Thoughts on Obedience
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| I vant to eat a bone. |
I just had a moment to read this address, Against Obedience, by Susan Ohanian from earlier in the year, over atCritical Education. It's the text of the remarks she gave over the summer at the Rouge Forum in Ohio.
It's worth your time.
I'm not going to lie-- I left the classroom because it was just too depressing, trying to be an English teacher in Arizona during the rise of the meaningless data obsession. I was the chair of an English department, and my principal called me in for a "come to Jesus" meeting about our 8th graders' dismal performance on the Arizona state test, a horrendous, illegal-to-look at secret test that I looked at year after year. There wasn't a single occasion where I was impressed enough by the test to consider even for a moment "teaching to" it. It was gotcha punctuation, and gotcha reading, and bullshit context clue material. In other words, it was a test of test-
It's worth your time.
I'm not going to lie-- I left the classroom because it was just too depressing, trying to be an English teacher in Arizona during the rise of the meaningless data obsession. I was the chair of an English department, and my principal called me in for a "come to Jesus" meeting about our 8th graders' dismal performance on the Arizona state test, a horrendous, illegal-to-look at secret test that I looked at year after year. There wasn't a single occasion where I was impressed enough by the test to consider even for a moment "teaching to" it. It was gotcha punctuation, and gotcha reading, and bullshit context clue material. In other words, it was a test of test-