Reheated (135)

“I’m a Starbucks barista at a drive-through,” says they. “I’ve de-escalated situations with people with guns… I’ve cooled shit down faster and better than a cop could.”

Readers are welcome to share clips of lively scenes to test this rather boastful hypothesis. It would, I think, have the makings of a compelling reality TV show. With preening, mouthy woke-lings encountering the realities they’ve so carefully ignored.

The subsequent tears and meltdowns could constitute a drinking game.

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.”

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.

So, to recap. Students must now be forewarned that Macbeth, a somewhat well-known tale of murder, includes scenes of blood and guilt – sorry, “psychological trauma.” And that Romeo and Juliet, one of the most famous tragedies in all of literature, contains, er, tragedy.

The modern sensibility, then, the approved outlook on things, is one in which we are to view cross-dressing perverts striding into schoolgirls’ changing rooms as in no way provocative or untoward, and regarding which one mustn’t bat an eye, while simultaneously trembling at the prospect of Shakespeare’s The Tempest containing dramatic approximations of bad weather.

A mindset in which almost any dramatic work that predates Instagram must now come with spoilers. Which does rather appear to defeat the object.

Says Ms Auken, “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.” All these things, these beastly capitalist products, would be “free.”

And not yours.