But Paying Attention Is Hard
Toni Airaksinen pokes a stick at some contrived agonising:
This “intellectual trauma” is, you’ll be shocked to hear, entirely the fault of “whiteness” and “heteromasculinity.”
As we’re in the realm of the excruciatingly woke, the terms violence and trauma are of course misused and deliberately misleading.
The supposed violence and trauma, then, is actually an attempt to excuse rates of classroom misbehaviour among black students.
Throughout the paper in question, the term “brilliance” is deployed no fewer than seventeen times, as if it were some obviously inherent, pre-existing attribute – of students who can’t be arsed to study, who don’t pay attention in class, and whose grades, as a result, leave much to be desired.
Even more frequent is use of the term “whiteness,” an alleged phenomenon on which the paper is premised. Though readers in search of some clear and convincing definition, or some compelling evidence of its existence, may find their hopes dashed. We are, however, assured that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”
And furthermore,
Saturated, you hear. Positively dripping with the stuff.
So, to paraphrase our fretful educators: Among these allegedly downtrodden and traumatised minority students, expectations of promptness and accuracy, of arriving at correct and verifiable answers, and handing work in on time, are alien things. Instead, it seems, we get lots of loud and goofy behaviour. Thereby disrupting attempts to learn by other, more conscientious students.
And which, it has to be said, isn’t entirely flattering of the drama’s supposed victims, or an obvious basis for sympathy, even pretentious sympathy. Nor is it an obvious footing for some sweeping, de-whitened reinvention of how mathematical knowledge might be imparted. All conjured into being at the expense of those more diligent and whose classroom behaviour isn’t selfish and disruptive.
Well, again, if a student doesn’t feel obliged to do the work, to learn, or to hand in said work by a given deadline, like everyone else, and instead spends class time pissing about, loudly, then being unwelcome seems an inevitable consequence of those choices.
And constructing elaborate, question-begging excuses for such behaviour, as if these inadequacies were somehow proof of obscured “brilliance,” things to which one should defer, and actively affirm, doesn’t strike me as a convincing, long-term solution. Indeed, it sounds rather… what’s the word? Oh yes, toxic.
Readers will note how any feelings of incompetence and not being welcome are immediately blamed on external causes, on some ectoplasmic “whiteness,” that Befouler Of All Things. As if such feelings had nothing whatsoever to do with the choices and behaviour, and the personal shortcomings, of the students themselves.
Instead, Dr Jasien and her colleagues expect the teaching of mathematics to be driven by the goal of “healing… intellectual trauma,” by paying “attention to the minds and bodies of students.” The students being, it seems, much less obliged to pay attention to anything beyond themselves.
And so, we’re told that “exclamations” and “cacophony” are “to be both expected and valued.” Because when you picture a maths classroom and people getting to grips with differential equations or vector calculus, the first thing that springs to mind is the word cacophony.
Update, via the comments:
As so, with eye-widening obliviousness, those who claim to champion certain supposedly downtrodden demographics do a disservice to those same demographics.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before, of course:
Hardness and stiffness. And we can’t have any of that beastliness in the minds of people who may one day be working on projects involving cranes and scaffolding. According to Dr Donna Riley, whose words glow above, academic rigour and the expectation of competence are “exclusionary” and tools of “privilege,” and are unfair to women and minorities, for whom rigour and competence are presumably impossible.
Dr Riley goes on to inform us that engineers need to spend less time doing load-bearing calculations, and more time pondering “radical protest” and “Marxist traditions.” Yes, the design and construction of fighter jets, oil rigs and 1000-tonne tunnelling machines will one day be informed not by careful calculation, or a knowledge of materials and thoroughly tested principles, but by criticality, reflexivity, and “other ways of being.”
Update 2:
Regarding Dr Jasien and her colleagues, Aelfheld adds,
Ah, but, you see, Our Betters will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.
I’m reminded, for instance, of assistant professor of art education, Dr Albert Stabler, who regards objections to being assaulted in class as “white supremacist violence” – because objecting to violence is violence now – while excusing a near-continual disruption of lessons as displays of “cultural knowledge” and “kinetic” creativity. A creativity that includes vandalism, punching staff, and forcibly cutting the hair of female teachers.
On grounds that expecting even minimally civilised behaviour is “the overvaluation of white feelings,” and therefore “racist.”
And note that those peddling this worldview, this poisonous counsel, can get quite annoyed when minority students don’t want to play along.
Update 3:
Regarding Dr Jasien’s insistence that the rest of us embrace the value of gratuitous, unending, rather loud background noise, Finno adds,
It’s hard to see the mannered outpourings of Dr Jasien and her colleagues as anything other than a perverse, contrived inversion, in which those inflicting the disruption and “cacophony” on others are to be pampered and indulged, as if they were the victims of their own self-inflicted drama – around whom, all else must be made to revolve. Their selfishness, their disregard for others, is something to be affirmed and championed, it seems.
Because magic blackness.
And this is advanced as obviously desirable, an unassailable course of action. As “social justice.” As if it imposed no cost on others, over and over again. But I suspect that my attempts to master multivariate calculus would be somewhat impaired, or made entirely impossible, by lots of nearby shrieking and general arsing about.
Oh, and see also this, in which Ms Xochitl Gonzalez, a columnist for the Atlantic – and who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is – is mystified and annoyed by people who don’t appreciate loud hip-hop in a university library. Where other people, better people, are trying to study for exams.
Via CavScoutCoastie.
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[ Chops lime. ]
This is hilarious. Mostly because it appears that the sign-language interpreter guy repeats what the street heckler is saying.
[ Slurps gin and tonic. ]
Unfortunately…or not…you probably need a Facebook account to see this advert but…this has gotta be the (literally) gayest rugby promotion ever. Though perhaps rugby is all gay now? Seriously. If you are trying to sell rugby to an American market, a Trump Golden Era America market…well…Swishy Sharks ain’t gonna do it.
This utter horseshit is just one of a thousand reasons why I stopped teaching math and became a truck driver.
A racist! incident in the town where I used to live. I can almost guarn-damn-tee you that this is a Smolletization. Yet if you read through the reactions of people in the community there (the mayor is a real piece of work as I recall), everyone is shocked! Shocked! Yet not one single thought that maybe, just maaaaaybe, this might be a faked hate crime. Conveniently occurring just before the museum was set to open. Oh, my!
You’ve also got all the people who aren’t injured or killed for daring to be between the criminal and their unlawful spoils. Or the people who can actually get any fruit at all because the young fruit seller humped a few crates to somewhere they can get to.
Instead we get “Don’t you dare think about stopping people from throwing stones at windows! Think of the glaziers!”
Mind, it’s easy to see how government ‘workers’ get confused when their entire livelihood involves taking money from taxpayers and giving it to someone else.
I prefer to think of the Jack Hawkins movie.
Oh dear lord. Sorry but in modern times most people/ male or female/ change their careers at least once. What you did at 25 may not be what you want to do at 45 or 55. The hotshot surgeon at 35 may want to teach by 55.
The pro-basketball player at 22 may quit at 27 and teach elementary school for the rest of their life because all that time/expense/energy at making the pros isn’t worth the time on the road. <—not a hypothetical. Look up Dave Meyers (I went to high school with him).
NO one can predict what any individual is going to do with whatever education/training they get. If they are the most talented at “X”, it is entirely unfair to not allow them to pursue “X” because someone else that looks like them dropped out, or died of cancer, or was hit by a bus and died.
Some people find their dream career at 20, some at 45. If they’re good, stop blocking individuals based on how you think the GROUP behaves.
I did, hon. 4 daughters, I was a SAHM for 17 years. Re-entered the workforce when youngest was in middle school. Had a whole other career that I retired from in 2020. And still my proudest acheivement is my daughters growing into serious, competent women in successful marriages and five thriving grandkids (the two oldest are active Navy).
AWFLs are the result of Marxist feminism promulgated by people like Betty Friedan who used feminism as compensation for her own failure at marriage and kids.
And whatever group of AWFLs or their more melaninated sisters is lurking about, that doesn’t excuse not dealing with individuals AS individuals.
Put some ice on it, son.
Yes, yes. Not All Women Are Like That. This isolated exception completely disproves a widely observable pattern.
Great! So I can choose to hire only men for my engineering startup then without suffering any legal consequences whatsoever? Oh, I can’t? Curious, that.
I’ve mentioned before my freshman Chemical Engineering class. Only 60 seats, incredibly hard to get into. Of the 12 women in the class in first year, only three were left by second. The rest took their free year of tuition and then transferred to easier programs. Leaving nine less engineers graduating that year.
I once had a co-worker storm out of the office, swearing a blue streak, because I pointed out that in rural areas where a fire isn’t likely to spread beyond a single farmstead and fire departments are largely volunteer-only, that private fire fighting/insurance was an entirely reasonable option. And that expecting private firefighters to risk their lives when you hadn’t paid them was a bit unfair.
My annual ethics-in-international-business training videos are so diverse that the unfortunate implication is that only brown people in brown people countries commit bribery.
Social shaming only works as long as men still give a shit about your dis/approval. Read the room.
In which Darleen either pretends to not understand statistics, or actually doesn’t. Thinking she can gaslight me into not noticing that women’s lower average career earnings and hours worked are because they, on average, put their degrees to less use than men and choose less-demanding professions than men, and work fewer hours per week than men.
Most places would prefer to hire a men for an important position, not a woman who might get pregnant and ding the company for an expensive maternity leave, then only come back part time. But women demand special consideration for their significantly less-attractive hiring profile.
You can’t afford to “treat people as individuals” when you make societal judgments about large numbers of women. Did you know insurance companies don’t treat everyone as individuals when calculating risk pools? “Oh, it would be wrong of me to charge this 16-year-old boy who’s a new driver more for insurance than 45-year-old women who statistically have far fewer accidents! After all, I know nothing about him individually!” said no insurance analyst ever.
Don’t attribute something to me that I’ve never said, dude. In fact, I’ve pointed stuff like this out time and again when Marxists insist on the nonsense stat of “women earn 78 cents on the dollar to men”.
And I’ll say again SO WHAT? Employment decisions should never be made on some f**king GROUP stat. And a smart business owner hires the best for the job at hand … and taking a brilliant woman on her second career or a brilliant man on his third is up to THEM, not some sniveling collectivist using group stats to deny jobs to people who change their minds between the ages of 22 and 72.
That’s called freedom of association. An American principle you seem unfamiliar with.
Your knee-jerk Marxism is noted, dude. I’d say go eff yourself, but I doubt you have anything of significance to grab onto.
Don’t care. If you think I support anti-discrimination laws, I have enough writing online that you can easily find something to support your risible claim. Knock yourself out.
But I’ll repeat to you what my own late father said that *I* repeated as a 16 y/o to a racist teacher who was brow beating a class about how we white kids were living on stolen Mexican land (So.Cal) and irredeemably racist because “Mexican-Americans being under-employed by white business owners.
The teacher had no answer for me except a derisive “well, yeah, maybe your dad would hire me, but he wouldn’t have me over the house for dinner.” This was the late 60s and it’s something that really impressed on me the basic covetousness and dishonesty of the racial/sex spoils ilk.
Any HONEST employer hires the best individual. Making decisions via sex or race as the primary condition of rejection is downright stupid.
Are you this stupid, hon? That you would reject out of hand an engineer just because of what’s between her legs instead of what’s between her ears?
Hmmmm…
A slightly different perspective: In my two-semester freshman physics and chemistry class, half the students of both sexes were gone by the end of the first year. (The class was intentionally tough for two reasons: To prepare students as much as possible for more advanced classes, and to weed out those who did not have what it takes for physics and chemistry majors.)
Gregory Benford weighs in:
If women tend to be much less interested in the intense commitment that some professions require for high achievement, then it is reasonable for those who mentor newcomers to entertain doubts about the payoff of the time they spend mentoring.
Such doubts are not rare, although I can only recall one professional who was actually hostile to women entering his profession and I believe that was because he simply disliked women in any context or setting.
Again, it’s back to negotiation between the employer and employee. If a lawfirm wants 80 hour weeks and time devoted to billable hours, then they are going to lose talent, male or female.
When my stepson was in law school, he spent two summers interning at my DA office. He worked with and was mentored by several brilliant attorneys, many of whom came from business law firms. They loved practicing law but felt exploited by some of these firms because – despite great salaries and a path to eventual partnership in the firm – the hours worked and demands placed screwed with time with family and even their own interests. Getting back time was much more valuable to them than a high salary and no life.
Agreed!
I don’t know much about the legal profession, but I do get the impression that partners are generally expected to put in huge hours.
The STEM fields are similar, especially for grads and post-grads and anyone who does not yet have tenure: Long hours doing and publishing research. The fields select for people who are by interest and temperament are motivated to work those long hours.
There is an old joke about physicists getting married so that they don’t have to spend time dating.
There is another old joke about a physicist in the mall, browsing a bookstore while his wife shops for clothes. He gets to talking with a beautiful woman who invites him back to her place where they sex. Afterwards, he feels horribly guilty and runs home to apologize to his wife. She angrily replies, “You’re lying! You were in the lab!“