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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I’m a teacher in Canada. Points below about teachers finding phonics boring are true, although there is constant pressure from administrators and colleagues to be FUN, and phonics doesn’t make class fun.

It is impossible, however, to overstate the staggering stupidity of the average teacher. Intellectual mediocrity combined with everyone else in the room treating you like an authority (and shamelessly kissing your ass) is a really bad combination for self-awareness.

Examples:

-Test question shows a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy. Implication is that he is supporting them. Correct answer is “this image depicts France after the revolution.” I show up and point out that the nobility was destroyed (not esoteric knowledge) and largely the clergy too, and therefore this image cannot depict France after the revolution. Say it is more like some noble’s uncharitable take on the true motivations of the 3rd estate. Unanimous response from the entire department: “we’ve used it for 17 years, we’re not changing it.”

-kid gets shunted out of AP English for arguing that the accepted interpretation of a story is wrong. “It’s not what you’re supposed to think.”

-AP English teacher says a play is racist because it contains a song where a girl mocks the bumpkin townsfolk by listing all the stereotypes they expect her to fulfill, and agreeing to enact them because that’s all their tiny minds can understand. Teacher protests that stereotypes should never even be mentioned unless he (personally)is present to make sure kids think correctly about them.

-I teach French, but can also teach math. Have no degree in either. Fellow teachers universally baffled that, in the 20 years after university, I have learned other things to slightly above high-school level. I say “you can learn new things.” One says “NO, I CAN’T.”

-Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.

-At provincial gr 12 French immersion meeting, teachers unanimously lament that, after 12 years of relentless French instruction, kids can’t read French novels and they must be read to them. Final essays are 80% about hallmark-grade movie Intouchables, a black-guy cool/white guy uptight shlockfest. Teachers are SO happy. It’s the BEST movie, with SO many themes.

I could go on and on (“I showed my students this really good TED talk”), but if you are wondering “how did they not see that the kids weren’t learning,” the answer usually is “they were, on average, not smart enough to do anything other than follow a recipe.”

-AP English teacher says a play is racist because it contains a song where a girl mocks the bumpkin townsfolk by listing all the stereotypes they expect her to fulfill, and agreeing to enact them because that’s all their tiny minds can understand. Teacher protests that stereotypes should never even be mentioned unless he (personally)is present to make sure kids think correctly about them.

I'm curious what this one is, this makes me think of Oklahoma! even though I'm pretty sure that's not what it is.

-I teach French, but can also teach math. Have no degree in either. Fellow teachers universally baffled that, in the 20 years after university, I have learned other things to slightly above high-school level. I say “you can learn new things.” One says “NO, I CAN’T.”

I have heard this exact phrase from a teacher before: "I'm not here to learn." ("Je ne suis pas la pour apprendre.")

The total lack of intellectual curiosity is no joke.

Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.

*Eye Twitch* had almost this exact thing happen at a Parent/Teacher conference for my eldest (9) involving fractions/division.

My wife (a teacher) has colleagues who mark their students' work incorrect for doing this kind of thing. Or worse, their parents will teach them some sensical method of doing math, and the teachers will mark them wrong because they're not doing it in the nonsensical curriculum-prescribed way.

My pre-calculus teacher gave me zero on a bunch of questions because I did the derivatives in my head and just wrote down the correct answers. This wasn't even made clear on the test but she had wanted me to write down every single step in the derivation.

Or worse, their parents will teach them some sensical method of doing math, and the teachers will mark them wrong because they're not doing it in the nonsensical curriculum-prescribed way.

Yup, that's pretty much what had happened in my case. I used to do things with my kid when he was around 6 or 7 where I'd be like "We need 8, 6-foot lengths to build this project, the store sells bar-stock in 12 foot pieces, how many do we need to buy?" and if he could figure it out he'd get an ice cream or something. Skip forward a couple years and he's trying to argue with his 3rd grade teacher about how fractions work.

I did the same thing as a child. It frustrated my teachers to no end that I could do the problems up for discussion in my head before the lesson had begun, and it frustrated me that they never let me.

Little dude had apparently "disrupted class" by insisting that "the irregular fraction" on the board wasn't a fraction at all but a "division problem" which granted, arguing with the teacher was disruptive, but he wasn't wrong.

After the teachers stopped actually looking at my notebooks and started to just "randomly" ask students (read: using some trivially simple to deduce pattern) to do homework problems on the whiteboard I just stopped doing most homework and would simply do the problem either on the fly or while waiting for the previous student to finish.

Test question shows a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy. Implication is that he is supporting them. Correct answer is “this image depicts France after the revolution.” I show up and point out that the nobility was destroyed (not esoteric knowledge) and largely the clergy too, and therefore this image cannot depict France after the revolution.

Was it this image I just found on the wikipedia entry for the French Revolution? If so, that would be (according to the caption on the entry) "the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back."

Actually, I suspect there probably is another version that depicts the Second Estate carrying the other two on its back ("a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy" as you describe) that is supposed to show the apparent situation after the revolution which you were shown, parodying the image I've linked to above

But either way, even after the French Revolution, France still had many rich people, right? Certainly the monarchy was abolished, and maybe the nobles were stripped of their titles or shunned from society or something, but somebody was still owning all those chateaux and vineyards and 18th century jewels, right?

They had rich people, but not in the service of the poor, the poor did not proclaim “vive le roi,” and the clergy did not become vessels of revolutionary justice, as the image suggests.

They show the kids the one you found and explain it, and then test “higher-order thinking” by showing the one I described, but the lesson is “different roles=reversed roles=opposite=after the revolution.” After the revolution, it was not the case that the peasantry and clergy were being supported by the nobles, but even if you didn’t know any of that, the chain of reasoning is still clearly fallacious.

There is indeed an image of the 3rd estate riding the 1st and 2nd that depicts conditions after the Revolution. You can find the original and the later parody here

http://davidmhart.com/liberty/Art/Class/ImagesAtlas.html

Which does somewhat put a hole in the criticism of the stupid colleagues if this is the image. And even if it isn't really, as neither the clergy or nobles were wiped out after the Revolution.

This is also a good example of epistemic learned helplessness. The teacher wasn't going to change his answer even though the answer was "proven wrong" by a complainant. This turned out to be the correct way to act.

Yeah, it's obviously riffing on the troisordres image, if it exists. I don't understand what sort of perspective it could come from. Is the rich guy a commoner, or nobility? If commoner, it's some sort of anachronistic libertarian perspective, I don't think rich commoners can afford to throw peasants under the bus just yet. If noble, they are usually allied with priests.

It seems like a dream of the ideal post-revolutionary period, but it’s so rosy that it looks like a cynic’s satire of revolutionary aims. It certainly doesn’t depict post-revolutionary France, though.

Sorry for being blunt, but I don't think the image exists as described, you must have misremembered. A satire of revolutionary aims would not have a priest sitting on a noble. The peasant would sit on both.

The priest on the peasant was a mistake. The image has a priest leading a noble, and a peasant riding the noble. It’s in the link someone posted above.

Yeah this is part of Reunion des Trois Ordres from 1789. And the interpretation of it being a depiction of post Revolutionary France is basically accurate. With the proviso that it is from just after the ancien regime was in theory abolished in 1789.

It is a depiction of revolutionary France from the time period itself. That doesn't mean it is necessarily itself factually 100% accurate.

"This print is in fact a combination of three etchings produced separately during the summer of 1789 to celebrate the overthrow of the political and social order in France following the Bastille’s fall and the legislative events of the night of 4th August."

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/obl4he/frenchrevolution/1_reunion_de_trois_ordres.html

The central and right images were paired as pendants and sold to commoners celebrating the revolution, so I don't think the idea it was a cynics idea holds up much.

A more accurate answer might have been: This is a depiction of France after the revolution as viewed by someone celebrating the reversal of fortunes between the 1st/2nd and 3rd estates. But depending on the level of the class, I am not sure you need that level of accuracy.

I can’t believe this has elicited such a response. Thanks for finding the original and clearing up the intent of the image. Looks like the idealism was because the revolution had just begun- not a cynic’s take, but the dream of a true believer. “The summer of 1789,” though, is in no way “France after the revolution,” any more than “The autumn of 1939” is “Germany after the Second World War.” “This is how things stood in France after the revolution was all over” is not a correct explanation of the picture, but that was the agreed-upon answer for 17 years.

It is a depiction of post revolutionary France however. Remember a depiction does not have to be true or accurate.

So the answer to the question what does this image depict? Is France after the revolution. It may not be how it ended up. But the intent of the artist was to depict French society post revolution.

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Yeepee, we got the right to hunt in our own forests now! Living high on the hog off the sweat of all those aristocrats! Although I've cooled down considerably on siding with the oppressed in the last two centuries, at the time, I'm sorry, those things weren't nearly enough, and nothing compared to the old regime's oppression.

Well to be fair, they did guillotine quite a lot of nobles as well. But yes there is definitely an argument that even in this idea of celebration and switching roles, they weren't exactly.....revolutionary.

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yeah that makes sense

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