Fuck off. I'm not a teacher and no longer a student. I've no ego invested in the problem.
Narrator: But she did have ego invested in the argument.
No one is saying that teachers aren't part of the solution. What those who have been teachers are saying is that being part of the solution isn't all of the solution. Poverty doesn't have to be a barrier to getting a good education (even though it often is), but everyone needs to pull together: student, parents, teachers, the school, the whole community.
Arethosemy feet pushes the burden more towards the parents than reality warrants. Parents who cannot/will not participate have always been part of the mix.
Once again:If teachers are not there to bridge the gap between what a student gets from home and what they need to learn, then we might as well just use audio books and Youtube.
You're missing (deliberately, obviously - whether it's for the hyperbole or genuine Dunning-Krueger) two essential and immovable factors.
Firstly, the student may be actually thick as mince. If the teacher - more commonly the TA - is able to get them to the point where they can count the correct change from a note, that is a fucking win right there.
Show me where I've said every student can be reached.
Secondly, teachers can do nothing about the home situation of every child they teach. Unless they adopt them. And it has happened. But not 30 kids, each year, every year.
Nothing in what I've said implies that I think teachers can do anything about a student's home situation.
Your demands? Expectations? are so wildly and wilfully ludicrous as to defy reason and reality.
You won't back down from this, because you never do, but Sweet Jesus, just volunteer in a school and see how it works.[/quote]I've taught short courses.* Mostly to adults, but to children as well. I designed my instruction prior to the course, but adjusted it based on feedback from the students. I do not know what homelife my students had, that was not within my purview, I worked with what they understood and tried to adjust my methods accordingly. I've also adjusted based on what engaged them. Teaching is more than textbooks and formulas. It is also encouraging the students to want to learn, and that is one difference between a good instructor and a mediocre or bad one.
*I would not call myself a proper teacher, more an instructor in specialised conditions.
I do not know what homelife my students had, that was not within my purview
And yet you don't have the sense or humility to see how this impacts your students and their ability to learn at different rates, or even at all?
Again (for those, ironically, at the back): teachers are important, but they're not miracle workers. They have kids for a few hours a day, and what happens outside the classroom affects what happens inside it - teachers have very little reach on that.
I do not know what homelife my students had, that was not within my purview
And yet you don't have the sense or humility to see how this impacts your students and their ability to learn at different rates, or even at all?
For the hard of comprehension, I do recognise this. I am saying that the schools system needs to work with what they have in the classroom.
Not within my purview is an accurate description of the circumstances in which I instructed, not in anyway a description of my personal concerns. Thank you for playing, though!
Again (for those, ironically, at the back): teachers are important, but they're not miracle workers. They have kids for a few hours a day, and what happens outside the classroom affects what happens inside it - teachers have very little reach on that.
For fuck's sake, I've never said that teachers can fix all there students ills. Just that the system in general, and teachers in particular, should make the attempt to engage their students and that pushing the problems too far onto the parents is not fair or realistic.
Fuck you very much for participating, I'm out.
*I would not call myself a proper teacher, more an instructor in specialised conditions.
Oh for the love of all that's good and holy: what are you ON?
What in the everloving name of human endeavor are you mincing up NOW? What the FUCK is "a proper teacher?" Could it be that "a proper teacher" might possibly be "one who (maybe permanently) alters the behavor, linguistic habits, attitudes, beliefs, thought patterns, etc. of another human in ways likely to enhance/support the other's integration into the social, familial, and occupational structures in which she finds herself?
Think what this actually boils down to: you are "a proper teacher" if you successfully instill in your own child a desire to learn to dress himself, pour her own breakfast cereal, play with the family dog without injury, etc. EVERY HUMAN IS A FUCKING TEACHER, PRETTY MUCH ALL DAY LONG, EVERY DAY, WITH EVERY OTHER HUMAN S/HE INTERACT WITH.
I write textbooks. I parent children. So I certainly create and aid learning, but I would not call myself a teacher. To do so devalues, in my opinion, the work of those who take so 20-30 minds with all their points of views, inspirations, and troubles, and try to teach them all the same lesson. Sure I teach, you teach, we teach, but teaching a whole classroom of kids is a beautifully insane amazing thing. I don't do that. I am not a teacher.
I mean, absolutely. I volunteered, thinking I was going to get to listen to, and help with, the youngest children read.
Didn't turn out that way, because I was co-opted into Year 6, stuck on the payroll, and told to go on courses, ending up as the design technology lead later on. It was a fascinating experience, I learned loads off them, and hopefully they learned loads off me. But after 8 years I was done. Definitely not cut out to be a full-time classroom teacher, who have my undying respect.
For fuck's sake, I've never said that teachers can fix all there students ills. Just that the system in general, and teachers in particular, should make the attempt to engage their students and that pushing the problems too far onto the parents is not fair or realistic.
Fuck you very much for denigrating teachers. Yes, they DO attempt to engage their students. What the fuck gave you the idea they don't? You been reading Republican magazines again?
Fuck you very much for participating, I'm out.
Yes, you coward out of any discussion where you're losing.
Fuck you very much for denigrating teachers. Yes, they DO attempt to engage their students. What the fuck gave you the idea they don't? You been reading Republican magazines again?
Fuck you very much for participating, I'm out.
Yes, you coward out of any discussion where you're losing.
This.
As a lowly adjunct instructor, I get neither awards nor decent pay nor much recognition, but my colleagues know and recognize such strengths as I posses (there may be one or two). Here is what's involved:
1. Figure out what motivates each individual student to learn, especially when the student comes equipped with boulder-sized shoulder-chips against you, schooling in general, requirements, rules, the hard work of thinking as opposed to regurgitating, etc. etc.
2. Understand that you cannot do this for your "classes" or even "a class" of students. You must do this for and with each individual student, including the ones who hide from you because they so dread and fear the changes they know you'll work on them, and they are scared to death they just can't manage this or that the change will cost them something they desperately need or value. It is your job to show them they can manage all this and persuade them it's worth trying for, even as you stand before them as living proof of the contrary. Who values what you do enough to pay you a decent wage? Who will offer a raise or a sabbatical after 10 years of faithful service? Who will help with your student loans? Who will help with costs for courses to add to your expertise?
Hahaha. Those are trick questions. You are on your own, honey-noodles.
3. Also understand that you may (or may not) be welcome to attend faculty meetings, get tips / advice / guidance from full-timers, and even given a desk to be shared with several other adjunct. Sometimes you get useful advice this way, but more often you get coping skills adopted by teachers whose pitifully low pay forces them to take on more classes than they can handle well.
There are also schools where you will be treated like pond scum. Department chairs will look through you in the hallway; "colleagues" may or may not return greetings or phone calls, and may or may not impart information about leave slips or photo-copy use. I vividly recall asking about desk space at a highly-esteemed religious school and being led to a locked storage room stacked high with dusty, damaged desks and refused a key.
And we are the people who, for the most part, try our honest best to help your anxious, excited first-year student turn into a functioning college student.
Quite a lot of that rings bells for me, Ohher, though for a long time I was 'staff', now 'hourly paid'. If I may add something - I worked out rather late that very little of what I was there for was to impart knowledge - plenty of that in books and these days on the web. Much more, I was trying to give them the confidence that if they just _engaged_ with the safe little subset I was picking out for them, good things would happen. It was all about confidence, most of the time - me trying to engender it in them, and (rarely) re-arrange it in (knock it out of!) someone who had it misplaced. I think that's really hard to do with something as preordained as a powerpoint (or even OHP, remember them?) presentation - how to say to the class 'tell me, what sucks most about this so far, for you?' and then say 'hang on a minute, I'll create 3 slides on that, just talk amongst yourselves'!
Yep, I was adjunct too for some years. A lot a lot a LOT about it sucked. But I did enjoy teaching the students who wanted to be there--the ones who didn't, well, you try your best to reach out to them, but some of them flat out tell you that they're marking time until Daddy buys me a car/ I can go do X / Some sugar daddy somewhere offers me a great job with great pay and no demands (ha), and the fact is, if you tell me straight out you have no intention of cooperating, I'm going to take my precious time and spend it on the ones who want to be there--who are often the very bottom of the class, and need beaucoup hours of individual help and hand-holding, which is NOT paid for, but I do it anyway because that's what I'm there for.
The occasional parent who turned up and bitched to my department head because his son got a C (when he deserved an F, but I couldn't be ruthless enough), and "I'm a major donor to this university!" -- Well.
...For fuck's sake, I've never said that teachers can fix all there students ills. ...
It helps, however, if a "proper teacher" knows the difference between "there" and "their," and that the plural possessive form dictates an apostrophe after the S, thusly: "students' ills." Oh, and that a few shreds of humility and humanity can never hurt.
but some of them flat out tell you that they're marking time until Daddy buys me a car/ I can go do X / Some sugar daddy somewhere offers me a great job with great pay and no demands (ha),
The most eye-opening one of these I ever heard was recently, amongst those Gulf-oil people I spoke of. A woman was chatting and in passing mentioned that she was not intending to practice engineering - but had been sent because if she did well in such a manly discipline, it would indicate that she was capable of bringing forth male offspring who would also be successful and manly, and would mean she could secure a 'better' marriage.
She said this in all good humour and, if anything, was laughing at our quaint misunderstanding that she might intend to build something someday. (I think now of introducing her to some 'manly' women I know, but perhaps that clash of cultures might be a long way up a steep curve ).
The world is stranger, and stranger closer to home, than we sometimes think.
People are just freaking WEIRD. I suppose it makes life interesting. I remember getting absolutely lambasted by the program director for whom I was teaching a night school course in cultural communications--I had committee the Awful Crime of allowing my students to go home early one night, as the first Gulf War had just broken out and several had sons, daughters, or others over there.
Apparently I had robbed them of their paid-for instructional time. Never mind the fact that I had compressed the lecture in order to get it all in. Nowadays, I would say "Screw it", dismiss everybody the second we got word war had started, invite anyone who had problems with that to stay after and be taught individually, and tell the program director to stick it up his ass.
His not understanding appears to be because his POV is out of date. Young men's POV should be very much more up to date.
Do you know, I think I'll abuse you in Hell because it will make me feel a little better.
If you think I am missing something, enlighten me. I get feeling angry, but I'd rather you discuss here and actually get somewhere. Perhaps achieve some understanding.
Like it's possible to get anywhere with lilKnowItAll? No, people don't get anywhere when talking with you because you won't concede an inch and attack people who have the temerity to agree with you.
‘The point about roma is that unless you visibly appear other than white, then White British is how you will be treated’
On 5th June @lilbuddha wrote on ‘white and other privilege’
'If a white traveller is harassed by the authorities, it will be because they are a traveller, not because they are white. A white person can mimic upper class society and they become invisible to authority, a black person can actually be middle class or posh and attract negative attention because of their colour.'
In these two comments, @lilbuddha seems to be suggesting that the solution to the prejudice that all traveller groups experience is in their own hands. All they have to do is abandon their history, culture, way of life, keep their heads down.
I think these two comments play down the prejudice, racism and sheer hate that Roma and other travellers face across Europe.
In England, travellers have been subject to a state led campaign to destroy their culture and way of life. Very many people describe prejudice against travellers as ‘the last acceptable prejudice’.
There is a point to be make about visible/invisible differences. Doing this in a way that might easily be read to diminish the lived experience of the most consistently hated ethnic group in Europe is (to say the least) ill judged.
@lilbuddha for me this isn't really a Hell thing, but it didn't belong on 'white and other' (which has its own very important topic). Perhaps you would like to set the record straight here?
Not wanting to speak on behalf of lilbuddha here, but that is one weird interpretation of her post. She has at no point denied that other prejudices happen or that they are serious. Why would separating out white traveller prejudice as being unrelated to skin-colour prejudice suggest she is justifying that prejudice? In the same way, if an autistic white person is harassed by the police, it will not be because they are white. It won't be a skin colour issue. It will likely be about the autistic person's unconventional communication. Doesn't mean it's the responsibility of the autistic person to stop being autistic, or to mimic non-autistic communication. Nor will it mean it's less of a concern than police harassing black people. It just means that skin colour isn't part of the issue here.
Being white doesn't mean you don't have other disadvantages, including very serious ones. But it does mean that your skin colour isn't one of them. That is the point that lilbuddha, I and others have been consistently making.
For context, here is lilbuddha's full post:
If a poor white person is treated badly, it will be because they are poor, not because they are white. If a white traveller is harassed by the authorities, it will be because they are a traveller, not because they are white.
A white person can mimic upper class society and they become invisible to authority, a black person can actually be middle class or posh and attract negative attention because of their colour.
In the UK, being white is never a disadvantage.
Are you beginning to see the picture?
If I am misunderstanding, lilbuddha can correct me.
‘The point about roma is that unless you visibly appear other than white, then White British is how you will be treated’
On 5th June @lilbuddha wrote on ‘white and other privilege’
'If a white traveller is harassed by the authorities, it will be because they are a traveller, not because they are white. A white person can mimic upper class society and they become invisible to authority, a black person can actually be middle class or posh and attract negative attention because of their colour.'
In these two comments, @lilbuddha seems to be suggesting that the solution to the prejudice that all traveller groups experience is in their own hands. All they have to do is abandon their history, culture, way of life, keep their heads down.
Not in the fucking slightest. The problem is on the people displaying prejudice. In the first example, I'm saying that EM is not directly affected by the prejudice aimed at the Roma if no one knows he is Roma. If his skin is white enough and his personal cultural behaviour English enough, he will not experience what it is like to be Roma. You cannot inherit experience. Adding, one can get some semblance from familial experience, but it is not the same as being.
In the second, I am not blaming travellers for the treatment they receive, just saying that being white is not the reason they are treated poorly.
I'm really not sure how you got your interpretation. Truly. Your interpretation is very inconsistent with the content of my posting history.
To clarify: I am saying that people who belong to a mistreated group but are, or appear to be, white can hide amongst the oppressive group. I am not saying that they should, I am not putting any onus on them at all to do so. The onus is on the oppressive groups to change their own behaviour.
As far as setting the record straight here, I don't come to this thread much. I only did so this time because I saw your name. I don't receive notifications when people @ me, BTW.
If truly you want to clarify something, PM me. I may not see it if you do it here.
If you wish to play here amongst the whingy buggers, by all means do so. But if you wish to better understand my POV, there are better places
‘The point about roma is that unless you visibly appear other than white, then White British is how you will be treated’
On 5th June @lilbuddha wrote on ‘white and other privilege’
'If a white traveller is harassed by the authorities, it will be because they are a traveller, not because they are white. A white person can mimic upper class society and they become invisible to authority, a black person can actually be middle class or posh and attract negative attention because of their colour.'
In these two comments, @lilbuddha seems to be suggesting that the solution to the prejudice that all traveller groups experience is in their own hands. All they have to do is abandon their history, culture, way of life, keep their heads down.
Not in the fucking slightest. The problem is on the people displaying prejudice. In the first example, I'm saying that EM is not directly affected by the prejudice aimed at the Roma if no one knows he is Roma. If his skin is white enough and his personal cultural behaviour English enough, he will not experience what it is like to be Roma. You cannot inherit experience. Adding, one can get some semblance from familial experience, but it is not the same as being.
In the second, I am not blaming travellers for the treatment they receive, just saying that being white is not the reason they are treated poorly.
I'm really not sure how you got your interpretation. Truly. Your interpretation is very inconsistent with the content of my posting history.
To clarify: I am saying that people who belong to a mistreated group but are, or appear to be, white can hide amongst the oppressive group. I am not saying that they should, I am not putting any onus on them at all to do so. The onus is on the oppressive groups to change their own behaviour.
As far as setting the record straight here, I don't come to this thread much. I only did so this time because I saw your name. I don't receive notifications when people @ me, BTW.
If truly you want to clarify something, PM me. I may not see it if you do it here.
If you wish to play here amongst the whingy buggers, by all means do so. But if you wish to better understand my POV, there are better places
Even black people can get exempted from racial prejudice at an individual level ("one of the good ones"). GRT folk are going to feel the effect of prejudiced attitudes and abuse every time some moron blames a theft on "those pikie bastards". Anti-GRT attitudes are alive and well and someone who can "pass" is likely to encounter them a lot mixing in white spaces. You think it's going to hurt less because the perpetrators don't realise the victim's in the room? Ask LGBT folk about that one.
Gypsy-Roma-Traveller. It's the somewhat unwieldy term used collectively in the UK for the various communities who have traditionally practised itinerant lifestyles, though many now live in settled communities of one kind or another.
‘The point about roma is that unless you visibly appear other than white, then White British is how you will be treated’
On 5th June @lilbuddha wrote on ‘white and other privilege’
'If a white traveller is harassed by the authorities, it will be because they are a traveller, not because they are white. A white person can mimic upper class society and they become invisible to authority, a black person can actually be middle class or posh and attract negative attention because of their colour.'
In these two comments, @lilbuddha seems to be suggesting that the solution to the prejudice that all traveller groups experience is in their own hands. All they have to do is abandon their history, culture, way of life, keep their heads down.
Not in the fucking slightest. The problem is on the people displaying prejudice. In the first example, I'm saying that EM is not directly affected by the prejudice aimed at the Roma if no one knows he is Roma. If his skin is white enough and his personal cultural behaviour English enough, he will not experience what it is like to be Roma. You cannot inherit experience. Adding, one can get some semblance from familial experience, but it is not the same as being.
In the second, I am not blaming travellers for the treatment they receive, just saying that being white is not the reason they are treated poorly.
I'm really not sure how you got your interpretation. Truly. Your interpretation is very inconsistent with the content of my posting history.
To clarify: I am saying that people who belong to a mistreated group but are, or appear to be, white can hide amongst the oppressive group. I am not saying that they should, I am not putting any onus on them at all to do so. The onus is on the oppressive groups to change their own behaviour.
As far as setting the record straight here, I don't come to this thread much. I only did so this time because I saw your name. I don't receive notifications when people @ me, BTW.
If truly you want to clarify something, PM me. I may not see it if you do it here.
If you wish to play here amongst the whingy buggers, by all means do so. But if you wish to better understand my POV, there are better places
Even black people can get exempted from racial prejudice at an individual level ("one of the good ones"). GRT folk are going to feel the effect of prejudiced attitudes and abuse every time some moron blames a theft on "those pikie bastards". Anti-GRT attitudes are alive and well and someone who can "pass" is likely to encounter them a lot mixing in white spaces. You think it's going to hurt less because the perpetrators don't realise the victim's in the room? Ask LGBT folk about that one.
Yeah I pass so well that an ex Policeman thought it quite ok to tell me what amounted to institutional hatred in the Police to GRT.
He was more than a little surprised when I told him that was part of my ancestry. (Ok you wouldn't know that was anything different unless you were aware that I am way down the black hairy end of the scale beneath my clothing). My granddaughter who has inherited darker skin does get mistaken not for GRT but Southern European.
Yeah I pass so well that an ex Policeman thought it quite ok to tell me what amounted to institutional hatred in the Police to GRT.
Your lived experience filters how that reasonably affects you. I dislike it when people say anti-GRT things, but I am not GRT, I have not lived their experiences. So the offence I feel isn't the same. I've a tiny bit of remote east Asian ancestry. I don't like anti-East Asian bigotry, but I don't get to claim being East Asian, nor do I get to claim knowing what they feel about how they are discriminated against.
Those experiences are NOT heritable.
Not getting that is part of the problem in understanding real racism.
Your ancestors felt real racism, you haven't.* Unless some living relative related their personal experiences, you've no more clue than I of what it is like to be Roma. Less, you being white.
Nothing EM has written expresses any real understanding of what it is like to BE Roma.
Again, if ancestry matters, then I am a monarch.
As far as oral information, If EM has a parent or grandparent who is/was actively in the culture, then he'd have a stronger connection. Go too much further back and it isn't the same thing. I've all sort of family stories, some going back near a thousand years. At what point are they mere stories?
My mum shares with me her culture, I've been to the country and village of her birth. I have her stories and some first-hand information. That is a strong connection. I have the skin colour to experience some of what she has. My father has heard the same stories and been there as well, so he has a strong connection. But he does not have the colour to match the lived experience, so his connection is different.
But neither of us actually knows what it was like to grow up where she did, be an immigrant and face the same prejudice she did. I've related experience, but it is not the same.
Slavery shaped part of my heritage. I do not know what it is like to be a slave, but it shaped my family's past and present, so there is a connection. I watched a programme where a pale, white red-haired woman found out about her African ancestry. She has no connection beyond an interesting footnote in the family tree.
Connection is a variable thing and experience is a huge factor.
On a Purg thread, EM claimed not to identify as English, which is mad. It is like the queen deciding she doesn't identify as rich. This doesn't strike me as the statement of someone who understands identity, especially not in terms of how prejudice shapes it. And that the key here. He expresses nothing in identity threads to generate any semblance of understanding of identity. Quite the opposite. I'm not Mexican, but when I've discussed stories of navigating through white culture, most American Mexicans I've spoken to share a level of connection with my experiences. This despite country and culture differences.
EM does not evince any understanding of what it is like to be other in one's own country.
I don't think it's for you to determine what constitutes a real understanding of GRT experiences, any more than it's for me to tell you about the black experience.
I don't think it's for you to determine what constitutes a real understanding of GRT experiences, any more than it's for me to tell you about the black experience.
But you just did. You evaluated your experience and decided you cannot. But you do have African ancestry, all humans do. At some point in your familial history, it ceases to matter as far as experience.
Speaking of which, DNA testing is throwing all sorts of family histories out of the window. People whose family history contain stories of ancestors that they don't actually have. And ancestry they didn't know they had.
One man I spoke to had actual stories of how particular individuals of his American Indian ancestors were treated and how poorly they lived on the reservation. That identity was important to him as is the way Indians are currently treated. He did a DNA test and not one drop of native DNA. All European. Interestingly his stories match experiences I've heard from real Indians on real reservations and he genuinely felt a connection, even though it was generated by lies. Even had they been real, he is a white man in a white world.
Whilst different groups face different sort of discriminations, there is a commonality in being outsiders.
There exists discrimination between groups that are separately discriminated against. One way I have sought to break that down is to find commonality in experience.
I do not hear that from EM. At all. Everything he has said points to knowing about Roma ancestry, but no direct connection to the experience.
From his own words, he is a white Englishman who is seen by others as a white Englishman. I do not know what he has learned from his family, all I am saying is that nothing he has expressed exhibits any understanding of what it is like to be discriminated against based on how he appears.
I’m not “gatekeeping”
I’m saying I don’t hear EM’s experience.
I’ve been to reservations. I’ve had in-depth conversations with many Native Indians about their experiences and history, but I’m pretty sure you’d shit bricks if I claimed know what they went through or to identify with the Indian experience.
@lilbuddha - you are being incredibly judgemental of matters of which you can have only the vaguest of notions. The traveller communities in the UK are disparate and range from travelling showmen, new age travellers, Romanies, Scottish and Irish travellers, plus the bargee travellers which were new to me as a grouping*, all have a different ethos, varying heritages and communities, different ways of doing things.
I don't know Exclamation Mark, but many of the things he says ring true about settled traveller families I've worked with - and yes, I've worked with a few, along with peripatetic new age travellers. I was invited to county education training in working with traveller groups, because I, at the time, ran a pre-school that accepted travellers and was regarded as priority training with the schools. I still have the notes, including the Runnymede Trust booklets on traveller discrimination. Since then I have met and worked with a number of other travellers in alternative education and mainstream settings.
Can you please stop telling us all incorrect information about stuff we might actually know something about? Like now.
* but shouldn't have been, as the minute I read of that grouping I realised I knew people who qualified.
EM claims to be ROMA. No other group matters in this discussion because he is not claiming those.
Nothing in the interactions between he and I indicate any experience. If there are other threads where he mentions his experiences, please show me. As I recall, when we were talking about identity, he began with not identifying as English, but as identifying by whatever village or town he lives in. Something like that. Nothing about Roma until later and then nothing beyond ancestry.
And for fuck's sake, I am not saying he doesn't have particular experiences, I'm saying I've seen no evidence that he has directly experienced prejudice from being perceived as Roma. And nothing secondary either.
I am very reticent about sharing personal details, but people have sussed them out because I speak from lived and real experience. I see nothing in EM that shows any such real experience.
White people in non-disadvantaged groups claiming distant ancestry as understanding is bullshit. That is not judgemental, it is plain and simple accurate representation.
What teenage boys are like who aren't hanging out with lesbians, so likely to be more relaxed about gender fluidity than the majority.
You want to discuss that, we can. But don't mix it with the discussion about EM because in the way you did implied I was making incorrect statements about him.
BTW, I recall saying nothing to contradict your experiences with teen boys, I was relating mine. Of course who they are speaking to will change how they express themselves, I believe that was part of my point.
Oh FFS - you asked me for another example. I gave you one. And nowhere, but nowhere, in that discussion did you acknowledge that your opinions and experiences are partial, just asserted the way you always do, with absolute certainty, that this was how things were. Not how things are in your tiny patch of the universe. And by implication your comments then applied globally and everyone else saying anything different was wrong, wrong, wrong, because the only person who is right is lilbuddha.
Just like with Exclamation Mark - you're asserting that he cannot possibly have any Roma or traveller heritage, with, I suspect, precisely zero experience of settled Roma or travellers in the UK.
Oh FFS - you asked me for another example. I gave you one. And nowhere, but nowhere, in that discussion did you acknowledge that your opinions and experiences are partial, just asserted the way you always do, with absolute certainty, that this was how things were. Not how things are in your tiny patch of the universe. And by implication your comments then applied globally and everyone else saying anything different was wrong, wrong, wrong, because the only person who is right is lilbuddha.
That is complete bullshit. I gave my experience and outlined the parameters.
And I said this about my experiences on that thread
How representative they are, I cannot completely know.
How the fuck does that jibe with absolute certainty?
Just like with Exclamation Mark - you're asserting that he cannot possibly have any Roma or traveller heritage, with, I suspect, precisely zero experience of settled Roma or travellers in the UK.
Bullshit. All of it.
Exclamation Mark said he has Roma heritage and I have not said one word contesting that. NOT. ONE. FUCKING. WORD. Do I need to repeat that? NOT. ONE. FUCKING. WORD.
Please process this before continuing. It does no one good if we misrepresent each other.
I've said that he doesn't appear to understand identity and that suggests he doesn't have first hand experience with being in an oppressed group. That is my opinion based on his interactions. I've said as much.
I've said that people who can pass for white British* do not have the same experiences as those who cannot. Not sure how this is remotely controversial.
*Some travellers are white and British, but othering them as if they are not is part of the problem.
Police identify George Floyd as black while looking for who had a counterfeit 20 dollar bill = George Floyd dead.
George Floyd looks white and middle class and has the accent and clothes to go with it but secretly has some black ancestry the cops don't know about, cops are chummy with George Floyd in consequence = George Floyd alive, who might experience hearing some shocking racism, but who goes home to his kids and lives and none of the last few weeks has happened.
In both cases racism is bad, but one of these things is very much not like the other.
Louise, the problem is that we're talking Roma here, where GRT (Gypsy Roma Traveller) discrimination is referred to in 2017 survey as being The last acceptable form of racism? (pdf link to report). This paper finds 91% of GRT have experienced discrimination due to their ethnicity, 30% have received discrimination when accessing health care, 55% have been refused services, 70% faced discrimination at school and 49% in employment. There is on record a lack of police action in the face of hate crimes and harassment, for example, in some cases the police are the harassers:
On perceived harassment, some respondents provided examples of being routinely stopped and searched by the police without good reason.
“Having the local police stop and question me every time I went out shopping, as I was a ‘known criminal’ despite never having a criminal record” (English adjusted)
“The police refuse to turn up when vigilantes are trying to burn you out”
This Guardian article from 2018 (link) says that police assume GRT members are the criminals not victims, and that the Traveller liaison officers are often employed to work against GRT groups, not with them. I hadn't realised until I checked this, but when PC Andrew Harper died, the police targeted the local traveller community and the man charged was eventually released by the CPS as not passing the threshold test.
Gypsies and Travellers have been living in the UK for hundreds of years and in some rural areas of the country represent the main established ethnic minority group,
yet they remain amongst the most disadvantaged racial groups in our society, with low levels of life expectancy, high vulnerability to serious illness, poor mental health,
high child mortality rates and low levels of educational attainment and literacy.
I'm aware there's a difference between passing as white and being black, my white daughter having the misfortune of passing as BAME, but really, the Gypsy Roma Traveller community are as discriminated against if not more so than BAME.
From the Parliamentary briefing paper:
In 2004 Trevor Phillips, then Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), compared the prejudice experienced by Gypsies and Travellers living in the UK to that of black people living in the American deep south in the 1950s, ...
On April 5, 2019 the Women and Equalities Committee published its report entitled Tackling inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. In essence,
the report concluded that Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities have been ‘comprehensively failed’ by policy makers. The report found that Gypsies, Roma and Travellers have the worst outcomes of any ethnic group across a huge range of areas, including education, health, employment, criminal justice and hate crime and made
49 recommendations for change.
Since then the lovely Priti Patel has suggested making new traveller sites illegal - when there's a huge problem with the availability of sites anyway. There have been several cases where GRT families have bought land for camps and refused planning permission to live there. Local authorities are not meeting their legal requirement for land provision now and haven't been for decades.
There have been a couple of funerals recently in London and Essex, where the pubs have been closed in all the area because travellers are coming to the funeral, and that racial profiling has been encouraged by the Met. This story is from February this year (link to Guardian).
If lilbuddha wasn't choosing to negate the discrimination experienced by the GRT community as being negligible she wouldn't be getting this push back.
I'm aware there's a difference between passing as white and being black,
Yes, where the police are concerned it can be the difference between life and death - going home to your family or the grave.
In a situation where the police don't know someone's hidden connection to a group they target, that person lives where another might die. They may hear hideous disgusting racist things- that's not nothing. That is bad. But they live. The hideous and real history of discrimination (such as you outline) which might otherwise claim them as another statistic for the cemetery is off the table because the police haven't matched them to that group but to a very privileged one.
People who belong visibly and unconcealably to a targeted minority-Black or Roma or whatever - cannot have that taken off the table and be treated as a person with white male British privilege. Those who can pass, live, but the person with visible, unconcealable ties in the same situation may well die.
Comments
That's fab. Good on you both!
You won't back down from this, because you never do, but Sweet Jesus, just volunteer in a school and see how it works.[/quote]I've taught short courses.* Mostly to adults, but to children as well. I designed my instruction prior to the course, but adjusted it based on feedback from the students. I do not know what homelife my students had, that was not within my purview, I worked with what they understood and tried to adjust my methods accordingly. I've also adjusted based on what engaged them. Teaching is more than textbooks and formulas. It is also encouraging the students to want to learn, and that is one difference between a good instructor and a mediocre or bad one.
*I would not call myself a proper teacher, more an instructor in specialised conditions.
And yet you don't have the sense or humility to see how this impacts your students and their ability to learn at different rates, or even at all?
Again (for those, ironically, at the back): teachers are important, but they're not miracle workers. They have kids for a few hours a day, and what happens outside the classroom affects what happens inside it - teachers have very little reach on that.
Not within my purview is an accurate description of the circumstances in which I instructed, not in anyway a description of my personal concerns. Thank you for playing, though! For fuck's sake, I've never said that teachers can fix all there students ills. Just that the system in general, and teachers in particular, should make the attempt to engage their students and that pushing the problems too far onto the parents is not fair or realistic.
Fuck you very much for participating, I'm out.
Oh for the love of all that's good and holy: what are you ON?
What in the everloving name of human endeavor are you mincing up NOW? What the FUCK is "a proper teacher?" Could it be that "a proper teacher" might possibly be "one who (maybe permanently) alters the behavor, linguistic habits, attitudes, beliefs, thought patterns, etc. of another human in ways likely to enhance/support the other's integration into the social, familial, and occupational structures in which she finds herself?
Think what this actually boils down to: you are "a proper teacher" if you successfully instill in your own child a desire to learn to dress himself, pour her own breakfast cereal, play with the family dog without injury, etc. EVERY HUMAN IS A FUCKING TEACHER, PRETTY MUCH ALL DAY LONG, EVERY DAY, WITH EVERY OTHER HUMAN S/HE INTERACT WITH.
Didn't turn out that way, because I was co-opted into Year 6, stuck on the payroll, and told to go on courses, ending up as the design technology lead later on. It was a fascinating experience, I learned loads off them, and hopefully they learned loads off me. But after 8 years I was done. Definitely not cut out to be a full-time classroom teacher, who have my undying respect.
Fuck you very much for denigrating teachers. Yes, they DO attempt to engage their students. What the fuck gave you the idea they don't? You been reading Republican magazines again?
Yes, you coward out of any discussion where you're losing.
This.
As a lowly adjunct instructor, I get neither awards nor decent pay nor much recognition, but my colleagues know and recognize such strengths as I posses (there may be one or two). Here is what's involved:
1. Figure out what motivates each individual student to learn, especially when the student comes equipped with boulder-sized shoulder-chips against you, schooling in general, requirements, rules, the hard work of thinking as opposed to regurgitating, etc. etc.
2. Understand that you cannot do this for your "classes" or even "a class" of students. You must do this for and with each individual student, including the ones who hide from you because they so dread and fear the changes they know you'll work on them, and they are scared to death they just can't manage this or that the change will cost them something they desperately need or value. It is your job to show them they can manage all this and persuade them it's worth trying for, even as you stand before them as living proof of the contrary. Who values what you do enough to pay you a decent wage? Who will offer a raise or a sabbatical after 10 years of faithful service? Who will help with your student loans? Who will help with costs for courses to add to your expertise?
Hahaha. Those are trick questions. You are on your own, honey-noodles.
3. Also understand that you may (or may not) be welcome to attend faculty meetings, get tips / advice / guidance from full-timers, and even given a desk to be shared with several other adjunct. Sometimes you get useful advice this way, but more often you get coping skills adopted by teachers whose pitifully low pay forces them to take on more classes than they can handle well.
There are also schools where you will be treated like pond scum. Department chairs will look through you in the hallway; "colleagues" may or may not return greetings or phone calls, and may or may not impart information about leave slips or photo-copy use. I vividly recall asking about desk space at a highly-esteemed religious school and being led to a locked storage room stacked high with dusty, damaged desks and refused a key.
And we are the people who, for the most part, try our honest best to help your anxious, excited first-year student turn into a functioning college student.
The occasional parent who turned up and bitched to my department head because his son got a C (when he deserved an F, but I couldn't be ruthless enough), and "I'm a major donor to this university!" -- Well.
Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
The most eye-opening one of these I ever heard was recently, amongst those Gulf-oil people I spoke of. A woman was chatting and in passing mentioned that she was not intending to practice engineering - but had been sent because if she did well in such a manly discipline, it would indicate that she was capable of bringing forth male offspring who would also be successful and manly, and would mean she could secure a 'better' marriage.
She said this in all good humour and, if anything, was laughing at our quaint misunderstanding that she might intend to build something someday. (I think now of introducing her to some 'manly' women I know, but perhaps that clash of cultures might be a long way up a steep curve
The world is stranger, and stranger closer to home, than we sometimes think.
Apparently I had robbed them of their paid-for instructional time. Never mind the fact that I had compressed the lecture in order to get it all in. Nowadays, I would say "Screw it", dismiss everybody the second we got word war had started, invite anyone who had problems with that to stay after and be taught individually, and tell the program director to stick it up his ass.
But I used to be nice.
You're one smug arsehole, Lilbuddha. I'm heartily glad we'll never meet.
Like it's possible to get anywhere with lilKnowItAll? No, people don't get anywhere when talking with you because you won't concede an inch and attack people who have the temerity to agree with you.
Just fucking clueless.
‘The point about roma is that unless you visibly appear other than white, then White British is how you will be treated’
On 5th June @lilbuddha wrote on ‘white and other privilege’
'If a white traveller is harassed by the authorities, it will be because they are a traveller, not because they are white. A white person can mimic upper class society and they become invisible to authority, a black person can actually be middle class or posh and attract negative attention because of their colour.'
In these two comments, @lilbuddha seems to be suggesting that the solution to the prejudice that all traveller groups experience is in their own hands. All they have to do is abandon their history, culture, way of life, keep their heads down.
I think these two comments play down the prejudice, racism and sheer hate that Roma and other travellers face across Europe.
In England, travellers have been subject to a state led campaign to destroy their culture and way of life. Very many people describe prejudice against travellers as ‘the last acceptable prejudice’.
There is a point to be make about visible/invisible differences. Doing this in a way that might easily be read to diminish the lived experience of the most consistently hated ethnic group in Europe is (to say the least) ill judged.
@lilbuddha for me this isn't really a Hell thing, but it didn't belong on 'white and other' (which has its own very important topic). Perhaps you would like to set the record straight here?
Asher
Being white doesn't mean you don't have other disadvantages, including very serious ones. But it does mean that your skin colour isn't one of them. That is the point that lilbuddha, I and others have been consistently making.
For context, here is lilbuddha's full post:
If I am misunderstanding, lilbuddha can correct me.
In the second, I am not blaming travellers for the treatment they receive, just saying that being white is not the reason they are treated poorly.
I'm really not sure how you got your interpretation. Truly. Your interpretation is very inconsistent with the content of my posting history.
To clarify: I am saying that people who belong to a mistreated group but are, or appear to be, white can hide amongst the oppressive group. I am not saying that they should, I am not putting any onus on them at all to do so. The onus is on the oppressive groups to change their own behaviour.
As far as setting the record straight here, I don't come to this thread much. I only did so this time because I saw your name. I don't receive notifications when people @ me, BTW.
If truly you want to clarify something, PM me. I may not see it if you do it here.
If you wish to play here amongst the whingy buggers, by all means do so. But if you wish to better understand my POV, there are better places
Even black people can get exempted from racial prejudice at an individual level ("one of the good ones"). GRT folk are going to feel the effect of prejudiced attitudes and abuse every time some moron blames a theft on "those pikie bastards". Anti-GRT attitudes are alive and well and someone who can "pass" is likely to encounter them a lot mixing in white spaces. You think it's going to hurt less because the perpetrators don't realise the victim's in the room? Ask LGBT folk about that one.
Thank you!
Gypsy-Roma-Traveller. It's the somewhat unwieldy term used collectively in the UK for the various communities who have traditionally practised itinerant lifestyles, though many now live in settled communities of one kind or another.
Yeah I pass so well that an ex Policeman thought it quite ok to tell me what amounted to institutional hatred in the Police to GRT.
He was more than a little surprised when I told him that was part of my ancestry. (Ok you wouldn't know that was anything different unless you were aware that I am way down the black hairy end of the scale beneath my clothing). My granddaughter who has inherited darker skin does get mistaken not for GRT but Southern European.
I do not need to ask anyone about this, I know it from experience.
Those experiences are NOT heritable.
Not getting that is part of the problem in understanding real racism.
Your ancestors felt real racism, you haven't.* Unless some living relative related their personal experiences, you've no more clue than I of what it is like to be Roma. Less, you being white.
*Not by anything you've revealed here
Please. Take a step back and re-read what you wrote to Exclamation Mark.
It really does read as you saying that you have more understanding or what is like being Roma than Exclamation Mark.
It really does read as very arrogant.
It would have been more generous to assume that given the oral nature of GRT culture Exclamation Mark will indeed be familiar with family stories.
Best wishes
Asher
Again, if ancestry matters, then I am a monarch.
As far as oral information, If EM has a parent or grandparent who is/was actively in the culture, then he'd have a stronger connection. Go too much further back and it isn't the same thing. I've all sort of family stories, some going back near a thousand years. At what point are they mere stories?
My mum shares with me her culture, I've been to the country and village of her birth. I have her stories and some first-hand information. That is a strong connection. I have the skin colour to experience some of what she has. My father has heard the same stories and been there as well, so he has a strong connection. But he does not have the colour to match the lived experience, so his connection is different.
But neither of us actually knows what it was like to grow up where she did, be an immigrant and face the same prejudice she did. I've related experience, but it is not the same.
Slavery shaped part of my heritage. I do not know what it is like to be a slave, but it shaped my family's past and present, so there is a connection. I watched a programme where a pale, white red-haired woman found out about her African ancestry. She has no connection beyond an interesting footnote in the family tree.
Connection is a variable thing and experience is a huge factor.
On a Purg thread, EM claimed not to identify as English, which is mad. It is like the queen deciding she doesn't identify as rich. This doesn't strike me as the statement of someone who understands identity, especially not in terms of how prejudice shapes it. And that the key here. He expresses nothing in identity threads to generate any semblance of understanding of identity. Quite the opposite. I'm not Mexican, but when I've discussed stories of navigating through white culture, most American Mexicans I've spoken to share a level of connection with my experiences. This despite country and culture differences.
EM does not evince any understanding of what it is like to be other in one's own country.
Speaking of which, DNA testing is throwing all sorts of family histories out of the window. People whose family history contain stories of ancestors that they don't actually have. And ancestry they didn't know they had.
One man I spoke to had actual stories of how particular individuals of his American Indian ancestors were treated and how poorly they lived on the reservation. That identity was important to him as is the way Indians are currently treated. He did a DNA test and not one drop of native DNA. All European. Interestingly his stories match experiences I've heard from real Indians on real reservations and he genuinely felt a connection, even though it was generated by lies. Even had they been real, he is a white man in a white world.
Whilst different groups face different sort of discriminations, there is a commonality in being outsiders.
There exists discrimination between groups that are separately discriminated against. One way I have sought to break that down is to find commonality in experience.
I do not hear that from EM. At all. Everything he has said points to knowing about Roma ancestry, but no direct connection to the experience.
From his own words, he is a white Englishman who is seen by others as a white Englishman. I do not know what he has learned from his family, all I am saying is that nothing he has expressed exhibits any understanding of what it is like to be discriminated against based on how he appears.
I’m saying I don’t hear EM’s experience.
I’ve been to reservations. I’ve had in-depth conversations with many Native Indians about their experiences and history, but I’m pretty sure you’d shit bricks if I claimed know what they went through or to identify with the Indian experience.
I don't know Exclamation Mark, but many of the things he says ring true about settled traveller families I've worked with - and yes, I've worked with a few, along with peripatetic new age travellers. I was invited to county education training in working with traveller groups, because I, at the time, ran a pre-school that accepted travellers and was regarded as priority training with the schools. I still have the notes, including the Runnymede Trust booklets on traveller discrimination. Since then I have met and worked with a number of other travellers in alternative education and mainstream settings.
Can you please stop telling us all incorrect information about stuff we might actually know something about? Like now.
* but shouldn't have been, as the minute I read of that grouping I realised I knew people who qualified.
Nothing in the interactions between he and I indicate any experience. If there are other threads where he mentions his experiences, please show me. As I recall, when we were talking about identity, he began with not identifying as English, but as identifying by whatever village or town he lives in. Something like that. Nothing about Roma until later and then nothing beyond ancestry.
And for fuck's sake, I am not saying he doesn't have particular experiences, I'm saying I've seen no evidence that he has directly experienced prejudice from being perceived as Roma. And nothing secondary either.
I am very reticent about sharing personal details, but people have sussed them out because I speak from lived and real experience. I see nothing in EM that shows any such real experience.
White people in non-disadvantaged groups claiming distant ancestry as understanding is bullshit. That is not judgemental, it is plain and simple accurate representation.
List any such information.
BTW, I recall saying nothing to contradict your experiences with teen boys, I was relating mine. Of course who they are speaking to will change how they express themselves, I believe that was part of my point.
Just like with Exclamation Mark - you're asserting that he cannot possibly have any Roma or traveller heritage, with, I suspect, precisely zero experience of settled Roma or travellers in the UK.
And I said this about my experiences on that thread How the fuck does that jibe with absolute certainty?
Bullshit. All of it.
Exclamation Mark said he has Roma heritage and I have not said one word contesting that. NOT. ONE. FUCKING. WORD. Do I need to repeat that? NOT. ONE. FUCKING. WORD.
Please process this before continuing. It does no one good if we misrepresent each other.
I've said that he doesn't appear to understand identity and that suggests he doesn't have first hand experience with being in an oppressed group. That is my opinion based on his interactions. I've said as much.
I've said that people who can pass for white British* do not have the same experiences as those who cannot. Not sure how this is remotely controversial.
*Some travellers are white and British, but othering them as if they are not is part of the problem.
George Floyd looks white and middle class and has the accent and clothes to go with it but secretly has some black ancestry the cops don't know about, cops are chummy with George Floyd in consequence = George Floyd alive, who might experience hearing some shocking racism, but who goes home to his kids and lives and none of the last few weeks has happened.
In both cases racism is bad, but one of these things is very much not like the other.
This Guardian article from 2018 (link) says that police assume GRT members are the criminals not victims, and that the Traveller liaison officers are often employed to work against GRT groups, not with them. I hadn't realised until I checked this, but when PC Andrew Harper died, the police targeted the local traveller community and the man charged was eventually released by the CPS as not passing the threshold test.
From a Parliamentary briefing on discrimination facing Gypsies, Roma and Travellers in the UK today from 2019 (pdf):
I'm aware there's a difference between passing as white and being black, my white daughter having the misfortune of passing as BAME, but really, the Gypsy Roma Traveller community are as discriminated against if not more so than BAME.
From the Parliamentary briefing paper:
Since then the lovely Priti Patel has suggested making new traveller sites illegal - when there's a huge problem with the availability of sites anyway. There have been several cases where GRT families have bought land for camps and refused planning permission to live there. Local authorities are not meeting their legal requirement for land provision now and haven't been for decades.
There have been a couple of funerals recently in London and Essex, where the pubs have been closed in all the area because travellers are coming to the funeral, and that racial profiling has been encouraged by the Met. This story is from February this year (link to Guardian).
If lilbuddha wasn't choosing to negate the discrimination experienced by the GRT community as being negligible she wouldn't be getting this push back.
Yes, where the police are concerned it can be the difference between life and death - going home to your family or the grave.
In a situation where the police don't know someone's hidden connection to a group they target, that person lives where another might die. They may hear hideous disgusting racist things- that's not nothing. That is bad. But they live. The hideous and real history of discrimination (such as you outline) which might otherwise claim them as another statistic for the cemetery is off the table because the police haven't matched them to that group but to a very privileged one.
People who belong visibly and unconcealably to a targeted minority-Black or Roma or whatever - cannot have that taken off the table and be treated as a person with white male British privilege. Those who can pass, live, but the person with visible, unconcealable ties in the same situation may well die.
Those are significantly different situations.
All I have done is question how/whether/how much Exclamation Mark has experienced that discrimination.