Even better, what does Eileen Bernstein do when she teaches the part about the holocaust? ….starve a student…or perhaps send a student into the shower and then…..?

Seriously reprimand Eileen Bernstein. And the student, be for real, if she’s traumatized by that, she’ll be a “basket case” in a real world where sick people actually do greater harm than that to each other, every day.

There is another good article on this on Ethic Soup blog at:

http://www.ethicsoup.com/2008/12/teachers-ethics-lesson-dont-bind-black-students-to-teach-slavery.html#more

Sharon McEachern

Slaves were beaten, tortured, abducted, imprisoned, chained, sold, abused, starved, hunted, murdered, orphaned, raped, forced to bear children, and worked to death. Which of these totally accurate scenarios should these young women have been asked to recreate, for their benefit and the benefit of their fellow students? Would a play slave auction have been good for them, too? A mock classroom lynching?

Maybe some of the boys and girls could have dressed up as slave hunters, while some of their classmates fled in terror of their lives, and the kids could have learned all about the Fugitive Slave Act and Harriet Tubman. Or the teacher could bring in a bunch of cotton balls and some craft glue, and then the kids could have recreated harvest time and learned all about being horsewhipped for failing to make your quota.

I mean, seriously? What next, creating a teachable moment about the burning times with a real stake? Buck v. Bell with a desktop operating table and some other lucky teenage girl? Where did you go to school, and how many of your classmates lost limbs when you studied the Civil War?

You don’t have to humiliate and terrify people in order to give them empathy, or pretend that their humiliation has social value in order to teach them perspective. The reason the non-volunteer was so traumatized is that she already knows, much better than her teacher, what history means. She wasn’t upset because she had to crouch under a desk for a class period. It’s the teacher whose ignorance needs correcting–along with her professionalism. If you can’t explain the horrors of the fucking slave trade to students without asking students to become audiovisual aids, you have no business being in a classroom anyway.

I can’t believe the posters here who are giving the benefit of the doubt to the teacher. This exercise DOES NOT and COULD NOT teach empathy, sympathy or any other pathy, and she should get her ass fired for this, period. While role playing has its place in the classroom, what the fuck ever happened to dialogue and discussion and reading and students engaging with activists and leaders to encourage critical thinking, or is that too old-fashioned pedagogy? I invite people to my classroom engaged in social justice movements, and it teaches the kids a hell of a lot more, and without harm, than any ham-fisted attempts to teach kids “what it was like” (as if we could EVER teach them what it was really like, because we simply can’t). I just want to ask this teacher, “How DARE you do this to this child, any child?”. It doesn’t matter what her intent was at all; the result was racist.

And I find it very interesting that very few people have posted comments here, compared to other posts at Feministe.

I never thought I would say this in a million years, but the unions, as much as we need them, do protect teachers like this, and they shouldn’t. We need reform, badly.