Substitute Teacher Goes Rogue, Conducts "Mock Slave Auction" at NJ School

[Anna Komnene]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mock-slave-auction-new-jersey_us_58d1d687e4b02d33b746c2cf

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[Virginiá]

Couldn't sleep, so I took to Atlas to fill the void...

runs far, far away from Atlas

[Mr. Reactionary]

Sounds like new jersey

[Sprouts Farmers Market ✘]

Sounds like new jersey

[kyc0705]

Sounds like new jersey

[Brittain33]

Sounds like new jersey

Maplewood and South Orange are exceptionally diverse, affluent, and liberal suburban towns in NJ; Maplewood is usually cited as an exemplar of diversity in a state which is otherwise highly segregated or only has select types of diversity in towns and districts.

[JA]

Apparently something similar just happened in New Jersey earlier this month where elementary school students were given an "assignment [that] listed “a poster for a lecture, speech, protest or slave auction” as examples."

I'd wager the substitute teacher and whoever created this assignment weren't descendents of a people who were enslaved on the basis of their socially constructed race, nor have they experienced systemic or social dehumanization for belonging to a particular group of disadvantaged people. Otherwise, they would've instinctively known that this is appalling, dehumanizing, and wrong. But this also raises the question: what the hell is wrong with New Jersey?

[Santander]

Sounds like new jersey

[Tartarus Sauce]

Sounds like new jersey

[The Arizonan]

Apparently something similar just happened in New Jersey earlier this month where elementary school students were given an "assignment [that] listed “a poster for a lecture, speech, protest or slave auction” as examples."

I'd wager the substitute teacher and whoever created this assignment weren't descendents of a people who were enslaved on the basis of their socially constructed race, nor have they experienced systemic or social dehumanization for belonging to a particular group of disadvantaged people. Otherwise, they would've instinctively known that this is appalling, dehumanizing, and wrong. But this also raises the question: what the hell is wrong with New Jersey?

Race is not a social construct. The assignment is still wrong on several levels though.

[JA]

Apparently something similar just happened in New Jersey earlier this month where elementary school students were given an "assignment [that] listed “a poster for a lecture, speech, protest or slave auction” as examples."

I'd wager the substitute teacher and whoever created this assignment weren't descendents of a people who were enslaved on the basis of their socially constructed race, nor have they experienced systemic or social dehumanization for belonging to a particular group of disadvantaged people. Otherwise, they would've instinctively known that this is appalling, dehumanizing, and wrong. But this also raises the question: what the hell is wrong with New Jersey?

Race is not a social construct. The assignment is still wrong on several levels though.

Race is, in fact, a social construct. This is a fact, not an opinion.

[pbrower2a]

If you want to keep doing substitute teaching, you don't rock the boat. You try to get students to generally like you. My goal is of a normal day, The last thing I would want to do is to create trauma. A slave auction? To do worse I would have to simulate a "selection" at a Nazi concentration camp. I question whether any K-12 teacher could ever  pull such a stunt and get away with it.    but I can deal with a little drama. My proudest moment came from talking a kid in a high-school special education class out of dropping out of school. I establish high standards of achievement. 

I've been one, and I may be again... I have taught every grade level (although I don't relate well to K-3 levels because I don't remember what I was like at such age, I don't ask for it) and every subject.

I have had to deal with ethnicity, and some black kids have accused me of asking them to act white. "Act white? No. There are plenty of white losers. White people use more drugs, use worse drugs, get away with them longer, and do worse things because of their worse drug use. You do not want to act like THOSE white people. I'm asking you to act... like Chinese-Americans".

I'm a white guy. I also recognize that the only chance out of poverty or even from slipping into poverty is a solid K-12 education. I would make it more rigorous if I had a chance. So far as I can understand, most people so desire whatever their ethnicity. 

Truth be told, there is a large black middle class, and it lives well enough that it has no cause to envy white people on the whole. If one is a white racist, then this is Enemy #1 -- black people who really can entice white people to marry into their group and have 'mixed' children. 

Should the Atlantic slave trade be brought up, I have no qualms about comparing it to the Holocaust. The death tolls are similar in magnitude, and both involved enslavement, the penultimate degradation of people. Only outright murder is arguably worse, and of that I am not sure. It seems obvious enough that cruelty and the desire to exploit cause most of the evil in our world.   

[Sumner 1868]

This reminds me of a story from about ten years. IIRC a school in California had it students sleep on the beach so they could understand "how the Native Americans lived."

[OneJ]

This is too much. They didn't even have the decency to ask parents for permission.

When you do this, you only add more fuel to the fire. You could teach a child unintentionally tell kids that using the word "n" is okay or that it's okay buy a human period. The fact of the matter is that it's no way in hell that this stuff is acceptable.

[JerryArkansas]

It sounds as if those same fifth graders are about to get an even more informative first-hand field experience in early twenty-first century HR etiquette.

I suppose that the substitute teacher should have stuck with the mind-numbing busywork or "educational" videos that are usually their assigned province. Do people really want their public schools so regimented and rationalized that this shocks and offends them and demands a media and administrative response (that probably involves hundreds of hours of work)? What a strange code it is by which we are now expected to live.

When I was in high school my history teacher called me to the front of the class without explanation for an impromptu re-enactment of the execution of Charles I involving a yardstick. I suppose I should have called the local television station with a sob story about how horrifying and insensitive the whole ordeal was.

WTF dude, I thought you had more sense than this mess of a post.

[Associate Justice PiT]

Apparently something similar just happened in New Jersey earlier this month where elementary school students were given an "assignment [that] listed “a poster for a lecture, speech, protest or slave auction” as examples."

I'd wager the substitute teacher and whoever created this assignment weren't descendents of a people who were enslaved on the basis of their socially constructed race, nor have they experienced systemic or social dehumanization for belonging to a particular group of disadvantaged people. Otherwise, they would've instinctively known that this is appalling, dehumanizing, and wrong. But this also raises the question: what the hell is wrong with New Jersey?

Race is not a social construct. The assignment is still wrong on several levels though.

Race is, in fact, a social construct. This is a fact, not an opinion.

     I'm not sure why, but people (myself included) hear "social construct" and get the notion that it is totally arbitrary with no existence beyond people's thoughts. Biological race is certainly an actual thing; it just does not carry a lot of the implications that have traditionally been applied to it to justify racist institutions such as slavery.

[JerryArkansas]

It sounds as if those same fifth graders are about to get an even more informative first-hand field experience in early twenty-first century HR etiquette.

I suppose that the substitute teacher should have stuck with the mind-numbing busywork or "educational" videos that are usually their assigned province. Do people really want their public schools so regimented and rationalized that this shocks and offends them and demands a media and administrative response (that probably involves hundreds of hours of work)? What a strange code it is by which we are now expected to live.

When I was in high school my history teacher called me to the front of the class without explanation for an impromptu re-enactment of the execution of Charles I involving a yardstick. I suppose I should have called the local television station with a sob story about how horrifying and insensitive the whole ordeal was.

WTF dude, I thought you had more sense than this mess of a post.

You would prefer that we all nod sagely and take the outrage and opprobrium for granted, I assume?

There is nothing in this description that justifies the suggestion that any student will be traumatized for life, as one parent hyperbolically suggests, or even that there is an immediate need for students to seek individual counseling from a social worker.

Unless there is something else to the story, all that it tells us is that one substitute teacher made the mistake of arranging a classroom activity that made for a shocking headline out of context.

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

[JerryArkansas]

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

The original story does not claim or imply anything like that.

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The exercise was initiated by students, who "asked" their classmates to participate in their presentation.

This appears to be an example of parents indulging in melodramatics over something that did not bother any of the students involved, local media making hay over it, and national media picking up the story. It was not a middle school re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

You really want to excuse this thing don't you.  Just call it what it is and move on.

[Intell]

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

The original story does not claim or imply anything like that.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The exercise was initiated by students, who "asked" their classmates to participate in their presentation.

This appears to be an example of parents indulging in melodramatics over something that did not bother any of the students involved, local media making hay over it, and national media picking up the story. It was not a middle school re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

You really want to excuse this thing don't you.  Just call it what it is and move on.

and that is?

[JerryArkansas]

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

The original story does not claim or imply anything like that.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The exercise was initiated by students, who "asked" their classmates to participate in their presentation.

This appears to be an example of parents indulging in melodramatics over something that did not bother any of the students involved, local media making hay over it, and national media picking up the story. It was not a middle school re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

You really want to excuse this thing don't you.  Just call it what it is and move on.

and that is?

Deplorable, something that shouldn't occur in 2017 America.

I don't know why some are so defensive of this.  I guess growing up in the South around African Americans, I learned that you shouldn't do certain things.

[Anna Komnene]

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

The original story does not claim or imply anything like that.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The exercise was initiated by students, who "asked" their classmates to participate in their presentation.

This appears to be an example of parents indulging in melodramatics over something that did not bother any of the students involved, local media making hay over it, and national media picking up the story. It was not a middle school re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It's hard to say whether students were bothered by it.  People are complicated.  There's been plenty of times throughout my life where someone did something that hurt me but I just smiled and said "okay."  Doesn't mean I didn't go in my room and cry afterwards.  Who knows?  Some students might even tease each other about it.  Why encourage that?

Even if it was the student's idea, the teacher could have stepped in.  They are the authority figure and need to be able to guide the students about what is acceptable behavior and what isn't.  Obviously it's awkward if they came up with the idea, but they could have just as easily done the project without actually using their classmates as the examples.  Also, it's problematic that only the black children were used as the slaves in this project.  It reinforces social divisions when people need to be coming together.  Students need to be taught about history, including the slave trade, but they don't need to be identifying each other as who would be the slave and who would be the master if this was 1786.

[Green Line]

I can tell you what's deplorable, and its not this story.

[Anna Komnene]

Well yeah, they know who would be the slaves, but thinking about a topic in the abstract and literally pointing to a child in the classroom and saying "you would be the slave" are completely different things.  One entails "my ancestors were the slaves" while the other entails "I am the slave."  Those two thought processes have a lot of different implications.  Learning about this can just as easily be accomplished by watching the movie "Roots" or reading The Color Purple.  I had to do both of those in school, and they were both pretty eye opening and taught me a lot about the issue, and they didn't involve me othering the black students in my class by thinking about them as potential slaves for my nonexistent plantation (though considering the racial makeup of my classes, I might have actually been the slave on their plantations... but whatever).

Another thing is that actually conducting a mock auction has a lot of other social implications than just race.  I mean, the whole point of an auction is to assess the value of a commodity, and in this case, the commodity in question is a human being.  That means allowing and even encouraging students to say things like "Jamaal is worth more than Derrick because he's bigger, and stronger.  He'd be a much better at picking my potatoes."  or  "I'll pay 50 dollars for Suzie because she's really pretty, but meh Naomi is only worth 3 dollars because she's kinda chubby and and has a crooked nose."  What could possibly go wrong with putting students in a situation where they are asked to think about human beings in that manner?

I do agree about schools being too restrictive.  I actually did some substitute teaching when I was about 19 and 20 to help pay the bills, and it might have been the job that I was most unhappy doing that I've ever had.  I was constantly afraid of acting like a normal human being and saying something that might get me in trouble or fired.  But even though that is a problem, the reason why it exists is because education is fundamental to shaping worldviews.  So yes, there will always be debate or outrage over teachers expressing views to the malleable minds of children that the community disagrees with.  It's over the top, yeah, but it also means that we don't want our children turning into the Nazi youth league or New Age KKK Revival.  It's hard to find that balance and most school districts lean way too far on the side of censorship, but letting anything be fair game is objectively awful too.

[pbrower2a]

I would never believe myself able to conduct such a classroom exercise. I would ask for an alternative. This is for the experts.

I made very clear that I could not do sex education. Just too many things can go wrong. As far as I would go if asked would be to have a discussion of the physiology of reproduction in the most clinical terms -- and in the end say that before marriage, chastity is best and be careful about whom you marry.

[MLM]

I did this in my History class last year; we all had a lot of fun and it was pretty helpful but, I suppose I can see why some would take offence. Interestingly we actually had a substitute teacher that day.