Because that’s a great way to teach Civil War History, right y’all?
No. No. No. No. No. No.
You do not have a mock auction and sell black students to teach a class about Civil War.
I don’t care whether your intentions are noble or not. You just don’t do it. And if you are a teacher and you don’t think about the fact that such an exercise will be deeply hurtful to your black students and their families, then you need to get your damn head examined:
A letter to parents with children at Sewells Point Elementary School was sent home last week, following the April 1 incident.
Officials say teacher Jessica Boyle separated black and mixed-race students from their white peers and then put them up for sale.
The letter from Principal Mary B. Wrushen says, in part, “Although her actions were well intended to meet the instructional objectives, the activity presented was inappropriate for the students.”
Norfolk Public Schools Communications Director Elizabeth Mather says there are policies in place to prevent inappropriate lesson plans.
She said the teacher in this case did not present the lesson plan to the principal for review.
She noted that all teachers follow an approved curriculum, but they’re responsible for making their lesson plans, which are supposed to be approved by principals.
Boyle has been in Norfolk Public Schools since 2005.
Jon Bershad of Mediaite who defended Boyle’s actions (sort of), writes:
Now, I’m going to take a potentially unpopular stance here and defend Boyle. I obviously don’t know what went down in the classroom but, in theory, this isn’t the worst idea in the world. Let me explain.
Take, for example, the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. They have a tour where each guest selects a card with a real person’s name on it. They follow this person’s story throughout and, at the end, they learn whether their person (which the guest is relating to at this point) dies. Just like that.
Is this pleasant? No. However, if you talk to someone who went to that museum when they were young, they instantly remember their visit. It is an incredibly effective way of getting young people to truly understand the unthinkable. I’m sure Boyle was trying to give her class a similar experience.
I must admit, that I began furiously to write this post immediately after I read these paragraphs. “No No No No. The Holocaust tour is different. WTF?!”
During the Holocaust tour, they don’t separate the Jewish students from the non-Jewish students and then have the non-Jews act as Nazis and the Jews act as… well… Jews. The Holocaust tour is a teaching moment for the entire class without humiliating any specific student. The students all participate and they all learn something (hopefully) about what it might have been like to be Jewish during the Holocaust.
But that wasn’t the case here. Here, the teacher segregated the black students and then fucking sold them. How humiliating and embarrassing and awful that must have been for those students. And, whatever message the teacher was attempting to convey immediately got lost.
It is, quite simply, one of the dumbest ideas a teacher could devise (aside from having students parade around school in KKK robes).
As I read these paragraphs, my outrage-o-meter steadily climbed. (Shocking, I know.)
But then I finished reading Bershad’s article:
Now, it’s in execution that Boyle really slipped up. The obvious problem is that she actually separated the kids by race. Had she just chosen a group at random and told them they were now the “slaves,” I doubt we’d ever hear about this story. But, since a white teacher actually set aside her black students, there’s no way this wasn’t going to cause a problem. Some things you just don’t do and any person, especially a teacher, should know better.
Ah, there it is!
::holsters flame-thrower::
The obvious problem is separating the kids — obvious problem is obvious.
But there’s another problem — the Charleston Problem, and that is, the narrative regarding the reasons this country fought itself in the Civil War have been coopted by idiots who like to put on their fanciest Confederate gear and pretend shoot one another. They see it as a celebration of history. I see it as a yearning for a Simpler Time, when it was all mint juleps, and seersucker, and field negroes. It makes me exceedingly uncomfortable.
In my view, it is a period of history that should be taught, but not revered or celebrated. The “War of Northern Aggression” is over, jackasses. Move on.
Let me relay a quick personal story: The summer after our sophomore year, my friend Amanda and I spent the summer in Atlanta. She was participating in a summer program at a hospital, I went along for the ride because I didn’t have anything else to do that summer. One weekend we went on a whitewater rafting trip in Tennessee (I don’t remember the name of the river) with some of the people in her summer program. As we drove farther and farther away from Atlanta and deeper and deeper into what I thought of as Confederate Country, I began to feel more and more uncomfortable. It was just a feeling that I had — nebulous, but stark.
At one point, we needed to stop for gas, so we pulled into a gas station behind a pick-up truck with a Confederate flag hanging in the window. On the bumper of the truck, someone had haphazardly slapped on a bumper sticker; “I love coon hunting,” it read.
Now, I knew that “coon” is also a word for “raccoon.” I also knew that coon had another meaning, and that there was no way in hell I was getting out of that car. In fact, both Amanda and I reflexively ducked when we saw the truck (we were sitting in the backseat).
Our white friends who were sitting in the front looked at us like we were nuts, and asked if we wanted to go into the store and get drinks. “Hell no! Get the gas and let’s get the fuck out of here!” we yelled practically in unison. I remember thinking “I really have to pee, but I’m not going in there. I’ll probably get murdered in the bathroom — in the bathroom. Gross. I’m not going out like that.”
I went on that whitewater rafting trip almost twenty years ago — when I was 18 years old — and I can still picture that truck in my mind. I can still feel the dread that washed over me when I read that bumper sticker. And I could still feel the panic wondering what the hell was taking those white girls so long in that store.
So, whatever Boyle’s intent was, I doubt a “Whoops, my bad!” will heal the wounds that the black students felt that day and will feel for days to come.
[via Mediaite]
N W Barcus
Yep, that was stupid. Better she chose the students randomly.
lamh34
posting this here like same as I did on last thread on this subject and on ABL’s site:
k, the big problem for me, is that in all likelihood, the AA kids and biracial kids are more well-versed in the cause and trauma of slavery. As an AA myself, my first lesson about slavery WAS NOT a lesson at school. The reality of enslaved Blacks was known to me seems like since I learned to read and understand. For many American born Blacks whose family history in America can be traced back to slaves, you will learn about slavery from older fam, neighborhood, pastors, councilers, etc.
So the attempt to show the kids how it would feel would have been a better idea if it was the White kids who were made to be “treated” like slaves. I might be exaggerating, but I don’t believe that most white kids grow up learing the lessons of the past as it pertains to slavery.
So NO, I don’t think the kids have learned much. The blacks kids learned that even if ur half-white, you will have to play the role of slaves. The white kids learned???
Omnes Omnibus
FWIW when I was in the Army, I knew an African-American Lieutenant Colonel who said that he would literally drive around, rather than through, Mississippi.
dave
obvious problem is just as obvious as it was at the beginning of the post, no more no less
lamh34
ABL,
I know just what you mean. My sister calls towns like that “Shawshank…” i.e. “Lets get some gas in Shreveport, cause I don’t wanna have to stop in Shawshank”.
Aside from the fact that I tend to drive by myself, but it’s also one of the reasons why I don’t like driving at night. I never ever wanna break down in or near
“Shawshank”. OH and I agree wit one of the above commenters, being from Louisiana, there are STILL parts of Mississippi and Alabama that I WILL NOT drive thru at night. I only makes stops at major city gas stations.
Kay Shawn
Look up Countee Cullen’s poem if you still feel like defending that maliciously stupid teacher. I’ll give you the first stanza:
INCIDENT
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
… …
sigh.
Brachiator
Yeah, it was stupid and hurtful. It might have been instructive had students been chosen at random, but even this could be problematic.
I am more concerned with how the students felt, and repairing the assault on their dignity.
The idea that there are things that teachers can never say or do, I got no use for that.
jane from hell
@Kay Shawn: well said.
jpmeyer
This is a terrible way to teach about the Civil War, because as we all know, the Civil War totes had nothing to do with slavery! Right? Right?!
Elisabeth
Shoot, I still remember how I felt when the blue-eyed kids “owned” the green-eyed ones in elementary school. I was a green-eyed kid and even though we switched places the next day that first day still hurt.
jane from hell
Reminds me of this experiment.
wasabi gasp
@Elisabeth: {{{hugs}}}
Phoebe
@Elisabeth: I think the hurt is supposed to be part of the lesson there, to teach kids what it’s like to be made to feel inferior for something arbitrary. There’s a movie about this experiment they did in the sixties I think, but with blue and brown eyed kids (green eyes are really rare — how did you get that many green eyed kids in one class?), and all the kids were white, and there wasn’t owning, but the sort of standard apartheid thing you had going on with races at that time. Brown eyed kids (and then later the blue eyed, or vice versa) had to defer to the blue eyed at the water fountain, use inferior supplies, that kind of thing, though I don’t remember the specific examples. It took NO TIME AT ALL for both groups to internalize the inferiority and superiority even though it only lasted one day, and was presented as a game, not fact.
Ruckus
@Elisabeth:
I have no idea what it’s like to be black. But I had a day in high school that gave me a very, very tiny,tny glimmer.
Shortest freshman kid contest.
Technical all boys catholic high school. Shortest kid had to go up on stage to be picked by the entire school to be the smallest. But I was not going and didn’t care what happened next. I believe that may have been the first time I told an adult to fuck off.
The major difference that I see here is that nothing happened to me. If I was black I’ll bet that would not have been the result, no matter where or what was happening. And I know that one didn’t have to be smaller, wear glasses, whatever, one only had to make the choice to be born black. It seems better now than 40 years ago but the couple of voices heard so far make the case that we still have a long way to go.
Hawes
My second or so year teaching US History, I did something kind of similar teaching colonial history, whereby some students were “free”, some students were “indentured servants” and some students were “slaves”. Indentured students had to carry a cup of water until lunch, slaves had to carry it the whole day. Anyone I caught without a full cup got a zero on a quiz grade. (I didn’t give anyone a grade in reality.)
The indentured servants, once “freed”, began to harass and try and spill the “enslaved” kids water.
Next day, I explained how this was how race politics worked in colonial Virginia. As long as the newly freed could harass the enslaved, they felt better about themselves.
And, no, I didn’t separate the kids by race, because I’m not a fucking moran. Also, I wanted them to get the random instance of chance involved. Also, I’m not a fucking moran.
James E. Powell
@N W Barcus:
This is beyond stupid. Stupid is forgetting that racist beliefs are so deeply embedded in American culture that it will be at least a century before they can accurately be called history.
Phoebe
@jane from hell: That’s it! I think it was a good lesson, this one, but for all the reasons mentioned, the point is lost when you take the people already made to feel inferior and pretend they’re slaves of the people already made to feel superior. What does that even purport to teach? “Things could be worse”??
rikyrah
I think it’s time that we have the NAT TURNER SLAVE REBELLION RE-ENACTMENT….don’t you?
Phoebe
@Hawes: See, I love that stuff. That is a lesson in human nature, which is extremely relevant to the study of history, and it really hits home when you feel it and see it yourself. It’s like the guy who volunteered to be waterboarded — some talk radio guy — and instantly and vehemently reversed his “it’s not torture” position. Anything that shows white kids what it’s like is a good thing. But it has to be presented as such by a good teacher, like the one in jane’s link. You can’t just create hurt feelings and not deal with them, which might have been what happened to Elisabeth.
Phoebe
Also, that cat looks like Wilfred Brimley. There used to be a whole web site devoted to this phenomenon, but it’s gone.
johnny walker
Reminds me of that time my dad caught me drinking and punished me by making me watch some random neighbor kid pound vodka until he died of alcohol poisoning.
And then gave me $20.
Well, it would be if the ability to force other peoples’ children to die of alcohol poisoning used to be constitutionally protected, anyway. Or yknow… certain colors of children, anyway.
jane from hell
@Hawes: Sorry, did I hear you say you’re a moran? ;)
cokane
exercise coulda been done by not segregating the students by race and then just doing. Random half and another random half. Woulda been a smarter more PC way to do it.
It’s not worth getting outraged about and not worth that teacher losing their job. Let’s save the outrage for the real racism and discrimination, of which there’s plenty.
wmd
I wonder how much trouble a teacher would get for teaching about the African ancestry of the white students. Use “The Sweeter the Juice” and teach it in a literature class?
You can bet that “white” teacher has no idea she could have great great grandparents that were sold as slaves.
johnny walker
Also, I assume you’ve all seen the poll that says 25% of the country is willing to tell a (possibly robotic, I’m not clear) pollster they sympathize with the Confederacy (40% among white southerners) and the notion that slavery was the root cause of the civil war might not even be a majority position, at 52% with a 3.5% MOE.
But yknow, black president. Problem solved.
Elisabeth
@Phoebe:
That’s probably the same thing we did ~ it was a long time ago and I was searching for the correct description. The test for the second day was to see if the kids exacted some kind of revenge for the way we’d been treated the day before. Because those nasty little blue-eyed (or whatever they were) kids didn’t treat it as a game at all. Nasty little buggers. :)
Apparently I’ve always been “sensitive,” though and didn’t exact my revenge. Yet.
Elisabeth
@Ruckus:
The bigger lesson is that kids (and adults) should think about how they treat one another based on physical appearance.
MattR
If done right, it could have been a very useful lesson but the execution was obviously off. Doing it by something random like shirt color or third letter of your first name, etc would have made the point just as well, if not better.
I still remember my seventh grade social studies teacher going though my bag looking for “contraband” as part of a lesson on the roots of the Fourth Ammendment and how “if you have nothing to hide, you won’t mind us looking” wasn’t considered acceptable logic to our founding fathers. It definitely shaped how I view my civil liberties and any attempts to find reasons why they should be curtailed.
MattR
@lamh34:
I hope the teacher was thinking that the white kids would have empathy for their black friends who were being mistreated for no good reason. I would guess that the more diverse and integrated an area is, the more likely that would be the reaction.
ABL – I know how creeped out I got in parts of the south as an agnostic Jew with a Christian sounding name, I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for you. If it makes you feel better in some small way, I do think that sharing that story can help white folks like myself to better understand what minorities have to go through. To share another story from my youth that has stuck with me, my father talked about traveling by car from Minnesota to Florida with friends from college and having to essentially hide his black friend as they drove through parts of the south. In the grand scheme of things, it was really a nothing story but it personalized things in a way that history books couldn’t. As I said to lamh34 I hope something similar was the intent of the teacher.
Paula
I learned about slavery in school like everyone else and I was terrified and ashamed. When I learned of the Holocast, I was ashamed of my German ancestry. I cried for days and to this day it still disturbs me. My dad told me that humans do awful things, but most are good.
If just learning about these horrible events isn’t enough to touch a young teens heart, then nothing will.
BC
@MattR:
If that was the intent, then why the fuck didn’t she use sensitivity training? That’s been around for around 30 or 40 years and can be valuable in raising awareness of the different ways we show bias and prejudice, often without knowing it.
MattR
@BC: I hope it was because she was too young and naive to realize how stupid what she was doing was. Maybe I am just too optimistic about people but I want to believe it was stupidity rather than maliciousness.
Angry Black Lady
@rikyrah: ok, THIS made me L right OL.
Angry Black Lady
@Phoebe: i hope kitty doesn’t have the beetus!
N W Barcus
James E. Powell @ 16:
You could be righter than me. It’s kinda calibrated by how much stupid one experiences in everyday life, and it’s entirely possible your calibration is different than mine. One teacher in the local school district told some kid that the word “bitch” on the t-shirt he was wearing would be like calling the kid a “nigger” — job over, man. Otoh, there was a big stink on the DC city council when someone called a budget “niggardly” — job over there too.
Any chance we can agree it’s beyond the pale?
Anne Laurie
@N W Barcus:
Oh YEAH?!? ‘The Pale’ was the Roman wall across occupied Celtic territory, and the so-called ‘savages’ living beyond it were MY CELTIC ANCESTORS, you anti-Pictish bigot.
Nice Virginia teacher lady did a really stupid thing. Getting caught up in another rousing round of “My Oppression Is Worser Than Yours, and Has Went On Longer” is the classic way of derailing discussion of such stupidity. As I certainly hope you know.
James E. Powell
@N W Barcus:
On review of my post, it may sound like I am calling you stupid. I am not and I am sorry if it seemed like I did.
I am a teacher. I do something stupid in class at least once a week, so I know all about stupid. This teacher wasn’t stupid. This was something she planned. She has some other problem, one that I can’t even come up with a name for. I am assuming she isn’t evil, so I have to put it down to some pathology, likely something in the culture in which she lives.
maus
@N W Barcus:
Better that she never did it to begin with, it’s near impossible to do it right, and a thousand ways to fuck this up.
maus
@James E. Powell: I’d chalk it up to a lack of empathy.
p mac
I think this is a really inspired idea, just not properly executed. For role-play to work well, you need to put people in each others’ shoes.
So if you want to role-play the selling of slaves in elementary, let the black kids sell the white kids not the other way around.
Observer
I can’t get outraged over this.
This is what you get when a whole society and especially so-called liberals think it’s okay for children to read a book with nigger, nigger, nigger in it one thousand times because “it’s an American classic”.
And when the publisher who’s making money off of that, says, “gee we’re going to change the words” to better sales to people who are offended, so-called liberals claim the publisher is “stupid”.
A culture created from that is going to periodically have this sort of thing happen. You agree with A then don’t complain when the predictable consequences happen.
Snarki, child of Loki
@Anne Laurie:
Not Roman, English. Perhaps you were thinking of Hadrian’s wall, keeping the Scots out of England, but the Pale was an English wall, built to secure their occupied territories.
lacp
This isn’t even the first time this shit has happened. Over the last 10-15 years, I’ve read about the exact same “lesson” being given in different schools, with the exact same predictable results (students get traumatized needlessly, clueless/racist/whatever teacher gets canned). Is our teachers learning yet?
Chinn Romney
Yes, I think the Disneyland version of history is much better for the kids. They have enough stress in their lives these days, what with the occasional glimpse of female nipple and what not.
Jasper
ABL, I like to think Tennessee is a bit more tolerant than most of the deep South. E. TN split between the Confederacy and the Union – brothers fighting brothers really happened here – and we have a history of decent race relations.
But you’re right about the mountain areas. People up there are often some of the best you’ll ever meet, but there is an evil and racist element mixed among them that will make my blood run cold. The guy in the truck WAS probably a raccoon hunter, it was my grandfathers favorite pastime, but it’s a decent bet he sympathized with the alternate meaning.
I don’t remember the context, but the subject of blacks came up in a convenience/gas store one day, and the women behind the counter casually declared to my brother, “We don’t allow n’s around here” or similar words. What was so frightening was the way she said it – just stating a truth, she might as well have told us they get a lot of rain in Spring.
BTW, probably rafted the Ocoee (difficult) or the Hiwassee (good for drinking beer). They’re both beautiful rivers.
Jason, not in an official capacity
I think the teacher needed to follow up with putting some torches in the hands of the black students. That would have been pedagogically valuable.
Don’t wag your fingers at them and turn to walk away/
Don’t shoot someone tomorrow that you can shoot today
jwest
As with most actions by liberals, this teacher probably thought she was helping.
This is just another example of how the inability to think things through to their logical conclusion makes those on the left do things that bring harm to the very people they believe need help.
Surly Duff
@N W Barcus:
Better she chose the students randomly.
Better she not hold a f’in mock slave auction with fourth graders in the first place. The Holocaust Museum is a good comparison. The museum attempts to personalize what amounted to a dehumanizing experience through long and thorough exploration of the Holocaust and its impact. Having students pretend to buy other students for 10 minutes would not effectively convey the dehumanizing experience of slavery. The teacher staged a mock slavery auction that was the equivalent of picking kickball teams. Sorry, but the fact that she singled kids out by race just compounded the serious error of holding a mock slave auction in the first place.
Aet
When I was young and stupid, I spent two years as a teacher’s aide. I learned a lot. Mostly that education was a job you have to love to do, and even then it still might kill you.
Some teachers want their lessons to have so much impact that they are willing to tapdance on the line between unforgettable lessons and psychological scarring. Others don’t give a crap about that line until the lawyers come, upon which they talk about how much they like their kids while simultaneously disrespecting them.
I’ve also learned that shit like this can only happen in a professional and management vacuum. Teachers who talk to each other about lesson plans across multiple grades don’t do this. Administrative staff who should be monitoring classes and lessons would stop this. Something like this happening means that the teachers in this school aren’t talking to each other, and admins in this school don’t give a crap what’s happening until, again, the lawyers show up.
This only looks like one person failing. In truth, its a school failing. But people will talk about bad apples, admin will complain, the union will get involved, and so on. And five years later there will be another little scandal from a different teacher at the same school.
Original Lee
That teacher was totally not thinking. OMG. Those poor kids. Every time I think we’ve made some real progress…
Original Lee
@Aet: This.
N W Barcus
@Anne Laurie
It’s hard for me to decide if you’re being entirely serious or modulating hyperbole into a stick. However it turns out, I’m not comparing oppressions here, just saying that our country is totally f’d up about race to the point where anybody can get caught in the crossfire whatever their intentions. As you seem to be proving.
Slavery disgusts me, whomever is involved. And that includes wage slavery.
devil's advocated
First, let’s consider the facts. How do we know that this teacher actually only singled out African American children? Where did this information come from? Who is the reporter? Have we heard her side of the story? Keep in mind, this particulare district has had several “scandals” over the past few years, and seemed to rush to judgement.
If a person wishes, he or she can be content with insignifcant lessons for their children. Gifted schools around the country employ lessons such as these on a regular basis. This is why these schools employ the best paid teachers and graduate the most intelligent, socially passionate students. This is a lesson that can be remembered, and was done because the children seemed to lack knowledge about the history of slavery in our country.
It’s interesting to notice how PC many people in this country want to be, but continue to allow their children to be exposed by violent fictional television programs, advertisements that create a materialistic and less humane society. If we want to address the issues of our past, we should be honest and allow children to be taught by teachers who think outside of the box. Anyone off the street can tell a child to turn to page 100 and read the section on slavery.