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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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If those quotes are said every day, they are monstrous, because they are setting up an expectation that students should be active collaborators in shielding teacher behavior from parental oversight. Teachers that undermine parental relationships with their children are abusing both their own authority and their students.

As an isolated incident, that sort of "off-hand gag" is in poor taste. If it becomes time-worn, it is abusive.

If those quotes are said every day, they are monstrous, because they are setting up an expectation that students should be active collaborators in shielding teacher behavior from parental oversight.

It can be humor and text doesn't work very well at capturing this.

No, it does not matter if they are intended as jokes or not, it still builds the same meme. Especially when the schools are also rife with sincere and unironic efforts to undermine parental authority, the "joke" actually plays out as "haha, only serious."

Good god, do you only allow pro-social humor in your world? There's almost always a force threatening to destabilize someone's authority.

Wait, edgy humor is OK again? When are we unbanning all the shitlords?

In what way is this an edgy joke?

Aren't edgy jokes a subset of non-pro-social humor?

Yes, and?

They're said every day by different teachers across the globe, not the same teacher or even the same school repeating it every day.

As an isolated gag, it's funny. Because the teacher I'm sure had 0 actual fear of getting fired for showing his students Michaelengo and was perfectly fine with them showing their parents, and thought that was common knowledge for everyone listening, until he actually was fired.

As an isolated gag, it's funny. Because the teacher I'm sure had 0 actual fear of getting fired for showing his students Michaelengo and was perfectly fine with them showing their parents, and thought that was common knowledge for everyone listening, until he actually was fired.

If the teacher "had 0 actual fear of getting fired" why would the joke ever occur to them? It's the joke of someone who is aware of the hazard, or there is no joke. Now, it may be that a teacher in an urban Portland Oregon school full of good little liberals might make that joke as an outgroup dig, but a teacher at a Florida school where "we don't use pronouns" is surely aware that he is operating in a different environment.

If the teacher "had 0 actual fear of getting fired" why would the joke ever occur to them? It's the joke of someone who is aware of the hazard, or there is no joke.

My chemistry teacher made the same joke a couple decades ago about not telling our parents we were playing with fire when we first got to use Bunsen burners. I guess I can't entirely rule out that she genuinely thought there was a .0000000001% chance of her getting fired for having us use them, but come on.

I'll grant that in his current environment he would have a better idea of things on the ground, but prior to this I really thought the level of antagonism towards teachers was mostly just getting played up by teachers who were pushing borderline pornographic shit in the name of inclusivity (and God knows this place opened my eyes up to some of the things some teachers were putting in their curriculums) and they were bullshitting about the degree to which they were constrained in terms of teaching normal stuff to get other teachers and average people to fall in line on their side.

Was the teacher fired? The top level post here talks about the principal being fired, but I haven't seen any specific news about the teacher.

It's not clear. I think the principal is fired because they were responsible for sending out the notice and because (as with most cancellations) the Board was already unhappy with them and this was just a politically palatable pretext to do something they already wanted to do.