God, I loathe teacher meetings. And I loathe my school district. Oakland Unified would NEVER pull this kind of shit on teachers. The morning session of today's "Professional Development" meetings featured, a) a lot of blah blah blah on the new, supposedly nationwide "Common Core State Standards", which, in 2014 will lead to new standardized tests which will supposedly have more to do with hands-on demonstration of mastery of skills. I am interested to see how they will score these. But even in that part of the presentation, it was mostly just stupid acronyms and a lot of menacing passive aggression from the horrible attack dog administrator who swans around the district popping into classrooms to grill students on what standards they are being taught that day. And at the end of her spiel, b) she forced us to watch this video. I wanted to scrub my brain out afterwards. I hate shit like this so, so, so fucking much.
The second half of the morning session was on equity, which means that white teachers should stop disproportionately referring black students on discipline issues, and recommending them for expulsion, although the rules about expulsion are kind of hard and fast and if you have a knife, you have to be expelled. I mean, I totally agree with the principles here, it's just the dude delivering the message strikes me as a careerist opportunist who does not have one useful tool to offer clueless teachers except guilt. The images for this half were marginally better than the butterfly effect video, because the guy had a powerpoint with slides from the old days of innocent and happy hip hop by, e.g. Monie Love and Grand Master Flash versus later evil developments like NWA and Nicki Minaj. He said nothing like Monie Love exists any more, and I wanted to say "What about Willow Smith's 'I Am Me'?" I am kind of stuck on that video actually; she's hella cute. I know she's the daughter of multibillionaire actors and all, but I love a short natural, honestly, and gawky tall girls, and sometimes even autotune.
Okay, fine, it's not hip hop. Still.
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