This is amazing.
In a linked video, an obviously incompetent teacher bellows “You will not disrespect the president of the United States in this class!” after students asked questions about Obama’s admission that he bullied a girl in high school in response to the teacher bringing up what she called a “fact of the day” — that Romney had been a bully in high school.
The teacher became indignant, and said,
“Obama is our friend!”
“Obama is the president!”
And,
“I cannot allow you to slander any president in here.”
According to another report, part of the exchange included this:
“Do you realize that people were arrested for saying things bad about Bush?” she says of former President Bush. “Do you realize you are not supposed to slander the president?”
The student responds by saying being arrested for talking badly about the president would violate the right to free speech.
Unless she means assassination threats, the teacher’s claims are false and the student is right. No one was ever arrested merely for “saying bad things about Bush.”
According to another analyst, the teacher may have gotten carried away because of strong personal feelings about Obama:
Michael Bitzer, a political science professor at Catawba College and a widely known political analyst, weighed in on the video.
“I think what this broke down to was a perceived personal slight by an instructor against someone she sees in a positive view, and things just went out of control from there,” Bitzer said in an email to the Post.
Bitzer said he thinks the teacher did go a “bit overboard in being rude towards the student.”
“I think the student was also trying to pick a fight, honestly,” he said.
Bitzer said it appears the teacher’s attempt to make a point about showing respect for the office of the president gets overshadowed by her personal feelings for Obama.
The student was trying to pick a fight? How? By saying what he thought? What is the subtext? Student bullies teacher? What the hell is going on in this country when a teacher is not able to handle a dissenting viewpoint from a student involving a matter she brought up in the first place?
More chillingly, I found myself with the creepy feeling that the teacher may well consider any criticism of Obama to be a criticism of her. While it’s a bit unsettling to think that there are people who are that profoundly illogical, they certainly should not be teaching.
Intrigued, I watched (more properly, listened to) the Youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjpWaESn_9g&feature=youtube_gdata_player
If we assume the tape is accurate (and I do not know for sure, although news reports would seem to confirm that it is), what shocks me is not so much her take on whether it is illegal to criticize presidents, but that a person possessed of such an abysmally low intellect is actually teaching students. That’s a lot more shocking than any of her false claims.
How could any child in the United States be deliberately placed in a position of having to be “taught” by someone like that?
It’s appalling.
No wonder we have to bring in people from foreign countries to do the brain work once done by Americans. Seriously. When most of us think of immigrants coming here to do the work Americans can’t do for themselves, we think of shit work like ditch digging, crop harvesting, and other forms of stooped labor that affluent Americans are unwilling to do for themselves. In the case of work that takes mental skill, Americans may be not so much unwilling, but increasingly unable. Little wonder.
A hell of a way to run the last best hope or the shining city on the hill or whatever the hell this place is supposed to be called.
Comments
5 responses to “Civics lesson”
I’ve already made my feelings known to Dr. Judy Grissom, the superintendent of the Rowan-Salisbury School District, and the employer of this hack, er, teacher. You can too ( and I know she’d appreciate hearing from you) at grissomjs@rss.k12.nc.us .
I’d expect this from some university faculty that I’ve crossed paths with, but not a K-12 teacher. At the very least it shows an abysmal lack of self-control, compounded by an apparent ignorance of the difference between threats and critical free speech.
what shocks me is not so much her take on whether it is illegal to criticize presidents, but that a person possessed of such an abysmally low intellect is actually teaching students. That’s a lot more shocking than any of her false claims.
That’s the way it is in the ed business. While there are bright teachers, ed school students tend to have lower SAT scores than students in other divisions.
You do not need a stratospheric IQ to be a good teacher. There are plenty of very good teachers out there who, shall we say, are not exactly brilliant.
A high IQ or a high test score is not all that is needed to be a good teacher. I taught math for 2 years. While my test scores were high, I didn’t make it as a teacher. A teacher needs to be a good persuader- salesman if you will. Persuading does not come easily to me.
The ignorant clown parading as a teacher should be forced to read about death threats against Bush at protests and also portrayals of Bush as Hitler. After reading about them, the clown parading as a teacher should be forced to make a public presentation about what she found.
When my youngest sister was in high school in 2008, Channel One news did a mock Presidential election among high school students, which President Bush won. Her history teacher flipped out, yelling that it was a good thing most high school students couldn’t vote, and that if their parents were stupid enough to vote for Bush, too, they should try to stop them from voting.
At the time, I was shocked that a teacher would act like that. Now, I guess I should just give up on expecting any kind of rationality from pretty much anyone with an education degree.
Robin S.: exit polls in the 2008 election showed that those whose highest education was a Bachelor’s degree were fairly evenly split between Obama and McCain.
There was a BIG split to Obama’s advantage for voters with a Master’s degree. While the immediate conclusion is that the brighter/more educated one was, the higher the tendency was to vote for Obama, there was a fly in the ointment.
About 30% of the Master’s degrees handed out are in Education, whose GRE scores tend to lower than the average grad student. A Master’s degree in education is no indication whatsoever of high intellectual achievement.