Scribblegoat

Scribblegoat

116p

97 comments posted · 5 followers · following 0

8 years ago @ The Toast - Desserts I Have Been H... · 1 reply · +3 points

Note that by "fake orange" I don't mean "orange" the fruit, I mean "orange" the color as it tastes. The flavor is weirdly close to carnival cotton candy.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Desserts I Have Been H... · 0 replies · +4 points

To this American-married-to-a-Scot, yes, it absolutely does. You can taste the rust under this absolutely perfect flashbacks-to-childhood fake orange. It is FUCKING DELICIOUS.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Desserts I Have Been H... · 1 reply · +2 points

You are not! My family-in-law makes it with a subtly coffee-flavored whipped cream. When piled onto the tiny slice you can possibly eat at once, it cuts the stickiness of the DELICIOUS pie. This is apparently customary in some parts of Scotland but maybe they made that up.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +2 points

Was the mounted cop perpetually surrounded by Horse Girls? That is the only way I can see that ending at my high school. (Similarly, I came from a best-case-scenario school-with-attached-cop.)

8 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +2 points

I've been brought up to think of teachers more as authoritative partners than disciplinarians, so I expect that's a huge part of the difference!

8 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +2 points

Oh, I forgot -- she also accompanied school admin and social workers on child welfare calls.

It was pretty common to do those in partnership with the school -- awkward situation once where my dad's good friend (the AP) was told "Hey, the students from this family say hi to you sometimes, so will you come be the Comforting Presence at this home visit?" and he didn't realize until they got to the house that they said hi to him sometimes because the oldest son in the family was dating me at the time. (I'm full of these stories.)

8 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +5 points

I expect this might also be a matter of a criminal justice system that makes practically everything a criminal matter, but, speaking from experience:

When I say that a teacher's responsibility does not include student discipline, I'm not talking about classroom management issues (talking and being disruptive, not doing homework, bothering your seatmate -- all these fall under classroom management for me.) Those are absolutely the teacher's job. (And you're absolutely right that it's problematic to disrupt that: calling security because one can't control one's class is both something I've personally known one or two cocky young (white male) teachers to do and something that will get your contract not renewed. In the discussed/video'd case, that got a student brutally assaulted.)

Where I think the problem arises is when teachers are expected to deal with A.) no disciplinary matters at all, see above or B.) criminal matters. Drug charges, for instance, shouldn't be criminalized, but in a place where they are, teachers need to be able to say "It is not my role to discipline you for this; let's talk about how you could get clean, maybe, rather than escalate this to administration and potential police report?" It's also important that teachers' authority be focused on classroom management and not out-of-class behavior because part of one's job as a teacher is to be the first one likely to notice child abuse; students who have been forced into bad situations need the safety of knowing that the teacher is not in the role of disciplinarian for anything that happens at home unless it spills over into school behavior.

Further, especially in places where racially-motivated gang violence is a thing, teachers of color in high schools may be in danger of physical assault from (usually white) students with something to prove about how big of a man they are. Having the ability to escalate such a situation to a criminal matter is an important protection.

That said -- again, I am aware of cases of literal assault of the teacher where the students were treated more gently and respectfully than the young woman in South Carolina who had the audacity to want to stay at her desk on a cold day, but her teacher felt zie had something to prove.

*stares up at wall of text* Apparently I have a lot of feelings about this.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Every Single Church Hi... · 0 replies · +3 points

Damn! Scooped.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +8 points

Gang violence, in our case -- up to and including hazing, physical assault, racially motivated hate crimes. Which made it extra-important that teachers should NOT be the ones engaged with actual criminal activity; there needed to be semi-safe people to talk to who were not the dealers of discipline for actually criminal acts, and the teachers' job (and duty) was not to discipline but to be those people.

The opposing holds true, of course: classroom management shouldn't be a police matter. The teacher in the South Carolina incident, I think, has obviously MAJOR-failed in that duty. The idea of the police being called because a student wouldn't leave the classroom is completely fucking ludicrous to me, too.

8 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 2 replies · +5 points

It honestly helps just to hear that -- my instinct is still "but Mom is a good mom and this isn't unreasonable," and the reality check of "Nope, that still sucks" is one that I really need.