White teacher binds two black girls to teach about slavery
Pedagogical perversion
A teacher wants to make an impact on her students in teaching them about slavery. Does she show the kids a movie, maybe, or take them to a slavery museum? No. She subjects two black girls in her seventh grade class to being bound with tape and forced to lie under a desk to reenact slavery as a history lesson for their class. One of the girls cries throughout the demonstration.
If you find that hard to believe — which I did, reading about it over at Feministing with slack-jawed disbelief — then you will certainly not believe the reaction of the school administration to this disgusting display of pedagogical perversion.
According to the Associated Press:
After the mother complained to Haverstraw Middle School, the superintendent said he was having "conversations with our staff on how to deliver effective lessons."
"If a student was upset, then it was a bad idea," said Superintendent Brian Monahan of the North Rockland School District in New York City's northern suburbs.
Bureaucratic blindness
No. That was a bad idea whether a student was upset by it or not. Who ever heard of enacting bondage in middle schools for the edification of children? If my daughter attended that school, I'd be trying to get that teacher removed. I wouldn't want my daughter to be taught by a teacher who is manifestly empty of empathy; lacks common sense and social skills. What might she dream up to simulate for the kids next, the Dachau Crematorium Ovens?
Again from the Associated Press:
The teacher apologized to the mother who complained and her 13-year-old daughter during a meeting Thursday that also included a representative of the local NAACP. But the mother, Christine Shand of Haverstraw, said Friday she thinks the teacher should be removed from the class.The superintendent is just as blind as the teacher here —seeing nothing wrong with the way the lesson was taught but only finding a problem "because the student was upset."
"I think the teacher should have gotten some discipline," Shand said. "I know if that was me, I would be uncomfortable going back to that class. Why should my daughter have to switch?"
Monahan refused to say what, if any, measures were taken against the teacher, Eileen Bernstein, who was still working on Friday. The school district said she was not available for comment.
"We encourage our teachers to deliver the curriculum in a variety of ways, to go beyond just reading the textbook," the superintendent said. "We don't want to discourage creativity. But this obviously went wrong because the student was upset."
As Womanist Musings said: "No one who thinks that it is acceptable to tie up two little girls has any place in a classroom. "
oh. my. god. how insensitive and crass and just terribly uneducated and cruel does a person have to be to think doing something like this is acceptable. receiving an education should not incorporate trauma and abuse. this person needs to be stripped of her teaching credential and i sincerely hope child protective services and the NAACP take full, just recourse against this backward individual. an apology isn't good enough.
Reply to this
Agreed. I wonder if the mothers can sue the teacher for false imprisonment. I wonder if the teacher being sued might help the superintendent to see things a little more clearly. I won't be surprised if the ACLU gets involved with this case.
Reply to this
yes reading this made me think of my own school days and how so many of the teachers I had were warped and ignorant indivduals.They really 'assault' your psyhological defences and breach them on numerous occasions . tragic
Reply to this
I think the subject of slavery should be never discussed again. For the love of God just let it go. It was infact way before any of our times. The word should be taken out of text books and dictionarys world wide.Congress says they all want us to get along, but this 200 year old subject keeps coming up. Also take out the word discrimination and racist from text books and dictionarys. We have had about enough crying about what someone else did when we were not even alive.
Reply to this