I'm a Public School Teacher. The Kids Aren't Alright.

ED Noor: A lot of images included here. They all add to the article even though the author speaks primarily of teens. Look at the eyes of all the children in these images. What do you see? No wonder the young ones will have difficulties once you read this and understand. And of course, there is the suicide rate which, at the time of this writing, the author has fortunately not had to deal with.

By Stacey Lance

bariweiss.substack.com
January 20, 2022

I am proud to be a teacher. I've worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics.

I don't claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don't know. But I spend my days with our youth and they tell me a lot about their lives. And I want to tell you what I'm hearing and what I'm seeing.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when our school went fully remote, it was evident to me that the loss of human connection would be detrimental to our students' development. It also became increasingly clear that the response to the pandemic would have immense consequences for students who were already on the path to long-term disengagement, potentially altering their lives permanently.

The data about learning loss and the mental health crisis is devastating. Overlooked has been the deep shame young people feel: Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

When we finally got back into the classroom in September 2020, I was optimistic, even as we would go remote for weeks, sometimes months, whenever case numbers would rise. But things never returned to normal.

When we were physically in school, it felt like there was no longer life in the building. Maybe it was the masks that made it so no one wanted to engage in lessons, or even talk about how they spent their weekend. But it felt cold and soulless. 

My students weren't allowed to gather in the halls or chat between classes. They still aren't. Sporting events, clubs and graduation were all cancelled. These may sound like small things, but these losses were a huge deal to the students. These are rites of passages that can't be made up.

In my classroom, the learning loss is noticeable. My students can't concentrate and they aren't doing the work that I assign to them. They have way less motivation compared to before the pandemic began. Some of my students chose not to come back at all, either because of fear of the virus, or because they are debilitated by social anxiety. And now they have the option to do virtual schooling from home.

One of my favorite projects that I assign each year is to my 10th grade students, who do in-depth research on any culture of their choosing. It culminates in a day of presentations. I encourage them to bring in music, props, food ~ whatever they need to immerse their classmates in their specific culture. A lot of my students give presentations on their own heritage. A few years back, a student of mine, a Syrian refugee, told her story about how she ended up in Canada. She brought in traditional Syrian foods, delicacies that her dad had stayed up all night cooking. It was one of the best days that I can remember. She was proud to share her story ~ she had struggled with homesickness ~ and her classmates got a lesson in empathy. 

Now, my students simply prepare a slideshow and email it to me individually.

My older students (grades 11 and 12) aren't even allowed a lunch break, and are expected to come to school, go to class for five and a half hours and then go home. Children in 9th and 10th grades have to face the front of the classroom while they eat lunch during their second period class. My students used to be able to eat in the halls or the cafeteria; now that's forbidden.

Younger children are expected to follow the "mask off, voices off" rule, and are made to wear their masks outside, where they can only play with other kids in their class. Of course, outside of school, kids are going to restaurants with their families and to each other's houses, making the rules at school feel punitive and nonsensical. 

They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.

Around this time of year, we start planning for the prom, which is held in June. Usually, my students would already be chatting constantly about who's asking who, what they're planning on wearing, and how excited they are. This year, they've barely discussed it at all. When they do, they tell me that they don't want to get their hopes up, since they're assuming it will get cancelled like it has for the past couple of years.

It's the same deal with universities. My students say,"If university is going to be just like this then what's the point?"

I have my own children, a nine-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son, who have spent almost a third of their lives in lockdown. They've become so used to cancellations that they don't even feel disappointed anymore.

I think all of my students are angry to some degree, but I hear it most from the kids who are athletes. They were told that if they got the vaccine, everything would go back to normal, and they could go back to the rink or the court. Some sports were back for a while but, as of Christmas, because of the recent wave of Covid-19 cases, club and varsity sports are all cancelled once again. A lot of the athletes are missing chances to get seen by coaches and get scholarships. 

I try to take time at the beginning of class to ask my kids how they're doing. Recently, one of my 11th grade students raised his hand and said that he wasn't doing well, that he doesn't want to keep living like this, but that he knows that no one is coming to save them. The other kids all nodded in agreement. They feel lied to ~ and I can't blame them.

What's most worrisome to me is that they feel deep worry and shame over the prospect of breaking the rules. 

ED Noor: No matter how much they tried to make masks cool, like Gaga above, the kids were not buying it.

Teenage girls are notoriously empathetic. I see that many of my students, but especially the female ones, feel a heavy burden of responsibility. Right before Christmas, one of my brightest 12th graders confided in me that she was terrified of taking her mask off. She told me that she didn't want to get anyone sick or kill anybody. She was worried she would be held responsible for someone dying.

What am I supposed to say? That 23 children have died from Covid in Canada during the whole of the pandemic and she is much more likely to kill someone driving a car? That kids in Scandinavia, Sweden, and the Netherlands largely haven't had to wear masks at school and haven't seen outbreaks because of it? That masks are not a magic shield against the virus, and that even if she were to pass it along to a classmate, the risk of them getting seriously sick is minuscule? 

I want to tell her that she can remove her mask, and socialize with her friends without being worried.

But I am expected to enforce the rules.

At the beginning of the pandemic, adults shamed kids for wanting to play at the park or hang out with their friends. We kept hearing, "They'll be fine. They're resilient." It's true that humans, by nature, are very resilient. But they also break. And my students are breaking. Some have already broken. 

When we look at the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of history, I believe it will be clear that we betrayed our children. The risks of this pandemic were never to them, but they were forced to carry the burden of it.

It's enough. It's time for a return to normal life and put an end to the bureaucratic policies that aren't making society safer, but are sacrificing our children's mental, emotional, and physical health.

Our children need life on the highest volume. 

And they need it now.

Comment:

~ As a headmaster I see children suffering mental health issues unlike anything before, this new shutdown of schools is disastrous

~ Lockdown 'has left pupils withdrawn and disturbed', says top London head

~ German study reveals disturbing trend on child mental health during lockdown

~ The number of children on antidepressants has soared. Is it a real crisis or one invented by psychiatrists seeking new patients?

~ 16,000 Belgian doctors think schools should open, 'children are victims of the lockdown, not coronavirus'

~ Lockdown policies and mask mandates linked with lower IQ in children

The Descent into (Utter) Madness

By Stephen Karganovic,

The Strategic Culture Foundation

July 4, 2021

Waking Times

Little wonder that here and there sanity nostalgia is gripping the Western world, at least those isolated portions of it that are not internalizing the sinister “new normal.” But it is seemingly to no avail. 

All commanding positions are firmly in the hands of lunatics, who are determined to turn a once great and exemplary civilization into an asylum.

As George Orwell has taught us, language manipulation is at the frontline (yes, I have just broken one of the cardinal rules of his “Politics and the English Language,” but not his final injunction to “break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous”) of politicized mind-bending.

The sort of language we are permitted to use

circumscribes the thinking

that we shall be allowed to engage in.

The assault on language is, therefore, an integral component of the unrelenting warfare being waged for the conquest and control of the mind. Word elimination and reassignment of meaning, as Orwell also presciently noted, are essential elements of the campaign to reformat the mind and eventually to subjugate it.

A breath-taking example of how this process works was recently unveiled by the thoroughly brain-washed students of the once prestigious Brandeis University who, this time without prompting from their faculty elders and betters, voted to ban from their campus such odious words and phrases as “picnic” and “you guys,” for being “oppressive”. “Picnic” is prohibited because it allegedly evokes the lynching of Blacks.

The precocious young intellectuals took pains to produce an entire list of objectionable words and phrases, shocking award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates who tweeted in bewilderment:

“What sort of punishment is doled out for a faculty member who utters the word ‘picnic’ at Brandeis? Or the phrase [also proscribed ~ S.K.] ‘trigger warning’? Loss of tenure, public flogging, self-flagellation?”

All three punishments will probably be applied to reactionary professors who go afoul of the list’s rigorous linguistic requirements.

Not to be outdone by the progressive kids on the East Coast, avant-garde California legislators have passed a law to remove the pronoun “he” from state legal texts. The momentous reform was initiated by California’s new attorney general, Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, who, after looking up the job requirements, made the shocking discovery that the law assumed that the attorney general would be a man.

ED Noor: (((Leadership))) from Ms. (((Kahan))). The most extreme politicians in CA are all members of the tribe. Who can forget the damage done by Sen. Scott Weiner of San Francisco, another member of the (((same group))).

Upon review, it turned out that the state code and other legal documents were enabling unacceptable concepts by using pronouns “he,” “him” and “his” when referring to the attorney general and other state-wide elected officials. Appalled, Ms. Bauer-Kahan denounced these linguistic lapses for not representing “where California is and where California is going.”

She unarguably was right on that score at least, which has perhaps also something to do with the massive exodus of California residents to less complicated parts of the country.

~ When lawmakers of a state which is rapidly turning into a North American Calcutta have no concerns more pressing than to revise the use of pronouns in official documents, that sends a clear message where that state is going, exactly as the smart and thoroughly up-to-date woman said.

But as a Pakistani immigrant father in Seattle, state of Washington, discovered to his chagrin, the linguistic clowning can have very serious personal and political consequences. 

(When the State Comes for Your Kids)

After checking in his 16-year-old autistic son for treatment in what he thought was a medical facility, Ahmed was shocked to receive a telephone call where a social worker explained to him that the child he had originally entrusted to the medical authorities as a son was actually transgender and must henceforth, under legal penalty of removal, be referred to and treated as a “daughter.”

Coming from a traditional society still governed by tyrannical precepts of common sense and not accustomed to the ways of the asylum where in search of a better life he and his family inadvertently ended up, the father (a title that like mother, now officially “number one parent,” is also on the way out) was able to conceive his tragic predicament only by weaving a complex conspiracy theory:

“They were trying to create a customer for their gender clinic . . . and they seemed to absolutely want to push us in that direction. We had calls with counselors and therapists in the establishment, telling us how important it is for him to change his gender; because that’s the only way he’s going to be better out of this suicidal depressive state.”

Since in the equally looney state of Washington the age when minors can request a gender-change surgery without parental consent is 13, the Pakistani parents saw clearly the writing on the wall and, bless them, they came up with a clever stratagem to outwit their callous ideological tormentors. Ahmed “assured Seattle Children’s Hospital that he would take his son to a gender clinic and commence his son’s transition. Instead, he collected his son, quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington.”

Perhaps feeling the heat from the linguistic Gestapo even in his celebrity kitchen, iconic chef Jamie Oliver has come on board. 

ED Noor: Actually, Jaime got on board when a large chain called Waitrose took the step of dropping this word, so he carried on the movement. Will no one come after JERUSALEM Artichokes and rescue those people from such discrimination? Why is the ADL not involved yet? 

 

Jamie is now busy, but not just cooking. He is going over his previously published recipes in order to expunge all offensive references to kefir leaves.

Orwell aficionados will recall this precious passage from 1984:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.”

And now every recipe as well. The dystopia fits, does it not, to a tee even something as seemingly trivial as a cooking show?

But it is not just recipes. 

Children’s fairy tales are also fair game for 1984 revision. Hollywood actress Natalie Portman (Star Wars, The Professional, Thor), inspired apparently by the new cultural normal, has taken it upon herself not to write, but to re-write, several classic fairy tales to make them “gender-neutral,” so “children can defy gender stereotypes.” Predictably, pronouns were again a major target:

“I found myself changing the pronouns in many of their books because so many of them had overwhelmingly male characters, disproportionate to reality,” quoth Natalie as she put her linguistic scalpel to such old favourites as The Tortoise and the Hare, Country Mouse and City Mouse and The Three Little Pigs.

Need we go on, or does the sharp reader already get the general drift? 

ED Noor: To be fair, I looked into Natalie's stories since I am "librarian" for my Grandkids and found nothing that I would not happily read to them. Consider the following images. However I would NEVER discount the literary war being carried on against even our very youngest children. TV is poison for the young mind. Stick to the classics and be very cautious what you add to their collections of bedtime stories. These I would consider. I also never read traditional fairy tales to my children preferring Tomie De Paola, William Steig, Barbara Cooney...

How about State University of New York student Owen Stevens, who was suspended and censured for pointing out on his Instagram the ascertainable biological fact that “A man is a man, a woman is a woman. A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man.” (Owen was snitched on by fellow students, readers from the former Eastern bloc will be amused to learn.) 

Or the Nebraska university basketball coach who was suspended for using in a motivational speech the mysteriously offensive word “plantation”?

Or the hip $57,000-a-year NYC school that banned students from saying “mom” and “dad”, from asking where classmates went on vacation or wishing anyone “Merry Christmas” or even “Happy Holidays”? 

Or female university student Lisa Keogh in Scotland who said in class “women have vaginas” (who would be better informed than she on that subject?) and are “not as strong as men”, who is facing disciplinary action by the university after fellow classmates complained about her “offensive and discriminatory” comments?

Or Spanish politician Francisco José Contreras whose Twitter account was blocked as a warning for 12 hours after he tweeted what some would regard as the self-evident truth that “men cannot get pregnant” because they have “no uterus or eggs”?

As Peter Hitchens noted recently 

“the most bitterly funny story of the week is that a defector from North Korea thinks that even her homeland is ‘not as nuts’ as the indoctrination now forced on Western students.”

One of Yeonmi Park’s initial shocks upon starting classes at Colombia University was to be met with a frown after revealing to a staff member that she enjoyed reading Jane Austen.

“Did you know,” Ms. Park was sternly admonished, “that those writers had a colonial mind-set? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.”

But after encountering the new requirement for the use of gender-neutral pronouns, Yeonmi concluded: 

Even North Korea is not this nuts… North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.” Devastatingly honest, but not exactly a compliment to what once might have been the land of her dreams.

Sadly, Hitchens reports that her previous experience served Yeonmi well to adapt to her new situation:

“She came to fear that making a fuss would affect her grades and her degree. Eventually, she learned to keep quiet, as people do when they try to live under intolerant regimes, and let the drivel wash over her.”

Eastern European readers will unfailingly understand what it is that Hitchens meant to say.