Well, no one has heard from me in weeks and weeks because they've been keeping me so busy, but school is actually going well. My professors (excepting my adolescent development prof, who claims that only 34% of students in grade 12 are cognitively capable of even rudimentary abstract thought, and who should be beaten with a nerf bat) are helpful and I'm learning a lot from them. My social studies curriculum prof is especially good; from him I'm learning how to teach the stuff I actually want to teach: critical thinking, how get students to assess their values and make their own decisions, and so on. Lovely. In my english curriculum class, I've realized how much I'm going to like reading stories to my class (and especially borderline-acceptable poetry).

I got in quite the scrap in my social issues class yesterday. A whole flock of Kerrisdalian, blond, future elementary teachers got all worked up when I suggested that the phrase "discovery of the new world" was racially loaded, eurocentric, and offensive. They liked it even less when I said that presenting American (the continent) history as having started in 1492 when some Spanish guy "found" the place was perpetuating racism and social injustice. And that wasn't even the worst part.

There is now a whole flock of shiny-haired, button nosed, GUESS sweatered, smily happy carpet-song-singing types who give me evil looks whenever I pass for having the gall to suggest that we shouldn't pretend that social hierarchy doesn't exist. We were looking at an exercise in class called "flower power" where kids identify the different aspects of their socially-constructed identity and have them identify (PRIVATELY) in which aspects they are priviledged, and where they are not. The point of the exercise is to help students recognize where inequalities may exist in their relations with others.

It seems the "my shoes smell like chewing gum" crowd believe that it could be okay to have students look at how their marginalised, as long as you're careful about their self-esteem, but it's not appropriate to talk about priviledge. Claimed one girl with perfect skin and teeth, making students see where they're priviledged is unfair because it might make them uncomfortable (OMG!!) and besides they might have other problems like not being good at math, so showing them that they're priviledged is unfair. Plus, as her Loius-Vetton school-bag sporting friend pointed out, if we tell some kids that they're in socially priviledged positions, they might start running around saying they're more powerful and treating the other kids badly. Might START??

Blah. Blogger ate my last rant section, but I'll just condense it into the following: social class is based on how much money you have, not how often you go to the opera. For you to be middle class, only about half of the population can have less money than you, and fully another half must have more.

Better get back to wokr now, if I fall to behind, I might get fed to middle class chihuahuas.