queerbychoice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queerbychoice) wrote2002-02-01 12:01 am
queerbychoice) wrote2002-02-01 12:01 am
Cat Poop Cookies and the State of Our Educational System
Anyone who hasn't read An Open Letter To Superintendent Grimmel by Robert Alter should definitely read it. This kind of thing is the reason I've lost my former conviction that I wanted to have kids. I'm not sure I could handle being so much responsible for the tragedy of a kid being, inevitably, socialized into the disgusting culture that is our own.
I forwarded it to my friend Megan, who is a fifth grade teacher and therefore stands accused by it. I never had a single elementary teacher ever who, looking back, I approve of at all. But I like to think that Megan is better. Not that I'd really know; I haven't seen her teach.
I bought myself a chair today. An office-style ergonomically correct $40 chair with adjustable height and such. The idea is to use it with my desk that I got free from work last year (they had an extra desk which for some reason they didn't want anymore, so they sent a mass email saying "anybody want a desk?" and I was the first to write back "yes" so I got the desk) and which has been sitting around unused for the past year since I never got around to buying a chair the right height for it. My current typing arrangement involves a tiny short easy-chair and a weird short little wooden computer stand. It's not really that bad but the desk would allow me a lot more desk space to work with. So anyway, I bought a chair. Then I called Megan and told her that I bought a chair, and that I hadn't put it together yet, it was still in pieces in a big cardboard box.
Megan: When you put things together, do you read the instructions?
Me: Yeah, I usually do.
Megan: Oh, I don't. I just look at the parts and explore how they might fit together.
Me: And then after a few minutes fiddling around with the chair-making kit, voila! You've created a desk!
Megan: A desk would be cool. I wouldn't mind a desk.
Me: Well, it would be interesting if you could really make a desk out of a chair-making kit.
Megan: But you could!
Me: No, my chair-making kit has parts that are quite distinctly shaped like a chair seat and a chair back.
Megan: But you could make a kind of desk . . .
Me: A modern art interpretation of a desk!
But I did read the instructions, and followed them, and created a chair instead. Even though Robert Alter would certainly prefer Megan's approach.
And Megan and I decided to go out to dinner tomorrow evening, though where on earth we'll eat is anybody's guess since there's not a single food category that either one of us likes which the other one doesn't abhor. A few years ago we went on a road trip to San Diego together for two weeks, and when attempting to eat together, we more than once resorted to finding to restaurants next door to one another that both had outdoor eating areas so we could get our food separately and still manage to eat together.
Which reminds me, I've gotten a surprising number of responses to my potato candy recipe, though Morgan is the only respondent who's actually eaten potato candy, and all the people who've never eaten it have the arrogance to assume they wouldn't like it. Well, if you like any candy bearing the Reese's label I assure you that you'd like potato candy: it doesn't taste like potatoes in the least, silly. You can't judge a candy by a list of its ingredients on paper.
But anyway, since candy recipes apparently get a big response, I can't resist mentioning that Andre recently linked to a recipe for cat poop cookies which has to be seen to be believed.
I forwarded it to my friend Megan, who is a fifth grade teacher and therefore stands accused by it. I never had a single elementary teacher ever who, looking back, I approve of at all. But I like to think that Megan is better. Not that I'd really know; I haven't seen her teach.
I bought myself a chair today. An office-style ergonomically correct $40 chair with adjustable height and such. The idea is to use it with my desk that I got free from work last year (they had an extra desk which for some reason they didn't want anymore, so they sent a mass email saying "anybody want a desk?" and I was the first to write back "yes" so I got the desk) and which has been sitting around unused for the past year since I never got around to buying a chair the right height for it. My current typing arrangement involves a tiny short easy-chair and a weird short little wooden computer stand. It's not really that bad but the desk would allow me a lot more desk space to work with. So anyway, I bought a chair. Then I called Megan and told her that I bought a chair, and that I hadn't put it together yet, it was still in pieces in a big cardboard box.
Megan: When you put things together, do you read the instructions?
Me: Yeah, I usually do.
Megan: Oh, I don't. I just look at the parts and explore how they might fit together.
Me: And then after a few minutes fiddling around with the chair-making kit, voila! You've created a desk!
Megan: A desk would be cool. I wouldn't mind a desk.
Me: Well, it would be interesting if you could really make a desk out of a chair-making kit.
Megan: But you could!
Me: No, my chair-making kit has parts that are quite distinctly shaped like a chair seat and a chair back.
Megan: But you could make a kind of desk . . .
Me: A modern art interpretation of a desk!
But I did read the instructions, and followed them, and created a chair instead. Even though Robert Alter would certainly prefer Megan's approach.
And Megan and I decided to go out to dinner tomorrow evening, though where on earth we'll eat is anybody's guess since there's not a single food category that either one of us likes which the other one doesn't abhor. A few years ago we went on a road trip to San Diego together for two weeks, and when attempting to eat together, we more than once resorted to finding to restaurants next door to one another that both had outdoor eating areas so we could get our food separately and still manage to eat together.
Which reminds me, I've gotten a surprising number of responses to my potato candy recipe, though Morgan is the only respondent who's actually eaten potato candy, and all the people who've never eaten it have the arrogance to assume they wouldn't like it. Well, if you like any candy bearing the Reese's label I assure you that you'd like potato candy: it doesn't taste like potatoes in the least, silly. You can't judge a candy by a list of its ingredients on paper.
But anyway, since candy recipes apparently get a big response, I can't resist mentioning that Andre recently linked to a recipe for cat poop cookies which has to be seen to be believed.
no subject
At the same time, however, you need to admit that the government has its own propagandistic agenda in teaching children, and that a home-schooled child (though she may well be harmed in other ways, perhaps more severe ways or perhaps not, depending on the integrity of the particular parent who home-schools her) is less likely to be brainwashed into agreeing with the government's agenda - which includes, among other things: patriotism, blind obedience, a tendency not to question certain prevailing gender, race, class, sexual preference, and other prejudices. In American history classes, for example, children invariably learn "their" history starting with Europe, and Columbus "discovering" America (as though there hadn't been millions of people well aware of america's existence and living there in it already!), and the Pilgrims coming over to colonize America and what a great amazing accomplishment that was, and oh by the way sorry we had to commit genocide on the Native Americans *shrug* but that whole manifest destiny thing really turned out cool, didn't it? We're so proud of ourselves! Oh yes, and along the way we enslaved some black people, sorry about that, but to make up for it we'll put a little extra paragraph at the end of each chapter full of white men's achievements, and devote that little extra paragraph to mentioning that by the way black people exist too and we should be careful not to be mean to them and by the way one or two of them might even be considered to have done something sort of historically relevant, I think one of them invented something or other, yeah.
A very very large percentage of the children in American schools are not of European ancestry (slightly over half, in California schools) and it's just evil to teach this kind of propagandistic history to them and say "we're studying the history of Americans here, so naturally we'll study it all from the Pilgrims' point of view and only mention your Native American or African or Asian ancestors in passing and from an outside perspective, always phrased as "we won the war against the Native Americans and killed them all, they were in our way but we should probably be sorry about it now and give them a reservation or two with a casino on it . . ."
"Honestly, I really hate to think what's going to happen when Greta hits sixteen, he's not going to think it's cute when she fights with everyone and calls them 'piss-asses' then."
How do you know he won't? I rather think he will.
(continued)
Re:
Patriotism forms no part of my education, I have never been influenced in any way to love Britain. Blind obedience is a part of childhood I have a lot of problems with, but it's certainly not confined to schools. Parents, teachers, and authority figures of any sort expect you to obey without question until you hit puberty, then it's not so much that they don't expect you to anymore, it's more that you start refusing and they get pissed off you and you have huge wars until you leave home. Ahem. I'm not sure about the tendency not to question...but up until very recently schools in Britain weren't allowed to teach us about homosexuality because there was this horrible fascist piece of legislation called Section 28 (I'm sure you've heard of it). There was a huge national campaign for it to be scrapped, and of course this nasty right-wing campaign decorated with billboard ads insinuating that all Britain's children would become screaming queers if they were taught about alternative lifestyles in schools. Eventually the conservatives won out and the bill stayed, but EU kicked up a fuss because it was a contravention of some European law. I assume they got rid of it after that, nobody's said much about it. History classes over here are not like that at all...We very briefly did Scottish history and we're doing Germany this year...we did a bit about the growth of industrialisation last year which was boring as hell. We learned that whole pilgrim thing about 7 years ago (I don't know what grade that translates to)...there was mention of the plains indians, we did a whole section on them after spending months learning about the pilgrims (nobody used that word actually...) traipsing across deserts and getting cholera, it was really depressing. Anyway, so I'm really not with you on the state trying to force its agenda down our throats. I really don't agree that any kind of brainwashing is taking place.
_Imp