Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again. - WaPo

[erronis]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/02/01/south-carolina-teacher-racism-lesson-revised/

Shared: https://wapo.st/47SXXDS

CHAPIN, S.C. — Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.

Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.

Her students reported her for a lesson on race. Can she trust them again?

“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
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Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.

[stopdiggin]

1. second try ..

good article - following good instruction, and good educators. (and, lord, do we need a full compliment of both!)
Also some unfortunate incidents of MAGA nonsense and ingrained white privilege - but in this case the boobs are not winning - so that's a bit encouraging.

- - As school policy demanded, she had gained permission to teach “Between the World and Me” from Chapin High School’s new principal, a Black man. She had given every student’s parents a chance to review her curriculum. She had offered to opt out any child whose family disliked Coates’s book. And she had assigned a conservative voice pushing back on Coates.

Her revised version of the lesson, Wood believed, complied with both the letter and the spirit of South Carolina’s proviso. So now, despite everything, she was trying again.

[live love laugh]

2. "...she had assigned a conservative voice pushing back..."

Really? They want a fairness doctrine in the classroom?

It’s good to hear all sides but this selective approach is not fair at all.

[Warpy]

3. Yes, for heaven's sake don't let anyone tell our little snowflakes

that the set of Leave it to Beaver wasn't where people with dark skin grew up and how they felt about it.

Our little snowflakes might MELT.


(I'm flow in the dark white and I didn't grow up there, either, which carries its own kind of pain. I can relate to a lot of memoirs written by black people, Indians, Asians, and any people who have been "othered." )

[erronis]

5. Feels like my personal life and observation.

Don't know how to quantify my multiple times being in highly segregated (mainly geography) and very mixed areas. Only a few times (mainly Europe and D.C.) did I feel like there was a natural blending. I miss that blending in my current life.

[Warpy]

6. NM is now only 32% northern and western European

so it's a great place to see blending. The cultures out here aren't always compatible but enough people have felt the sting of bigotry to call it out when they see it.

I like it here.

[The Mouth]

4. Thanks