant that they didn’t get pictures of anything more private than that.
The district’s attorney, Henry Hockeimer, declined to describe in detail any of the recovered Web cam photos, or identify the people in them or their surroundings. He said none appeared to show “salacious or inappropriate” images but said that in no way justified the use of the program.
Color me skeptical. Teenagers keep their laptops in their bedrooms, most of the time. Bedrooms are places where you disrobe, and who among us can say that we make sure never to naked in front of our computers? To make it worse, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine that they spied on a number of teenagers with computers, and not one of them did anything you might call indiscreet in front of the computer. Last time I checked, 99% of home computers are occasionally used in the service of self-relief. Since the district has stonewalled and been dodgy all this time, I wouldn’t put it past them to destroy and conceal the fact that they got naked pictures of students.
Then there’s this dodginess:
The “vast majority” of instances, he said, represent cases in which the technology appeared to be used for the reasons the district first implemented it in 2008: to find a lost or stolen laptop or, in a few cases, whether a student took the computer without paying a required insurance fee.
About 38,500 images - or almost two-thirds of the total number retrieved so far - came from six laptops that were reported missing from the Harriton High School gymnasium in September 2008. The tracking system continued to store images from those computers for nearly six months, until police recovered them and charged a suspect with theft in March 2009.
The next biggest chunk of images stem from the five or so laptops where employees failed or forgot to turn off the tracking software even after the student recovered the computer.
Okay, but if it was just randomly taking pictures and no one was really monitoring them, then how is it that the school officials outed themselves by contacting a student about what they’d seen? And if it was just randomly taking pictures, how is it that no naked pictures were taken? I’m skeptical. The investigators have 15 separate incidences where they can’t figure out why the student’s webcam was turned on and pictures started to be taken.
Here’s what I think is likely: The program was started to find missing laptops. And then maybe an incident here or there caused the school district to expand the parameters of what that meant—-for instance, they flipped on the camera for a kid who didn’t pay the $55 insurance fee. And their internal limits on what was an acceptable reason to flip on the camera expanded over time. And now some of the reasons they thought sounded so reasonable internally seem kind of awful now, so they aren’t talking to the investigators. For instance, every school has a few kids that the staff thinks are up to no good, and the temptation to flip on the camera and prove it must have been strong. Strong enough to do it? We can’t know for sure, but it’s weird that the investigators have no explanation in 15 cases.
Julie Sunday, writing for RH Reality Check, 
Julea Ward was 
I posted some on 
The super hard core right wing takeover of the Texas State School Board has been completed. Under the guise of eradicating liberal bias, 
Arizona just banned 
I posted on this when it broke awhile back, so I thought it was a good time to update. Now that they’re facing a lawsuit and and FBI investigation,