Teacher Warren Smith’s deconstruction of accusations towards J K Rowling

[Dervel]

In case anyone has not seen this I thought you guys might find this worth a watch.

If they hadn't voiced their views across all these years, it's quite likely they would never have been heard. Critical thinking skills requires data to inform it.
If JKRowling hadn't put her view across, that conversation with the student could never have happened.

It can seem tedious to any of us who have been schooled by our parents, friends, culture, education system to think things through and question our own and others assumptions. Unfortunately there is a lot of this lacking around the Western world at the moment, especially with the nature of short soundbites on social media - people seem to have outsourced their thinking.

Tedious to many, but revelatory to those who haven't ever been challenged to methodically think through their assumptions and biases.

I am sure that many of us came to critique Gender Ideology because we thought "I am missing something? This seems nonsensical" and after doing research and hearing both sides came to the conclusion "apparently I was right all along, it's based on absolutely nothing except wishful thinking". But we did take the time to analyze our thought process, because there was a default position that was very popular and being promoted far and wide.

His job as a teacher is to improve critical thinking not to promote gender critical ideology.

So he did really well at that. He did his job.

Yes, he did. If only more teachers were teaching their students HOW to think rather than WHAT to think.

"Critical thinking skills requires data to inform it.
If JKRowling hadn't put her view across, that conversation with the student could never have happened."

This is where I think I diverge from your reading of this video, @Joleyne.

(Obviously if JKR hadn't tweeted what she did, it would not be possible to analyse the tweet).

But critical thinking requires logic, not data. He was helping that student to analyse and appraise IF what JKR had actually said was in fact transphobic, rather than simply agreeing with it. His logical thought process did not rely on anyone else's thoughts/data, and could be applied to anyone's statement on any subject. I'm just happy the student chose to bring up this one - more sunlight!

ho hum

JFC...

It's easy for my middle-aged corporate trained self to point out that you shouldn't house personal stuff on your work computer, but he lost a book he was writing and he's right to be worried about his financials...he's young, so lesson learned on that topic.

But he's absolutely right to be angry about the loss of his job because, well, sounds like he defended a witch. Off with his head!

My god, what a nightmare, poor bloke! Hope he is able to challenge this in some way, he looks shattered right now though, unsurprisingly