Tag: education

marinashutup:

deermouth:

marsincharge:

Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).

Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.

You can read the most accurate transcript here, alongside the racist edited one.

I have studied this in multiple women’s studies classes taught by white professors and they never once mentioned this. Yikes.

I figured the dialect writing had been played up and overdone in a very period condescending racist way. But, I had no idea before that it was a complete rewrite in totally fabricated “dialect”–considering the lady was not from the South at all and spoke Dutch as her first language.

Whatever political message Gage was trying to put across with that rewrite, it really doesn’t reflect Sojourner Truth’s intentions. I wish I were more surprised that it does so commonly get presented as a faithful transcript of the speech, but that really is appalling.

Thirteen-year-old activist with autism wants to close seclusion rooms at schools

socialjusticeichigo:

Nov. 23, 2018

POWHATAN, Virginia — Alex Campbell was just 7 years old when, he says, his principal dragged him down the hall to the school’s “crisis room.”

Administrators reserved the room, a converted storage closet, for children who acted out. He still remembers the black-painted walls. The small window he was too short to reach. The sound of a desk scraping across the floor, as it was pushed in front of the door to make sure he couldn’t get out.

Alex, who has autism spectrum disorder, says he was taken there more than a half-dozen times in first grade, for behavior such as ripping up paper or refusing to follow instructions in class. The room was supposed to calm him down. Instead, it terrified him.

“When I asked for help or asked if anyone was still there, nobody would answer,” Alex said. “I felt alone. I felt scared.”

According to the latest data collected by the U.S. Department of Education, public school districts reported restraining or secluding over 120,000 students during the 2015-2016 school year, most of them children with disabilities. Families and advocates have documented cases of students being pinned down, strapped to their wheelchairs, handcuffed or restrained in other ways. Both practices, experts say, can traumatize children, and may lead to severe injuries, even death.

Alex is determined to close the seclusion rooms for good. Last week, the 13-year-old told his story to legislators, congressional staff and advocates to mark the introduction of the Keeping All Students Safe Act, a bill that would bar the use of seclusion and significantly curtail the use of restraints in schools that receive federal funds. No federal law currently regulates the use of such practices on students.

“We believe schools should have a safe environment for students to learn and grow,” said Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia’s 3rd Congressional District. Scott sponsored the legislation with fellow Democrat Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia’s 8th District.

“It’s a civil rights issue,” added Scott, who serves as the ranking member of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Children should not be subjected to practices that are counterproductive, endangering their safety or health.”

Alex tried to keep the “crisis room” a secret.

No laws required school administrators to tell his parents what was happening. Alex says the principal warned him that if he said anything, he would spend the rest of the year locked in the room.

But Alex’s parents said they could tell something was wrong. They noticed unexplained bruises on his knees. He became increasingly anxious. His father Sean Campbell, who works as a data specialist in a public school system, thought it was especially strange when Alex visited the school where he worked and asked where the children got “locked up.” He stopped wanting to go to sleep.

“That’s when it hit me,” Campbell, Alex’s father, said. “He doesn’t want to wake up because he doesn’t want to go to school.”

Eventually, Alex broke.

“He started babbling like crazy,” Campbell said. “‘I can’t go back to that room. I can’t go back.’”

The idea of the school not notifying them appalled Alex’s mother, Kelly Campbell, who has taught in public schools for 11 years. “If a child falls on the playground and bumps their head, I’m obligated to call the parents,” she said. “I’ve been told that in every school I’ve worked with. Something like that could happen to Alex, and nobody has to know about it? Like it’s some dark secret?”

While a landmark piece of federal legislation called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, mandates that all students with disabilities are provided with a free public education tailored to meet their needs, regulations governing the use of restraint and seclusion in schools vary from state to state. Many states don’t require school administrators to notify parents when their child is restrained or secluded. According to a recent analysis published by the Autism National Committee, only 28 states provide “meaningful protections against restraint and seclusion” for children, including those with disabilities.

Thirteen-year-old activist with autism wants to close seclusion rooms at schools

Reminded again by this post, as an adult I am impressed in some different ways by the fact that when I had some horrific GI symptoms as a kid? The go-to explanation was always “stress from school”.

(It really was a pretty stressful experience, what with the bullying and all. The main thing causing those problems was unrecognized celiac, however.)

I mean, doctors were taking it as a given that the educational system is regularly stressful enough for kids that they will develop things like frequent otherwise unexplained vomiting and explosive cases of the runs in response. (Plus migraines, and you name it.) Whether it’s “just” from the direct physical effects of stress, or some weird psychosomatic ploy to try to avoid a stressful environment, and/or best attributed to mental health problems brought on/aggravated by school stress.

This evidently seemed totally reasonable, to the point of being the default assumption whenever they encountered a school-aged kid dealing with health problems which they couldn’t immediately figure out. (Then no further investigation required…)

This seems disturbing enough, on its own.

What really gets me, though, as an adult? The answer to this was never once “Gee, if this stressful environment is making children sick, maybe we should figure out how to change the situation to be less stressful!” Or even trying to make some changes to take pressure off the individual kid who is barfing in their office here and now. No, they apparently need to just get over it, if they are not actively milking it to avoid going to school like they should be doing.

Of course, I understand a lot more about institutions now. It’s still seriously messed up, how accepted and enabled some of the harm coming out of bad ones can be.

kellyclowers:

bramblepatch:

dragon-in-a-fez:

dragon-in-a-fez:

adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.

children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.

couple things here:

  • multiple things can actually be bad at the same time
  • I’m 32

couple more things:

  • Little kids really aren’t equipped to work full time without damaging their physical, mental, and emotional development and health, and when you play the “but adults work all day!” card you sound like a nineteenth century textile baron.
  • Highschoolers can easily be “working” 40+ hours a week, between school, homework, and extracurriculars and/or part-time work, and still hear this smug “:/ wait til you get to the real world sweaty” rhetoric all the time.
  • The original claim here wasn’t even “school is too hard,” it was “school is failing to perform its most basic function,” which is different.

As a 36 year old I’ll just say that I found Jr high/high school to be harder than any of my full time jobs I have held

kellyclowers:

aokayinspace:

gotsnolegs:

adhdteacherthings:

peanutworm:

You, an intellectual: 9+7=16

Me, with ADHD: if you take 1 from 9 and give it to 7 thats 8+8 and 8×2 is 16

Someone, usually a Teacher: NOT LIKE THAT YOU HEATHEN

I teach common core and I literally encourage kids to explain their answers in this way. And it’s so validating as a teacher with ADHD because that’s how my brain works anyway and I know it’s how a lot of kids’ brains work too. And honestly, if you’re getting the right answer, who cares how you get it?

This is decomposition of numbers and I actively teach this.

This is why I hated when you had to show your work, because when it came to math in school my brain worked differently than you are typically taught. It also didn’t help that I was on the mathelete team and we were literally taught shortcuts like this that were helpful competitively but meant when it came to “show your work” quizzes I’d lose points because my brain would go from A to C and skip step B but still get the answer. I was the kid good at math who couldn’t help friends struggling because what made sense in my head didn’t make sense out of it.

I mean, I was taught basic math in the 80s in rural Montana. And no one ever had any issue with things like that. The idea that anyone would is baffling to me. I mean maybe in the 1800 or something I don’t know…

Glad your experience was a bit better, from the sound of things.

My experience at the elementary school level in rural Virginia in the ‘80s was that usually if you didn’t show work in the exact same steps as the example problems in the textbook, it was wrong. Sometimes the correct answer would get partial credit; sometimes not even that, depending on the teacher.

I am also one of the people with the combo of (then-unrecognized) dyscalculia, and a fairly easy grasp on concepts. Which meant that I have often needed to figure out my own shortcuts and workarounds to actually get things done in a way that made sense. That…did not go over too well when we were supposed to be learning the basics.

Some of the alternate approaches that I figured out may well have had problems, and not been more generally applicable. Some explanation of why this might be a sensible or not-so-great different approach to the problem would have been handy at times. (And I did start getting more feedback like that later in school.)

The kicker, though? I have to suspect that many/most of the elementary school generalist teachers couldn’t have offered that type of more involved explanations if they had wanted to. A lot of the time, “but, that’s not how it’s done in the book!” may well have been the main way to judge correctness they had available. Largely thanks to their own math education, without as much focus on how and why the numbers are doing what they are.

(Which isn’t really down to time/place, BTW, other than some bigger longterm problems with math education in the US. Seems like an unfortunately common thing.)

backblacklikeliquor:

Accessibility Advice Needed: Affordable text-to-speech phone app.

I think I bookmarked posts with recommendations for text-to-speech phone apps, but I don’t have my home laptop synced with my work one and I’m shitty at tagging things on here.

If anyone has any recommendations for an app that lets you take a pic with your phone and then reads the text, I would REALLY appreciate your advice!

I’ll be asking my coworkers at lunch if their visually impaired students know of any.

My phone is pretty good at reading text from PDFs and web pages, but it would really help if we could use our phones to read text from images.

Feel free to reblog and add tags you think might help!