A third-grade teacher at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School began the lesson on “social identities” during a math class.
But of course. You see, for some primary-school teachers, conveying the basics of arithmetic and fractions isn’t sufficiently sexy or particularly statusful. Marxoid pronouncements on “power and privilege,” however, and sermons on how straight white men are oppressing everyone else, are much more flattering to the ego of a leftist educator. And after all, those pretentious resentments, the ones you hope to exploit, won’t cultivate themselves. Oh, and apparently, transgenderism and “nonbinary sexuality” are suitable classroom topics for the modern eight-year-old.
What, you didn’t know?
Update, via the comments, where Karen adds,
Today’s word is ‘fraud’.
Given the apparent indifference to parental approval – one might call it subterfuge – you do have to wonder exactly how much class time has been wasted on ‘projects’ of this kind. Or would have been, had parents not discovered what their children were actually being taught instead of mathematics. And it is, I think, interesting just how often these things occur without the knowledge or consent of the parents whose children are being indoctrinated and psychologically abused, as if such details didn’t matter. As if the children weren’t theirs.
Note too how readily parental umbrage is framed as “divisive.” As if the problem were the parents, not the ideologically possessed educators.
during a math class.
Today’s word is ‘fraud’.
Today’s word is ‘fraud’.
Well, given the apparent indifference to parental approval – one might call it subterfuge – you have to wonder exactly how much class time has been pissed away on ‘projects’ of this kind. Or would have been, had parents not discovered what their children were actually being taught instead of mathematics.
And it is, I think, interesting just how often these things occur without the knowledge or consent of the parents whose children are being indoctrinated. As if it didn’t matter.
These early maths lessons, of course, represent the first educational steps in the development of the scientists, doctors, engineers etc. of the future on whom the prosperity and happiness of our society will depend.
What could possibly go wrong?
Cupertino will be an interesting battleground for pushback against teaching CRT. The population is 63% Asian. That’s a whole lot of Tiger mums and a principal with the distinctly non-Asian the name Jenn Lashier should be easily removable. Also as over 25% of the population are employed by Apple there might be considerable vested interest in keeping local educational standards high.
“After a tense meeting, the administration agreed to suspend the program.”
Suspend, not terminate. Rest assured the administration quietly told the teacher that he/she can resume the indoctrination when the parents are no longer paying attention.
“(When reached for comment, Jenn Lashier, the principal of Meyerholz Elementary, said that the training was not part of the ‘formal curricula, but the process of daily learning facilitated by a certified teacher.’)”
Yup, making excuses and covering up. But my teacher friends tell me that “academic freedom” permits them to indoctrinate children however they wish.
“…permits them to indoctrinate children however they wish.”
And parents should have no say in this.
Funny, isn’t it, how leftists keep revealing themselves to be totalitarian monsters? In spite of their rhetoric about freedom and the dignity of all individuals?
Cupertino will be an interesting battleground for pushback against teaching CRT.
I wonder, however, about the ability of most parents to keep an eye on the schools: I strongly suspect that in most of the tech industry families both spouses work, which would leave little time for scrutiny of the schools.
And it is, I think, interesting just how often these things occur without the knowledge or consent of the parents whose children are being indoctrinated. As if it didn’t matter.
The default assumption should always be that these things happen with the full approval and connivance of the school administration. The school personnel should be treated accordingly.
Suspend, not terminate.
You do have to marvel at the presumption, the casual, practised arrogance.
You do have to marvel at the presumption, the casual, practised arrogance.
It’s amazing what you can get away with when you have allies in most of the
propaganda network“news” media.the first educational steps in the development of the scientists, doctors, engineers etc. of the future on whom the prosperity and happiness of our society will depend.
What could possibly go wrong?”
*looks up Florida passenger bridge failure*
Ever read some Kornbluth?
A math class about “nonbinary sexuality”? I assume they’re teaching mathematical theorems about the computable models that define their relations with the full power of Turing completeness, since last I heard the Gender Studies haven’t settled on a finite list of genders and would never say “no” to somebody who wants to add a new one.
Should be beneficial; when they cover how easily these models can fail to be computable, or even computably enumerable, the wokefolk should stop impugning the intelligence of those who say their dogma is “too complicated”. When they cover how it is usually strictly more complicated than the simplest non-computably-enumerable problem to determine whether or not two of these models are isomorphic (i.e. whether or not two different people agree on the model), they’ll realize their whole plan for reforming society was doomed from the start. Maybe they’ll even start to apply those lessons to centrally-planned economies, too.
Seems a bit heady for third grade to me, but I’m not an education expert.
…
Wait, you’re saying that’s not what these classes are about?
I’ve lived in silly valley for 6 decades.
At one local high school (ages 14-17) there is what can only be described as a “Science Palace”, with facilities comparable to my labs at Berkeley back in 1980.
Paid for entirely by parents direct funding.
In a fight between parents and school staff, I know who I’d bet on.
Wait, you’re saying that’s not what these classes are about?
Sure. Don’t most third grade maths cover proofs theory vs. model theory?
Just to be clear, Meyerholz school is public (in the US sense, as is the science palace school I mentioned).
Cupertino will be an interesting battleground for pushback against teaching CRT […] Also as over 25% of the population are employed by Apple
More interesting than you think. Apple’s part of the wokerati and engineering employees are a minority at any large company, technical or otherwise. You’re going to see a nasty little turf war between parents who want their children to succeed and parents who want to sacrifice their children’s future for their own aggrandizement.
between parents who want their children to succeed and parents who want to sacrifice their children’s future for their own aggrandizement.
That.
You can bet too that these kids are not allowed to play ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in the playground, either.
…kids are not allowed to play ‘Cowboys and Indians’ in the playground, either.
Only because given the demographics in Silicon Valley it would have been “EIC and Indians”.
I will now denounce myself for my un-woke wrongthought and report for regrooving.
I strongly suspect that in most of the tech industry families both spouses work, which would leave little time for scrutiny of the schools.
Cupertino school district is pretty big — over 16,000 students across 26 schools, and that’s just kindergarten through eighth grade (the high school is a separate school district). If there are just 30 or 40 stay-at-home parents with the time and motivation, they can absolutely make life a living hell for the school administration.
Better yet, they can decide that the School Board needs to be changed. Thirty people working the phones for a challenger can do an incredible amount of damage to an incumbent’s campaign. And that gets multiplied if one of the thirty is friends with a local newspaper editor, or the head of the Chamber of Commerce, or other such platforms.
Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to just yank your kid out of the dysfunctional school and plunk him in a private school which you find more conducive to proper education. That’s great when you have the money to pay tuition, but it results in the feudal system we see today, where those with money get great benefits while the peasants subsist on whatever crumbs the Teaching Guild sees fit to drop.
There’s only one reason why people buy the so-expensive houses in Cupertino, and it ain’t the beautiful scenery, or proximity to tech jobs. It’s the Cupertino schools, first and last. I’m making popcorn as I type…
It’s not so easy to go private in Cupertino. Single Family detached homes in that suburb are paying roughly $25,000 per annum in property taxes, the vast bulk of which fund the schools. People moved to Cupertino specifically to take advantage of the good local public schools. Folks will be royally pissed if they have to go private while still paying those taxes and their mortgages.
There’s only one reason why people buy the so-expensive houses in Cupertino, and it ain’t the beautiful scenery, or proximity to tech jobs. It’s the Cupertino schools, first and last.
This. Y’all way over estimate the number of parents, even among the “engineers”, who are not part of the wokerati. This idea that technical success/talent is somehow an anathema to socialist style thinking is more WPTGY (the whistling thing). Socialism is engineering writ large…i.e. social engineering. And the more “successful” the engineer, the more his ego believes he can change the world. Especially if he manages to dodge the real hard engineering work and live off the backs of the real engineers…who then must kiss up to him with their own wokeness. See Steve Jobs vs. Steve Wozniak. Or Bill Gates. Etc. Damn near every tech engineer that I know and have been friends with for decades are now all wokey-wokey and currently regard me as some sort of conspiracy theorist lunatic who doesn’t believe the #Science! on CNNMSNBCCBSPBSNPR. (Just an aside…If you asked me who my 10 closest friends were a year or two ago, or especially four or five years ago…and all would have been software work-related…they have all gone dark on me except maybe one…and I’m still not sure about him). Now if you talk to the engineers and such who actually build things in the real world, the guys who build their houses, their swimming pools, their offices, who manage their logistics operations or run the companies that clean their homes, windows, offices and such, THOSE people might be concerned. But while many are rather wealthy, they don’t on average have the financial pull.
A third-grade teacher at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School began the lesson on ‘social identities’ during a math class.
To risk being frivolous: It’s the same compulsive hijacking of unrelated topics as Leftist political platforms which has gotten us the current and damaged state of Dr. Who. And to varying degrees, other sci-fi franchises such as Star Trek (Discovery and Picard versions), Star Wars (sequels version), the Marvel & DC comic books, etc., etc.
The worst part is that software engineers should be the ones most familiar with how futile social engineering is, since they’re supposed to have experience with things like multiple decision-makers, limitations of formal requirements, and the like.
Part of it is they’re assuming that the Social Sciences have already solved these problems, when most think it’s a deep revelation that they exist at all.
Part of it is that the job usually involves patching up a system that’s been jury-rigged from inception, so so their attention is often on less abstract problems. Plus, it makes it easier for socialists to say “Once we’re in power, we’ll make sure everything is designed the way it’s supposed to be, or at least more so than your current bosses do”. Of course, there’s also plenty who simply bluff comprehension of anything more complicated than a hashmap.
Real software engineering has never been tried.
I’m not actually making a joke. I came from conventional engineering before getting into software engineering and twenty years on what they call “software” engineering is still laughable. An IBM engineer once quipped that software engineering is worse for fads than women’s fashion.
“Software” engineers are used to not having to concern themselves with whether their current fad actually works, as most software projects are so huge and complex that they kind of stumble along to some kind of conclusion no matter what method you use, and everyone involved will claim it as a success. The cloudcuckoolanders who invented Xtreme Programming/Agile still insist that the C3 project was a success. No one else does.
You can see the obvious parallels to social engineering, and why software engineers are prone to think it’s feasible.
“You can see the obvious parallels to social engineering, and why software engineers are prone to think it’s feasible.”
Also due to autism spectrum? An awful lot of the engineers I have known were not really sharp on social matters.
“they kind of stumble along to some kind of conclusion”
As someone who worked for a company that went through a severe period of low revenue, and even in the best of times did not have extra millions to throw away, I fully understand. And don’t forget the maintenance costs, too: Will the new product be a human and financial nightmare to maintain and enhance?
Landlord, what do you have that’s good for these gloomy thoughts?
Landlord, what do you have that’s good for these gloomy thoughts?
Oh dear, David seems to have gone to bed. There’s got to be something good to drink around here. [rummages in pockets for unauthorized key to the wine cellar]
Daniel Ream:
“…and twenty years on what they call “software” engineering is still laughable.”
Because real engineering is ultimately constrained by physics; software ‘engineering’ umm… not so much. When someone discovers the three laws of motion for the software domain (or the three laws of software thermodynamics) then we might have a fighting chance of creating an engineering discipline for software. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like software is such a field, so our chances aren’t very good.
An IBM engineer once quipped that software engineering is worse for fads than women’s fashion.
Heh.
Landlord, what do you have that’s good for these gloomy thoughts?
Friday Ephemera!
Retired sw “engineer” and physics and mechanical engineer guy here.
Engineering is about systems that have tolerances and unknowns and margins of safety. Failure is an analog thing.
Software is a mathematical, formal construct. Failure is a discrete thing.
Software implementations that execute on real physical hardware combine the worst of both domains.
I would never claim to have “engineered” a piece of code, nor would I claim to have “proved correct” code that is running on real hardware.
And don’t get me started on Agile, which is about shipping something, anything, on schedule.
Because real engineering is ultimately constrained by physics; software ‘engineering’ umm… not so much.
One thing that is common between the two is that engineer’s time is money, and in conventional engineering wasting a lot of time screwing around with processes or tools that don’t produce tangible results quickly gets stopped in short order. This doesn’t much happen in software. Some of it, I think, is the rather odd notion among many programmers that what they do is some kind of art, a creative endeavour akin to poetry. They get very upset when I point out that their brilliant algorithm was in Knuth twenty years ago and maybe they should spend more time on fundamentals and less on sniffing their own flatulence.
Heh. We all seem to despise (to some extent) our profession for similar reasons. My father had been a civil engineer. As long as he was alive (he passed in 2007) I never considered myself an engineer. He and I would discuss similarities in working large projects and such, but I NEVER would have called what I did “engineering”. Certainly not to him. I had of course heard people refer to software engineering, a term at which I scoffed. Software isn’t “engineered”, it’s developed. I was a software developer. Then I went to work for “A Major Defense Contractor” where everyone called themselves “engineers”. As it became something of an explanation for certain attention to detail that most other people fail to appreciate, and as it thus made communication of certain points easier, I adopted the “engineer” title. I haven’t done the research but I will swear on a stack of Bibles that this “software engineer” term overrode the “developer” term right around the 2006-2008 timeframe. What I find ironic about that is that “Agile” is pretty much a concession to the “development” label and thus proof that software isn’t “engineered”. Yet Agile seemed to have gotten traction just around the same timeframe.
And don’t get me started on Agile, which is about shipping something, anything, on schedule.
Though to this…and “anything on schedule” beats “nothing on schedule, check back next Tuesday” every time…Agile was at least an admission as to the failure of the industry, nor the customer, to be able to precisely define what the customer needed. The idea is certainly superior to the waterfall crap that came before, but as noted above the “real Agile hasn’t really been tried” excuse does apply to some extent. I’ve been on about half a dozen projects that were nominally “Agile”. None of them came close to what the process really should be. Yet the more you try to nail down what it should be, the less “Agile” it becomes. The general idea, development being more of a creative process of sketching in approximately what is wanted without wasting time going down a pointless path, I think is sound. It’s the attempts to nail it down and preach it that cause most of the problems. There’s a God/religion analogy in there somewhere but I’m a little too wiped out/marginally buzzed to pursue it.
Agile “consultants” hate me because I know more about the history of Agile than they do (this is, not coincidentally, why I dislike Agile so much).
Agile has its place: for a very specific type of software project it works better than anything else. The problem, as with so many other fads in software, is that it gets a lot of buzz and then the suits hear about it and then the cargo-cult mentality kicks in and you’re forced to use Agile for everything, including projects where Agile will actively hinder you getting anything done. As many critics have pointed out, the original project that gave birth to Agile was in fact a terrible fit for Agile, which is why it failed.
this “software engineer” term overrode the “developer” term right around the 2006-2008 timeframe
In the mid-1990s, I had many conversations with programmers who wanted to call themselves “software engineers” but couldn’t because the regional engineer’s guild would sue them for doing so. I pointed out that one of the requirements for a professional engineering credential was liability: were they willing to be sued, personally, for any bugs found in code they had written?
That usually ended the conversation.
Yup. My brother in law was a PE. High power electrical. 250KVA. Motors the size of small houses.
His chuckle when the topic of software engineers arose was quite something, emanating from his 6’2″ Texan frame.
Friday Ephemera!
But will they raise my spirits as much as a glass of spirits?
You do have to marvel at the presumption, the casual, practised arrogance.
That’s because they’ve been getting away with it for over 100 years. Those of us who are sane have been writing about how terrible it is that whole time.
We’ve been voting for politicians who talked about how terrible it is that whole time.
We’ve been laughing at how silly it is while its products eat us alive.
What we haven’t done is put a stop to it.
What we haven’t done is put a stop to it.
This. Apparently the laughter tactic didn’t work as well as expected. Funny thing, that.
“One parent told me that critical race theory was reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. ‘[It divides society between] the oppressor and the oppressed, and since these identities are inborn characteristics people cannot change, the only way to change it is via violent revolution,’ the parent said. ‘Growing up in China, I had learned it many times. The outcome is the family will be ripped apart; husband hates wife, children hate parents. I think it is already happening here.'”
–from the article
It’s almost as if Critical Race Theory, which, like all other “Critical Theories”, is rooted in Marxism, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was a Marxist movement, have something in common. I cannot for the life of me figure out what that commonality is, so let’s keep sending our kids to schools where Marxists “teach” them.
I am sure were Swift alive today his Gulliver’s Travels would involve a fascinating visit to the ‘Land of Silly Words and Made-Up Titles’
Taught math at 6th through college for about 30 years. The firewall between the hard sciences and this sort of tripe finally began collapsing where I am (CA, USA) 2-3 years ago. I think the plan was to appoint so many “teachers” instead of “mathematicians” into a department, so that the injection of anti-science crap would go unchallenged. Sigh.
The firewall between the hard sciences and this sort of tripe finally began collapsing where I am (CA, USA) 2-3 years ago
Engineering began to crumble 25 years ago and is now completely lost.
For reference, this is a picture of Jenn Lashier. Her name may not be Asian, but she definitely is.
Driving through Cupertino just now I noticed a yard sign about “Saving Meyerholz”. Apparently it is under threat of closure due to a possible school district rezoning.
The Plot Thickens.