Another thing I’m not adding to the educator post, but is relevant:
We need to deal with the homophobia, transphobia, and racism toward students and staff in our schools.
This crap is unacceptable. I talked to HR about a classroom teacher I was a long term sub for. He regularly belittled his students for being LGBTQ kids.
He used a lot of ‘dogwhistle’ racism that the Black, Latino, and Native American kids picked up. Multiple students said they were afraid of him.
I was told that he resigned. People like him should not be teachers.
He was working with vulnerable kids and was doing this crap. Don’t be this guy. Also: I’m not closeted at workplaces if I know I’m going to be treated all right. I stayed in the closet here. I was notified that he would not be rehired.
I’m a queer of color. I’m a school employee. I didn’t realize I’d be a refuge for students. I AM. I’m a magnet for kids looking for a positive adult in their lives.
Do you know how important that is? We need staff that reflect our student population. I went to these schools. I grew up in the district. I get where some of them come from. That’s A BIG DEAL.
Don’t be the teacher, school, or school district that drive away great staff because you tolerate ridiculous crap like racism/homophobia/transphobia. Even if you don’t ‘‘get’‘ your students of color or your queer students or your queer students of color, make an effort. If you don’t understand, it’s OK to say “I don’t understand, but I’ll do my best to support you.”
Same deal with your staff. “Hey, I don’t understand (insert issue here), but I’m happy to learn about it.”
Long story short: Don’t be that guy.
Friendly reminder: Your after school gardening enrichment teacher is a queer woman of color. And I’m AWESOME. 😀
Regarding Don’t Be That Guy in the above thing:
Don’t misgender your trans students. It’s not that hard to use their pronouns.
They/Them? Awesome.
She/Her? Cool beans
He/Him? Neato
Other pronouns? Also neat!
They want to be addressed as Mx. (last name)? Go for it!
They want to use a different name from their given name? Right on!
It takes 0 time to make these quick changes. Also: Your students will trust you!
One of my coworkers is given gendered activities to work with. She says Boys Here, Girls Here, and Everyone Else Here. Some kids join the 3rd team because their friends are on it. It’s not seen as a big deal.
My mom cried as a first year teacher when she realized many of her students were food insecure. She put a snack pantry in her class and has had one ever since.
My sister cried with anger as a first year teacher because of how few of her students grew up without being exposed to violence, poverty, and neglect.
My dad didn’t cry as a first year teacher, but was convinced he was the worst teacher ever for 4 years straight. (He wasn’t)
My aunt was exhausted for the first year because her students were convinced she’d only be at their school for one year and then move to a better paying school district like all of their other new teachers. She spent the entire time teaching, actively gaining trust, and calming anxieties.
Some of these things are not technically school related, but have an impact on students in the classroom. As new teachers, my relatives got varying levels of support. New teachers need better support.
3 quit at my old job because they didn’t feel like they were getting the pay or support that was appropriate for what they were doing in the classroom. All of the teachers I have encountered pay for many of their own supplies. Many take time before or after school to check up on students they feel are at risk.
There are teachers that have students live with them or end up fostering students. My mom fostered 2 students and had another 2 live with us.
What many teachers do on the job isn’t as supported as it could be. They aren’t paid like they should.
Did I mention that a lot of the first year teachers I have worked with qualify for SNAP benefits and/or WIC? 😦
This post has 2k notes.
Re: Why Teachers Provide Snacks (at my work)
ALL of the teachers I work with at my school provide snacks to students.
We’re a Title I school. This means almost all of our students are food insecure. It’s unreasonable to expect food insecure families to provide their own snacks to school.
ALL of the teachers and many of our other staff members provide snacks for their classrooms or offices. Our counselor has snacks in her office. Our health room assistant has snacks in her office. Our principal has snacks in his office. Our vice principal has snacks in her office. The office professionals have small snacks available as well.
Our new teachers usually can’t afford to do this, so veteran teachers and support staff often chip in.
When students DON’T have access to snacks, they get tired. Our students can’t focus. Students get irritable. They’re feeling the effects of hunger and cannot focus on their work. We see escalated behaviors because kids are hungry.
Providing food not only prevents some problems from happening, but it’s The Right Thing To Do.
Many of our students’ Only Guaranteed Meals are at school. School meals are not designed to provide a child’s only source of nutrition. The caloric value of school lunches isn’t enough. So—Kids get snacks with lunch. Kids get multiple ‘breaks’ (which they think are ‘‘regular breaks’‘) for snacks.
Anyone who wants a small snack will get one.
We have a Friday Weekend Bag Program, but many families HATE THOSE. Those snack bags come from the Thurston County Food Bank. They only contain shelf stable food since many of our families don’t have a reliable way to cook things. Most of the families decline the bags because the Instant Noodles, Dry Granola Bars, and Vegetable Soup aren’t what they’d eat anyway.
__
A lot of the kids DO want fruit/vegetables. (Downside is if they can’t store those at home). We have some kids who try to hoard milk. <—a problem since many kids don’t have access to reliable refrigeration at home! Our milk ‘‘collecting’‘ kids ALL don’t have reliable refrigeration since they’re in living situations that don’t have refrigerators or freezers.
We provide snacks for the kids because we need to.
My Personal Project this coming school year is connecting My School with local nonprofit Fairshare Food Share Resource. It’s a group of volunteers who harvest small amounts of fruit and vegetables and give them away. They’re for smaller home gardeners who aren’t up for sending items directly to our food bank system due to time/health issues/etc.
The Thurston County Food Bank is expanding our school garden this year. I’m hoping that the garden will eventually be a nice Community You Pick for our students and the surrounding neighborhood.
The last big ol’ update had links. I’ll add links to this because food insecurity TICKS ME OFF. It shouldn’t be a thing. We’re fightingfood insecurity at my elementary school.
“Schools have always been the front line in the battle against
childhood hunger. It started with the National School Lunch Act, signed
by President Truman in 1946, which gave federal money to states to fund
school lunches.
Today more than 30 million kids benefit. And yet,
by some estimates at least one in six still doesn’t know where the next
meal is coming from.
“School
lunch is no longer this Brady Bunch convenience; it is a soup kitchen,”
said Jennifer Ramo, of the New Mexico anti-poverty group Appleseed.
“It
is a place where kids who haven’t eaten at night or haven’t eaten that
weekend, go to get basic nutrition so they can function. I think
we just have no idea how big the problem is and how many children are
suffering. And the best thing to do is just must make sure they’re fed.”
“What do parents tell their kids on the first day of school – stay
out of trouble, do your homework, and listen to your teachers,” Nelson
said.
“That’s our message today: listen to your teachers. What are they
telling us? Hunger needs to be a national priority.”
One in five children struggle with hunger nationwide and six out of
ten teachers report students regularly coming to school hungry. According to 80 percent of those teachers, the problem is only getting worse.
Educators realize the toll hunger takes on students. Nine in ten
teachers consider breakfast to be “extremely important” to academic
achievement. Fifty-three percent of teachers spend an average $26 of
their own money each month providing snacks for their students.”
“There
is tremendous stigma of children going into a cafeteria before the
bell,” said McAuliffe, “whereas with the alternative breakfast model, it
normalizes it, creates community in the classroom around a meal, and
starts the day off strong.”
Underscoring the crucial impact a
healthy breakfast can have, a 2013 study done by Deloitte for No Kid
Hungry found that kids who have regular access to breakfast score 17.5
percent higher on standardized math tests
.Breakfast and lunch
programs in schools are making great strides in attacking childhood
hunger, but a huge gap remains. According to No Kid Hungry, a quarter of
all low-income parents worry their kids don’t have enough to eat
between school lunch and breakfast the next day; and three out of four
public school teachers say students regularly come to school hungry.
Increasingly, advocates are focusing on programs that ensure kids have
enough to eat when they are not in school, and after school and summer
meal programs are on the rise.”
ngl sometimes i look at my paypal balance and do an autoconversion in my head to chicken nuggets
Shitpost calligrapher continues to be inspirational. Poutine sounds awesome tbh. I’m been shocked America doesn’t have much of it since I heard of it; we’ll really deep fry butter but not put gravy on fries? It’s just weird.
its delicious but canada is so fuckin obsessed with it there are a zillion versions and legitimate discourse on what can be considered true poutine. the consensus seems to be the cheese must be in cheese curd form and there must be gravy.
beyond that go hog fuckin’ wild.
my personal fave is the shawarma pountine across from my university, its like 2900 calories a serving and involves cheese, gravy, a whole fuckin cup of shawarma chicken, in-house made toum (like a garlic sauce) and optional hot sauce.
it is a pinnacle of culinary hubris and i can never finish a serving in one sitting and i love it with all my heart
please mail the remainder to me, a poor new york city child who has never had poutine and has to live in the same city as trump
believe me when i say i would if i could but mailing hot food is generally frowned upon.
yall just need to come visit me and share the shawarma poutine with me so i can finish a portion in one sitting
Considering the discourse involved, would you say that poutine is the pizza if Canada?
P.S. I’ve only ever had poutine once from an olive garden in Niagara.
hhhh i would actually say it is the pizza of Quebec.
There are certain parallels between the arguments of authenticity in regards to old world integrity vs. new adaptation and innovation in both pizza and poutine. There’s just so much potential for evolution in such open concepts as flat dough+sauce+cheese and fries+gravy+cheese, that a traditionalist/innovator dichotomy was pretty bound to happen on both ends.
But it definitely isn’t entirely the same because many of the old to new world shifts for italian food came about due to ingredient availability, rather than on ingredient expansion and fusions for novelty.
Authenticity is a difficult thing to pin down, especially in a food category that is so young. (origin: roughly 1950s) And we already have diehards in both fusion poutines and as traditionalists, which is insane, and I-
someone please fuckin stop me
i could, have, and will write essays on the subject of food evolution and the impacts thereof or vice versa on cultures.
My restaurant served poutine for a while, basically because we already had cheese curds in house for frying. (Eventually we got rid of it because not enough people ordered it to make it worth the time to make the gravy.)
One night, some random woman had a complaint about the poutine and wanted to talk to the chef. Intelligently, the server came and got me instead. My chef at the time did not take criticism well. (There are stories…)
The woman was Canadian, and was upset that our poutine was “too nice”. (It was hand-cut fries, real cheese curds, and brown gravy. Classic poutine, as far as I know.) The gravy, she said, should be rabbit, but also poutine should be “really bad and dirty, just filthy”.
“Ma’am,” I said, “we do not serve food that can be described as ‘filthy.” She got huffy, of course, but I was done and said so.
Personally I don’t care for it because I don’t care much for gravy. On the other hand, give me a big plate of fries with cheddar and bacon, and I’m a happy woman.
Let’s play a game: why am I, an ostensibly well-intentioned leftist, banging on about the “sacrifices” that will have to be made under socialism this time?
I’ve uncritically swallowed the ancap canard that all economic activity is a form of capitalism, and I’m tying myself into knots trying to imagine a society with no economy
I’m fixated on the aesthetic of a society of enlightened
artist-philosophers subsisting in genteel austerity, probably from
watching too much Star Trek, and I’ve built my entire notion of socialism around the assumption that this sort of society is both desirable and inevitable
I like the idea of social safety nets in theory, but I haven’t gotten over
my upper middle class suspicion that somewhere, somebody might be
getting something they don’t deserve
I’ve only managed to overcome my unexamined productivity fetishism by replacing it with an equally unexamined efficiency fetishism, and I’ll blink at you like a confused owl if you bring up quality of life
I’ve bought into the narrative of personal responsibility and I honestly believe my massive carbon footprint stems primarily from my individual consumption choices rather than from institutional inefficiencies
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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