Cultural Critic

Teacher and academic who is equally worried by alt-right demagoguery and toxic identity politics of social justice warriors. Anonymous by professional necessity

[Cultural Critic @aculturalcritic]

This abstract is the equivalent of someone taking a dump on a stack a paper and submitting it for publication. https://t.co/GjJE3QwprC

[Lindsay Shepherd @NewWorldHominin]

"the authors argue that subjects are only successful within heteronormative sequential temporal schemes of living if they are normatively sized and shaped"

[Jen @jenteach13]

You want to fix education?

Fix #1: Restore consequences.

Let me break down Fix #1.
Somewhere along the way we confused kindness with the absence of consequences. We decided that holding a student accountable was the same thing as being hard on her, that a consequence was a punishment rather than information, that protecting a child from the results of her choices was the same thing as protecting the child. It is not. A child who learns that nothing follows her actions learns something very specific. She learns that the rules do not apply to her. She learns that the adults in the room are not actually in charge. She learns that effort and its absence produce the same outcome. That is not a lesson we meant to teach. It is the one we taught anyway.

What does it mean in practice?
It means a missed deadline has a consequence that is not negotiated away by a parent phone call. It means a student who disrupts the class does not return to the same room twenty minutes later with nothing addressed. It means a grade reflects what a student actually did, not what she might have done under better circumstances or what her parents believe she is capable of. It means the teacher who said there will be a consequence for that is backed by every adult above her in the building, instead of being quietly undermined when the pressure comes. It means we stop removing every uncomfortable outcome from a child's path and start letting her feel the weight of her own choices while the stakes are still low enough to learn from them.

How does this help kids?
A child who has never experienced a consequence has never had the chance to develop the one skill that will carry her further than any academic content she will ever learn, which is the ability to connect what she does to what follows. That connection is the foundation of self-regulation, of work ethic, of the kind of resilience that gets a person through a hard job and a hard life. We cannot build it for her. We can only create the conditions where she builds it herself. Consequences are those conditions. They are not cruel. They are the most honest feedback the world will ever give her, and we owe her the chance to receive it while someone who cares about her is still in the room.

How do we make this happen?
We need discipline systems that mean something and are applied consistently across every classroom in the building. We need administrators who understand that backing a teacher's consequence is not optional and that undermining it in the name of keeping a parent happy teaches every student in that school exactly who is in charge. We need parents who can tolerate watching their child experience a consequence without rushing to remove it, because the removal is the damage. We need to stop designing school systems around the avoidance of discomfort and start designing them around the development of character. And we need to be honest about what we have built in the years since consequences became optional. We built kids who do not know what to do when the world does not bend around them. The world will not bend around them. We knew that. We prepared them for a different world than the one they are going to live in.

The goal is not to be hard on kids. The goal is to be honest with them while there is still time for honesty to help.

#YouWantToFixEducation

[Jen @jenteach13]

Nobody talks about the student who came ready to learn, sat through the disruption, said nothing, and fell further behind while every adult in the building focused on the one who made the most noise. She is still waiting for someone to notice she was there, too.

[Frank McCormick @CBHeresy]

School superintendents have been amongst the most narcissistic and self-important bureaucrats I’ve ever encountered.

[Daniel Buck, “Youngest Old Man in Ed Reform” @MrDanielBuck]

My wife and I make our daughter wait if we (or other adults) are talking and it's one of the most counter cultural things we do

[Jen @jenteach13]

A few weeks ago, I started posting one educational fix a day. Here is the list so far.

You want to fix education?

🔹 Count the administrators in your district. Then count the teachers. Then ask who is in the room with your child.
🔹 Stop treating teachers like they're the problem. They're the ones who showed up every day, documented everything, and told you the truth all year.
🔹 Pay teachers more.
🔹 Close the Chromebook. Confiscate the phone. Hand them a pencil.
🔹 Fix class sizes.
🔹 Start with accountability. When nothing happens, students learn something. It is not the thing we want them to learn.
🔹 Make attendance mean something again. A child cannot learn in a building he doesn't enter.
🔹 Figure out how to keep the good teachers where they are.
🔹 Staff the building.
🔹 Stop pretending teachers are only working when you can see them.
🔹 Let teachers remove kids who make it impossible for everyone else to learn.
🔹 Restore consequences.
🔹 Stop buying curriculum from companies that repackage the same junk every seven years. Ask the teachers in the room what actually works for the students in front of them.

We know what is broken. We know how to fix it. We just keep aiming at the wrong person.

[Saagar Enjeti @esaagar]

It's the screens

ban them. All of them. No smartphones, no chromebooks whatsoever. Paper homework only

[Daniel Friedman @DanFriedman81]

Brett Kavanaugh, a man in his 50s, had been valedictorian of his high school, at Yale College and a star student at Yale Law, had clerked for the Supreme Court, had a top career as an appellate lawyer and federal judge and a pristine reputation, and then a random woman from the town he grew up in claimed he had groped her at a party 35 years earlier when they were in high school.

Kavanaugh didn’t try to argue that the incident was consensual. He didn’t claim he remembered things differently than she did. He immediately stated that he had never even met the accuser. Denying ever meeting the accuser is a much stronger claim than merely denying assaulting her, and much easier to refute. After Kavanaugh made this denial, Christine Blasey-Ford no longer had to prove he had sexually assaulted her to scuttle his nomination, she only had to prove that the two of them had attended a party together at which such an assault might have occurred.

She was unable to do so. She did not know whose house the alleged assault occurred at. None of the people she claimed attended the party corroborated any aspect of her account. Leland Keyser, a friend of Blasey-Ford’s, who the accuser claimed was at the alleged party, said she recalled no such event and had never met Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh produced a detailed calendar he had kept during the summer Blasey-Ford alleged she was assaulted, which included his whereabouts of every weekend night and listing who he was with. Kavanaugh argued that he could alibi himself and provide witnesses for any night Blasey-Ford claimed she might have been at a party with him. Blasey-Ford responded that she did not know the date of her assault and was not entirely certain it even occurred that year. Instead of being seen as persuasive, Kavanaugh’s calendar was mocked in both mainstream and social media because the reason he kept it was for a drinking contest he was having with his friends.

Nearly a decade later, there is still not a single shred of proof or a single witness who will corroborate the claim that Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford were ever in the same room before she testified at his confirmation hearing. Nonetheless, people like Nick Kristof still claim Kavanaugh was “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting this woman.

[Jen @jenteach13]

You want to fix education?

Let teachers remove kids who make it impossible for everyone else to learn.

[Fixing Education @FixingEducation]

If schools lack the courage to suspend the unruly, they are quietly expelling the innocent.

[ZUBY: @ZubyMusic]

The answers to many modern problems are simple but politically incorrect.

So instead of solving anything, everybody pretends they don't know what's going on, and spend years misdiagnosing the issue, talking in circles, and wasting time.

[Michael Shermer @michaelshermer]

I disagree with you here @glukianoff

Melania Trump voicing her personal opinion that ABC should fire Jimmy Kimmel for joking around about assassinating her husband is not "the White House" officially commanding the network.

Presidents (and first ladies) have always voiced their opinions. When Harry Truman said he wanted to give a black eye to the newspaper reporter who gave his daughter's dance performance a bad review, it was not "the White House" issuing an order for violence against reporters.

In any case, we can all see the hypocrisy in MSM, e.g., ABC famously fired Bill Maher for saying the 9/11 terrorists were not cowards, and Chris Harrison for simply saying that the white woman on the Bachelorette, Rachael Kirkconnell, who attended an antebellum plantation-themed party many years prior, not be judged by today's standards (it was the George Floyd backlash movement) for past behavior, a totally reasonable comment. He had to apologize and, of course, resign in disgrace.

We can all see that Jimmy Kimmel is given a free pass by ABC, so it's the hypocrisy of the network that is so disgraceful. Do they have consistently applied principles? They don't. THAT'S the problem.

[Anthony Bradley @drantbradley]

I recently heard someone equate college students using AI as equivalent to using calculators. I laughed. This is not what we’re seeing in the humanities and social sciences. Students are using AI to avoid learning and deep-think writing assignments. It’s not a “tool.”

[stepfanie tyler @stepfanie]

When I was in “Women’s and Gender Studies” in college, we spent a lot of time talking about “systems,” “the patriarchy” and all these hidden structures supposedly shaping women’s lives in the West

I entertained a lot of those ideas back then and I was trying my best to understand the frameworks they were teaching

But the one place I never gave them an inch on was women in the Middle East

Every time someone would say “that’s just their culture” something in me short-circuited. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t reconcile it

We were told American women were oppressed because of wage gaps or subtle social expectations, but when the conversation turned to women who could be punished by the state for showing their hair, suddenly we were supposed to become culturally sensitive (some of these lunatics even romanticized it!)

My professors used to get irritated with me when that topic came up bc they knew I wasn’t going to play along and my pushback would cause a rift in their narrative

They didn't like it when I pointed out the hypocrisy of calling Western women oppressed while treating literal legal restrictions on women’s bodies as a cultural difference

One of my professors even had a running joke she'd use to preface discussions on Islam—she'd do this smug smirk and say something to the effect of “we all know Stepfanie's take on Islam” as if I was the ridiculous one

Looking back, I wish I had the language and wit to verbally obliterate her but I was 22 and simply did not have the intellectual capacity yet. I didn't know the first thing about geopolitics, I just knew in my bones how fucking stupid it sounded to be bitching about making 20 cents less than men when women in the Middle East were being stoned to death for showing their hair

Even back then, before my politics changed, that contradiction never sat right with me. And it's one of the many reasons I despise so-called feminists so much today

[Ms. Sam @SciInTheMaking]

“Why are students today being taught the same way their parents were? Look at how much everything else has advanced.”

First of all, they’re not being taught the same way as their parents. Which is why they’re so behind.

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

Alejandra Caraballo, a Harvard Law School clinical instructor and trans activist, is unable to make sense of my position regarding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif. So let me clarify.

I don't care how Khelif thinks about himself. I don't care if he maintains or abandons his female identity after taking a chromosome test.

All I care about is that he not compete in the female category, because he is not female. He is male.

That's my entire position, and I've articulated it many times. It really shouldn't be difficult for a Harvard Law School instructor to understand.

[Tom Rogers @RogersHistory]

Inclusion has become perhaps the most used word in education today. But what’s interesting is how many children aren’t actually ‘included’ in the conversations about inclusion - the quiet, hard working, under the radar, polite, always respectful children who just get on with it day after day. But whose needs and wants are often ignored, or not included, because they aren’t loud enough to warrant it. The whole thing needs flipping on its head as these children, and there are loads of them, deserve a way better deal than having all their lessons ruined and their ability to exist in school feeling safe and not being bullied diminishing.

[Helen Joyce @HJoyceGender]

And what a very stupid take it is

[Batya Ungar-Sargon @bungarsargon]

So much of what makes leftists feel morally superior—open borders, defunding the police, letting homeless people live on the street—creates unbelievable amounts of cruelty and suffering. Mayor Mamdani abolishing homeless encampment sweeps killed 16 people. Just let that sink in.

[Brandel Chamblee @chambleebrandel]

Listening to the entertainment industry talk about political
issues is like listening to a goldfish talk about the vastness of the cosmos.

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

It is increasingly clear that the careless mass introduction of 1:1 devices (on each kid's desk) in the 2010s was, at best, a waste of billions that could have been spent on teachers. At worst: a major cause of declining ed outcomes.