It’s The Teachers, Stupid
Headlines about how behind the kids are after lockdown and not going to school. How in-person school is essential.
I actually know something about this so I’m a-going to hold forth. Brace yourselves.
For me, it started in the late 1990s at the dawn of the widespread web. I’m a major hermit. People are okay but not very necessary, y’know? So I thought online teaching and learning would solve all our problems. I won’t bore you with the whole process. Here are the take home lessons after decades:
- Fully online learning without a specialized online-adapted curriculum is only suitable for advanced students who already have considerable knowledge of their subject.
- Online learning is significantly facilitated if the participants meet and get to know each other in person. Australians have spent decades teaching children by correspondence and now online. (It’s that far-flung outback with hundreds of miles between houses.) At some point(s) in the school term, the kids travel all the way to a boarding-type school for a week or so and have classes together. Without this, there is just not enough engagement.
- Online learning at basic levels takes more, more, much more tailored curriculum and teacher time and specialized training in some of the teaching skills than in-person. It takes more time and costs more money to achieve the same level of learning. Not less.
It never works when some educrat expects the real world can magically go virtual. It especially doesn’t work when the educrats decide it’s a great time to save money on teachers and materials. After all, they’re just sitting at home on their butts doing nothing, amirite? None of the tools, time, or money were applied. What you get then is this:
You can’t really say it’s the children who’ve fallen behind. They learned what they were taught, which wasn’t much. Especially when, also magically, parents without any teacher training were somehow expected to fill in for teachers. Early in the pandemic lockdowns there was some recognition of the gap. It seems to be gone now.
There’s one other giant massive awful fact that goes unmentioned and has nothing to do with online-ularity. A huge number of children lost parents and people dear to them because of covid. Even with the best in-person schools and the kindest teachers, grief and stress set children back. That’s not news. That’s a reason to approach pandemics more rationally and usefully.
My personal hopelessly cynical take on this all-in-person-all-the-time-damn-the-viruses-full-speed-ahead business?
People have already forgotten that teachers are a essential component. They cost money, after all. It makes it harder to cut costs if you recognize what they do.
No, the real motivation is to get the kids out of the house and off the parents’ hands to where somebody can babysit them for a while. The “think of the children learning!” is just a BS cover story. If they were really concerned about learning they’d be lobbying for small class sizes. Also for lighter teaching loads to enable individual attention to the students. Because if you let teachers do their jobs, children learn. It’s right there in the name of the profession.
Sorry to be off topic, but it’s so galling to read comments (elsewhere) to the effect that speaking of women’s human rights is so “cruel and insensitive” after the murders in Colorado Springs. The person who made that comment doesn’t even know WHO was murdered as the press has not yet (as far as I know) revealed that, saying only that it was at an “LGBTQ club”, which force teams a number of very different types of “identities” together. She assumes these were “transphobic” murders with “trans people” as targets. How does she know these murders were not motivated just by garden variety homophobia / lesbophobia against non-trans gay men /lesbians? And maybe one or more trans-identifying people were murdered, but how does she know these murders are “transphobic” rather than garden variety homophobic / lesbophobic murders? The press has not given any indication as of yet. Also, the killer formerly threatened his mother with a homemade bomb, multiple weapons and ammunition, indicating he is a misogynist.
As a lesbian I do not find it the least bit “cruel and insensitive” to talk of women’s rights in the wake of the Colorado Springs murders, but probably more apt than talk of “transphobia”, or at least, just as apt. It made me sick to read that ignorant comment by a straight woman.
Branjor on November 20th, 2022 at 14:47
Well, the trans rights activist types on SD have finally shown their true colors when faced with the disagreement of other women. Beata has picked up her marbles and gone home and JJ has forbidden any further gender critical commentary on her threads. IOW she has silenced women rather than listen to any woman assert that trans “women” are not women. Fine people they are. They will not talk or debate, it’s only “their way or the highway.” The truth is they know they have no legs to stand on and would be demolished in fair and open debate with gender critical women on the subject.
Branjor on November 20th, 2022 at 17:02
Thanks for the support, Branjor. Yeah, that really came out of left field. I mean, obviously I knew how she felt on the issue, but I didn’t realize she’d go the fingers-in-the-ears-shut-up-shut-up-shut-up route.
(For anyone reading who’d like to read the original source: comments in the link.)
It’s the unwillingness to think that always gets me by surprise, no matter how much it happens. Step 1, lay some pretty heavy trips. Step 2, response which boils down to “No! And here’s why.” Step 3, Don’t respond to any of the points raised but say, “How very dare you.”
There’s not even anything to disagree with there.
Very ‘Oh well’ feeling. I’m in awe of Victoria Smith, Jane Clare Jones, Graham Linehan, JKRowling, Julie Bindel, Hadley Freeman, Debbie Hayton, so many who fight on that turf for bloody years.
quixote on November 21st, 2022 at 10:23
I found one of JJ’s responses to the trans commentary on the blog as early as a few months ago to be quite disturbing. In response to comments about women prisoners being incarcerated with male rapists (and I think also about men in women’s sports and children being sterilized) she said she KNEW but didn’t want to hear it because she had trans relatives. That’s really disturbing. She revealed yesterday which sex her sympathies are with (and probably which sex her trans relatives are) when she said she would no longer accommodate feminists who didn’t fight for “trans women” (MEN) as part of their feminism on her threads. So she doesn’t want to hear about women being raped in prisons by TIMs, TIMs taking spots on women’s sports teams, scholarships, opportunities, etc. and children being sterilized because MEN larping as women are more important.
Some details are beginning to come out about the murdered victims now. One was a straight woman, married and with an 11 year old daughter, now dead. She and a friend had gone to Club Q for a good time. Another was a trans identified female (“trans man”), a bartender at the club, and a third was a male victim, a bartender, no information given about his sexual orientation or trans status in the article I read.) This is so sad, there is NO EXCUSE AT ALL for the violence. We should have had effective gun control long ago! The Guardian has said the shootings may be related to the Trans Day of Remembrance. I have no idea if that’s true.
Branjor on November 21st, 2022 at 12:48
When the inevitable comments appear about how validating trans-identified men is the important thing, and how some tiny (and probably imagined!) number of sexual assaults don’t matter, there’s one good question that’s never answered.
So how many rapes is enough? When does what women go through start to count?
quixote on November 21st, 2022 at 15:50
I am finding out they do that quite a lot. They really don’t have anything to counter our points with, so they don’t. The males who are the self appointed “experts” on this, the greatest oppression humanity has ever known/s, teach all their allies that women like us asking questions and making our points are just doing it out of our pure transphobic bigotry and to drain their energy, so they don’t have to bother answering our questions or the points we make, because we are not worth it. If you notice, JJ didn’t even bother to answer your question about in what way she thought you didn’t respect trans rights.
This goes to the core of the matter. As a man who I judge to be speaking honestly said, the transgender “rights” movement is a male exercise in control. They are testing to see how far they can go in controlling society, and women in particular, in every way imaginable, thoughts, behavior, beliefs, priorities, everything. They are looking to be able to say the most patently absurd and untrue things, such as some men are really women, and just have us bow our heads, say “yes master” and live our entire lives as though that were the Word of God.
There are no number of rapes that will finally be enough in the man’s world and what women go through will never start to count. As dakinikat once surmised, they are just slave masters at heart.
Branjor on November 22nd, 2022 at 19:15
My sense is that very few people are strategic enough to lay masterplots and follow them through. I think it’s more a case of trying some stupid dominance play, without even admitting to yourself that’s what you’re doing, and when it works getting that little ruffle of a dopamine hit. So doing it again and more. And before you know it you’re Fred in the Handmaid’s Tale and totally puzzled about why “women are so weird.”
As to the last point, yeah. If any number was enough, one would be.
quixote on November 23rd, 2022 at 16:01
I don’t recall saying anything about a “master plot”, which sounds paranoid; these dynamics tend to develop organically and spread sans “master plot”. Of course, groups of TRAs do meet to strategize sometimes, as does any group aiming to change society.
As to:
Maybe I should’ve said they communicate this to all their allies rather than “teach” it, which sounds more deliberate and purposeful. It is like the feminist habit of not answering the questions of and wasting energy on inveterate misogynists, who will never change no matter what, so it’s not worth it. The TRAs tend to imitate certain feminist tactics and arguments in order to give some credibility as a progressive human rights movement to their own unethical movement.
Anyway, I am hoping I was able to effectively communicate my thoughts on this matter. I found them inordinately difficult to put into words.
Branjor on November 26th, 2022 at 12:09
Excellent article in The Critic about TRA methods of “witch hunting” the TERFs.
https://archive.ph/AmoD9
Branjor on November 26th, 2022 at 12:17
I’m not disagreeing with you, Branjor. More a case of harping on that they’re too dumb to think any of this stuff through. (If they did, they’d be unable to continue the stupidity, so probably a large dollop of motivated reasoning in there too.) And who knows, maybe some of them do plot. I’d actually have more respect if it wasn’t all just accidentally-on-purpose freeriding on the patriarchy.
Victoria Smith’s article in The Critic is brilliant. She’s one of my all-time favorite writers. She’s who I want to be when I grow up! (which may be a while)
quixote on November 26th, 2022 at 16:10
One more thing I want to say here. Since JJ made it clear that trans critical feminists who put their sex first aren’t welcome to post on her crappy threads, I think that to roll out the welcome mat for such feminists as you and NW Luna would have been the decent thing for dakinikat and BB to do (if indeed they do believe that women should be free to express their trans/gender critical feminism and not be censored for it.) The fact that they did not do so does not speak well of them. They have disagreed with JJ before. On the Confluence there was once a controversy about building an Islamic community center not far from Ground Zero. JJ was dead set against it and both dak and BB fought her tooth and nail. If it’s not worth it to fight with a friend over women’s freedom of speech, all I can think is that to them the rights of Muslim men = worth fighting a friend for, but the rights of women = not fighting a friend for.
Branjor on December 24th, 2022 at 13:56
I don’t even remember the back and forth on the Confluence. It obviously melted into the great blob of Women Ignoring Women If Any Man Could Care.
Although, really, I think even that’s attributing too much consciousness to it. I’m pretty sure the actual source is a desperate desire to be part of the high-status Guy’s Table and avoid the pathetic loserdom of girls. The choice gets made using some kind of spinal reflex, completely unencumbered by the thought process.
BB’s & Dak’s reactions, or non-reactions, were fine with me. Not contributing to that kind of thing is all that’s required. I had a related but worse problem elsewhere, because I thought we were all on the same page as far as respecting facts goes. It turned out we weren’t, and as far as I’m concerned using your platform, any platform, to pretend damaging fantasies are real is a truly Bad Thing. What’s the real difference between that and Tucker Carlson then? Except that he does it way more and worse and to a bigger audience? Difference of degree, not of kind.
I’m bound to get in trouble sooner or later now that I’m on mastodon too, since they seem to be all-trans-all-the-time. But I keep hoping that the dawn of understanding that’s begun in Britain will spread.
quixote on December 24th, 2022 at 18:00