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The Demoralization of the American Teacher Shane Trotter Shane Trotter

https://quillette.com/2021/11/03/the-demoralization-of-the-american-teacher/

Ten years ago, I showed up for my first day as a high school teacher. I had landed a job in the best school of what is often called a “destination district.” Still, I knew I was facing an uphill battle. Warnings abounded of an American public school system in decline. But I was undeterred. I had that youthful sense that education needed change and I was just the one to change it.

Throughout that first year I worked incessantly—creating lessons, grading, and making myself available to students an hour before school each day. I ran around the room joking with students, telling stories, creating relevant analogies, and turning pop-culture songs into lesson reviews that I’d sing for the class.

My students looked forward to my energy and I enjoyed their sense of humor. Still, I couldn’t have predicted how unprepared my students would be. They had never taken notes. They were shocked that my test reviews weren’t a list of the questions on the test. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t allow 20 minutes of review before the test, or why a history exam would have sections requiring written responses. In fact, many would just skip the entire short answer and essay sections, despite being given these topics in advance. Those who did respond often wrote single words or incoherent run-ons.

I’d spend entire classes explaining what I wanted to see in the short answer responses. We’d practice writing the “who, what, where, when, and why this concept is important.” But little changed. After their years of schooling in which writing never extended beyond filling in a blank, my expectations were analogous to asking high schoolers to solve algebraic equations when they had not yet learned to multiply and divide. They were capable, but it was going to take a lot of effort to fill in the gaps. Which raises the question, why would a student be willing to put in that much work?

I was fighting the overwhelming tide of a system intent upon handing over diplomas. Over half of my students would have failed if I gave them the grade they earned. But the unwritten, yet well-communicated, rule was that teachers should never fail a student if it could be helped. The onus was on the teacher to hound students for late assignments and find a way to bump them to a C.

As much as I wanted to fight every battle, I eventually caved to the exhaustion of a demanding Texas high school coaching schedule (which seemed to be the job I was really hired for). I compromised more times than I would have ever thought possible. I eliminated homework, allowed test retakes, gave fill-in-the-blank notes, graded essays at a 5th grade level, gave test reviews that were basically the test, and intentionally made tests easy. When there were still too many students failing at the end of a grading period, I went above and beyond to manufacture easy routes to a passing grade so that only a handful of incomprehensibly effort-averse students failed.

How the 2020 Election Was Rigged Next time someone caricatures evidence of voting irregularities as a conspiracy theory, throw the book at them—Mollie Hemingway’s book. By Bruce Oliver Newsome

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/31/how-the-2020-election-was-rigged/

We are a year overdue for the true story of the 2020 elections. Mollie Hemingway has at last delivered it to us in one tidy volume.

It’s a complex story, which makes for a weighty book. The research is thorough, the writing is evidentiary, the style is clinical—like investigative journalism and social science used to be. The endnotes alone run nearly 100 pages. 

Reading Rigged, one isn’t jarred by hyperbole, conjecture, or spin. Hemingway is unequivocal on progressive malice, yet she can be scathing of Republicans, too. She is particularly critical of Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to publicize fraud nationally, thereby undermining prior case-by-case efforts to get particular state courts to recognize particular violations of particular state laws. 

She also calls out Republican officials who preferred to help the opposition rather than reveal their own state’s dysfunctions. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office, for instance, secretly recorded a telephone appeal from Trump to expose fraud in Fulton County, then misrepresented Trump to the press as asking for the statewide result to be changed. 

Overall, the story reads like a tragedy. One alternates between anger and consternation that bleeding obvious facts were not reported by the mainstream media at the time.

Some evidence of election irregularities broke through mainstream censorship: the strange spikes in votes counted for Biden overnight in counties with unusually strong Democratic Party governance and histories of criminal mishandling of votes (Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Fulton County, for example). 

Over subsequent days, a news consumer with time and effort could piece together strange disputes. Official election observers were denied access, or kept so far away they could not see any ballots. They sought emergency court orders, but some courts set hearing dates weeks in the future or simply denied jurisdiction. Even if observers did obtain a court order, election officials claimed not to understand it (as in Philadelphia). 

In Georgia, observers were told that counting was being suspended overnight, but a surveillance camera recorded video of four persons pulling boxes of ballots from beneath a cloaked table for unobserved digital entry. Still, Georgia’s officers continued to claim that voting had been suspended overnight. Surely this was a story worthy of investigative reporting? The mainstream media preferred to report all the disputes as conspiracy theories. 

Witnesses came forward testifying to ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing, counts for the Democratic Party without ballots, ballots for the Republican Party that disappeared without counting. Nevertheless, the Republican Party could not get most of the media to show up to hear these witnesses, or the courts to admit them. 

And so 2020 petered out, with the election still disputed but barely investigated. Most of the evidence, most of the admissions, most of the backtracking, waited until after Biden’s victory was confirmed by Congress in January.

‘It works! It works! It works!’: Jonas Salk and the Vaccine that Conquered Polio Paul A. Offit

https://quillette.com/2021/10/29/it-works-it-works-it-works-jonas-salk-and-the-vaccine-that-conquered-polio/

Excerpted, with permission, from You Bet Your Life: From Blood Transfusions to Mass Vaccination, The Long and Risky History of Medical Innovation, by Paul A. Offit.

Jonas Salk was born on October 28th, 1914, in a tenement in East Harlem, New York—the first son of Russian immigrants and the eldest of three brothers. After finishing four years of high school in three, Salk entered the City College of New York and later won a scholarship to the medical school at New York University. In December 1941, after the United States entered World War II, Salk was given a choice. He could either be commissioned as a doctor in the armed forces or remain in the United States to pursue a scientific career. He chose science, working on an influenza vaccine in the laboratory of Dr. Thomas Francis at the University of Michigan. Fifteen years later, Francis would supervise the critical test of Salk’s vaccine.

In 1943, while Salk was working on the influenza vaccine, 10,000 people, mostly children, contracted polio in the United States; in 1948, when Salk was first studying polioviruses at the University of Pittsburgh, 27,000 more people were affected; and in 1952, when Salk was first testing his polio vaccine in and around Pittsburgh, 59,000 more cases occurred. A national poll found that polio was second only to the atomic bomb as the thing Americans feared most. There was a desperate, growing desire to prevent polio.

Viruses, unlike bacteria, grow inside cells. To grow polioviruses in the 1930s, scientists John Kolmer and Maurice Brodie had used cells from monkey brains and monkey spinal cords. Salk, on the other hand, used cells from monkey testicles. Later, concerned that people would never accept a vaccine grown in monkey testicles, Salk switched to monkey kidney cells, which are still used to make polio vaccines today.

Because three different types of poliovirus cause disease, Salk knew that he would need to include representatives of all three types in his vaccine. For type 1, Salk chose the Mahoney strain—a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The Mahoney strain was first recovered from a child in Akron, Ohio, whose last name was Mahoney. But the Mahoney strain wasn’t limited to the Mahoneys. The Klines, living next door, were also infected. Three of five Kline children were paralyzed and later died from the disease—an early clue to the unique horror of this particular strain. The other two strains of virus contained in Salk’s vaccine, representing types 2 and 3, weren’t controversial.

Very Fine People These are the times that try men’s souls. Some will be found wanting. Others will come through with a pure and noble wrath. By Peter W. Wood

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/29/very-fine-people/

An excerpt from Wrath: America Enraged (Encounter, 256 pages, $28.99)

Jacob Anthony Chansley, who also goes by the name Jake Angeli, was one of the people who made their way into the chamber of the U.S. Senate in the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to protest the Senate’s impending certification of state electors who would install Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. His name may not register, but his image will: he was the fellow bizarrely attired in a coyote-fur hat sprouting black buffalo horns; shirtless, showing his muscular but heavily tattooed torso; sporting black gloves and a red knapsack; face painted in vertical red, white, and blue stripes; and carrying an American flag on a spear.

The disorderly intrusion of several hundred protesters into the Capitol was quickly characterized by the media, and by many politicians, as an “insurrection.” Moreover, the accusation of insurrection was applied to the many thousands of Trump supporters in Washington that day who had nothing to do with the intrusion into the Capitol. And that characterization became the basis for the House of Representatives to impeach President Trump for supposedly inciting the “insurrection” and the impetus for Joe Biden to order 26,000 National Guard troops to defend Washington during his inauguration on January 20.

As it happened, there was no insurrection.

Images of Chansley in his costume—arguing with a police officer; posing with other protesters in a foyer; standing behind the Senate dais with his fist raised in triumph; outside holding a sign that declared “Q Sent Me!” and speaking into a microphone while clutching the obverse of the sign, “Hold the Line Patriots God Wins”; and, in several shots, chin raised as he apparently sings—stand out among the handful of photos of the Capitol protest that have become iconic. They helped cement the reputation of the protesters as crazy extremists.

When Your Body Is Someone Else’s Haunted House Dara Horn’s brilliant new book Bari Weiss

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-your-body-is-someone-elses-haunted

Tomorrow marks three years since the massacre at Tree of Life, the most lethal attack on Jews in American history and a watershed event in the lives of so many I love.

I find myself pulled back to that time. To the shock I felt. To the sense I had immediately that the country I thought I lived in was changing in radical ways, even if I didn’t yet fully understand them.

One of the people who helped me make sense of it all — who helped me see that the fate of Jews and the fate of liberty are intertwined; who helped me grasp that an assault on Jews was an assault on the very notion of difference — was Dara Horn.

Dara is a novelist and an essayist whose writings on Jewish history, culture politics has shaped my own thinking. Her new book is called “People Love Dead Jews.”

This is a book deeply relevant to everyone who cares about the future of America, not just the future of American Jews.

………Sometimes your body is someone else’s haunted house. Other people look at you and can only see the dead.

I first discovered this at the age of seventeen in the most trivial of moments, at an academic quiz bowl tournament in Nashville, Tennessee—where, as the only girl from my New Jersey high school, I shared a hotel room with two girls from Mississippi. We were strangers and competitors pretending to be friends. One night we stayed up late chatting about our favorite childhood TV shows, about how we had each believed that Mr. Rogers was personally addressing us through the screen. We laughed together until one girl said, “It’s like Jesus. Even if he didn’t know my name when he was dying on the cross, I still know he loved me, and if he knew my name, he would have loved me too.” The other girl squealed, “I know, right? It’s just like Jesus!” Then the two of them, full of messianic joy, looked at me.

I said nothing—a very loud nothing. The girls waited, uncomfortable, until one braved the silence. “It seems like people up north are much less religious,” she tried. “How often do you go to church?”

Book Review: ‘Woke Racism’ by John McWhorter For the left, antiracism is the new religion, and ‘pious, unempirical virtue signaling’ is a form of political activism.By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-woke-racism-by-john-mcwhorter-11634596283

‘This book frankly leapt out of me,” writes John McWhorter, “during the summer of 2020.” The country was convulsed not just with Covid-19, but with protests in response to the killing of an unarmed black man by a white policeman whose actions were caught on camera. Mr. McWhorter began to write in the first week of August. Eight weeks later, he’d finished “Woke Racism,” a book that hits back at the “antiracists” who prowl public life in search of transgression, and whose mission to rid America of “racist” thought he likens to that of a religious cult. His book is a cry from the heart, and readers should gauge the depth of his indignation from the fact that its working title was “F*** ’Em.”

This eloquent manifesto is Mr. McWhorter’s 22nd book, a majority of those on the subject of linguistics. His is a split personality: A linguist in his day job as a professor at Columbia University (specializing in creoles, particularly the Saramaccan language in Suriname), he’s also an outspoken commentator on race whenever the national mood requires it. As Mr. McWhorter’s thinking on race is in conflict with that of the black American political mainstream, he’s often miscast as a black conservative by glib taxonomists. But he’s careful to point out that he wasn’t “thinking of right-wing America as my audience,” even as he acknowledges that many liberal readers will think him “traitorous” for writing this book.

Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

By John McWhorter

Mr. McWhorter’s target audience is, precisely, the one that would regard him as racially incendiary. It includes white progressives who have “fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism.” Equally, it comprises black people who have succumbed to the “misimpression” that the way to their own salvation lies in “a curated persona as eternally victimized souls.”

Mr. McWhorter’s targets in “Woke Racism” are antiracist crusaders whom he calls the Elect—borrowing a term used by the essayist Joseph Bottum in his book “An Anxious Age” (2014). Mr. McWhorter chooses not to call these people Social Justice Warriors or Inquisitors, deeming those labels “unsuitably dismissive” and “mean,” respectively. He’s not the first to trace the “rootstock” of their ideology to critical race theory. This is a once-fringe belief, now muscling its way into mainstream thought, that every individual’s fate is determined by racial “hierarchy” and power. The theory contends, writes Mr. McWhorter, that a nonwhite in America is “akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains.”

Progressive Craziness Of The Day: Transgender Orthodoxy Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=c951b15f01

Perhaps I’m slow on the uptake. But somehow I’m just catching on that the latest tactic of the Left in the culture wars is to indoctrinate all the kids from K-20 in the latest insane piece of orthodoxy before letting the outside world, most particularly the parents, know what is going on. So, to use the example of the new racism going by the name “anti-racism” or Critical Race Theory, by the time you find Ibram Kendi’s “How To Be an Antiracist” on the shelf at your local bookstore, your kid has already without your knowledge undergone multiple years of instruction (if white) that s/he is an “oppressor” and a “systemic racist,” or (if black) that s/he is “oppressed” and a “victim.”

Is the same tactic pervasive in other areas? I had had some inklings that the ideology of transgenderism may be another such area, but I must admit that I hadn’t been paying that much attention. After all, what percentage of the population could this ideology apply to — maybe 0.1%? Then a few weeks ago I read a piece by Abigail Shrier at Bari Weiss’s Substack (“Top Trans Doctors Blow the Whistle on ‘Sloppy’ Care”), and I decided it was time to get Ms. Shrier’s book (“Irreversible Damage”) to learn some more about what is going on out there.

The short version is that we have what may have started as a perfectly reasonable request for respect for a group of people some of whom in the past have experienced ridicule or bullying. But over time the request became a campaign and and campaign fell into the hands of the most extreme activists and ideologues. These people recognize no limits on their demands, let alone any trade-offs in life generally, and are prepared to destroy all who get in their way.

Weaponizing Our Schools Richard Cravatts’ new ebook reveals the Left’s racist assault on America’s students. Sara Dogan

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/weaponizing-our-schools-sara-dogan/

Below is Sara Dogan’s introduction to Richard Cravatts’ new ebook on Critical Race Theory in K-12 indoctrination. Read Weaponizing Our Schools: HERE. And make sure to visit StopK12Indoctrination.org.

As the debate over Critical Race Theory has emerged in the media and garnered the attention of the nation, Richard L. Cravatts, Ph.D., has aided us in understanding the insidious nature of this radical new ideology now being taught to American schoolchildren and the myriad ways in which public school students are being groomed to carry out the agendas of the Left.In the following articles, Cravatts documents and exposes the left’s attempts to indoctrinate America’s youth through our public schools. We meet Bettina Love, founder of the Abolitionist Teaching Network, a group recently promoted by President Biden’s Department of Education, who believes that we must “recognize America and its schools as spaces of Whiteness, White rage, and White Supremacy, all of which function to terrorize students of color.” We learn about the children’s book Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness (Ordinary Terrible Things), which claims that “Racism is a white person’s problem and we are all caught up in it” and portrays “whiteness” as a literal deal with a pointy-tailed devil. Not My Idea is now being taught to schoolchildren in 30 school districts across America. Meanwhile, 4th and 5th grade students in the Seattle Public School district are taught to question whether “Black Lives Matter in America?” and are presented with skewed data which allegedly prove that police officers, motivated by racism, unjustly murder innocent black men with impunity.

“CRT does not teach tolerance by urging school children to be kind to each other and treat each other as equals, which it purports to do,” writes Cravatts, “but instead elevates blackness by degrading whiteness, making white people seem to be regressive, intolerant, hateful, and perennially racist as part of their very nature. Thus, CRT is condemned by its critics for branding white children in this way while at the same time telegraphing to black children that they are perpetual victims in a society dominated by whites who are morally defective as a result of their racist core.”

Weaponizing Our Schools is an essential read for anyone concerned about the future of public education in America.

Saying Ngo to Antifa The reporter who knows Antifa best tells its story. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/saying-ngo-antifa-bruce-bawer/

Reporting on the events of June 29, 2019, when the gutsy freelance reporter Andy Ngo was beaten half to death by Antifa goons during a disturbance in Portland, Oregon, journalist Katie Shepherd – then at the local rag Willamette Week, now at the Washington Post – described the demo as “mostly unremarkable.” Later, Jerry Nadler called Antifa “imaginary” and Post “fact-checkers” denied Antifa’s brutality. When, in August 2020, Ngo addressed a Senate hearing at the invitation of Ted Cruz, Hawaii’s Mamie Hirono dismissed his testimony out of hand, while other Democrats left the chamber. So it goes on both sides of the Atlantic: pols and pressmen alike repeatedly deny or defend even Antifa’s worst depredations (“Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence,” pronounced New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, notorious for rewriting American history in the 1619 Project) while celebrities like Steve Carell shell out sizable sums to bail out Antifa thugs.

Some of these supporters (such as, presumably, Carell) are fools who’ve drunk the Antifa Kool-Aid; the likes of Nadler and Mirono, meanwhile, crave power at any cost, and view Antifa as a handy tool. (The Nazis had the Gestapo and SS; the Democrats have Antifa and Black Lives Matter.) Some Democrats don’t love Antifa, but much of their base does; better, they reason, to let innocents be killed than to alienate voters.

The Critical Qur’an: A Weapon In An Ideological War In his version of the Islamic holy book, Robert Spencer gives us a valuable tool in the civilizational war of ideas. Bill Warner

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/critical-quran-bill-warner/

Robert Spencer’s new book The Critical Qur’an is a one volume encyclopedia of the Qur’an. It is a superb reference book with a sound foundation, using multiple translations. It is detailed. All of the knotty problems are solved by direct scholarly references.

In The Critical Qur’an, Spencer clarifies the problems that cloud our understanding of the Qur’an, which lurches from one subject to the next. Ideas come out of nowhere with no context. Topics – like “hell” – repeat again and again and again.  The constant repetition is tiresome.

There is no recognition of time in the Qur’an. The chapters are laid out in order of their length, not in a time sequence.  It starts with the longest chapter and ends with the shortest. To add to the confusion, it uses many strange names and foreign terms. Basically, it is unintelligible, confusing, repetitive and filled with hate towards the Unbelievers.

The most problematic to most non-Muslim readers is that the Qur’an presents contradictory ideas. One verse will teach tolerance and the next will call for the death of the Unbelievers. Islamic ethics are contradictory or dualistic, with one set of rules for dealing with other Muslims and another set of rules for the Unbelievers.  

So no one can understand the Qur’an by simply reading it. There must be auxiliary commentators, exegetes, in order to find meaning in the words of Allah. Robert Spencer guides us through the mire of this contradictory and perplexing work using all the tools of exemplary scholarship.