swanjolras:

okay, motherfuckers, let me tell you about schoolteachers

schoolteachers are the most hardcore people you are ever going to meet

they get up at fuck o’clock in the morning to grade the fuck out of your essays and tests and other assignments

then they go to school at the same time you do (except most of the time they get there earlier than you, so they can xerox things and email things and prepare their classrooms so fucking hard for the day those classrooms don’t know what hit them)

then, once the bell rings and all you kids go running out of the door to go play sports and do homework and all the other shit you do, they hang around for like an hour just sitting in their classrooms grading things, in case you need them

and the fun does not even stop there, because once they go home they work until like 7 or 8 grading, writing lesson plans, writing tests, and probably also cooking dinner for their families and dealing with chores shit around the house and dealing with fucking door-to-door missionaries because in addition to having jobs many of them also have real lives

you think that’s a breeze? you think that’s fun? motherfucker, let me tell you about the shit schoolteachers deal with

there’s the fucking parents, half of whom believe their child deserves an a in the class for being pretty (no lie, i once knew a parent who wrote a sonnet to his child’s english teacher begging her to give his child an a)

there’s the fucking administration, who just want to get the school’s test scores up so they’ll look good in rankings

there’s the fucking government, which believes in its heart that cutting spending on education will result in a better world, and not teachers losing their jobs, class sizes expanding dramatically, important programs in the arts and humanities and athletics and even science & math getting cut, you name it

not to mention teachers in school districts with little or no money to begin with, teachers whose students won’t graduate high school, teachers in schools where their students might get shot

y’all have talked some shit about schoolteachers in your life— don’t fucking lie, you know you have— and sure, some of them deserve it. but let me tell you, motherfuckers, for the vast majority, when they drag themselves out of bed every goddamn morning to grade all your shit and be there for you, it sure as hell ain’t because they hate your guts

so you have a responsibility

take the time this week to bake some goddamn cookies, make a mixtape, draw a pretty picture, just write a nice thank you note

because the sheer fucking dedication that it takes to be a schoolteacher is worth a million dollars

iwillincendiotheheartoutofyou:

My response to this.

ianthe:

Hundreds of Chicago Students Walk Out of Standardized Test

Hundreds of Chicago students are taking up the mantle in the fight against the role of standardized tests in public school closures as they walked out of a state exam Wednesday. Their message: “We are over-tested, under-resourced and fed up!”

Over 300 students from over 25 different Chicago public schools boycotted the second day of a state-wide standardized test.

Ahead of a school board meeting, at which the demonstrators were banned from speaking, the students rallied outside the district headquarters carrying placards and forming a human chain.

“We’re just trying to make a statement that tests should not determine our future or the future of our schools,” said student organizer Alexssa Moore, a senior at Lindblom High School.

Brian Sturgis, senior at Paul Robesan High School and boycott organizer with the group Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools (CSOSOS), declared in an op-ed “We are Chicago students and we are here to save our schools!”

He writes:

Mayor Emanuel and his Board of Education want to close 54 grammar schools around the city, all of which are in black and Latino communities: this is racist. These schools are also being judged based on assessments and tests given throughout the year: this is foolish. These school closings will leave neighborhoods dismantled, parents lost, students unaccounted for, and more importantly, will put children in harmful situations: this is dangerous.

Sturgis explains that Mayor Emanuel and the Board of Education

are putting too much pressure on standardized testing and threatening to close schools that don’t have high test scores. When schools are under so much pressure to raise test scores it leads to low-scoring students being neglected, not supported. This is what happened when 68 low-scoring juniors were demoted to sophomore status at a southwest side high school in Chicago last month, right before the state test.

The student boycott follows a protest earlier this month, Occupy the Department of Education, during which teachers and education activists descended on the Capitol to draw attention to the rampant privatization of public schools and the rash of recent school closures.

In February, a nationwide day of action led by the Seattle school teachers’ boycott of a standardized test brought this issue to national attention.

koreaunderground:

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in 2012

What Japanese history lessons leave out

by Mariko Oi

Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia.

[…]

I asked the children of some friends and colleagues how much history they had picked up during their school years.

Twenty-year-old university student Nami Yoshida and her older sister Mai - both undergraduates studying science - say they haven’t heard about comfort women.

“I’ve heard of the Nanjing massacre but I don’t know what it’s about,” they both say.

“At school, we learn more about what happened a long time ago, like the samurai era,” Nami adds.

Seventeen-year-old Yuki Tsukamoto says the “Mukden incident” and Japan’s invasion of the Korean peninsula in the late 16th Century help to explain Japan’s unpopularity in the region.

“I think it is understandable that some people are upset, because no-one wants their own country to be invaded,” he says.

But he too is unaware of the plight of the comfort women.

Former history teacher and scholar Tamaki Matsuoka holds Japan’s education system responsible for a number of the country’s foreign relations difficulties.

“Our system has been creating young people who get annoyed by all the complaints that China and South Korea make about war atrocities because they are not taught what they are complaining about,” she said.

“It is very dangerous because some of them may resort to the internet to get more information and then they start believing the nationalists’ views that Japan did nothing wrong.”

I first saw her work, based on interviews with Japanese soldiers who invaded Nanjing, when I visited the museum in the city a few years ago.

“There were many testimonies by the victims but I thought we needed to hear from the soldiers,” she says.

“It took me many years but I interviewed 250 of them. Many initially refused to talk, but eventually, they admitted to killing, stealing and raping.

read more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21226068

yogurtpockets:

STOCKHOLM — At an ocher-color preschool along a lane in Stockholm’s Old Town, the teachers avoid the pronouns “him” and “her,” instead calling their 115 toddlers simply “friends.” Masculine and feminine references are taboo, often replaced by the pronoun “hen,” an artificial and genderless word that most Swedes avoid but is popular in some gay and feminist circles.

In the little library, with its throw pillows where children sit to be read to, there are few classic fairy tales, like “Cinderella” or “Snow White,” with their heavy male and female stereotypes, but there are many stories that deal with single parents, adopted children or same-sex couples.

Girls are not urged to play with toy kitchens, and wooden or Lego blocks are not considered toys for boys. And when boys hurt themselves, teachers are taught to give them every bit as much comforting as they would girls. Everyone gets to play with dolls; most are anatomically correct, and some are also black.

Sweden is perhaps as renowned for an egalitarian mind-set as it is for meatballs or Ikea furnishings. But this taxpayer-financed preschool, known as the Nicolaigarden for a saint whose chapel was once in the 300-year-old building that houses it, is perhaps one of the more compelling examples of the country’s efforts to blur gender lines and, theoretically, cement opportunities for both women and men.

What the children are taught, said Malin Engleson, an art gallery employee, as she fetched her 15-month-old daughter Hanna from the school, “shows that girls can cry, but boys too.”

“That’s why we chose it,” she said. “It’s so important to start at an early age.”

The model has been so successful that two years ago three of its teachers opened an offshoot, which now has almost 40 children. That school, named Egalia to suggest equality, is in a 1960s housing project in the Sodermalm neighborhood.

What has become a passionate undertaking for its teachers actually began with a nudge from Swedish legislators, who in 1998 passed a bill requiring that schools, including day care centers, assure equal opportunities for girls and boys.

Spurred by the law, the teachers at Nicolaigarden took the unusual step of filming one another, capturing their behavior while playing with, eating with or just being with the center’s infants to 6-year-olds.

“We could see lots of differences, for example, in the handling of boys and girls,” said Lotta Rajalin, who directs the center and three others, which she visits by bicycle. “If a boy was crying because he hurt himself, he was consoled, but for a shorter time, while girls were held and soothed much longer,” she said. “With a boy it was, ‘Go on, it’s not so bad!’ ”

The filming, she said, also showed that staff members tended to talk more with girls than with boys, perhaps explaining girls’ later superior language skills. If boys were boisterous, that was accepted, Ms. Rajalin said; a girl trying to climb a tree on an outing in the country was stopped.

The result, after much discussion, was a seven-point program to alter such behavior. “We avoid using words like boy or girl, not because it’s bad, but because they represent stereotypes,” said Ms. Rajalin, 53. “We just use the name — Peter, Sally — or ‘Come on, friends!’ ” Men were added to the all-female staff. With Egalia, Nicolaigarden sought and obtained certification from an organization for gay and bisexual people that its staff is sensitive to their problems.

Criticism was not long in arriving. “There are a lot of letters, mail, blogs,” Ms. Rajalin said. “But it’s not so much arguments; it’s anger, basically.”

A persistent critic has been Tanja Bergkvist, a mathematician at Uppsala University whose blog consistently attacks Sweden’s “gender madness.” In an article for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, she questioned whether children were not being “brainwashed by our parents already at the age of 3 months.” On outings, she mocked, “what do they do when a girl is picking flowers, while a boy collects rocks?”

Such criticism, said Carl-Johan Norrman, 36, who has worked at Nicolaigarden for 18 months, “starts from misconceptions: we want to turn little boys into little girls. It’s a whispering game that snowballs.”

Despite such gibes, others see the efforts as somehow peculiarly Nordic, and admirable. “I think it’s quite Swedish, it’s good,” said Camilla Flodin, 29, a native of London who has lived in Stockholm for two and a half years. Her boyfriend’s sister gets annoyed, she said, if you give her daughter a gift that is overly feminine.

Peter Rudberg, 36, an anesthesiologist whose 3-year-old son, Hjalmar, attends the kindergarten, called its gender-neutral approach “a boon,” though, like many Swedes, he believes the country has moved beyond the problem. “In modern Sweden, gender equality is a nonissue,” he said. Yet he cautioned against extremes, like “boys prohibited from playing boys’ games.”

At Stockholm’s immense brick town hall, the moderate-conservative coalition government fully supports the gender policy. “The important thing is that children, regardless of their sex, have the same opportunities,” said Lotta Edholm, the deputy mayor responsible for schools. “It’s a question of freedom.”

On the other hand, she said, parents will always play a larger role in children’s development than day care or school. “Preschool is a couple of hours a day,” said Ms. Edholm, who has a 16-year-old son. “Most of the time, children are with their parents, and the values parents impart to their children tend to be the values they adopt.”

As the Christmas season approaches, Swedes are preparing for the Feast of Lucia, on Dec. 13, when children march in processions accompanying St. Lucia, traditionally portrayed by a teenage girl in white robes and crowned with a wreath of lighted candles.

Could a boy now portray Lucia?

In fact, Ms. Edholm said, in recent years in a town outside Stockholm a teenage boy did seek the role, but was refused. Evidently, she said, women in modern Sweden can more readily slip into male roles than vice versa.

“The interesting thing is that it’s not a problem for a girl to be Santa Claus,” she said. “But it is a problem for a boy to be Lucia.”

Ah, the gender-binary. Yet another reason I am one day moving to Scandinavia…

evilgingerbirdy:

what-a-n00b:

poorhornycat:

inkandscales:

amuseoffirebane:

nadroleon:

queennubian:

ignisaquae:

A Tennessee lawmaker has relented and agreed to drop his bill linking academic performance to the family’s welfare benefits after an 8-year-old girl shamed him by following him around the state Capitol. (via)

This just may be my favourite thing ever.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

badass little girl

YOU GO GIRL, YOU GO

WOO

Oh thank god. 

I like how he says “Using children as props is shameful.”

BUT THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HE’S DOING!

But also if you read the article he said he’s not giving up on the bill and will have an opportunity to bring it up next year.

The lawmaker that introduced this bill is a Republican called Stacey Campfield. In the state of Tennessee, he is very unpopular and considered an embarrassment. Campfield’s district is small, oddly shaped, and VERY conservative. His district does not mind his behavior, in fact they think he does a good job. Campfield also introducted the “Don’t say gay” bill that would have banned the discussion of homosexuality in Tennessee schools and would have made teachers obligated to tell a teen’s/child’s parents if they were suspected of being gay. This was defeated because other Tennessee lawmakers thought that it was a bad bill. The Republican Party in Tennessee is also not so happy with him. During the next election they are going to fund a candidate to beat him in the primaries. He is known for coming up with stupid bills like the one linking a family’s welfare to the childs’s ability to preform in school. Stacy Campfield is an idiot and in Tennessee he is a joke.

what-a-n00b:

poorhornycat:

inkandscales:

amuseoffirebane:

nadroleon:

queennubian:

ignisaquae:

A Tennessee lawmaker has relented and agreed to drop his bill linking academic performance to the family’s welfare benefits after an 8-year-old girl shamed him by following him around the state Capitol. (via)

This just may be my favourite thing ever.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

badass little girl

YOU GO GIRL, YOU GO

WOO

Oh thank god. 

I like how he says “Using children as props is shameful.”

BUT THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT HE’S DOING!

But also if you read the article he said he’s not giving up on the bill and will have an opportunity to bring it up next year.

(Source: drunkonstephen)

afghandoll:

anarcho-queer:

Homeless Mother Imprisoned For Sending Kid To Better School District, Charged For Stealing Free Public Education

A mother who pleaded guilty to fraudulently enrolling her six-year-old son in the wrong school district has been sentenced to five years in prison.

Tonya McDowell sent her son to an elementary school in Norwalk, Connecticut, instead of her home city of Bridgeport.

The 34-year-old, who was homeless when she was charged with felony larceny last year, said she wanted the best education possible for the boy.

Authorities told the hearing that she used a babysitter’s address to enroll her son in kindergarten in Norwalk when he should have attended schools in Bridgeport, her last permanent address.

McDowell told police she was living in a van and occasionally slept at a Norwalk shelter or a friend’s Bridgeport apartment when she enrolled her son Norwalk’s Brookside Elementary School.

Police said McDowell stole $15,686 worth of free educational services from Norwalk.

She also pleaded guilty to four counts of sale of narcotics, which will be included in her prison sentence.

McDowell was sentenced to 12 years in jail, suspended after she serves five years, and five years probation.

Ladies and gentlemen, the stupidity of the American justice systems.

thepeoplesrecord:

Jim Crow for kids: Schools prepare children for life behind bars
March 26, 2013

Gone are the days of children dreading a trip to the principal’s office or spending their lunch time in detention. Instead, children are now facing the possibility of being dragged out of their classrooms in handcuffs for conduct violations, such as a schoolyard brawl or being accused of stealing a student’s lunch money.

Increasingly, children of color and children with learning disabilities are being prepped for a life in the American injustice system as police officers have become as common of a figure at schools as the nurse. After the Newtown massacre in December, police presence in schools across the country jumped leaving the authorities to deal with school children just as they deal with criminals, in an arrangement commonly referred to as the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

Recent cases of criminalization include a 12-year-old junior high student who was handcuffed and arrested for doodling on her desk in New York City; a 13-year-old Florida boy arrested and charged with disrupting a school function after passing gas; and a 6-year-old child handcuffed and arrested for throwing a tantrum in Georgia.

More guns, officers aggravate injustice

In his recent gun control proposal, President Obama slipped in a call to staff schools with police officers, further exacerbating the school-to-prison pipeline that unequally marginalizes black and Latino children. According to a study by the Civil Rights Data Collection—one that covered 85 percent of the nation’s students and 72,000 schools—black students are three and a half times more likely to be arrested than their white peers. The study also showed that 70 percent of students arrested were either black or Latino. Running in sync with the National Rifle Association’s call to put armed guards in every school, Obama’s plan will only intensify the school-to-prison pipeline, endangering children of color across the country.

Students with disabilities are also the victims of these harsh policies. Officers already receive very little training on how to handle suspects with mental disabilities, but even less so when it comes to children. Even though 8.6 percent of children in public schools have been found to have some sort of disability, they make up 32 percent of the youth in detention centers.

In a prison system that author Michelle Alexander has called “The New Jim Crow,” mass incarceration has led to one in six Latino men living behind bars, people of color making up 60 percent of the prisoner population and more black people in prison than there were slaves before the Civil War began. These same principles used to lock up people of color for petty “crimes” have found a way into classrooms, preparing these children for the racist injustice system they are statistically likely to encounter later in life by forcing them into the prison system early.

Not only have more security guards and police officers resulted in more bogus misdemeanor arrests, but they drain the already scarce funding for schools. School districts have spent upwards of $51 million on school security, while other much more vital aspects of education go underfunded, especially in poor urban neighborhoods of color.

A child is not a criminal

School-to-prison pipelines have been under fire recently with the expansion of the police state into elementary and middle schools, especially in places notorious for racial discrimination. In October, Meridian, Mississippi was sued for operating a pipeline where students were denied basic constitutional rights once they were arrested and taken to juvenile court. About 86 percent of the students in the Lauderdale Country School District are black, and every single one of the students referred to the court for violations were students of color. Not only were these students arrested, but they were denied legal representation, detained without probable cause, and weren’t advised of their Miranda rights.

Texas isn’t far behind when it comes to criminalizing students for minor infractions, such as disrupting class. According to The Guardian, the state tallied more than 300,000 Class C misdemeanor arrests in 2010 because of zero-tolerance policies and increased police forces on school grounds.

But this extension of the New Jim Crow has been found to have been the worst and the largest in Florida. According to the Orlando Sentinel, 12,000 students were arrested 13,870 times in public schools last year. Black students made up 46 percent of the referrals, even though they make up only 21 percent of the Florida youth.

According to the Center for Behavioral Health Services and Criminal Justice Research, these arrests make for long-lasting psychological damage to the student. Incarcerated youth are more likely to exhibit symptoms of oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and anxiety issues. Detained students are also more likely to lose ground academically from juvenile detention. According to a study done on inner-city Chicago high school students, those arrested in the first two years of high school were six to eight times more likely to drop out than those who hadn’t been arrested.

Instead of focusing on education, school-to-prison pipeline policies are preparing America’s youth for a life in the injustice system. Scare tactics, zero tolerance policies, and police forces are quickly threatening the future of millions of young students. But this criminalization won’t end for them when they graduate high school because, as Alexander states, “mass incarceration in the United States has, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow.”

- Graciela
The Boston Occupier
Larger graphic here