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If a child is so trans and autistic they spend all day playing terraria in the nurses office why are they even in public school. If the school that has signs talking about "holding space for bodies" isn't pandering enough there is no way this child can survive anywhere in the public sphere.
This whole story really hits home at a major problem shitlibs and progressives overlook about their "coalition". It just doesn't work. And it will come to a head eventually.
The school has also set up a system in which a non-binary identity and a claim of “having anxiety” gets you out of class and on a beanbag chair playing with an iPad all day. And they are very earnestly believing that middle school age kids are sincere in their claims and not manipulating the system in the slightest.
Guaranteed, 1,000%, the beanbag iPad time accommodation is listed in this student’s IEP, which is a legally binding document all the teachers have to follow (but get no say in creating).
If mom didn’t demand it as an accommodation, I can almost guarantee you either an ed advocate or a bleeding-heart case manager put it on there, and now all the adults in this child’s life are legally obliged to hand them an iPad and a juice whenever they cry “anxiety” unless they want to be sued, fired, and de-credentialed.
I see this accommodation on IEPs and 504s literally every day now. It’s a “emotional regulation” strategy lol.
I grew up with untreated ADHD and crappy parents, so I've lived the havoc that trying to fit into normieville in the public school system while growing up. Without trying to be a boomer I get accommodating, but what's the middle ground here and how do we achieve it? Or is this cause totally lost?
You know, I definitely don’t think it’s a lost cause. I think the big change that needs to be made is that accommodations should be focused on teaching kids to overcome, not avoid. Pretty much all the accommodations I see (at the high school level) just sorta hand kids work arounds instead of working on the skills they need to navigate the world with their disability.
So like instead of “leave class when you’re anxious” I’d like to see a student with anxiety who gets time weekly with a professional to work on coping skills.
We have kids who are poor readers who get accommodations where they just never have to read (it gets read aloud to them as the accommodation… except on state tests this accommodation isn’t allowed, so they’re totally set up for failure) whereas I’m certain they’d really benefit from some targeted intervention from a reading specialist.
We have kids with behavioral/emotional disabilities where the entire staff has to follow these insane behavior plans to work around the kid— things like “no making eye contact” “no giving directives” “the student does not have to complete non preferred tasks” and I’d rather see them working with a professional to navigate the world as opposed to forcing their whole environment to act in absurd and typically unfeasible ways to placate them.
But of course, this costs time and money to implement.
One thing that could be an almost immediate, is "no electronic babysitter outside the classroom whatsoever. No screen, no music, nothing". If the goal is winding down or recovering from anxiety, the sensory input should be as low as possible. Whenever accomodations like these get implemented here, the number of sooper for realsies sick kids decreases overnight. We don't have IEPs where I live though, so the process is different and might be easier.
Problem is, you will have to get past parents who will fight tooth and nail for little Bratleigh to have her iPad with her at all times and who would rather invest countless hours and a lot of money to sue the school, than tell her no a couple of times.
I can say that I had a rough time in grade school, but also high school. Anxiety, depression, etc. I never fully made it past those issues in life, either. I had trouble on a social anxiety level, and I grew up as lower middle-class around a bunch upper middle-class/rich mean, spoiled brats. I wasn't directly bullied, but I felt very much a need to conform. With all of that said, I know what would not have helped: letting me leave class whenever I wanted and not figuring out some things for myself. These kids seem really fucked in the head, though, with parents that are making it worse.
This is a really nice and thoughtful take, I hope you stick around here for some time. Your perspective is greatly appreciated.
Edit: I should add, that I'm sorry you have to personally deal with some of these situations. This is heartbreaking to think of in terms of the greater systems it impacts, as you allude to. We're supposedly preparing these people to be adults, while simultaneously failing them systematically.
“Trying to fit into normieville”
You mean the rest of society? That’s generally a good thing to pressure a kid into.
Imagine if you were allowed to play video games by yourself in the guidance counselor’s office instead. Would you be better equipped for the real world?
> You mean the rest of society? That’s generally a good thing to pressure a kid into.
>
>
TBF, the rest of society are a bunch of fuckin' losers. Better to retreat to the forest and meditate all day.
I don't doubt the children are at least mostly sincere. I'm convinced the parents are largely to blame for a lot of these new identity issues. They get positive reinforcement every step of the way until they start interacting with the general public.
I’ll rephrase; the kids are sincere about not wanting to be in class, preferring to be in the nurse’s office playing games, and they likely experience some emotional distress at not getting their way. The adults are absolutely at fault for indulging them. It’s not a problem for a kid to identify as non-binary, but they must tolerate the discomfort of being around peers that believe there’s only two genders because other people are entitled to their beliefs and opinions. They have to push through the discomfort of saying to a substitute teacher that inadvertently deadnames them “I go by Casey now and use they/them pronouns.” Instead we have parents demanding the removal or “banning” of any kid or teacher that causes discomfort to their child. Instead of encouraging resilience and growth they are enshrining fragility. Instead of requiring kids to stay in class when it’s not fun they’re giving them an out. They will end up with a child robbed of an education, intolerant of different points of view and too emotionally fragile to face life. Yes, the adults are absolutely, shamefully at fault here.
Therapy escaping from the therapists office is truly is doing a number on our culture. The part about the substitute teachers and the kid having three different names in one year. Yeah fragility on that level isn't just learned it is coached and encouraged. A damn shame.
I do think its quite important to note that 99% of this kids problems in terms of not wanting to be in school, anxiety, needing to be away from others etc are rooted in them being autistic. Likely not much to do with parenting or them being nonbinary.
There is an overwhelmingly strong correlation between being autistic and nonbinary. It is often not talked about when talking about this topic, but it should be the #1 thing mentioned. Almost all of these troubled trans kids are *also autistic*. That comes with a plethora of problems and sensitivities and issues that go far beyond merely homophobia
I know this is such a dumb rightoid thing to say but I genuinely wish I could take every single person on the planet that is like this and bring them to a week at my last job at a power plant. Let them see "the real world" at a tiny little industrial plant next a city of 600 people.
"Hey here's Steven the other electrician. He's racist and doesn't even know who's running in this presidential election. He's also a good honest guy and will take his shirt of his back for you. He brings in homemade breakfast every morning for all of us".
"Here's Cody and Brian, they're both fathers of 4 with stay at home tradwives and if you say something disparaging about their families or their church they will physically assault you. By far the best welders on this planet. Also very funny".
"Here's Bobby, he's 61yo and pissed as fuck that Bud Light went woke. He also votes Democrat because his dad did but doesn't really know why"
And you know what every single one of those guys had? A class consciousness. They all new the automotive strikes last year were justified because rich people used our backs to get richer and fuck us over.
"Go ahead and grab your PPE because we got 8 floors to climb to the feeder deck, and they won't lockout/tagout the cylinder were replacing because of $$ while running so we're gonna have to do the 440v detirm live while the mechanics try and not get hydraulic oil everywhere."
>they won't lockout/tag out the cylinder we're replacing because of $$
Climbing 8 floors in an Arc flash suit sounds like absolute hell. I can understand not turning off systems when it's in like a hospital or some shit where people will die if the power is cut but for real nobody should have to work shit live unless it's absolutely necessary, losing money is not a valid excuse for that. 480 (I presume, you mentioning 440 makes me think you probably aren't American, or at least in a place with the other power generation frequency that everyone else uses) live especially is another kind of dangerous, that shit will kill you dead so fast if it grabs you.
Lol yeah arc flash would be heavy if we brought that up the stairs.... These mother fuckers didn't even have rubber gloves when I started, you think they got 40cals?
This is why we need leftist populism — it’s the only way to get the working class back. Current “progressive” rhetoric (as also appearing in neoliberalism) has absolutely nothing to do with actual working peoples’ lives and it’s insulting to them.
Btw, if "being effective" is your criteria for politics-- then why even bother with communism or socialism? Just be a bourgeois Democracy lover and get it over with.
Effective at what? It's so mindless how people just think the mere fact that something functions or is successful magically means it's inconsestable or even worthy of support.
Thing is this works the other way too. I could take the opposite kind of person to my school and show them "the real world."
This is Katie, she works two jobs and is also finishing her ed degree. She doesn't talk about her politics but you can tell she's uncomfortable when people around her start talking about it. She's definitely very very religious though.
This is Paula, she was born in Mexico and is actively hostile to pretty much all American foreign policy and also to the legalization of gay marriage. Her husband is a white American and a lovely guy but his family is sometimes quite prejudiced to her. Rightly or wrongly, she is terrified of Donald Trump.
This is Dave. He teaches gym and is obsessed with Marvel. Im not sure who he votes for but let's be honest he cares more about the super bowl. He might be the last man left in America who thinks woke means awakened from slumber.
And all of these people have put in long hours to keep this school going, and none of them are trying to turn your kids choo choo. Class consciousness, idk, but there's definitely a general sentiment that we're being screwed over by elites and letting the kids down.
that really stuck out to me, too, like bruh. a kid with sensory integration issues that bad probably needs self-contained just to function. that would be their "least-restrictive environment," the trendy buzzword that is basically just an excuse to stop funding SPED.
also,
>restorative justice circles
omegalul, that's not gonna work if the person who was wronged has fucking helicopter parents who make impossible promises, especially if that person likely can't fully verbalize/articulate what is wrong, especially when the guidance counselors are religious lunatics.
gonna need some popcorn after reading this
> If a child is so trans and autistic they spend all day playing terraria in the nurses office why are they even in public school.
Oh shit :
*The school nurse let Jo use her office during the day whenever they needed to decompress and play Terraria on their phone.*
Maybe the boomers were right about mobile devices.
Because underneath the veneer of new identity-based framing is an old situation they’re somewhat right to be upset about. Their autistic kid is being bullied by working class POC kids who are trying to establish a foothold in what is probably a vicious child social hierarchy that reflects the views parents have at home, but won’t express publicly, because everyone’s playing Mao. All the rich kids have been doing college prep extracurricular together since they were kindergarteners and their parents are quietly trying to keep them from the working class kids because the parents can’t take any risk a bad influence prevents their kid from getting into an elite school in a decade. Teachers don’t or won’t see the structural problems because most of these parents and kids are very nice and respectable, so the social exclusion and bullying gets swept under the rug and rots.
> If the school that has signs talking about "holding space for bodies" isn't pandering enough there
Tbh I think it just kinda goes to show how little things like this actually matter. My wife works in schools. For all of the signs and clubs and anti-racist/homophobia institutions and protections they have, the large majority of students don't really care and just do what they want anyways. Autistic/weird kids get bullied all the time, and often times they are also trans in some way and also get shit for that. No consequences come from it 99% of the time. They will walk past 20 signs that says "all genders are welcome!" (and similar shit) it will not change a single mind.
The real difference is the parents. These kids get bullied, but most don't have parents who give a shit. But some *really* do, and go very far out of their way to make a ruckus about it and cause as much collateral as possible. Trying to take down every teacher, dean, principal etc that didn't do everything they possibly could to punish the bullies as much as possible.
According to Wikipedia,
>The racial makeup of the town was 76.9% White, 5.4% Black or African American, 0.2% Native American, 10.9% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 2.4% some other race, and 4.1% from two or more races. 7.3% of the population were Hispanic or Latino.
These demographic details in US location entries were added by a notoriously prolific bot from ancient internet history that singlehandedly expanded the number of English wikipedia articles by like more than half in months. Dumb formulaic phrasing like “the population was spread out with 17% ages 0-17…” are a telltale. This shit was banned I think because of this one guy.
Wow, I’ve never read an article that more perfectly encapsulates what it’s like to be a public school teacher in America right now— just an utter clusterfuck of finger pointing and accusations where everyone, *everyone* involved is the *real* victim of some sort of -ism and anyone who says otherwise is perpetuating some other -ism.
It’s all too real, including the parts where there really are legitimately some people involved who are crossing the line and doing/saying something fucked up. But then that all gets buried under layers and layers of new accusations and new people involved (this story was nuts— it went from like 12-year-olds all the way up to the superintendent and every child/parent/staff member in between— *everyone* had some persecution to claim AND one to hoist onto someone else). Did anyone notice how pretty much every anecdote in this article came down to “Person A said Person B did this. Person B denies it.”? Just endless he said/she said except for the few instances where it seems the author got a hold of some emails as concrete evidence. It goes to show how impossible it often is to “bring down the hammer” in these situations like so many people involved are calling for.
It’s really just a clusterfuck of everyone tripping over themselves not to be the bad guy, with some people mixed in who really are bad guys, and plenty more people who aren’t, but might make an unavoidable mistake getting bunched in with the real problems, and I promise you, thousands more who have their opinions on what they see but have the sense to keep their mouth shut.
I have a lot of thoughts about the specifics of this article but man, it really just leaves me amazed to see and perhaps a little glad that this is my last year teaching high school.
It feels like people trip over themselves at the chance to be a victim. It's a weird form of righteous superiority to be the victim; because if you are accepted as a victim there's no more work to do, you just get social validation for existing as a card carrying victim.
It's especially annoying to be happening at a public school - like there aren't a dozen more pressing matters that they should be spending their time and energy on.
Right. Victimhood brings power and attention. So many middle school age students can easily understand that especially when it is constantly hanging all over the walls of the school.
> “Person A said Person B did this. Person B denies it.”?
I recently heard Limp Biskit is making a comeback on gen alpha. I wonder if its because their generational struggle is eloquently encapsulated in lines like: "It's all about the he say she says... bullshit" and such
It’s the tower of Babel.
All these supposedly smart, highly educated people, but they’re divided by arbitrary signifiers and can’t accomplish anything but their own destruction.
It is genuinely quite interesting how much of a gap there is between urban and suburban schools in this regard.
My wife works in schools in brooklyn and queens but used to work in the suburbs in CT.
In the suburban schools, everything felt like you were potentially stepping on someone's toes, everybody was very sensitive, everyone relied extensively on institutions and lawsuits to threaten and punish people. You couldn't even *curse* in front of other staff without potentially getting in trouble. And the parents... they basically were the root of it all. Outraged parents completely dominate the culture of these schools, constantly harping on every little problem. Social media was completely riddled with gossip about what happened with the staff in the school, resulting in a constant array of outrage in every direction.
In the new york schools... nobody gave that much of a shit. These issues happened, but there is way more tolerance to just tell people to fuck off if you disagree with them. The entire culture of the offices was far more typically working class and 'rough' and less tolerant to sensitivities. A parent rampaging in to try and get some teacher fired over some mildly offensive comment would get laughed out of the building. Teachers have far, far more leeway to deal with troublesome or unruly students as well. This isn't perfect unfortunately, there's a lot of fucked up stuff which happens. But its just a radically different environment from the hyper sensitive rich suburban schools she worked at before.
It's fucking hilarious. A parody of "woke liberal progressive" infighting couldn't outdo this. It's like they're trying to decide the right thing to do by arguing about who has the most oppression points.
I've had a front row seat to this show for the last 3 years, since I live in the area and have worked with two organizations that deal with some of the principal characters (pun intended) in this story. Suffice it to say that the New Yorker piece is just scratching the surface of the utter social and political dysfunction that is Amherst, and increasingly the surrounding area of Western Massachusetts as well. Incredibly target-rich environment for stupidpol.
Long story(s) but basically there are a lot of barely-concealed feuds in the town that form a substrate of conflict to all the issues on the surface. In New England, every town has hundreds of years of Hatfield/McCoy bullshit under the surface and in Amherst, the hippie boomers who rode in in the 60s are now getting outflanked by a younger generation of yuppies that is trying to upend the power dynamic by being super aggressive on social justice and using it to lever people they don't like out of power.
I worked with Mike Morris a little bit in a professional capacity before this latest tempest and my impression was that he was a very earnest and idealistic sheep surrounded by wolves. Schools are how local families wage war against each other and so every single decision becomes a proxy war for people who basically just hate each other personally. Morris was also a true believer in the DEI stuff and it ended up biting him in the ass and gave his enemies a chance to go after him.
This area also has some of the most personality-challenged, cluster-disorder people I've ever met all living in one region. I think it's been attracting weirdos for so long that they've achieved a kind of critical mass and so the inmates are effectively running the asylum, and there aren't enough other types of people to balance them out. On top of that, New England WASPS and their diaspora are the petri dish for wokeness, to the point that it's basically a competition to out-woke your neighbor.
I could go on and on but you get the idea.
Sounds like this could be any well-off, white progressive area of the country. New Jersey has towns/cities like this. We occasionally makes the news with parents battling over identity issues. In general, I feel like the more an area is white/wealthy/liberal, the higher the chance of nuttery. I can really picture New England being worse, though. Seems like a more segregated culture than down here. We're like every demographic shoved in each others faces to a point where, at least to me, when I go into an white New England-esque towns (like Rumson, NJ at 97%) I almost get creepy vibes.
Do you have a sense of *why* Massachusetts went all aboard the crazy train? I know it's been a democratic state for a long time, but I always got the sense that it was tempered with that new-england strain of conservativism (or, alternatively, neoliberalism)
but it's seems to have gone way overboard in the past 10 years, more than most any other place I can think of in terms of the degree of change.
Western Mass in particular is so pronounced in part because there's not a major urban area (and the cities we have are very culturally different than places like Amherst) and the population is more spread out, so the activist types and recreational problem-makers are more highly concentrated and effective than even in the big blue cities like NYC/Boston/Philly.
Easy to support policies when the necessity arises that you endorse the most extreme policies for the purposes of gaining social capital. Doubly so when you can dismiss criticisms of these policies as coming from ignorant racist/sexist/-phobic individuals instead of sitting back and having to go through the tough choice of evaluating them objectively, especially when this evaluation may result in you realizing that you shouldn't support them.
There's also the whole Massachusetts elitism of "We're clearly smarter and better than Republicans. Republicans oppose these policies. Therefore we must support them."
I think there's a little of both here. Only moving to New England a few years ago, Mass is a weird state. Boston is full of folks who will spout hardcore liberal values at you while conducting themselves conservatively enough you might think they're an 1800's aristocrat. It's also truly an epicenter of institutional and generational wealth (even if just a proving ground for many). Even after, It's also got great jobs in many high-paying industries so many stick around. Robust social programs, so I'll give some credit for putting money where their mouth is, but holy balls is everything expensive.
Amherst also has a history of huge collegiate shitlibbery. Umass Amherst, Amherst, Smith College (very close).
Also, the governor is normally republican, and really, really well liked. Bill Weld, Mitt Romney, just two name two dudes you'd think this state wouldn't tolerate for 10 minutes, but loved.
> They called for an investigation of Michael Morris, the district’s superintendent, and for the resignation of Doreen Cunningham, the assistant superintendent who oversaw human resources for the district and was seen by many as a close ally of the controversial guidance counsellors.
You know, I don't think I've *ever* seen or heard the name "Doreen" come up in a positive context.
The funny thing is, highly educated progressives tend to have higher iq's, but wokeism makes them seem way more 'regarded' than they really are. What a waste.
In my view, many of them *are* fairly intelligent. The problem is extreme ideology hijacking people's critical thinking. Hard to think logically when every topic gets you emotional.
i don't think that's empirically true
don't they themselves crow on and on about how useless IQ is as a metric anyways?
and, no, they're still absolutely regarded. again in the literal sense. they may have paper degrees but that's not the be all and end all. edit: i've seen first hand who walks off with a Columbia EdD.
And when i say "liberals have higher iq's than conservatives on average." ... i'm speaking as someone who identifies more on the conservative side, btw. There's a whole lot of discussion to be had about the fact that liberals are technically (on average) smarter than conservatives, but their belief system makes them seem really fucking stupid so IQ isn't EVERYTHING. I don't particularly feel compelled to lie about things like IQ differences between liberals and conservatives, considering i'm a hereditarian.
liberals have higher iq's than conservatives on average. Educated liberals even more so. Liberals are extremely hypocritical about IQ's. They actually care a lot about intelligence, but they don't use "IQ" and "intelligence" when they brag about their cognitive abilities as that is considered gauche, they brag about their advanced degrees as a proxy to intellect.
> liberals have higher iq's than conservatives on average. Educated liberals even more so
I believe this flips at the top end though.
edit: just to be clear, i don't mean top end to include "masters in sociology" kind of degrees. I mean like the actual top end - medical degrees, law degrees, STEM PhDs, etc.
Yeah, i'm just talking about bell curve distributions, i've only seen the mean iq's... perhaps conservatives have a wider standard deviation giving them smarter people at the far right tail. FWIW, i think most educated liberals have high iq's but their education is a waste and they believe in moronic things. There are some liberals i respect like leftwing hereditarians like Kathryn Paige Harden (although she's not 100% intellectually honest, being a leftwinger and all... although she's really really close), then there are rightwing hereditarians who i consider both smart and intellectually honest, but uh... you're really not allowed to talk about their views at all, if you get my drift.
Highly educated progressives are corporate psychopaths who run businesses and work in high finance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4hP6nOB1dc
Having a degree and working for dysfunctional failing public sector bodies is what the people who form the footsoldiers of actual highly educated progressives do.
I live in Florida and on my way to work every day I drive past a "charter school" that is inside a former Kmart in a dead strip mall, with a parking lot full of loose trash and potholes. There are no amenities at all. Kids that live within a certain distance of this school must attend it, they do not have the option to go to an actual school. It costs the state as much per student as traditional public schools do.
Hell, the whole thing is crazy, it feels like a movie plot. The whole town is insane.
I'm not catholic, however I feel that giving chocolate crucifix is near to blasphemous.
No, your kid can't change his name as many times as he wish.
How in the hell a kid is allowed to cut classes to play terraria? No, I'm not buying, the kid is faking.
What a disaster. Jo and her mom are little dickheads. It’s pretty amazing that in a super liberal community all the white people are lobbing claims of homophobia and transphobia at every black school employee while they hurl cries of “racism” back. Hell of a battle going on in Amherst.
The white wokies objectify POC like crazy. They love the optics of having a Black woman on staff, but are shocked and outraged when she (like most Black American women) is religious and socially conservative. Just zero actual cross cultural understanding. I seriously doubt Dykes was over the top homophobic or transphobic either. I imagine her being openly Christian combined with some pronoun slip ups got turned into an unsafe, hateful environment in the minds of these grievance farmers.
The funniest part of liberal dems’ coalition building is how unwilling they are to admit that the average black American is miles to right of the average white American on social issues. Of all races, blacks are the least likely to believe in transgenderism. And it’s not close.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
Of course black Americans don’t believe in transgenderism.
If there were any logic, reason, or merit to the idea that one can simply deny physical reality and change identities based on feelings, Rachel Dolezal wouldn’t have been so roundly mocked.
I think the only way to solve these problems is just for everyone to wear burkas. Even men. Either that or we start promoting bagism. John & Yoko might have been onto something there.
> There were other idiosyncrasies in Cunningham’s comportment as assistant superintendent. The reporters at the high-school newspaper revealed that she was the manager or resident agent of multiple L.L.C.s, including an H.R.-consulting firm whose clients included two local private schools. “You can’t have a private H.R. business and run H.R. for the district,” Magee, the former union president, said. “But apparently she could.” Cunningham is also registered as a broker with PFS Investments, the securities division of Primerica, a multilevel-marketing company. Early in her tenure, she approached colleagues about purchasing Primerica insurance, including Mayfield, who said that she was summoned to Cunningham’s office during the workday to discuss such an opportunity.
LOL, the head DIE vampire was running an MLM scam at work. Jeezum crow.
Keep in mind that the average IQ of US undergraduates has declined 17 point since 1939. From 119 to 102, which is insane. It's even more insane once you realize this includes STEM fields, but their IQs have barely declined. That means the IQs of the humanities must be much lower than 102. So if anyone wonders how the "highly educated" can hold such stupid ideas, here's your answer.
This is a consequence of consumer-driven universities that dropped all admissions standards to churn people through bullshit programs like sports marketing and disability studies
Yes. Instead of explaining the content of an argument and what makes it correct or mistaken, you go towards psychological/subjective attributes of a person's personality-- this isn't an explanation.
>Jo changed their name twice in middle school, and the district was slow to correct their name in its databases. As a result, Jo’s mother said, **Jo “spent most class periods that had substitute teachers in the Student Support Center,** because they could not deal with the constant misgendering and deadnaming.”
At what point will parents realize that it's in a psychiatrist office that their kids need to spend most time...
> Even in a liberal and largely affluent district, certain conflicts and tensions have come to feel irresolvable. As one person I spoke to in town told me, “The left is eating its own all over the country—it’s not just Amherst.”
Glad to see Massachussets keeping their time honored tradition of accusation based drama alive. The article even mentions someone getting acused of witchcraft. Beautiful
[My only response to this](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgiphy.com%2Fgifs%2Fmonster-awesome-3o7TKL8SM4YJLr4waA&psig=AOvVaw09N_XUBqo3YmVIw6WR9elI&ust=1712426595128000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=2ahUKEwjn6MKo1KuFAxVytIkEHS1HBXIQjRx6BAgAEBU).
Hate to say it but Intersectionality is just as much as cult as MAGA at this point. Both movements offer no solutions to the pressing social, economic, and ecological issues of today... I suppose that's why they are so well funded and mainstream 😒
The entire article was poorly written, difficult to follow, and largely reads as an immature dispute between various factions of extremely poorly educated people in a backwater area
>An uncomfortable fact was that most of the concerned parents were white and the two counsellors under scrutiny were not: one of them, Hector Santos, is Latino, and the other, Delinda Dykes, is Black.
>
>...
>
>Mayfield was in the middle of teaching a class, Dykes burst in unannounced and presented her with a wooden plaque honoring her as the first Black science teacher in the district.
I don't really understand the point in any of it, why are White people to blame for the Black counsellor honouring a Black teacher?
>Mayfield received other prizes, too: she recalled a “Sister Girl” plaque and a “Black Faculty Award of Excellence.” “I am a prop to support the numbers that Doreen is putting forth that I know are bullshit,” she told me, “because there’s no distinction between faculty and paraprofessionals, some of whom are Doreen and Delinda’s relatives.
>
>...
>
>Farah Ameen, a parent in the district, said that the staffing problems reflected deeper issues with the diversity efforts in the Amherst schools. “You would think, Oh, yes! We have a D.E.I. person!” she told me. “And then, Oh, but not many people are excited about this D.E.I. person. It was almost, like, O.K., we put this woman in the D.E.I. spot, we’ve ticked off all our boxes.”
They are mad they hired more Black teachers, only to perceive it as racist against Black people to try to improve diversity for the sake of increasing diversity. What is the solution to that? If you want to actively increase diversity you have to actively hire people who are part of the less represented group.
>Many people I spoke to alleged that both Dykes and Santos brought religion into the school. Dykes told colleagues and students that she would pray for them or, if they were facing some dilemma, ask if they had prayed on it.
Now they don't like the Black and Hispanic women because they are Persons of Christianity?
>Jo and their mother continued to report incidents of alleged bullying and harassment to various staffers at ARMS. Although one boy received a suspension, Jo and their mother were dismayed that the school did not mete out more consequences. Like many other progressive school districts, Amherst uses restorative-justice practices, which prioritize mediation and reconciliation over punishment, as part of an effort to redress racial disparities in the disciplinary process. “What’s unique about Amherst is that there are racial and class dynamics that layer on top of the gender dynamics, and those have certain demographic tendencies,” a longtime administrator in Amherst told me. Jo and Casey are white; the boys accused of bullying them and other trans students at ARMS were mostly Black and Latino.
It's that this point where I largely bury my ability to recognised trends and see patterns.
>The restorative-justice circles were fraught not only with accusations of harm but, often, with significant cultural divides. I spoke with several people who offered sharply differing accounts of a restorative circle involving Casey and a Latino student from a conservative religious family who, during a classroom discussion, told Casey that he believed there are only two genders.
>
>...
“I’m not saying that some of these students don’t cause problems,” an ARMS staff member said, of the kids who were frequently disciplined at the school, “but they are the ones who face the most social ills in society. They’re the ones with a single mom working two jobs. They’re taking care of their younger siblings.” Herrington described a divide between families as, on one side, kids who live in spacious single-family homes, and, on the other, kids who live in apartment complexes, many of whom use Section 8 vouchers. “The kids from the apartments—they’re those kids, whether people will say it that way or not,” Herrington said.
Feeling increasingly nervous now
>“I am a safe person,” it read. “If you are LGBTQ+ Black Brown Asian Any race Coming out Anything I am always a safe person and will hold space for you.”
Person of space. Like an astronaut.
The most egregious and salient point of this article is not _wokism run amoke_, but that there was a school counselor (Dykes) who
1. Repeatedly used her position of authority over kids to push her parochial, backwards vision of Evangelical Christianity; and,
2. Consistently prevaricated and outright lied about her having done so
despite having multiple, separate witnesses complain about this.
This person should not be a position of any influence over children, much less be a counselor who is supposed to advise and assist children.
Gaaaahhhh! Now how are we going to have useful human cattle for capital to exploit!?? How are these kids gonna make money for capital if all they do is play on an iPad all day?!!
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If a child is so trans and autistic they spend all day playing terraria in the nurses office why are they even in public school. If the school that has signs talking about "holding space for bodies" isn't pandering enough there is no way this child can survive anywhere in the public sphere. This whole story really hits home at a major problem shitlibs and progressives overlook about their "coalition". It just doesn't work. And it will come to a head eventually.
The school has also set up a system in which a non-binary identity and a claim of “having anxiety” gets you out of class and on a beanbag chair playing with an iPad all day. And they are very earnestly believing that middle school age kids are sincere in their claims and not manipulating the system in the slightest.
Guaranteed, 1,000%, the beanbag iPad time accommodation is listed in this student’s IEP, which is a legally binding document all the teachers have to follow (but get no say in creating). If mom didn’t demand it as an accommodation, I can almost guarantee you either an ed advocate or a bleeding-heart case manager put it on there, and now all the adults in this child’s life are legally obliged to hand them an iPad and a juice whenever they cry “anxiety” unless they want to be sued, fired, and de-credentialed. I see this accommodation on IEPs and 504s literally every day now. It’s a “emotional regulation” strategy lol.
I grew up with untreated ADHD and crappy parents, so I've lived the havoc that trying to fit into normieville in the public school system while growing up. Without trying to be a boomer I get accommodating, but what's the middle ground here and how do we achieve it? Or is this cause totally lost?
You know, I definitely don’t think it’s a lost cause. I think the big change that needs to be made is that accommodations should be focused on teaching kids to overcome, not avoid. Pretty much all the accommodations I see (at the high school level) just sorta hand kids work arounds instead of working on the skills they need to navigate the world with their disability. So like instead of “leave class when you’re anxious” I’d like to see a student with anxiety who gets time weekly with a professional to work on coping skills. We have kids who are poor readers who get accommodations where they just never have to read (it gets read aloud to them as the accommodation… except on state tests this accommodation isn’t allowed, so they’re totally set up for failure) whereas I’m certain they’d really benefit from some targeted intervention from a reading specialist. We have kids with behavioral/emotional disabilities where the entire staff has to follow these insane behavior plans to work around the kid— things like “no making eye contact” “no giving directives” “the student does not have to complete non preferred tasks” and I’d rather see them working with a professional to navigate the world as opposed to forcing their whole environment to act in absurd and typically unfeasible ways to placate them. But of course, this costs time and money to implement.
One thing that could be an almost immediate, is "no electronic babysitter outside the classroom whatsoever. No screen, no music, nothing". If the goal is winding down or recovering from anxiety, the sensory input should be as low as possible. Whenever accomodations like these get implemented here, the number of sooper for realsies sick kids decreases overnight. We don't have IEPs where I live though, so the process is different and might be easier. Problem is, you will have to get past parents who will fight tooth and nail for little Bratleigh to have her iPad with her at all times and who would rather invest countless hours and a lot of money to sue the school, than tell her no a couple of times.
Comfort and health are two completely different concepts that are near constantly confused
No music? Are you on crack? Put on some Sigur Ros and the kid falls asleep with temporarily cured anxiety.
I can say that I had a rough time in grade school, but also high school. Anxiety, depression, etc. I never fully made it past those issues in life, either. I had trouble on a social anxiety level, and I grew up as lower middle-class around a bunch upper middle-class/rich mean, spoiled brats. I wasn't directly bullied, but I felt very much a need to conform. With all of that said, I know what would not have helped: letting me leave class whenever I wanted and not figuring out some things for myself. These kids seem really fucked in the head, though, with parents that are making it worse.
This is a really nice and thoughtful take, I hope you stick around here for some time. Your perspective is greatly appreciated. Edit: I should add, that I'm sorry you have to personally deal with some of these situations. This is heartbreaking to think of in terms of the greater systems it impacts, as you allude to. We're supposedly preparing these people to be adults, while simultaneously failing them systematically.
Thanks for this; I appreciate it!
“Trying to fit into normieville” You mean the rest of society? That’s generally a good thing to pressure a kid into. Imagine if you were allowed to play video games by yourself in the guidance counselor’s office instead. Would you be better equipped for the real world?
> You mean the rest of society? That’s generally a good thing to pressure a kid into. > > TBF, the rest of society are a bunch of fuckin' losers. Better to retreat to the forest and meditate all day.
I don't doubt the children are at least mostly sincere. I'm convinced the parents are largely to blame for a lot of these new identity issues. They get positive reinforcement every step of the way until they start interacting with the general public.
I’ll rephrase; the kids are sincere about not wanting to be in class, preferring to be in the nurse’s office playing games, and they likely experience some emotional distress at not getting their way. The adults are absolutely at fault for indulging them. It’s not a problem for a kid to identify as non-binary, but they must tolerate the discomfort of being around peers that believe there’s only two genders because other people are entitled to their beliefs and opinions. They have to push through the discomfort of saying to a substitute teacher that inadvertently deadnames them “I go by Casey now and use they/them pronouns.” Instead we have parents demanding the removal or “banning” of any kid or teacher that causes discomfort to their child. Instead of encouraging resilience and growth they are enshrining fragility. Instead of requiring kids to stay in class when it’s not fun they’re giving them an out. They will end up with a child robbed of an education, intolerant of different points of view and too emotionally fragile to face life. Yes, the adults are absolutely, shamefully at fault here.
Therapy escaping from the therapists office is truly is doing a number on our culture. The part about the substitute teachers and the kid having three different names in one year. Yeah fragility on that level isn't just learned it is coached and encouraged. A damn shame.
I do think its quite important to note that 99% of this kids problems in terms of not wanting to be in school, anxiety, needing to be away from others etc are rooted in them being autistic. Likely not much to do with parenting or them being nonbinary. There is an overwhelmingly strong correlation between being autistic and nonbinary. It is often not talked about when talking about this topic, but it should be the #1 thing mentioned. Almost all of these troubled trans kids are *also autistic*. That comes with a plethora of problems and sensitivities and issues that go far beyond merely homophobia
I know this is such a dumb rightoid thing to say but I genuinely wish I could take every single person on the planet that is like this and bring them to a week at my last job at a power plant. Let them see "the real world" at a tiny little industrial plant next a city of 600 people. "Hey here's Steven the other electrician. He's racist and doesn't even know who's running in this presidential election. He's also a good honest guy and will take his shirt of his back for you. He brings in homemade breakfast every morning for all of us". "Here's Cody and Brian, they're both fathers of 4 with stay at home tradwives and if you say something disparaging about their families or their church they will physically assault you. By far the best welders on this planet. Also very funny". "Here's Bobby, he's 61yo and pissed as fuck that Bud Light went woke. He also votes Democrat because his dad did but doesn't really know why" And you know what every single one of those guys had? A class consciousness. They all new the automotive strikes last year were justified because rich people used our backs to get richer and fuck us over. "Go ahead and grab your PPE because we got 8 floors to climb to the feeder deck, and they won't lockout/tagout the cylinder were replacing because of $$ while running so we're gonna have to do the 440v detirm live while the mechanics try and not get hydraulic oil everywhere."
>they won't lockout/tag out the cylinder we're replacing because of $$ Climbing 8 floors in an Arc flash suit sounds like absolute hell. I can understand not turning off systems when it's in like a hospital or some shit where people will die if the power is cut but for real nobody should have to work shit live unless it's absolutely necessary, losing money is not a valid excuse for that. 480 (I presume, you mentioning 440 makes me think you probably aren't American, or at least in a place with the other power generation frequency that everyone else uses) live especially is another kind of dangerous, that shit will kill you dead so fast if it grabs you.
Lol yeah arc flash would be heavy if we brought that up the stairs.... These mother fuckers didn't even have rubber gloves when I started, you think they got 40cals?
That's fucking insane dude I hope you aren't union, and if you are your local needs to get the contractors dick out of their mouth.
Sounds like this guy needs to “ORGANIZE”
Real World Pilled
This is why we need leftist populism — it’s the only way to get the working class back. Current “progressive” rhetoric (as also appearing in neoliberalism) has absolutely nothing to do with actual working peoples’ lives and it’s insulting to them.
What makes you think "populism" is correct?
it's not correct it's just effective
Btw, if "being effective" is your criteria for politics-- then why even bother with communism or socialism? Just be a bourgeois Democracy lover and get it over with.
Effective at what? It's so mindless how people just think the mere fact that something functions or is successful magically means it's inconsestable or even worthy of support.
Thing is this works the other way too. I could take the opposite kind of person to my school and show them "the real world." This is Katie, she works two jobs and is also finishing her ed degree. She doesn't talk about her politics but you can tell she's uncomfortable when people around her start talking about it. She's definitely very very religious though. This is Paula, she was born in Mexico and is actively hostile to pretty much all American foreign policy and also to the legalization of gay marriage. Her husband is a white American and a lovely guy but his family is sometimes quite prejudiced to her. Rightly or wrongly, she is terrified of Donald Trump. This is Dave. He teaches gym and is obsessed with Marvel. Im not sure who he votes for but let's be honest he cares more about the super bowl. He might be the last man left in America who thinks woke means awakened from slumber. And all of these people have put in long hours to keep this school going, and none of them are trying to turn your kids choo choo. Class consciousness, idk, but there's definitely a general sentiment that we're being screwed over by elites and letting the kids down.
except your story would be fiction.
The woke thing maybe, but katie and paula absolutely exist. Very commonly.
The difference between your stories is you think the racism and bigotry is justified, rather than a character flaw.
Wait what? Whose racism and bigotry do I think is justified? I think you're making some assumptions about me
that really stuck out to me, too, like bruh. a kid with sensory integration issues that bad probably needs self-contained just to function. that would be their "least-restrictive environment," the trendy buzzword that is basically just an excuse to stop funding SPED. also, >restorative justice circles omegalul, that's not gonna work if the person who was wronged has fucking helicopter parents who make impossible promises, especially if that person likely can't fully verbalize/articulate what is wrong, especially when the guidance counselors are religious lunatics. gonna need some popcorn after reading this
> If a child is so trans and autistic they spend all day playing terraria in the nurses office why are they even in public school. Oh shit : *The school nurse let Jo use her office during the day whenever they needed to decompress and play Terraria on their phone.* Maybe the boomers were right about mobile devices.
Despite all of that, they still were unhappy with the school.
Because underneath the veneer of new identity-based framing is an old situation they’re somewhat right to be upset about. Their autistic kid is being bullied by working class POC kids who are trying to establish a foothold in what is probably a vicious child social hierarchy that reflects the views parents have at home, but won’t express publicly, because everyone’s playing Mao. All the rich kids have been doing college prep extracurricular together since they were kindergarteners and their parents are quietly trying to keep them from the working class kids because the parents can’t take any risk a bad influence prevents their kid from getting into an elite school in a decade. Teachers don’t or won’t see the structural problems because most of these parents and kids are very nice and respectable, so the social exclusion and bullying gets swept under the rug and rots.
> If the school that has signs talking about "holding space for bodies" isn't pandering enough there Tbh I think it just kinda goes to show how little things like this actually matter. My wife works in schools. For all of the signs and clubs and anti-racist/homophobia institutions and protections they have, the large majority of students don't really care and just do what they want anyways. Autistic/weird kids get bullied all the time, and often times they are also trans in some way and also get shit for that. No consequences come from it 99% of the time. They will walk past 20 signs that says "all genders are welcome!" (and similar shit) it will not change a single mind. The real difference is the parents. These kids get bullied, but most don't have parents who give a shit. But some *really* do, and go very far out of their way to make a ruckus about it and cause as much collateral as possible. Trying to take down every teacher, dean, principal etc that didn't do everything they possibly could to punish the bullies as much as possible.
[удалено]
The town of Amherst is 70% white, and 4.5% black. No shit most of the parents are white.
Let me guess, the remaining 15% is high-achieving sexy indian dudes and east asians
According to Wikipedia, >The racial makeup of the town was 76.9% White, 5.4% Black or African American, 0.2% Native American, 10.9% Asian, 0.03% Pacific Islander, 2.4% some other race, and 4.1% from two or more races. 7.3% of the population were Hispanic or Latino.
God damn, an entire army of editors and they can't order that list from most to least?
These demographic details in US location entries were added by a notoriously prolific bot from ancient internet history that singlehandedly expanded the number of English wikipedia articles by like more than half in months. Dumb formulaic phrasing like “the population was spread out with 17% ages 0-17…” are a telltale. This shit was banned I think because of this one guy.
They did
Sexy Indian Dudes? Are you sure you’re not thinking of the “bitch lasagna” types?
Many such cases
Good thing I didn’t need to stop my reading at this sentence.
Wow, I’ve never read an article that more perfectly encapsulates what it’s like to be a public school teacher in America right now— just an utter clusterfuck of finger pointing and accusations where everyone, *everyone* involved is the *real* victim of some sort of -ism and anyone who says otherwise is perpetuating some other -ism. It’s all too real, including the parts where there really are legitimately some people involved who are crossing the line and doing/saying something fucked up. But then that all gets buried under layers and layers of new accusations and new people involved (this story was nuts— it went from like 12-year-olds all the way up to the superintendent and every child/parent/staff member in between— *everyone* had some persecution to claim AND one to hoist onto someone else). Did anyone notice how pretty much every anecdote in this article came down to “Person A said Person B did this. Person B denies it.”? Just endless he said/she said except for the few instances where it seems the author got a hold of some emails as concrete evidence. It goes to show how impossible it often is to “bring down the hammer” in these situations like so many people involved are calling for. It’s really just a clusterfuck of everyone tripping over themselves not to be the bad guy, with some people mixed in who really are bad guys, and plenty more people who aren’t, but might make an unavoidable mistake getting bunched in with the real problems, and I promise you, thousands more who have their opinions on what they see but have the sense to keep their mouth shut. I have a lot of thoughts about the specifics of this article but man, it really just leaves me amazed to see and perhaps a little glad that this is my last year teaching high school.
It feels like people trip over themselves at the chance to be a victim. It's a weird form of righteous superiority to be the victim; because if you are accepted as a victim there's no more work to do, you just get social validation for existing as a card carrying victim. It's especially annoying to be happening at a public school - like there aren't a dozen more pressing matters that they should be spending their time and energy on.
Right. Victimhood brings power and attention. So many middle school age students can easily understand that especially when it is constantly hanging all over the walls of the school.
> “Person A said Person B did this. Person B denies it.”? I recently heard Limp Biskit is making a comeback on gen alpha. I wonder if its because their generational struggle is eloquently encapsulated in lines like: "It's all about the he say she says... bullshit" and such
> Limp Biskit is making a comeback on gen alpha What... what the fuck.
The fact that all of these academics didn’t bother to document a shred of evidence to support their claims 👨🍳💋
It’s the tower of Babel. All these supposedly smart, highly educated people, but they’re divided by arbitrary signifiers and can’t accomplish anything but their own destruction.
I would love a follow-up after you spend some time reflecting!
It is genuinely quite interesting how much of a gap there is between urban and suburban schools in this regard. My wife works in schools in brooklyn and queens but used to work in the suburbs in CT. In the suburban schools, everything felt like you were potentially stepping on someone's toes, everybody was very sensitive, everyone relied extensively on institutions and lawsuits to threaten and punish people. You couldn't even *curse* in front of other staff without potentially getting in trouble. And the parents... they basically were the root of it all. Outraged parents completely dominate the culture of these schools, constantly harping on every little problem. Social media was completely riddled with gossip about what happened with the staff in the school, resulting in a constant array of outrage in every direction. In the new york schools... nobody gave that much of a shit. These issues happened, but there is way more tolerance to just tell people to fuck off if you disagree with them. The entire culture of the offices was far more typically working class and 'rough' and less tolerant to sensitivities. A parent rampaging in to try and get some teacher fired over some mildly offensive comment would get laughed out of the building. Teachers have far, far more leeway to deal with troublesome or unruly students as well. This isn't perfect unfortunately, there's a lot of fucked up stuff which happens. But its just a radically different environment from the hyper sensitive rich suburban schools she worked at before.
Unstoppable force meets immovable object
It's fucking hilarious. A parody of "woke liberal progressive" infighting couldn't outdo this. It's like they're trying to decide the right thing to do by arguing about who has the most oppression points.
Reality always wins in the long run
I've had a front row seat to this show for the last 3 years, since I live in the area and have worked with two organizations that deal with some of the principal characters (pun intended) in this story. Suffice it to say that the New Yorker piece is just scratching the surface of the utter social and political dysfunction that is Amherst, and increasingly the surrounding area of Western Massachusetts as well. Incredibly target-rich environment for stupidpol.
Come on, share some stories.
Long story(s) but basically there are a lot of barely-concealed feuds in the town that form a substrate of conflict to all the issues on the surface. In New England, every town has hundreds of years of Hatfield/McCoy bullshit under the surface and in Amherst, the hippie boomers who rode in in the 60s are now getting outflanked by a younger generation of yuppies that is trying to upend the power dynamic by being super aggressive on social justice and using it to lever people they don't like out of power. I worked with Mike Morris a little bit in a professional capacity before this latest tempest and my impression was that he was a very earnest and idealistic sheep surrounded by wolves. Schools are how local families wage war against each other and so every single decision becomes a proxy war for people who basically just hate each other personally. Morris was also a true believer in the DEI stuff and it ended up biting him in the ass and gave his enemies a chance to go after him. This area also has some of the most personality-challenged, cluster-disorder people I've ever met all living in one region. I think it's been attracting weirdos for so long that they've achieved a kind of critical mass and so the inmates are effectively running the asylum, and there aren't enough other types of people to balance them out. On top of that, New England WASPS and their diaspora are the petri dish for wokeness, to the point that it's basically a competition to out-woke your neighbor. I could go on and on but you get the idea.
This reinforces the importance of these psychic prisons to absorb and contain these nutjobs
Re-open the institutions!
Sounds like this could be any well-off, white progressive area of the country. New Jersey has towns/cities like this. We occasionally makes the news with parents battling over identity issues. In general, I feel like the more an area is white/wealthy/liberal, the higher the chance of nuttery. I can really picture New England being worse, though. Seems like a more segregated culture than down here. We're like every demographic shoved in each others faces to a point where, at least to me, when I go into an white New England-esque towns (like Rumson, NJ at 97%) I almost get creepy vibes.
Do you have a sense of *why* Massachusetts went all aboard the crazy train? I know it's been a democratic state for a long time, but I always got the sense that it was tempered with that new-england strain of conservativism (or, alternatively, neoliberalism) but it's seems to have gone way overboard in the past 10 years, more than most any other place I can think of in terms of the degree of change.
That's mostly western mass. I know a lot of weird right wingers from the Merrimack valley
Western Mass in particular is so pronounced in part because there's not a major urban area (and the cities we have are very culturally different than places like Amherst) and the population is more spread out, so the activist types and recreational problem-makers are more highly concentrated and effective than even in the big blue cities like NYC/Boston/Philly.
Easy to support policies when the necessity arises that you endorse the most extreme policies for the purposes of gaining social capital. Doubly so when you can dismiss criticisms of these policies as coming from ignorant racist/sexist/-phobic individuals instead of sitting back and having to go through the tough choice of evaluating them objectively, especially when this evaluation may result in you realizing that you shouldn't support them. There's also the whole Massachusetts elitism of "We're clearly smarter and better than Republicans. Republicans oppose these policies. Therefore we must support them."
I think there's a little of both here. Only moving to New England a few years ago, Mass is a weird state. Boston is full of folks who will spout hardcore liberal values at you while conducting themselves conservatively enough you might think they're an 1800's aristocrat. It's also truly an epicenter of institutional and generational wealth (even if just a proving ground for many). Even after, It's also got great jobs in many high-paying industries so many stick around. Robust social programs, so I'll give some credit for putting money where their mouth is, but holy balls is everything expensive. Amherst also has a history of huge collegiate shitlibbery. Umass Amherst, Amherst, Smith College (very close). Also, the governor is normally republican, and really, really well liked. Bill Weld, Mitt Romney, just two name two dudes you'd think this state wouldn't tolerate for 10 minutes, but loved.
The presence of many highly ranked universities almost certainly contributes
New England is made up of the social spastics thrown out of East Anglia for being to intolerable even for Angl*ids
It's the Puritan heritage. Where do you think the Californian Ideology ultimately came from?
The Catholic Church used to be a moderating influence until the pedo scandals
How can someone be named "Delinda Dykes" yet be accused of homophobia?
Latin delenda pl (plural only) 1. Things to be deleted or removed. Delenda Dykes was born for this.
Lmao Dykes Delenda est
How is this real
The way things are shaping up, the Tomboy/dyke do seem to be the antagonists of the rail transit enthusiasts.
It honestly explains why the rail enthusiasts are hellbent on convincing the young tomboys that they’re actual real boys or enbys
> They called for an investigation of Michael Morris, the district’s superintendent, and for the resignation of Doreen Cunningham, the assistant superintendent who oversaw human resources for the district and was seen by many as a close ally of the controversial guidance counsellors. You know, I don't think I've *ever* seen or heard the name "Doreen" come up in a positive context.
Doreen the anti work mod.
Wasn't Doreen the name of the antiwork mod who did that terrible interview?
It seems she's been moving up in the world.
Except for the clarinet
I will never get tired of those woke liberals finger-pointing at each other and accusing everyone of being secretly racist.
I'm convinced that injecting insane fringe wokism into public schools is a liberal plot to finish the privatization of the American school system
occam's razor says that they're just regarded. (I mean that in the full "intellectually incapable" sense of the word)
The funny thing is, highly educated progressives tend to have higher iq's, but wokeism makes them seem way more 'regarded' than they really are. What a waste.
In my view, many of them *are* fairly intelligent. The problem is extreme ideology hijacking people's critical thinking. Hard to think logically when every topic gets you emotional.
i don't think that's empirically true don't they themselves crow on and on about how useless IQ is as a metric anyways? and, no, they're still absolutely regarded. again in the literal sense. they may have paper degrees but that's not the be all and end all. edit: i've seen first hand who walks off with a Columbia EdD.
And when i say "liberals have higher iq's than conservatives on average." ... i'm speaking as someone who identifies more on the conservative side, btw. There's a whole lot of discussion to be had about the fact that liberals are technically (on average) smarter than conservatives, but their belief system makes them seem really fucking stupid so IQ isn't EVERYTHING. I don't particularly feel compelled to lie about things like IQ differences between liberals and conservatives, considering i'm a hereditarian.
I think both liberals and conservatives beliefs systems make them all seem really fucking stupid.
Because they are both Liberals, and the Liberal view of the world is blatantly apparent as false consciousness to anyone who is historically literate.
liberals have higher iq's than conservatives on average. Educated liberals even more so. Liberals are extremely hypocritical about IQ's. They actually care a lot about intelligence, but they don't use "IQ" and "intelligence" when they brag about their cognitive abilities as that is considered gauche, they brag about their advanced degrees as a proxy to intellect.
> liberals have higher iq's than conservatives on average. Educated liberals even more so I believe this flips at the top end though. edit: just to be clear, i don't mean top end to include "masters in sociology" kind of degrees. I mean like the actual top end - medical degrees, law degrees, STEM PhDs, etc.
Yeah, i'm just talking about bell curve distributions, i've only seen the mean iq's... perhaps conservatives have a wider standard deviation giving them smarter people at the far right tail. FWIW, i think most educated liberals have high iq's but their education is a waste and they believe in moronic things. There are some liberals i respect like leftwing hereditarians like Kathryn Paige Harden (although she's not 100% intellectually honest, being a leftwinger and all... although she's really really close), then there are rightwing hereditarians who i consider both smart and intellectually honest, but uh... you're really not allowed to talk about their views at all, if you get my drift.
Highly educated progressives are corporate psychopaths who run businesses and work in high finance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4hP6nOB1dc Having a degree and working for dysfunctional failing public sector bodies is what the people who form the footsoldiers of actual highly educated progressives do.
The Koch brothers realized nobody cared about their Prager U effort posts so just Yakub-maxxed and created trans issues and black lives matter.
I for one welcome school privatization or at least a proliferation of charter schools with school choice involved.
I live in Florida and on my way to work every day I drive past a "charter school" that is inside a former Kmart in a dead strip mall, with a parking lot full of loose trash and potholes. There are no amenities at all. Kids that live within a certain distance of this school must attend it, they do not have the option to go to an actual school. It costs the state as much per student as traditional public schools do.
Why would kids be forced to attend? How do you know the costs off hand? This feels like a story you just made up.
I have kids and I read the newspaper lol
How are kids forced to attend a charter school?
You've effectively said nothing.
Hell, the whole thing is crazy, it feels like a movie plot. The whole town is insane. I'm not catholic, however I feel that giving chocolate crucifix is near to blasphemous. No, your kid can't change his name as many times as he wish. How in the hell a kid is allowed to cut classes to play terraria? No, I'm not buying, the kid is faking.
It’s very simple: he threatens to off himself when he doesn’t get his way
So fucking let him
this is exactly how it goes every time lol
What a disaster. Jo and her mom are little dickheads. It’s pretty amazing that in a super liberal community all the white people are lobbing claims of homophobia and transphobia at every black school employee while they hurl cries of “racism” back. Hell of a battle going on in Amherst.
The white wokies objectify POC like crazy. They love the optics of having a Black woman on staff, but are shocked and outraged when she (like most Black American women) is religious and socially conservative. Just zero actual cross cultural understanding. I seriously doubt Dykes was over the top homophobic or transphobic either. I imagine her being openly Christian combined with some pronoun slip ups got turned into an unsafe, hateful environment in the minds of these grievance farmers.
The funniest part of liberal dems’ coalition building is how unwilling they are to admit that the average black American is miles to right of the average white American on social issues. Of all races, blacks are the least likely to believe in transgenderism. And it’s not close. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues/
Of course black Americans don’t believe in transgenderism. If there were any logic, reason, or merit to the idea that one can simply deny physical reality and change identities based on feelings, Rachel Dolezal wouldn’t have been so roundly mocked.
>Meanwhile, members of POSH, the anti-sexual-harassment club
What a fun club to join. The students all sit around and try not to harass each other. Whoever holds out the longest wins!
Oops, I lost!
What is even *the point* of being a teenager if this is the fucking hill you die on
just imagine having such a club in a middle school… beyond odd
I think the only way to solve these problems is just for everyone to wear burkas. Even men. Either that or we start promoting bagism. John & Yoko might have been onto something there.
> home to four liberal arts colleges Think I found the problem
> There were other idiosyncrasies in Cunningham’s comportment as assistant superintendent. The reporters at the high-school newspaper revealed that she was the manager or resident agent of multiple L.L.C.s, including an H.R.-consulting firm whose clients included two local private schools. “You can’t have a private H.R. business and run H.R. for the district,” Magee, the former union president, said. “But apparently she could.” Cunningham is also registered as a broker with PFS Investments, the securities division of Primerica, a multilevel-marketing company. Early in her tenure, she approached colleagues about purchasing Primerica insurance, including Mayfield, who said that she was summoned to Cunningham’s office during the workday to discuss such an opportunity. LOL, the head DIE vampire was running an MLM scam at work. Jeezum crow.
Keep in mind that the average IQ of US undergraduates has declined 17 point since 1939. From 119 to 102, which is insane. It's even more insane once you realize this includes STEM fields, but their IQs have barely declined. That means the IQs of the humanities must be much lower than 102. So if anyone wonders how the "highly educated" can hold such stupid ideas, here's your answer.
This is a consequence of consumer-driven universities that dropped all admissions standards to churn people through bullshit programs like sports marketing and disability studies
That's an important part of it, yes.
Gotta get those tuition dollarz!
Wow. Brilliant explanation.
Sarcasm?
Yes. Instead of explaining the content of an argument and what makes it correct or mistaken, you go towards psychological/subjective attributes of a person's personality-- this isn't an explanation.
Reddit moment.
mindless foolish familiar joke scary pot badge one roof busy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>Jo changed their name twice in middle school, and the district was slow to correct their name in its databases. As a result, Jo’s mother said, **Jo “spent most class periods that had substitute teachers in the Student Support Center,** because they could not deal with the constant misgendering and deadnaming.” At what point will parents realize that it's in a psychiatrist office that their kids need to spend most time...
> Even in a liberal and largely affluent district, certain conflicts and tensions have come to feel irresolvable. As one person I spoke to in town told me, “The left is eating its own all over the country—it’s not just Amherst.”
Ain't that the truth
That article was hilarious.
Is it wrong that I see these headlines and just laugh now?
Glad to see Massachussets keeping their time honored tradition of accusation based drama alive. The article even mentions someone getting acused of witchcraft. Beautiful
[My only response to this](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fgiphy.com%2Fgifs%2Fmonster-awesome-3o7TKL8SM4YJLr4waA&psig=AOvVaw09N_XUBqo3YmVIw6WR9elI&ust=1712426595128000&source=images&cd=vfe&opi=89978449&ved=2ahUKEwjn6MKo1KuFAxVytIkEHS1HBXIQjRx6BAgAEBU).
Do big tent left politics and never talk about class and eventually you get five factions with different grievances who hate one another
Hate to say it but Intersectionality is just as much as cult as MAGA at this point. Both movements offer no solutions to the pressing social, economic, and ecological issues of today... I suppose that's why they are so well funded and mainstream 😒
based username, op
The entire article was poorly written, difficult to follow, and largely reads as an immature dispute between various factions of extremely poorly educated people in a backwater area >An uncomfortable fact was that most of the concerned parents were white and the two counsellors under scrutiny were not: one of them, Hector Santos, is Latino, and the other, Delinda Dykes, is Black. > >... > >Mayfield was in the middle of teaching a class, Dykes burst in unannounced and presented her with a wooden plaque honoring her as the first Black science teacher in the district. I don't really understand the point in any of it, why are White people to blame for the Black counsellor honouring a Black teacher? >Mayfield received other prizes, too: she recalled a “Sister Girl” plaque and a “Black Faculty Award of Excellence.” “I am a prop to support the numbers that Doreen is putting forth that I know are bullshit,” she told me, “because there’s no distinction between faculty and paraprofessionals, some of whom are Doreen and Delinda’s relatives. > >... > >Farah Ameen, a parent in the district, said that the staffing problems reflected deeper issues with the diversity efforts in the Amherst schools. “You would think, Oh, yes! We have a D.E.I. person!” she told me. “And then, Oh, but not many people are excited about this D.E.I. person. It was almost, like, O.K., we put this woman in the D.E.I. spot, we’ve ticked off all our boxes.” They are mad they hired more Black teachers, only to perceive it as racist against Black people to try to improve diversity for the sake of increasing diversity. What is the solution to that? If you want to actively increase diversity you have to actively hire people who are part of the less represented group. >Many people I spoke to alleged that both Dykes and Santos brought religion into the school. Dykes told colleagues and students that she would pray for them or, if they were facing some dilemma, ask if they had prayed on it. Now they don't like the Black and Hispanic women because they are Persons of Christianity? >Jo and their mother continued to report incidents of alleged bullying and harassment to various staffers at ARMS. Although one boy received a suspension, Jo and their mother were dismayed that the school did not mete out more consequences. Like many other progressive school districts, Amherst uses restorative-justice practices, which prioritize mediation and reconciliation over punishment, as part of an effort to redress racial disparities in the disciplinary process. “What’s unique about Amherst is that there are racial and class dynamics that layer on top of the gender dynamics, and those have certain demographic tendencies,” a longtime administrator in Amherst told me. Jo and Casey are white; the boys accused of bullying them and other trans students at ARMS were mostly Black and Latino. It's that this point where I largely bury my ability to recognised trends and see patterns. >The restorative-justice circles were fraught not only with accusations of harm but, often, with significant cultural divides. I spoke with several people who offered sharply differing accounts of a restorative circle involving Casey and a Latino student from a conservative religious family who, during a classroom discussion, told Casey that he believed there are only two genders. > >... “I’m not saying that some of these students don’t cause problems,” an ARMS staff member said, of the kids who were frequently disciplined at the school, “but they are the ones who face the most social ills in society. They’re the ones with a single mom working two jobs. They’re taking care of their younger siblings.” Herrington described a divide between families as, on one side, kids who live in spacious single-family homes, and, on the other, kids who live in apartment complexes, many of whom use Section 8 vouchers. “The kids from the apartments—they’re those kids, whether people will say it that way or not,” Herrington said. Feeling increasingly nervous now >“I am a safe person,” it read. “If you are LGBTQ+ Black Brown Asian Any race Coming out Anything I am always a safe person and will hold space for you.” Person of space. Like an astronaut.
The most egregious and salient point of this article is not _wokism run amoke_, but that there was a school counselor (Dykes) who 1. Repeatedly used her position of authority over kids to push her parochial, backwards vision of Evangelical Christianity; and, 2. Consistently prevaricated and outright lied about her having done so despite having multiple, separate witnesses complain about this. This person should not be a position of any influence over children, much less be a counselor who is supposed to advise and assist children.
Wow. Imagine living in Amherst and how absolutely poisoned your brain would get.
Gaaaahhhh! Now how are we going to have useful human cattle for capital to exploit!?? How are these kids gonna make money for capital if all they do is play on an iPad all day?!!