Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Teachers’

Even if I don’t always approve, I generally understand the things Los Angeles Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa does. This time around, it’s neither. This fool is trippin’.

In a recent statement, he’s excoriated some teachers at a South Los Angeles elementary school for encouraging some of their students to celebrate O.J. Simpson, Dennis Rodman, and RuPaul at a Black History Month event.

“I am shocked and outraged by the actions of these teachers at Wadsworth Elementary School,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “These teachers undermined the school’s well-intentioned celebration, and they did so at the expense of elementary school students. Their actions were not only cynical, but did a terrible disservice to the students.

Apparently while “other students were carrying pictures of President Obama and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,” these kids were displaying pictures of their heroes.

The outrage seems pretty universal. The superintendent of schools, “community leaders,” and a bunch of organizations have spoken out against the teachers’ behavior. They’ve been suspended without pay and, from the looks of it, they’re going to get canned. At least that’s how it always seems to go with these kinds of things.

But this is straight-up bullshit.

Among the many problems with the way we educate kids these days is that we reward them for giving us the obvious-ass choice for things. We feed them the conventional answers and expect them to parrot the shit back to us. If anyone should disrupt that process, we come down on them like Australians on a bucket of chicken. Kids go to the retarded class and teachers get fired.

NBA Rebound, Defense, and Hustle King, Dennis "the Worm" Rodman

The way I see it, Barack Obama and MLK don’t need any more recognition. One of them already has a national holiday that kids get off of school. The other guy has a Nobel-fucking-Prize and is on TV every day.

I wouldn’t want my various kids learning the over-simplified, sterilized shit it took me years to purge out of my system: Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, “Indians” and Pilgrims got along just fine, and Abraham Lincoln “freed” the slaves.

These kids are learning a valuable lesson: life is messy and complicated. O.J. Simpson, Dennis “the Worm” Rodman, and RuPaul may not be a conventional heroes, but they’re real.