Good to know.

Can you say more about what happened to you? Were you tenured? How long had you been teaching? What area of the usa? How were you driven out exactly? How were you not diplomatic? Any other details that you can share with harming anyone else's confidentiality?

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I think everyone can agree that our teachers and schools should exemplify those ideals.


I'd ask you, as well, not to assume it isn't. With only one abusive teacher in all of my schooling, I think my experience is likely to be fairly representative of the country as a whole, or we would have far more news stories about teachers and school systems than we already have.

To circle back around, that 4th-grade teacher of mine who surely broke our trust in her did indeed use a teaching style that was "disrespectful to human dignity." In no way was this a racial thing in our classroom, so using a racially-charged phrase like "white supremacy" to describe what she did is not only false but unnecessarily adds a racial component to a situation where there was none. Those two phrases are not equivalent.

I listened to a recent interview with a French sociologist, and here is part of her take on the American phenomenon of cancel culture.

"So, for us [French], cancel culture is perceived as the citizens who authorize themselves to regulate public expression outside the laws, which, for us, is totally illegitimate. It means, for us, cancel culture is censorship by citizens, which is totally contrary to our laws and to our customs… Laws are protective. Laws protect freedoms, because the mob is not protective of freedoms." Nathalie Heinich

The French have strict laws regarding discriminatory speech, while we have the First Amendment. They use the government to censor, while we have the mob.

YOU not being diplomatic?! Can't even imagine :-)

I live in the Midwest as well. Conservatives and Republicans have been making fun of the "Triggered" left and "Political correctness" for decades.

I also grew up a "Real Christian" and the "Trigger" was never Christmas but rather Xmas which was was always, largely mistakenly, as Christ being taken out of Christmas. I was however not allowed to celebrate Halloween which was indeed "Satan's Holiday". One year my two older brothers and I where allowed to dress up as a tooth paste, a tooth and a brush. Another, even more humiliating time I went to a church halloween party which my mother insisted on going to incase the church had been corrupted and I was a Bee and she was a leaf....we were beeleafers....

Again, in my experience the right tends to be comprised of blue collar working class and some uber rich people. These people generally are not "Triggered" by much and tend to make fun of "Snowflakes" that are. These are generally people that get their hands dirty and work and have little time to run around being "Offended" by people using this word or that.

In fact the entire "God, Guns and Country" seem to be the antithesis of what you seem to be seeing.

That being said I do think the entire country is spiraling in to "I'm a whiny little bitch" territory so maybe you're seeing early signs of things I'm not.

~Matt

Yeah, but I wasn't saying that anyone is "a whiny little bitch", only that real christians are definitely morphing. The most avid ones, especially the ones that like drumpf and all, they now don't even celebrate american christmas anymore, they actively campaign against it, since it is of course originally a pagan holiday. Which the christians have recently learned in their churches. And after they get over their triggering, they then don't want to celebrate a pagan holiday. Or, at least, this is the logic that I have been hearing out here from real christians.

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I’m getting confused. When you say “real” Christians, do you mean Jesus Christians or Republican Christians? Which ones are rejecting the Christmas celebration?

Also, didn’t Trump say that Biden would take away Christmas?

Are you seriously asking me to believe that your experiences in school in America should be taken as the rule for all American students?

If so, then we should conclude our discussion.

To be honest, I'm not sure. These are the 'new right' extreme christians, which many many mild christians have sadly morphed into in the last decade or so.

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There's not much more to the story. Tenure normally comes after 2 years. I was not offered tenure after 2 years, but instead was offered to have my performance improvement plan extended.

I taught in a high school in rural MD.

I was "driven out" by being placed on a performance improvement plan indefinitely (they are supposed to be one semester long. I was to be extended for my 3rd semester) and not offered tenure.

The bottom line is, they wanted someone to tow the line and I wasn't doing it. They needed to prove that their new cutting edge methods were going to revolutionize mathematics, and I was showing them that traditional methods were more effective as some 3rd year teacher was out performing the district by......uh......actually teaching math.

I could go on about all the looney stuff the school was trying. The point is, as slowguy said, a lot of schools don't give teachers much flexibility in how they teach.

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If you believe the majority of American schools and teachers are white supremacists, just say so.

You’re bonkers if you think I’m saying that a majority teachers are white supremacists. I don’t think that. But I do think you’re bonkers, so I’m done talking with you.

Did you read the letter sent from her sons private school? Or that her kindergartner had an assignment to write to the Cleveland Indians that their mascot was racist? If you don't think these types of things are being 'taught' in the more progressive school districts then you just haven't been paying attention.

This seems relevant:
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/is-it-racist-to-expect-black-kids


I again ask what I did on the first page:
Can you explain what these phrases (“white supremacy math” and “math teaching styles that are disrespectful to human dignity”) mean to you, and specifically what white supremacy has to do with teaching math? Genuine question.

Do you believe her claim that the school was trying to convince her kid to be Transgender?

No, I don't. Do I think there are schools which are putting too much emphasis on the gender spectrum and exploring sexuality and discomfort in your own body for fairly young kids? Yes, and I'd be willing to bet that's what Megyn is talking about.

Nathalie Heinich is Art specialist.


When she is not talking about Art she is a far-right nut who spews nonsense. She is Islamophobic, homophobic, and has repeatedly been caught spreading lies. It is comical that you use her on the topic of cancel culture and freedom. She has campaigned to get people she disagrees with fired and thinks that gay couples should not have the same rights as straight couples.


Your spin on French hate speech laws is deliberately misleading.

Is this your opinion? If not, I’d love to see as much ammo as you have.

There is zero indication that any program like Megyn claimed exists. She spun it as recruitment and indoctrination, that they were trying to get them to “come on over.” Such nonsense.


The fact is NYC public schools are encouraged to incorporate "LGBTQ history, reading books by LGBTQ authors" and take care to make sure "sexual health curriculum is inclusive of all identities,". Bad faith actors like Megyn try to spin this into recruitment. No, your kids are not going to "catch the gay"

Cm’on man. Everyone knows that you can’t catch the gay. That’s ridiculous. It’s not a communicable disease. But, sure, you can teach it If you just try hard enough. Because sexual attraction is definitely a learned behavior. It’s also something that can be unlearned which is why the gay conversion camps pence is such an aficionado of have been so universally successful and globally acclaimed.

That’s just science.

In my opening post, I talked about how people define words differently. I said that a person could say “disrespect” and mean something as serious as racism. Disrespect can also be something fairly benign. In order to understand the meaning of “disrespect” in a conversation, I need to think about context, which actually includes the life experiences of the other people speaking. If I fail to consider who is saying something, I’m not using all available information to know what we’re talking about.

Applying this idea that words can be interpreted in various ways, I said that “white supremacy math” could mean the same thing as “math teaching styles that are disrespectful to human dignity.”

I concluded my opening post to ask whether thinking more about the various meaning assigned to words might help us. Rigid thinking is the opposite of what I’m asking for.

I’m not here to call anyone names. I’ve been very careful to avoid doing that— I’m not even here saying that any bad conduct is intentional. So, I am not condemning teachers as white supremacists. I’m not condemning rigid thinkers as anything. I’m suggesting that a habit of thinking more about the life experiences of marginalized groups might improve communication.

I'm just wondering if there's "white supremacy math" are the hard sciences all "guilty" of the same?

What it boils down to is though there are approaches that can be biased against minorities, there is no "white supremacy math." As mentioned earlier in this thread, most of the math we teach didn't even come from white people.

It's math. Not history or literature. Whoever coined the phrase "white supremacy math" was just so woke that they felt bad that math was being left out of the discussion of racism.

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From what I saw scanning the document, what makes it "white supremacy math", at least in part, is the notion that there are right and wrong answers, that you're expected to able to come up with the answer on your own without help from others, and that you have to "show your work".

Her kids were in NYC private schools, I don't think we know what they're doing there - as I said, I can't imagine any kind of trans 'conversion' program which she somewhat alluded to.

I never said kids are going to catch the gay. Don't misconstrue my words. What I said, exactly, is this:
Do I think there are schools which are putting too much emphasis on the gender spectrum and exploring sexuality and discomfort in your own body for fairly young kids? Yes, and I'd be willing to bet that's what Megyn is talking about.

I have no evidence of this, my son and future child are both pre-school (and unborn) age. But the NYC policy above does suggest that some of this may be happening.

Do I think kids should be learning about complex sexual and gender subjects in elementary school? No, I do not. Megyn's concerns were larger than just this one point, and I generally take issue w/ some of the other points and this one is of lesser concern to me, but I do think that, aside from generally being inclusive of all the kids and teachers, elementary school kids should not spend time on these complex subjects.