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

[JerryArkansas]

It sounds as if those same fifth graders are about to get an even more informative first-hand field experience in early twenty-first century HR etiquette.

I suppose that the substitute teacher should have stuck with the mind-numbing busywork or "educational" videos that are usually their assigned province. Do people really want their public schools so regimented and rationalized that this shocks and offends them and demands a media and administrative response (that probably involves hundreds of hours of work)? What a strange code it is by which we are now expected to live.

When I was in high school my history teacher called me to the front of the class without explanation for an impromptu re-enactment of the execution of Charles I involving a yardstick. I suppose I should have called the local television station with a sob story about how horrifying and insensitive the whole ordeal was.

WTF dude, I thought you had more sense than this mess of a post.

[JerryArkansas]

It sounds as if those same fifth graders are about to get an even more informative first-hand field experience in early twenty-first century HR etiquette.

I suppose that the substitute teacher should have stuck with the mind-numbing busywork or "educational" videos that are usually their assigned province. Do people really want their public schools so regimented and rationalized that this shocks and offends them and demands a media and administrative response (that probably involves hundreds of hours of work)? What a strange code it is by which we are now expected to live.

When I was in high school my history teacher called me to the front of the class without explanation for an impromptu re-enactment of the execution of Charles I involving a yardstick. I suppose I should have called the local television station with a sob story about how horrifying and insensitive the whole ordeal was.

WTF dude, I thought you had more sense than this mess of a post.

You would prefer that we all nod sagely and take the outrage and opprobrium for granted, I assume?

There is nothing in this description that justifies the suggestion that any student will be traumatized for life, as one parent hyperbolically suggests, or even that there is an immediate need for students to seek individual counseling from a social worker.

Unless there is something else to the story, all that it tells us is that one substitute teacher made the mistake of arranging a classroom activity that made for a shocking headline out of context.

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

[JerryArkansas]

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

The original story does not claim or imply anything like that.

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The exercise was initiated by students, who "asked" their classmates to participate in their presentation.

This appears to be an example of parents indulging in melodramatics over something that did not bother any of the students involved, local media making hay over it, and national media picking up the story. It was not a middle school re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

You really want to excuse this thing don't you.  Just call it what it is and move on.

[JerryArkansas]

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

The original story does not claim or imply anything like that.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The exercise was initiated by students, who "asked" their classmates to participate in their presentation.

This appears to be an example of parents indulging in melodramatics over something that did not bother any of the students involved, local media making hay over it, and national media picking up the story. It was not a middle school re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

You really want to excuse this thing don't you.  Just call it what it is and move on.

and that is?

Deplorable, something that shouldn't occur in 2017 America.

I don't know why some are so defensive of this.  I guess growing up in the South around African Americans, I learned that you shouldn't do certain things.