Category: ZT & PC

In an attempt to get bridge recognized as an Olympic Sport, the World Federation of Bridge is imposing Olympic-style rules on its competitions. Thus it has stripped the silver medalist from a recent championship of her prize for refusing a drug test.

I swear, folks, sometimes you just can’t make up stuff this stupid.

(via BoingBoing)

Well, if you put your ear up to the monitor, you’ll know.

A teacher wanted to increase her students’ vocabulary. Bully for her. Our vocabulary binds our ability to express thought, and in many ways binds our thought itself. The more words you know and can use, the more nuances of language you can control, the better you can think and the better you can pass that thought on to others.

The teacher, unfortunately made a grave error. She forgot that there are stupid people out there.

People who can’t use a dictionary.

People who think that because a word sounds vaguely like another word, they must mean the same thing, or at least should be treated that way.

People who could use a frickin’ vocabulary lesson themselves.

The word? “Niggardly.” It means stingy, ungenerous, scanty.

That you’ve already figured out where this is going is probably a bad sign. one parent of one of the fourth-graders had a conniption.

Although the word means stingy, Akwana Walker said it was inappropriate to use it because it sounds similar to a racial slur. She said she doesn’t think fourth-graders can distinguish between the two words.

“My daughter told me what that word was, and I told her not to complete that part of her homework,” said Ms. Walker, who is black.

The teacher, under direction from her principal, has apologized. The kids have learned that it’s not enough not to use bad words, but you shouldn’t use words that sound like bad words (like “buck” or “sit” or “punt”). And, of course, they’ve learned that you can claim to be offended and get everyone in the world to fall all over themselves apologizing and taking corrective action.

The student has been moved to another class. The teacher has issued a public apology, and has promised never to use the word again in class. A counsellor will speak with the students.

Ms. Walker wants the teacher fired. Ridiculous? Not given how the district has already caved on the matter.

Norm Shearin, deputy superintendent for the New Hanover County Schools, said Friday the principal is dealing with the situation.

“Our position is that it was an inappropriate action in terms of using that word at that grade level, in that context,” he said. “… It was a bad choice.”

(via VotC)

Here’s a chilling charming tale, a follow-up to an earlier story, about a high school honors student who, in moving his grandmother to an assisted living facility, inadvertenly left a non-serrated bread knife in the back of his pick-up. Hilarity, and explusion for a full year, ensued.

Still, Buinger had to admit–zero-tolerance rules made life easier. They eased the burden. By applying consistency instead of subjective judgment, you had support for your actions rather than claims of discrimination. If Jim Short disregarded the Taylor Hess case and six months later a different principal responded another way with, say, a Latino student, you would surely hear cries about prejudice.
That, above all, was why Short’s supervisors wanted firm formulas. Their school district was in transition, undergoing “a change in demographics.” It was one-third minority now, mostly Latino. There was a distinct and growing gap between poorer and more affluent students. For people to have faith in the school system, they had to believe everyone was being treated equally.
Deep down, despite his unease, Jim Short agreed. He had to admit: He derived a certain comfort in not having discretion. He could lean on that. He could then say he followed the formula.

Yeah, because “follow the formula” is what we really want our kids to learn.

Gutless bastards.

What’s really scary about this is that it took a a well-liked kid with spotless record, a dedicated family, a lawyer, and intense national press scrutiny to get the district to sorta-kinda-waive their inflexible, draconian rules. If any of those steps had been missing, what would have been the outcome? If the kid hadn’t been straight-A, if the parents hadn’t been able to afford a lawyer, if the press hadn’t been alerted, or were burned-out by similar cases, what would have happened?

The latest craze amongs radical vegans? Decrying the evil of honey, which, as everyone knows, is produced by the labor of “oppressed” worker bees.

That they are oppressed by their own quisling queens is beside the point, of course.

I’ve always enjoyed honey. The biggest thing it has going against it is its tendency to drip everywhere and get everything sticky, which drives me nuts.

Although “nuts” is evidently a relative term these days.

(Via Blogatelle)

A British theater company has dropped the term “hunchback” from its production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Oddsocks Productions has renamed its touring production “The Bellringer of Notre Dame” after discussions with a disability adviser raised the possibility of offending people with spina bifida or the disfiguring scoliosis of the spine.
“We have not changed the novel in any way, we simply felt changing the title would cause less offence of people,” producer Elli Mackenzie was quoted as saying by the Daily Mirror.

Except all those bellringers, of course.

The 4-H in West Virginia is in trouble with the Feds because they have, for years, used Indian themes at their summer camps, including face painting, tipi building, totem poles, and war whoops.

This is, of course, clearly racist. Clearly.

Can’t wait for someone to launch an investigation into the Boy Scouts over this sort of thing.

UPDATE: Sanity may prevail.

I was awfully worried that nearby Dry Creek Elementary might win the Nutty School Administrator Award of the Quarter for punishing kids playing “Army and Aliens” during recess (since it involved the verboten practice of “shooting” finger guns).

I should have rested easy that my old home state of California would pick up the slack, as they have at Santa Monica’s Franklin Elementary, where the principal has banned tag — but only during recess.

The problem, it seems, is that being declared “It” can be very damaging to a child’s self-esteem, especially when it’s done in social, not controlled/pedagogical fashion. Older, bigger kids often dominate the game, and thus impose the outcast-causing “It”/”victim” status on smaller, younger, weaker kids (clearly reenacting the anthropological ostracization of the “Other”).

Said younger, weaker kids, their self-esteem crushed, internalize this lesson of the strong being able to dominate the weak, and perpetuate this madness upon succeeding generations of children.

War, domestic abuse, and the Paternalistic Theocracy ensue. Civilization collapses shortly thereafter.

By moving chase games into the realm of PE, with proper supervision by socially sensitive educators, the children can be taught … well, I guess they can be taught to not run faster than other children, to tag gently with only two fingers between the shoulder-blades (but not below the waist or on the head), and to bounce their ball in an eerily synchronized fashion when playing after school

The other Horrific Justification for the restriction is that kids playing tag and other chase games sometimes don’t watch where they were going and, lacking sufficient recess supervision (or State-Approved Padding Apparatus and Shock Collars), occasionally run into other kids, causing (gasp) injuries.

According to the article, over the last year there have been two concussions and a couple of broken bones (and untold psyche-shattering bruises, scrapes and bumps), ostensibly due to tag and other chase games.

This will, of course, be resolved by playing tag solely in PE, since the kids will be restricted to walking, and will be enclosed in giant plexiglass bubbles, with 5-point restraints and air bags.

Sheesh.

I’m fascinated by language — by how we use it, by how it shapes us, by how we shape it.

If unconscious use of language is interesting, so, too, is the conscious effort of individuals to change and manipulate language, whether in advertising or propaganda, or in declaring certain euphemisms to be approved, and other terms to be forbidden.

Which makes this review of Randall Kennedy’s Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word fascinating, almost enough for me to add the book to my Wish List. Kennedy’s description of the history of the word, from neutral description to vile epithet and up to the modern acceptable usage within certain African-American circles, sounds extremely interesting — as has been the firestorm surrounding the book, by the mere fact that it uses That Word in the title.

That word is one that I do not believe I have ever used, except perhaps in relation to an ethnic joke (and then rarely, back in the days when The Italian-American Joke Book drew guffaws, not law suits). It’s a word I did hear sometimes, growing up, but not a word I hear any more in my acquaintances, certainly not as the “paradigmatic” racial slur that Kennedy describes — a word that a many vocal people believe should be forcibly stamped out of the language.

Interesting stuff.

But just to show how potentially sensitive a subject this is, even though it’s a frickin’ book title, I still used the embed-a-comment-inside-the-word HTML coding trick on The Word inside the title. That’s one Google search term (not to mention corporate web content filter) I’m not interested in showing up on.

USS Clueless discusses how population shifts are rendering politically correct terminology factually incorrect.

The New York State Regents exam, which is required for all high school students in order to graduate, includes essay questions based on excerpts from literature.

Sort of. It turns out the Regents Board has been sanitizing the excerpts, running the text contents through “sensitivity” standards. Any references to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity, or anything that might “offend” somebody were changed or removed.

The State Education Dept. says it did not want any student to feel ill at ease during the test.

The modifications to the passages ranged widely. In the Chekhov story “The Upheaval,” the exam takes out the portion in which a wealthy woman looking for a missing brooch strip-searches all of the house’s staff members. Students are then asked to use the story to write an essay on the meaning of human dignity.
A paragraph in John Holt’s “Learning All the Time” is truncated to eliminate some of the reasons Suzuki violin instruction differs in Japan and the United States, apparently not to offend anyone who might find the particulars somehow insulting. Students are nonetheless then asked to answer questions about those differences.
Certain revisions bordered on the absurd. In a speech by Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, in addition to deletions about the United States’ unpaid debt to the United Nations, any mention of wine and drinking was removed. Instead of praising “fine California wine and seafood,” he ends up praising “fine California seafood.” In Carol Saline’s “Mothers and Daughters” a daughter no longer says she “went out to a bar” with her mother; on the Regents, they simply “went out.”
In an excerpt from “Barrio Boy,” by Ernesto Galarza (whose name was misspelled on the exam as Gallarzo), a “gringo lady” becomes an “American lady.” A boy described as “skinny” became “thin,” while another boy who was “fat” became “heavy,” adjectives the state deemed less insulting.

There is no indication on the tests that the texts have been abridged, altered, or otherwise are not exactly as written.

Now, it is certainly the prerogative of the NY State Education Board to present “sensitive” texts to teens taking the tests. A silly prerogative, perhaps, but still, they’re the ones putting the test together.

What has me scratching my head, though, is why, if the contemporary literature and writings that are chosen there are so many things that need to be removed (since, damn, it’s probably pretty tough to find any sort of lit that has no references to anything that someone might take offense to), why they bother actually choosing “real” examples, rather than simply making up something blandly acceptable on their own?

Granted, that might require some imagination.

“We do shorten the passages and alter the passages to make them suitable for testing situations.” The changes are made to satisfy the sensitivity guidelines the department uses, so no student will be “uncomfortable in a testing situation,” she said. “Even the most wonderful writers don’t write literature for children to take on a test.”

Then why bother to use such “wonderful writers”? Why not note that the text has been abridged?

I can understand not wanting to add any more stress than a test necessarily carries with it. And I can understand the justification (unstated) that the last thing the Board wants is some parent suing to have Junior’s failure nullified because he was upset over the use of the word “stupid” in one of the essays.

But, come on, people. Again, if it’s that big of a deal, craft your own damned “literature” and test off of that. Otherwise, if it was good enough to teach from, it’s good enough to test from. And if it’s not, it’s not.

The California state Assembly has defeated a bill that would have banned Native American team names from public schools.

Said the sponsor of the bill, Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, “I think what we’re really seeing is the idea of, ‘My school mascot right or wrong,’ is more important than whether it’s humiliating a group of people.”

In reality, most of the objections seemed to be, reasonably, that this was a matter for local communities to decide, rather than political correctness being imposed from above.

Kids still can’t “shoot” each other — or imaginary aliens — with pointed finger “guns” at Dry Creek Elementary, but at least if they do, they won’t be questioned about whether their family owns any fire-arms.

Of course the inanity of disciplining children for finger-guns in the first place goes unaddressed.