Substitute Teacher Goes Rogue, Conducts "Mock Slave Auction" at NJ School

[pbrower2a]

If you want to keep doing substitute teaching, you don't rock the boat. You try to get students to generally like you. My goal is of a normal day, The last thing I would want to do is to create trauma. A slave auction? To do worse I would have to simulate a "selection" at a Nazi concentration camp. I question whether any K-12 teacher could ever  pull such a stunt and get away with it.    but I can deal with a little drama. My proudest moment came from talking a kid in a high-school special education class out of dropping out of school. I establish high standards of achievement. 

I've been one, and I may be again... I have taught every grade level (although I don't relate well to K-3 levels because I don't remember what I was like at such age, I don't ask for it) and every subject.

I have had to deal with ethnicity, and some black kids have accused me of asking them to act white. "Act white? No. There are plenty of white losers. White people use more drugs, use worse drugs, get away with them longer, and do worse things because of their worse drug use. You do not want to act like THOSE white people. I'm asking you to act... like Chinese-Americans".

I'm a white guy. I also recognize that the only chance out of poverty or even from slipping into poverty is a solid K-12 education. I would make it more rigorous if I had a chance. So far as I can understand, most people so desire whatever their ethnicity. 

Truth be told, there is a large black middle class, and it lives well enough that it has no cause to envy white people on the whole. If one is a white racist, then this is Enemy #1 -- black people who really can entice white people to marry into their group and have 'mixed' children. 

Should the Atlantic slave trade be brought up, I have no qualms about comparing it to the Holocaust. The death tolls are similar in magnitude, and both involved enslavement, the penultimate degradation of people. Only outright murder is arguably worse, and of that I am not sure. It seems obvious enough that cruelty and the desire to exploit cause most of the evil in our world.   

[pbrower2a]

I would never believe myself able to conduct such a classroom exercise. I would ask for an alternative. This is for the experts.

I made very clear that I could not do sex education. Just too many things can go wrong. As far as I would go if asked would be to have a discussion of the physiology of reproduction in the most clinical terms -- and in the end say that before marriage, chastity is best and be careful about whom you marry.