The Fifty Seventh Republic - the joy of bank holiday marking

[StaffRepFeistyClub]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement. Baiters, haters, goaders, and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

If you are NOT staff and just have a general education query please start your own thread.

Do not give the staffroom password to non-staff as it attracts the wrong sort of crowd.

Other requirements for staff room entry include the ability to find the staff room, the ability to find a clean mug in the staff room, knowledge of the photocopier codes, and the ability to sniff out where the booze is stashed - Thirsty Tuesdays, Fizz Fridays now in operation. Do not sit on the chairs and do wear a mask

I’d say so. But it’ll probably depend on your head.

I think I’d take double vaccination over a hall. 21 invites have gone out have gone out so we’re obviously taking another section down with us too 😂

We're allowed to do that because the ht thinks we need stabbing vaccinating.

I had jab 4 today so I'm all done

I feel like I missed something on racist edutwitter. What is going on there?! Lots of #antiracist but not really sure what that means either.

We had f2f briefing this morning. All in hall socially distant with masks. Felt OK as most of us have been vaccinated.

As one of the as-yet unvaccinated I’m not sure I’d be happy with things going ahead ‘as most are vaccinated’.

As far as I can tell on edu twitter, the progs are calling the trads racist. Things that are racist are ‘asking for evidence of racism when people you know are accused of being racist’ and ‘not calling yourself anti-racist, just not a racist and against racism’.
Paul Garvey appears to be right in the middle of it.

HercwasanEnemyofEducation
There seems to regularly be something going down on racist/antiracist edutwitter. It could be anything from people genuinely tackling racism to posters claiming that expecting students to be punctual is promoting white supremacy.

Paul Garvey appears to be right in the middle of it.
Why does that not surprise me? I could list around half a dozen people (probably all men with lots of followers) who are at the centre of 99% of edutwitter conflicts. They all seem to thrive off it.

The last bit there though noble does go back to Lehain et al demanding that anti racism be taught as a political viewpoint and that ' a counterbalance must be presented.' When he and others were asked what the opposite of anti racism was they really couldn't answer. They did open themselves up. However, to fo him credit he maintains silence in general on Twitter.

I think I might have caught something along the lines of ‘If you are calling somebody racist you should probably check their bio and see if they are a teacher’ which descended into a bun fight when it got interpreted as you can’t be racist if you are a teacher.

Paul Garvey appears to be right in the middle of it.
Eye rolls. Vile man. How do so many hang off his every word?

The spats are something else. They must spend very little time teaching because they spend so much time twitter spatting.

I need to learn more about anti racist. It sounds like something we all are but I'm guessing it's a term that's been taken over for a purpose. Sounds like there are anti anti racists out there...!

I think there’s ‘antiracist’ which has political connotations around critical race theory and ‘antiracist’ which is ‘of course I hate racism and will challenge it’.

I sometimes think that some deliberate conflation is going on in order to provoke conflict.

Given that this racism row appears to be neatly divided along prog/trad lines, I suspect this is another manifestation of the (tedious) culture war.

I really don't want to start a raging row about the new right's views on critical race theory! It's a perfectly valid theory.

It is all wrapped up in the rather sinister proclamation a while ago that schools have to teach that capitalism is great and shouldn't teach anti capitalist views (other than to deride them). I am getting increasingly worried about political interference which is being spearheaded by Gav. As he isn't busy.

Sorry, said I didn't want a row , but when you google CRT and find it is school districts in Texas and Alabama, for example, that want to ban its presence , that tells you where we are headed.

Tbh, it's an American theory.

Bit as for Paul Garvey, I very much doubt he has the first clue. He is one of those kids at school who hang with whatever is the edgy gang at the time.

In other news...

www.tes.com/news/gcses-a-levels-pay-us-horrendous-exam-work-say-teachers

Before this year, I rarely went on Twitter as usually can’t be doing with it (think it was the UsForThem nonsense to see for my own eyes) and I must say, the education tweets really are self serving in the main, aren’t they? The biggest shock for me personally is Tom Bennett. He has definitely changed (online at least) from when I trained in one of his schools, which was certainly not the behaviour utopia he alludes to! Yeah, back to not going on to Twitter much anymore!

Blooming ‘eck, Y8 wet break behaviour today. I shouted, a lot. I wasn’t even on duty but some of their form rooms are right by the library. My boss decided she wanted to join in too!

The biggest shock for me personally is Tom Bennett.

Not leeessstening. Lalalaaaaa. 🎶

Thanks staff. Sorry been away for a few days.

In answer to my previous post. We had 17 people apply for a Science job. All Biology some Psychology and PE studies.

37 for an English job. Normally get about 6 for each.

Oh there was literally ice crashing out of the sky at a 45 degree angle today here - trying to get kids to focus on Nuremburg laws rather than hang out the windows was fun. It was quite apocalyptic at one point.

@Piggywaspushed

Sorry, said I didn't want a row , but when you google CRT and find it is school districts in Texas and Alabama, for example, that want to ban its presence , that tells you where we are headed.

Tbh, it's an American theory.

I think trying to import American ideas over here into a completely different political landscape and entirely different population and history is not a great idea.

I also think groups like Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter (the specific political group, not the slogan and more general movement) are Trojan Horses for some quite out there political messages (destroy capitalism, defund the police). I think schools looking for resources about climate change or racism do need to be wary of that.

@TheHoneyBadger

Oh there was literally ice crashing out of the sky at a 45 degree angle today here - trying to get kids to focus on Nuremburg laws rather than hang out the windows was fun. It was quite apocalyptic at one point.

We had something similar here, but it was 3:40, so the kids had finished lessons. The majority of them were standing out on the playground waiting for their buses, mostly without coats. They were freezing and drenched by the time they got on their buses to go home

I'm with you Noble. I was doing a round up of USA 20's and Jim Crow Laws and kkk and how that linked in with the history of slavery and the continuing white supremacy as a legacy of that in the southern states etc etc etc. They're going to write an essay on how much life improved in that era and I want them to be able to tackle it critically and the limitations of those improvements as in who benefited from them and who didn't. The USA has a totally different history and very different wounds and very different racial politics and traumas.

That's not a 'we're not racist here' thing which an 'anti racist' or 'blm' group might denounce it as but an appeal for nuance. American politics and solutions are entirely different and whole sale importing them just doesn't fit. Do we really want to defund the police here for example? We don't have the same police state that some parts of USA feel like they live under and while we have our issues with racism and the police and our own turning points like eg. Stephen Lawrence it's very different.

My impression of anti-racism is that it wants to take an unquestioning position of white privilege and not bother to look at broader intersectionality. I've been at feminist conferences where that was the approach and it was really challenging eg. a white woman who had been in a shelter with 4 kids and then temporary accommodation before finally being housed after fleeing domestic violence, no education, no money and mental health problems being shouted down that she was privileged by a very a private school and top uni educated upper middle class black young woman and any attempts by the former to question and try to understand what privilege the latter thought she had enjoyed being slammed as racist and ignorant.

I don't think the anti racist stance has much nuance but perhaps it is a better fit in USA - I don't know having not lived there. I personally think it would be massively divisive to present it uncritically in my classrooms where people are coming from very complex backgrounds and 'black' for example is a very broad church as is white.

Hope I'm not causing disagreement or going to be called racist. We are anti racist at school and in the curriculum officially and unofficially but the capital A antiracism as I've understood from things I've read would be divisive and problematic in my classroom imo.

MsAD - fortunately it was at about 1 here and all whilst I was in one lesson so I didn't have to walk through it for changeover and it had stopped by the time I had to do bus duty!

I have lived in both countries. I think Britain is actually very racist...