To think that this teacher should be made to apologise to these students?

[EasterEggsComeAtMe]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12211691/amp/EXCLUSIVE-Mother-Year-8-pupil-scolded-gender-proud-her.html

It's an older article from July. Just came across it from a random tik tok video and listened to the whole recording on the article. Scary to think without the recording how the poor girls would've been made out to be troublesome teenagers or exaggerating most likely...

Yanbu - apologise
Yabu - don't apologise

The world has gone mad.

It seems that the girl's Mum is confused re: the gender debate, going by this quote:

'There are girls in her class and at the school who are trans and she has no problem with any of them, she calls them by their preferred pronouns and accepts them for who they are - but there are only two sexes. It's just science, you are born male or female.
'The fact that the school is shielding this young girl who identifies as a cat and reprimanding anyone who challenges that notion seems to me to be completely absurd.
‘Why on earth are 13-year-old kids being taught about gender identity anyway? They're just children. It’s not right.'
Is this about sex or gender? Or is it about a couple of girls mucking up in class, challenging a teacher and making another student cry? If they didn't agree with an aspect of the curriculum, that isn't the right way to go about it.

If it's true, the teacher's competence should be questioned.

It must be damn near impossible to be a teacher these days.

While I think she was wrong, it must be difficult to try to protect a clearly struggling child who sits in her classroom while claiming to be a cat.

At least with the trans thinking, people are still human.

A child identifying as a cat need help. It shouldn't be indulged. The child should be referred a mental health specialist.

If you listen to the recording it seems like the teacher was far more confused about sex and gender and sexuality, amoung a bunch of other things.

This wasn't kids "just mucking about in class" from the conversation the teacher had with the girls. It was about the girls refusing to accept a controversial view of identity as fact and a teacher threatening them with a loss of a place at the school for standing up for their belief that claiming a gender identity separate from your sex, or a species identity separate from your biological species is not a legitimate way to describe yourself.

I heard that the whole 'girl identifies as a cat' thing was pure BS. Maybe someone said I'm a cat, but no school ever endorsed it.
It's just trying to stir shit where there are more important things to think about regarding schooling.

@NumberTheory

If you listen to the recording it seems like the teacher was far more confused about sex and gender and sexuality, amoung a bunch of other things.

This wasn't kids "just mucking about in class" from the conversation the teacher had with the girls. It was about the girls refusing to accept a controversial view of identity as fact and a teacher threatening them with a loss of a place at the school for standing up for their belief that claiming a gender identity separate from your sex, or a species identity separate from your biological species is not a legitimate way to describe yourself.

I listened to the recording, and I don't agree. The kids, IMO, were implicitly in the wrong for shaming a classmate and questioning the teacher. "Standing up for a belief" is absolutely fine, but do it appropriately. (I will also say it isn't their belief they are standing up for - it is clearly their parents'. 13-year-olds challenging adults on beliefs and facts shouldn't be a standard to clap over.)

At no point did anyone identify as a cat .. a badly managed conversation was whipped up by the media.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/26/girl-didnt-identified-as-a-cat-post-truth-politics-media-gender-identity

Aha. That's typical. Of course they didn't, but we won't let pesky things like facts get in the way of a bit of froth.

I don’t disagree that the classmate felt shamed, since she cried I would assume she did. People who aren’t prepared for debate often feel shame when their ideas are exposed as ridiculous. 13 year olds are not going to have the best skills for challenging gently, nor the best for accepting that their ideas aren’t accepted by everyone. That’s a really tricky discussion for a teacher to lead well and one that, I would think, was inappropriate at that age without a lot of prep work.

That doesn’t make what the kids were doing “just mucking about” as you claim. They are being introduced to ideas that they find unbelievable - which isn’t surprising, since vast majority of people find the idea of being cat gender unbelievable - they challenged that. That’s not “just mucking around”, it’s engaging in learning. Questioning what you don’t understand is essential to gaining understanding They may not have the best skills to do so well, and a good teacher would hopefully be able to help the whole class develop the sort of discursive and critical thinking skills necessary to do it respectfully. This teacher didn’t attempt to do so. Given her own appalling grasp of the issues she was clearly ill prepared on the specific subject matter, but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have been able to model the skills she wanted to see from the kids instead of trying to shame them (which was spectacularly unsuccessful given she couldn’t string a coherent sentence about the ideas together) and threatening them about their place in the school.

*All this assumes there was a girl who identified as a cat and cried in class - which, if we are to believe the guardian, may not have been the case at all, in which case we are simply talking about discussing the idea of identity theory, not about kids who shamed another child.

That makes it worse doesn’t it?

If there was no child in the class identifying as a cat, then the girls were just using an example to explain their position and did not shame or otherwise directly criticise or contradict another class member. So this was simply a teacher trying to shame the girls for voicing their belief and understanding.

Urgh, kids in the UK...

How about just get on with learning stuff instead of trying to "platform your personality"

@NumberTheory

That doesn’t make what the kids were doing “just mucking about” as you claim. They are being introduced to ideas that they find unbelievable - which isn’t surprising, since vast majority of people find the idea of being cat gender unbelievable - they challenged that. That’s not “just mucking around”, it’s engaging in learning. Questioning what you don’t understand is essential to gaining understanding They may not have the best skills to do so well, and a good teacher would hopefully be able to help the whole class develop the sort of discursive and critical thinking skills necessary to do it respectfully. This teacher didn’t attempt to do so. Given her own appalling grasp of the issues she was clearly ill prepared on the specific subject matter, but that doesn’t mean she shouldn’t have been able to model the skills she wanted to see from the kids instead of trying to shame them (which was spectacularly unsuccessful given she couldn’t string a coherent sentence about the ideas together) and threatening them about their place in the school.

This approach would make being a teacher quite difficult, and the classroom the Lord of the Flies. I agree, though, these types of skills are essential for students to develop - in the appropriate environments and when the teacher determines. In a classroom, students shouldn't speak whenever they feel like it.

We don’t know what happened in the classroom. The recording is the discussion where they were held back after class and told off - not for speaking out of turn but for saying something the teacher disagreed with.

Jon Roson thoroughly debunks the ' cat litter boxes in classrooms' conspiracy. The 'it's soooo crazy how we've been captured by the woke agenda/kids identify as cats and teachers defend it' trope is closely related. If your not holding a huge amount of scepticism about the details of this story you should be.

But you didn't let that fact get in the way of your previous frothy comments about shaming a classmate.

It doesn’t matter your beliefs on gender or whether what they’re saying is true - they’ve upset someone. The teacher handled this wrong - in that she focussed on the debate and the discussion - rather than the fact that they’ve hurt someone’s feelings.

i don’t agree with the teachers views on gender, but the girls have upset someone with what they’ve said.

i had Muslim children in my class being homophobic. I said: “i will not allow you to use being Muslim as a way of saying homophobic things. Being a Muslim doesn’t mean you can upset someone.” I then had to have an investigation into whether or not I was racist. I was actually brought up Muslim in the first place. I should also add at no point in the lesson were we discussing homosexuality. I’m a performing arts teacher and we were learning to play ode to joy on the piano.

being a teacher is so hard right now - I didn’t listen to the entire discussion - but these girls have clearly made someone upset and if you care more about their beliefs about gender than other peoples genders (specifically when there’s no danger - like a public place where everybody’s minding their own business) then I think there’s bigger problems.

who recorded the teacher? Why is it recorded?

Do you think it was an appropriate way for the teacher to talk to them even if they had said something offensive?

The article clearly states it was recorded by one of the girls being spoken to by the teacher. The implication is that they didn’t think anyone would believe them if they reported the incident without evidence. Given the mother says she didn’t believe them until she heard the recording that’s probably not unfounded.

The cat litter thing was on an entirely different continent.

The veracity of the recording in this incident, on the other hand, is not in doubt. Rye College has apologised to parents for the way they handled incident which they describe as unlike the normal way the subject is handled.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jul/13/school-in-cat-pupil-controversy-given-ofsted-all-clear-after-snap-inspection
No idea if the teacher responsible apologised to the kids she berated, though.

Having listened to the video, I think the teacher was a bit aggressive in pushing her views about gender identity . A reflective conversation would have been a better educational approach.
But no - i don’t think the teacher needs to apologise. I’m sure teachers all have moments when they have been driven to distraction by an unruly class.

This was discussed to death at the time, and used as an example of how the world has gone mad and children are identifying as cats. Which is not what happened.

YABU unreasonable to raise it again months later.

Problem nowadays is people seem to have lost the ability to say no.
No you not a cat. Now get to school and stop being ridiculous
Oh and don't bring any dead mice home either 🤣🤣🤣

@Underthinker

But you didn't let that fact get in the way of your previous frothy comments about shaming a classmate.

Even without searching the its history - and I admittedly should have done - It was clear to me there was something wrong with the story as it was told in the Daily Mail. Thus my comments.

@Arbor
There is a trend of children identifying as animals. There have been threads of parents talking about it here, and I know a teacher who has one in their year group. So even if it didn't happen it that school, it does happen.

But the point of the story really is how the teacher yelled at the kids for not agreeing with her own [false] beliefs. That the cat kid was hypothetical in this example is a mistaken assumption on the part of the Mail, who should have fact checked, but not the most important thing here.

Gender identity does not have a scientific basis, it is a belief system that should be respected in the same way that other belief systems, such as religion are

Nobody should be compelled to accept someone elses belief system and that was what the teacher was doing here. Having gender critical beliefs is a legitimate position that also deserves respect, as long as expressing those beliefs don't amount to harrassing anyone.

The teacher was also woefully uneducated on the subject 'There are three sexes, male, female and intersex' No there most certainly isn't. There are differences in sexual development, but only 2 sexes. To be saying that in an educational setting is quite astonishing