He’s Ready For His Close-Up
As readers may imagine, I do have some sympathy with this view:
I have no problem with my child’s teacher being gay.
I have a problem with them being incredibly strange and narcissistic about it.
It’s not because you’re gay that I don’t want my child around you, it’s because you think this is normal or appropriate behavior for a teacher. pic.twitter.com/3chE6L5Hr3
— Frank McCormick | Chalkboard Heresy (@CBHeresy) July 2, 2023
Note, in the background, the prominent reminder to the class – a countdown to the teacher’s birthday. Because, obviously, it’s all about him and acknowledging his fabulousness.
But then, it so often is.
Update, via the comments:
Mike D adds,
It has to be said, in terms of setting an example – a reference point for children of what a functional adult might look like – needy, narcissistic theatre isn’t exactly what one hopes for.
It’s worth noting how rapidly, and seemingly unopposed, it’s become something of a norm for children to be entrusted to emotionally arrested men who think that prancing about in leggings and five-inch heels, and flapping paper fans – and looking “cute” in painted nails and make-up – are part of their job description. As if they were doing us a favour.
And so, we have children being taught by men who, in their thirties, are still buying blue and green hair dye, and who habitually film themselves miming to pop records, before uploading the results to TikTok in search of affirmation, not least from their own students.
Because, it turns out, what the children really need to learn is the importance of continual, flamboyant self-preoccupation, and the round-the-clock foregrounding of one’s “identity” and sexual inclinations, especially in office hours and among children. Along with the conceit that authenticity, being one’s “true self,” entails enacting a caricatured pantomime, a generic cartoon. And of course, the lie that the endless, tedious performance is being done for their benefit.
It is, however, curious how the men mouthing this claim most emphatically – about doing it for the children, to create a “safe space” – just so happen to like parading around the classroom in glitter, stilettos and clownish make-up, and just so happen to already have an extensive collection of rather tarty ladies’ shoes.
A coincidence, I’m sure.
Update 2:
Regarding the paragraph above, and Mr Hey-Kids-Look-At-My-Hooker-Shoes, Clam adds,
What’s remarkable is the obviousness of the lie. If you poke through chappie’s TikTok videos, it’s clearly all about him and what he wants. The children are just a pretext, a rhetorical shield. And it seems that his peers and employers are too cowed and complicit to acknowledge the obvious dishonesty.
Because objecting to narcissistic overreach – and the use of other people’s children as a captive audience – would be “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “right-wing,” etc. And so, our self-imagined hero, our champion of the downtrodden fetishist, is triumphant and boastful: “If we’re not pissing off the homophobes, we’re not doing our jobs,” says he.
And of course, the children are manipulated, dragged into his drama, made to browse his TikTok videos and read the comments, and made to side with him against any parent who might object.
To call it narcissism scarcely covers it.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
It’s all so tiresome.
It has to be said, in terms of setting an example – a reference point for children of what a functional adult might look like – needy, narcissistic theatre isn’t exactly what one hopes for.
And yet.
Harry Potter fan fic ruined an entire generation.
It’s worth noting how rapidly, and seemingly unopposed, it’s become something of a norm for children to be entrusted to emotionally arrested men who think that prancing about in leggings and five-inch heels, and flapping paper fans – and looking “cute” in painted nails and make-up – are part of their job description.
As if they were doing us a favour.
And so, we have children being taught by men who, in their thirties, are still buying blue and green hair dye, and who habitually film themselves miming to pop records, before uploading the results to TikTok in search of approval.
I do hate to sound stuffy, but that doesn’t sound ideal.
Also noteworthy is how such teachers never seem to be filming in private school classrooms.
Though some private schools do offer ‘alternative’ education and at least one of them will do something of this kind, I strongly suspect this simply does not happen in fee-paying schools in the majority of cases.
It’s possible that it’s also because private schools are much stricter than public ones as to what they allow their staff to post on social media (a whole other issue worth paying attention to incidentally).
Related, at least in the more general sense:
The retention crisis has been going on for years and the fact that they think throwing money at it will address, much less resolve, the underlying issues is as alarming as it is laughable.
Oh, and how will this be paid for?
Ah but, what the children really need to learn is the importance of continual, flamboyant self-preoccupation. And the conceit that authenticity, being one’s “true self,” entails enacting a caricatured pantomime, a generic cartoon. And of course the lie that the endless, tedious performance is being done for their benefit.
That.
Well, it is curious how the men mouthing this claim most emphatically – about doing it for the children, to create a “safe space” – just so happen to like parading around the classroom in stilettos and clownish make-up, and just so happen to already have an extensive collection of rather tarty ladies’ shoes.
A coincidence, I’m sure.
When I was a child, we students were not told such things, much less more intimate details of our teachers’ private lives.
Relax. He’s just part of The Long Prance Through the Institutions.
I remain doubtful about this, as I have read reports now and then about private schools with extremely “woke” curricula. Could it be that the difference is merely that there are far more public schools than private ones? I don’t know.
It’s more a matter of osmosis. The public schools have little resistance. The private ones are a bit harder for these clowns to get into but at sufficient concentrations in the bluer areas they are showing up. The general wokeness in regard to other issues has made significant inroads into the private schools. These more extreme aspects are just taking a bit more time.
Conservatives get way too comfortable thinking that they have these fall back positions to retreat to. It’s loser-think. Conservative positions/attitudes, the viable ones of work ethic, responsibility , etc., need to be pressed by conservatives in our schools even harder than these defensive positions are. Make them justify keeping conservative ideas out. Take the book “banning” hysteria. If conservatives fought just as hard to ensure that conservative books, ones that have genuinely been removed or banned from the schools, are in the libraries and curriculum as they (finally try to) fight to keep the groomer porn out, the fight would be much, much more effective. But no, conservatives…”conservatives” are too nice to be so aggressive.
I’m just going to leave this here for no reason whatsoever.
That.
If it’s oppression and injustice for default public norms to exist, for those norms to be determined by majority sensibilities, and for the majority to have the moral legitimacy to enforce those norms – then the logical consequences work themselves out eventually.
If a minority member doesn’t shout his minority status from the rooftops, then to the extent that anyone thinks about him at all, they might take him on balance of probabilities to be a majority member, and this “passing” perpetuates a legacy of shameful erasure, othering, genocide, etc.
Activist sexual minorities are often accused of sexualizing neutral public spaces just as activist religious minorities are often accused of religious displays that are inappropriate in secular contexts. But public spaces are never neutral, but steeped in the sexual and religious sensibilities of the historic majority, in implicit ways like Sundays being a day off.
If all norms are truly equal, then minorities have just as much right to stamp public spaces with their own sensibilities. If children and their parents are embarrassed by such displays, they’re wrong and need to be educated, and if they don’t accept the teachable moment they’re bad people whose discomfort is deserved.
The teacher’s unions might be the source of the difference – they’ve not much of a toe-hold in private schools.
That does seem to be the common conceit.
Likewise, the supposedly unassailable niceness of the Pride flag itself, now seemingly ubiquitous and subject to additions, as if it couldn’t possibly have acquired connotations of a kind that many parents wouldn’t be thrilled about. Say, the propagation of “non-binary” woo and imaginary identities, the ongoing girls’ sports-and-bathroom wars, the deceiving of parents, and the mutilation of children.
It’s just sparkles and ponies, you see.
Really? We’re seeing pervy LGBTQ narcissists doing things in public that would have gotten heterosexuals condemned and even arrested. For most of my life heterosexuals agreed that sex belonged in private and especially should not be shoved in children’s faces. The perv wing of the left has been waging war on such standards, but those were the traditional standards of civilized society.
there weren’t privileged castes
Conservative positions/attitudes, the viable ones of work ethic, responsibility , etc., need to be pressed by conservatives in our schools even harder than these defensive positions are.
History and Moral Philosophy should be a mandatory course, and it must be taught by a citizen.
“The law equally forbids rich and poor from sleeping rough and stealing bread.”
–Anatole France
“The law equally forbids normal people and perverts from sexually molesting children.”
–LGBTQ activists
a reference point for children of what a functional adult might look like – needy, narcissistic theatre isn’t exactly what one hopes for.
Now, somewhere in that classroom are kids with family/extended-family members who just happen to be gay/lesbian. Just regular, old Uncle Bill (or cousin Katie) who show up at Thanksgiving with dessert & their boyfriend/girlfriend or give books as gifts at Christmas. What must those kids be thinking when they see Mr. “I’M GAY GAY GAY ME ME ME” in class?
Such teachers (and the “KINK IS AWESOME let me SHOW YOU!” creatures in “Pride” parades) are a threat to Bill & Katie and how they will be viewed, not the least by the kids in their family.
While I agree significantly in principle, at the current time, in the current culture, especially in a public school environment, you aren’t going to find a significant number of such angels. Putting aside that it’s a huge can of worms. Again, to be clear I agree. But a lot of prep work needs to be done before that is likely to happen.
Imagining the content of that course as devised by current ‘thought leaders’ is to induce a migraine.
If all norms are truly equal
Is it possible for one to be truly fabulous and normal? Fabulosity is clearly above the normal.
Well, quite. As seen in the links upthread, and the further links therein, the message seems to be that gay equals self-absorbed Nancy with cross-dressing tendencies.
From one of the posts linked above,
And,
Which, again, isn’t what might be hoped for.
If it wasn’t clear, that was what I meant when I said (and which is included in your post):
By ‘alternative’ education I meant, alternative, progressive, ‘woke’ and so on.
So I mean, yes, sure.
In the UK at least, some have become minor legends such as Summerhill and Bedales.
I mean, I have no idea whether either of those places have, or would be happy to have, a teacher such as Mr Proctor there, but I doubt it would surprise many to discover that they did.
It could, I suppose, yes.
Though I think a major difference (at least in the UK) between the public (state) and private schools is that the former are far more likely to appeal to those with a sense of mission.
Conceited and patronising, they go not to teach, but to transform lives and whole communities.
Consequently, they are probably far more motivated to share TikTok’s of themselves.
My kids’ school (U.S., Private, silicon valley) had a Fabulous! Teacher. But her idea of Fabulous! was to arrive one morning dragging a roadkill deer, so the kids could investigate it with knives and surgical scissors.
Thanks, Molly!
I always wondered how many laws and school regulations she violated, say, averaged over a typical school year…
Within McCormick’s comments section, some of the more ingenious participants accused McCormick of being anti-gay. He denied it, and then they proceeded to say things like, So you’re against rainbows then? Or are you just against colors? So we’re supposed to avoid teaching students about colors now? Maybe you’re just afraid of rainbows.
It’s a silly argument, but it is an example of the motte and bailey argumentative style. Surely you can’t be against the teaching of colors! That would be insane!
I had thought to counter argue something like, What? Are you afraid of us filling the classroom with images of plus signs with rainbows over them and surrounded by white birds? Are you afraid of birds? Are you afraid of weather events? Should we not teach about weather? And you don’t like the signs saying, JESUS IS LORD? Are you afraid of letter j? Are you afraid of the letter e? Should we not teach the alphabet anymore because you’re afraid of letters?
I don’t even know how to respond to these people, because on one hand they’re obviously trolling with the stupidest arguments possible. But these arguments are not far from the sneaky way they manipulate the system to get their viewpoints into place.
I should just go outside and lay on a grassy hill and stare at the blue sky instead of the blue bird.
That sounds truly educational.
When I were a lad back in the 1960s male teachers made up between 25-50% of the average primary school. Nobody gave it a moments thought.
Over the next 2-3 decades said teachers, with the possible exception of physical education were as near as damn it completely eradicated from state schools. Overwhelmingly this was because of the assumption that they “weren’t safe to be around kids” unlike many women whose proclivities would make a Borgia blush.
The at the beginning of the century something changed and the men came back. Except not the middle aged geography and history geezers with their knitted ties and leather-patched jackets. These men were colourful, unconventional, uninhibited and not at all shy in advertising these facts. In fact it rapidly became their favourite subject and overriding preoccupation to the detriment of anything so conventional as actual teaching. The education establishment twisted itself into knots not to be seen as judgemental and before we knew it the freaks had established an unassailable bridgehead with zero control over their premature (to be extremely kind) proselytism.
I laughed and I’m not sorry.
I’m just going to leave this here for no reason whatsoever.
Related…
It was very very sneaky adopting the rainbow as the woke symbol. Kids love rainbows. It has for years been used on a kids show about books: “reading rainbow”. So so easy to then slip it into the children’s clothing section of target
It saddens me that the LGBTQUERTY activists have hijacked not only the rainbow but also the word “gay.”
Also related: https://stonetoss.com/comic/class-struggle/
Like pst said above, the sorts of things it is inappropriate for school-age children to see if done/worn by XX female humans are ok if XY male humans do/wear it, as long as it is in the sacred name of Inclusion, Pride, and whatever else the Rainbow Cult says we’re worshipping today.
Guess he didn’t bring enough for everybody.
Also related related…
Part the First:
Part the Second
This. I don’t know what the answer is but giving up and letting them repeat their idiocy unchallenged, unchecked has not worked. Pretending otherwise is just that. Pretending.
Snort! What are the odds?
What’s remarkable is the obviousness of the lie. If you poke through chappie’s TikTok videos, it’s clearly all about him and what he wants. The children are just a pretext, a rhetorical shield. And it seems that his peers and employers are too cowed and complicit to acknowledge the obvious dishonesty.
Because objecting to narcissistic overreach – and the use of other people’s children as a captive audience – would be “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “right-wing,” etc. And so, our self-imagined hero, our champion of the downtrodden fetishist, is triumphant and boastful: “If we’re not pissing off the homophobes, we’re not doing our jobs.”
And of course, the children are manipulated, dragged into his drama, made to browse his TikTok videos and read the comments, and made to side with him against any parent who might object.
To call it narcissism scarcely covers it.
[ Post updated. ]
When you put it like that… 😀
Well, it isn’t at all unfair, and is pretty much the nub of it. That’s who he is.
And by the way, a happy Fourth to American readers.
Not much sugar, plenty of spice here.
If only indignation could be harnessed as a power source.
Snort
[ Sprays coffee over keyboard ]
[ Passes bar-wiping cloth. ]
I wouldn’t sniff it.
“It saddens me that the LGBTQUERTY activists have hijacked not only the rainbow but also the word gay”.
Geezer. That was a long time ago.
The current development is the campaign to completely invert language towards being queer-centric so that we no longer have normal people. Rather they are to be referred to as “cis” on account of being different from the new trans norm. In their brave new world we are the freaks.
Incidentally away from government and institutions, in other words among us mere plebs, the appeal of the alphabets is considerably less than some would have us believe. Within the first few weeks of the pandemic the beloved rainbow symbol, which LGB groups had worked so hard to lay claim to, was effortlessly appropriated by the NHS. But that’s another story….
Even as a kid, I found rainbows rather disappointing. I remember actually seeing one for the first time and feeling a bit cheated. So dull and blurry relative to the happy Roy G. Biv style ones from my Sunday school paper. Damn thing only poked out twixt a slag dump and a couple of clouds. No horizon-to-horizon for me. And don’t get me started on that pot-o-gold fiasco.
Not much sugar, plenty of spice here.
Black lady historian uses the podium to accuse the conference founded by white lady historian of being racist, presumably for not giving enough prominence to black lady historians. When the white lady historian, who if I understand it is sitting on the panel on stage with her, is baited into a response that insinuates that black lady historians if anything are given too many career opportunities, maybe it’s old age (she was born in 1939) no longer being able to hide latent racism, and maybe she’s snapped after decades of having to put up with such insinuations of racism from this professional colleague. I do wish nice white lady liberals would understand that when black ladies talk about “intersectionality” they don’t have sisterly alliances and cozy chats in mind, they expect you to hand over leadership and stay silent while in “powerfully truthful speeches” they express their superiority, contempt, disgust and hostility towards you and your people.
For a moment, I thought you meant the coffee.
None dare call it grooming.
A disservice mind you, how we struggled for the last few thousand years without these luminaries in our faces is a mystery.
Band name.
Indeed.
It might well be childish, but I cannot help indulging in at least a little schadenfreude.
I mean, this is a quote from Banner, during an interview she gave in 2014, following her retirement, looking back on her career:
The website for the conference where the drama happened has a Land Acknowledgment on its landing page (“Native people have lived in what is today Santa Clara since time immemorial, a region that was known locally as Thámien … The Berkshire Conference remembers their connection to this region and gives thanks for the opportunity to meet, celebrate, and learn on their traditional homeland”).
The website for The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians describes its vision and mission respectively as:
But, apparently, the moment you get them in a room together they’re going for each other’s throats like a business* of polecats trapped in a burlap sack.
*Believe it or not, that is apparently the collective noun for a polecat.
If anyone’s learning anything from this thread, anything at all, I’m upping the price of the drinks.
I do hope you’ve memorised this new addition to the set.
Damned kids were always after those lucky charms.
Once again, we are told that the truth is racist. Even 50 years ago, lesbians and blacks enjoyed special privileged status, especially in those departments run by and for leftist ideologists. Their opinions were above criticism and their qualifications were assumed to be of the highest before any attention was paid to their actual academic accomplishments.
Would that they would walk right out of our country and never return.
Not surprising:
Women are at least as competitive as men, but instead of violence and striving for greater accomplishment they use reputation destruction and ostracism.
And women on the left strongly exhibit the Dark Triad or Dark Tetrad of negative personality traits.
Do they no longer say folx or does that mean something entirely different?
On a different kind of pride.
Thank you kind sir.
Does learning to be sparing in the ordering of drinks count?
There seems to be much less coverage of this contretemps. Would it be invidious to think the colour of the defendant might be the cause of this laxity?
The phrase “lived experience” is getting on my last nerve.
Philadelphia mass killer appears to be some sort of trans.
How about “hallucinated experience”?
Philadelphia mass killer appears to be some sort of trans.
AND melaninated … watch this slip down the memory hole as fast as the Nashville shooter.
I don’t know if this will work properly as the link is copied from an embedded twit and twitter is still banjaxed and I refuse to make an account, but the new Farcebook version of twitter – what could possibly go wrong?
Everything up to and including whether you picked your toes in Poughkeepsie.
I don’t understand why this “teacher” isn’t sanctioned.
When I did teacher training, one of the last lessons we got was on social media. We were told to preferably make all our accounts private, and never engage in conversations with students other than directly about school matters. These were liberal types telling us, not conservatives. They knew that crossing those borders leads to disaster, both ways.
Any teacher at my secondary school who encouraged students to comment on his private social media would be in the principal’s office in an instant, and told to stop it at the point of dismissal.
To allow comments relating to sexual matters would, I suspect, be an instant suspension.
This isn’t about gay or fabulousness. You just aren’t meant to discuss private matters with students.
We got a message recently from the Teachers Council, warning us not to discuss specific political parties in the upcoming general election. While there is a bit of leeway in that, it is clear that we are not meant to campaign, and that very active partisanship will be frowned upon.
Riddle-me-ree
When is an American mass shooting resulting in the deaths of five people not considered worthy of inclusion on the bbc news front page?
This is yet another unanticipated consequence of having high divorce rates.
Feeling abandoned by the adults in their life, and in the UK at least where almost nobody goes to Church anymore, a surprising number of adolescent girls will look to a teacher as a more consistent and reliable father figure.
Example:
A girl at my high school I knew well discovered at the age of 11 that her mother had been having an affair with a close family friend for several years prior.
Her parents then promptly split, her father moving out and very quickly descending into acoholism and depression.
The close family friend was, at the same time, booted out of his own marriage and took a room in a rought part of town.
More drama unfoldered when the girl’s mother discovered her lover had also been regularly seeing prostitutes. Several more months then passed until they worked out their differences at which point he finally moved in.
Before turning 13, she became sexually active and by the age of 15 she had had at least half a dozen sexual partners, one of them an adult in his late 20s.
Unable to relate to her almost permanently drunk father, unable to trust her stepfather and increasingly paranoid that he was trying to sneek glimpses of her in the shower, no longer able to confide in her mother, at the end of a class one day, she burst into tears and let it all come out to one of the science teachers, a genial older man in his late 50s.
The teacher dealt with it appropriately and responsibly and from then until she graduated she would, from time to time, ask to see him and tell him all about what had been going on in her life.
Apologies for going on so long, but the point of this example is that it was just one of literally a dozen such cases I knew of at my high school and I’m certain there were many more like this.
The worst of it is that due to a small but visible number of weak and irresponsible male teachers, those who have ended up sexually exploiting vulnerable girls (as in this notorious case here), yet another outlet for adolescent girls who feel they can no longer trust their own parents has been closed off.
You don’t have to be a feminist to see what avoidable tragedies have resulted from all this.
The phrase “lived experience” is getting on my last nerve.
This is one of those phrases that has p1ssed me off since I first heard it. If you have had the experience, it is ‘lived’, so no extra words required. If you have not ‘lived’ it In Real Life, it is hearsay.
If your ‘lived experience’ is stuff you read or were told, you’re just BSing.
It’s a fashionable way for a person to make some sweeping claim as if it were inarguable, while offering no evidence that whatever it is actually happened, or happened in the manner claimed, and while being conveniently excused from normal expectations of debate – say, being honest or coherent, and not just making shit up.
It often comes with an implicit threat that any disputation or factual correction will be taken as a personal insult, indeed a sign of bigotry, and will therefore result in lots of pouting and shrieking. And it’s typically used in a hierarchy of Designated Victim Groups – not all “lived experience,” however ostensibly harrowing, is indulged with the same deference. Nodding and affirmation generally depend on the speaker belonging to a favoured identity group.
You can imagine the kinds of people to whom it might appeal.
There’s something else to do there?
There’s something else to do there?
Popeye Doyle, French Connection reference, “picking your feet in Poughkeepsie” was something real life cop Eddie Egan would ask a subject during interrogation to throw him off. It apparently had no real meaning and was a tactic, “did you pick your feet in Poughkeepsie?” Then his partner would ask a real question about the investigation.