Category: Culture

Why I don’t teach to cancel culture

Posted on by Suki

I get lots of requests from parents regarding their students. I am used to accommodating all sorts of needs, and in the online webinar format, it’s very easy to do that. But there’s one request that I’ve received that I will never accommodate, and that’s canceling history or ideas from my courses.

Though “cancel culture” is in the news a lot, let me start by explaining how it works in an online course for children. [Here’s Wikipedia if you want more details.] No matter what subject I’m teaching, whether it’s language, music, or food, we face what I call capital-C Content. That’s content that may not be child-appropriate, may be offensive to some people, or may refer to subjects that are offensive to some people.

My job as a teacher is to decide how to deal with capital-C Content in an age-appropriate manner.

In some ways, this is easy. In my all-ages courses, I tend to skip the personal foibles of historical figures, for example. It’s not necessary to know about a composer’s bigotry unless it’s expressed in the music. But I won’t shy away from age-appropriate discussions that are more central to the subject we are studying, such as Roald Dahl’s unhappy childhood.

In my teen courses, I will address sensitive issues more in depth. I ask students to use our defined standards of behavior and language when discussing issues, but I don’t stop them from addressing them. Teens often have a deep interest in discussing topics that affect their lives, whether it’s a popular writer’s posts on Twitter or their own experiences with discrimination.

“Cancel culture” would have me avoid sensitive topics or cover them with platitudes. Cancel culture asks teachers to offer trigger warnings or to avoid entire topics altogether. Cancel culture also asks us to omit historical complexities when a topic doesn’t align with our modern sensibilities.

What comes up in the classroom

You may be surprised at the topics that come up in classes for kids.

  • In my music history class, I just had to tell parents that there was no way I was going to avoid all Content…especially in the week that we studied opera! Murder, rape, war, and cultural stereotypes abound.
  • In my class about food, Yum!, contentious topics come up all the time. Some of my students are vegan and others are dedicated meat-eaters, and that leads to potential conflict.

But it’s in my language courses that we are faced with Content on a regular basis. The history of the English language is fascinating and complex. It’s regularly the case that unsuspecting students share etymological information about a word without even noticing the, ahem, Content that comes along with it. Just think about trying to avoid sex, violence, religion, and bigotry when researching the many meanings and history of these words: head, buck, jazz—even intelligent!

One such situation comes up while discussing the word apoplectic in my vocabulary class. The history of this word really helps students understand just how angry you are when you are feeling apoplectic. Literally, the meaning derives from the symptoms of a stroke, which was referred to apoplexy, which was defined at the time the word was being used as “being crippled, struck dumb.”

Ouch, lots of Content in there. It leads to a discussion of the evolution of the word dumb, from a medical term for something that doctors didn’t understand (being “struck dumb” because of damage to the brain) to the current meaning, “stupid,” which derives from the prejudice that people had against deaf people in the past.

It’s very upsetting for a child to know that there is discrimination in the world, especially if that discrimination hits home. But if I were to cancel all the words with embedded discrimination in them, we’d be left with a language bereft of its complexity and history. Canceling words and their history isn’t the solution—understanding words and their historical context is the solution.

Keeping it age-appropriate

In my all-ages courses, of course, we don’t actually discuss offensive topics in detail. For example, if my student did research on the word jazz and the word gism was in the etymology, I would just simply ignore it and move on. If a student directly asked what it meant, I would say that it’s not appropriate for discussion in our course—and move on.

In one of my writing courses, a young girl used the word “bitch” in the text chat—quoting her teen sisters, who used that word (lovingly!) with each other. As I was reading her writing out loud to the other students, I just quickly said, “oh, whoa, that’s not a word we use in polite society” and moved on. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to discuss it further, so I sent her a private message later.

Teens need to explore ideas in depth

In my teen courses, the controversy over J.K. Rowling’s views about transgender people has been a topic of great interest. It brought up insightful discussions, such as the ethics of enjoying an artist’s work when the artist is someone whose views are repugnant to the reader. Teens are not too young or too fragile to find out that the authors of some of their most treasured stories were not necessarily morally upright people, and our discussions lead to a greater understanding of the interplay between literature and culture.

Nevertheless, I have been asked by students or parents to offer trigger warnings before such conversations take place. But we can’t offer trigger warnings for conversations, given that they haven’t been had yet. All I can do is enforce our standards for respectful discussion. If one of my students started to describe, for example, child abuse in detail, that would be clearly inappropriate and I’d interrupt the conversation. But to say that a teen can’t mention existence of child abuse because it triggers another student? I can’t agree to that.

We have clear rules about respectful language in our courses, and students almost always follow them. We encourage students to speak up when they feel uncomfortable, and they often do. Within the rules for respectful conversation, we have the most in-depth, insightful conversations about difficult topics.

When the student is the one who cancels

Students themselves sometimes buy into the ideas of cancel culture, believing that anyone or anything that upsets them should be dismissed. Those students are the ones who, instead of joining in the conversation or listening to see where it goes, disappear from the webinar with a click. Sometimes we never hear from them again.

This is when I wish I could keep them in the discussion. I always reach out to them after class to try to keep them communicating, because life, they will find out, will not always give them the opportunity just to close the tab and go back to a carefully constructed world. The day that they find out that a valued co-worker has views they don’t agree with, what will they do? Education is more than facts and figures; it’s a preparation for life.

Learn to be a confident messenger

Life doesn’t offer trigger warnings and won’t cancel history as you walk through it. I want my students to be confident messengers for their viewpoints. And in order to do that, they will have to face what the world puts in front of them.

Most of the time—let’s not forget—this world offers natural beauty, kind people, and an amazing and empowering history of humankind. But we do our children no favors by obscuring the challenges that we face in making a safer, kinder, more inclusive culture for all.

Are you suffering from outrage addiction, my friend?

Posted on by Suki

I am a strong curator of my social media feed. When people I follow post back-to-back ugliness, I unfollow them. I’ve read the research and I know that a steady peek into the ugliest parts of their souls is not good for my mental health.

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

But then the 2020 election happened, and everyone was outraged. Conservatives were outraged, liberals were outraged, middle-of-the-road why-can’t-we-all-just-get-along people were outraged. We became a culture of outrage. Unlike some people I know, I didn’t leave social media, but I definitely limited my engagement.

There was a palpable drop-off in outrage after Biden’s inauguration. Most people not on the fringes moved on. But some of the people I know seemed, for lack of a better word, stuck in outrage. Outrage had become their drug of choice, and they simply couldn’t stop.

I started unfollowing people whose feeds were stuck in pointless outrage. In a few cases I attempted to post moderating comments, but the ugliness of the responses gave me pause. I decided I needed to calm my own brain and I unfollowed them all.

Righteous anger is not outrage

There’s a place for—and a grand tradition of—righteous anger in our culture. Righteous anger is focused and in its own way positive: its goal is to get people to sit up and take notice.

The BLM protests were initially fueled by righteous anger. And though they had been lied to and misled, a lot of right-wing voters who believed that our election was stolen were also initially inspired by righteous anger.

But I make a distinction when I use the word outrage. Outrage is a knee-jerk reaction that is unfocused and has no particular end-goal:

  • If you’re outraged by racism, you yell a lot, you riot, or you live in anger and fear.
    If you are experiencing righteous anger about racism, you take part in peaceful protests, you communicate the reality of the problem to others, and you vote.
  • If you’re outraged by voting issues, you yell a lot, you riot, or you decide not to vote because it’s pointless.
    If you are experiencing righteous anger about voting issues, you learn about how the system works, you read the data, you get involved to keep the election secure, and you vote.

This year has given us plenty of examples…

like racism

The BLM protests did a lot of good. They focused the attention of a lot of well-meaning white people in power whose attention really hadn’t been focused. People influenced by righteous anger got to work and pressured their lawmakers and their communities to do better.

But when you look at the outrage that accompanied the righteous anger, there was a fair amount of collateral damage. Property was damaged, people were harmed or killed, and lots of fundamentally decent people got really nasty in their social media feeds.

Righteous anger fueled real, positive change. Outrage fueled anger, depression, alienation.

and voting rights: on the right…

The concern over voting rights is shared by people all over the political spectrum. America without secure elections is not America, that’s clear. But on all sides of the political spectrum, you see the difference in outcomes between outrage and righteous anger.

On the right, people who listened to outrageous lies felt their outrage grow. Righteous anger would have led them to listen to conservative politicians and officials who did the research and found the facts. But the people who broke into the Capitol on January 6 were not fueled by righteous anger. Clearly, there is no logical world in which breaking windows and zip-tying Nancy Pelosi would end in a more secure vote.

There were those on the right who had, if not righteous anger, well-researched concerns. And you may have heard their voices if you were reading the mainstream press. But right-wing media feeds on outrage at this particular time, so that’s what most conservatives heard (and continue to hear). Conservatives who actually understand election security seem to be screaming into a void.

…and the left

The left wasn’t immune to voting rights outrage. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard—and saw in my social media feed in the last year—people saying things like “all politicians are the same so my vote isn’t important” or “the party has the vote rigged.” My observation is that this attitude is more common in younger adults, but there may be other factors than youth. Lack of interest in or understanding of the political process is probably also a factor. Although this may not feel like outrage, this attitude is often accompanied by outrage responses to particular triggering topics such as immigration. The same people who rail against Democrats being “as bad as Republicans” generally don’t take the positive steps that result from righteous anger. They just get pissed off and alienated.

I’ve had to turn off feeds from liberal friends because now that they got what they wanted, they are continuing to bang their nasty words against that wall of outrage. Their hatred of any politician who disagrees on policy is intense, immediately writing them off as “racist” or “in the pocket of corporations” if they don’t agree on the best way to solve a problem.

How are you feeling?

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker

I’m worried about you, friends who are still fueled by outrage. I did turn you off, it’s true, but I think of you and hope that you will be able to step off the outrage machine. It’s not good for your health or for our society.

I believe that we need lots of righteous anger. We have so many difficult problems to address in this country, and so little agreement on how to address them (and sometimes, so little agreement as to whether there’s a problem at all).

But I’d like to see the smart, fun, creative, and energetic people around me step back and assess whether their righteous anger is giving them the energy they need to solve problems, or if they’re allowing their outrage to make them part of a problem.

Parenting your LGBTQ+ child

Posted on by Suki

I started a new online course for LGBTQ+ youth and their allies because I noticed that my queer students needed a place to congregate, learn about themselves, and be their full selves without fear. We’ll be learning about history, literature, film, health, mental health, and anything else that comes up during the semester.

Some of the parents in the course requested that I share some good LGBTQ+ resources for parents that will be accessible outside of Rainbow Room. I thought that was a great idea, so you can now access my LGBTQ+ Parenting Resources page on this site.

If you have just learned that you have a queer child, you may feel like this is a challenge you aren’t ready to face. But just like all parenting challenges, this is one that will strengthen your relationship with your child and help you grow as a person.

Here is some general advice if you are at the beginning of learning to parent your child. Much of this advice was given to me by others and has proven itself useful.

  • Always remember that your child is still the same person. They may ask for new pronouns or surprise you in their choice of dates, but they are the person you love and nurture.
  • Practice unconditional love. It’s so important that they feel that your love is not dependent on their pleasing you.
  • Defer to your child in how they want to present themselves to the world. Some kids will want to be out and proud. Others will have their reasons for being more circumspect. Don’t out your own child.
  • That said, you are your child’s advocate, and if your child sees you not advocating for them in one area, they will receive a clear message that you don’t support them. Make sure to politely and kindly remind people who misname or misgender your child. Make sure to stand up for your child when they are criticized for who they are.
  • Recognize your child’s individuality and know that they need to make mistakes. I call this “I got your back” parenting—you don’t always have to be out front fixing things for them. Your child needs age-appropriate autonomy and privacy.

I hope the resources are helpful and that you feel positive about parenting your rainbow child!

The Final Snub Says it All

Posted on by Suki

The smallest snub can be the biggest gesture.

This is the role of the First Lady, to welcome the new one with grace and humility.

Newspapers report that Melania Trump has not reached out to Jill Biden to welcome her to her new home. Now, I suppose this isn’t surprising. Her husband has never admitted that he lost the election.

It may not be surprising, but it is deeply shocking. No matter what sorts of actions American presidents have taken on the national stage, their wives have had one job and one job only: to be gracious. 

First ladies have taken on many roles, from Jackie Kennedy’s promotion of the arts to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to solve our healthcare dilemma. But no matter what else they did, first ladies knowingly signed on to the job of being everyone’s First Lady. Their job has been to humanize their husbands, take over the care and nurture of the White House, make everyone feel at home in their home, and then pass the job on.

No American first lady has gone into the job thinking that she was moving into a permanent home. They knew that their part in the history of this country was a gender-determined role as homemaker, peace maker, she who keeps up the public face.

I’m willing to overlook all the other nasty gossip that came out about Melania Trump (though the recordings are a little hard to wipe from my memory), but this last gesture is a step too far. If the Senate doesn’t convict Trump of inciting sedition, they at least could convict him of having exceedingly bad taste in his [temporary] life partners.

The gossips say that Melania cried on election night, 2016. They say she didn’t cry tears of joy for her husband. She cried, I can only guess based on her subsequent actions, because she was actually going to have to extend grace to others. The world had always bent to its knees in front of her, and now she was going to have to do a little bending.

Apparently, even that was too much.

Women’s liberation is [almost] complete

Musing about Melania Trump leads me to look wider into the society of Republican women. I was raised in a conservative town and I know the unwritten code that conservative women follow. These women knew their place and they knew their role. They were the nurturers of children, the keepers of home, the supporters of their husbands, and sometimes, the movers and shakers of charity and social good in their communities.

Conservative women still love to dis feminism, but it’s clear that they have learned its lessons. Just look at the recent Capitol riots. Women can act just like men? The zip-tie guy’s mom went in to cause mayhem at his side. Women don’t have to be sweet and perfect? It was a woman who walked off with a computer from Nancy Pelosi’s office. Women should dress pretty? The women in that mob were almost indistinguishable from the men, dressed in t-shirts promoting hatred and division, red caps to hide anything they might have done to their hair that morning, even military gear.

Women used to talk sweet even when they were spewing the rawest hatred. No more. Kimberly Guilfoyle’s GOP convention speech? Well, I’ll just leave it at that.

Like it or not, the role of the First Lady is to be nurturer, keeper of the house, paragon of graciousness.

The people who talk tradition trash tradition

So I circle back to Melania and then all the incredible breakage of norms perpetrated recently by Republicans. I can’t help but think that we are in a children’s story about Backwards World, where you wake up and everything you used to experience has been turned around.

In my childhood, it was the left screaming bloody murder at the establishment. It was post-hippie liberated women who took it on themselves to dress and act however they wanted. Conservatives were…conservative. They didn’t want change. Heck, the women had not even changed their hairstyles since 1958.

I can’t imagine those people I grew up with making any apologies for a band of hoodlums that entered the Capitol building and laid waste to it.

The Republican party is not the conservative party anymore. They don’t want to conserve the earth for their children. They don’t want to conserve decorum in our government. They don’t want to conserve the proper operation of our society.

“Whatever it is, I’m against it,” indeed.

As soon as the Capitol dust settled, they were back to using the word “unity,” as if they understood the term in the slightest. For years, the Republican party has gained power through insinuation, fear, and lies. You can say this about Trump, he does sometimes tell it like it is. He’s the one who said out loud that Republicans can’t win without voter suppression.

Republicans have realized that true conservatism has died a silent death. While Reagan courted evangelicals and Gingrich courted revolutionaries, the true conservatives became truly outnumbered in their party.

Republicans trash tradition because they are no longer conservative. They are liberal in the most general sense of the word: They want change. And the change they want is to do away with everything that has held this country together. They are against compromise. They are against fair representation. They are against loving their neighbors.

They are even against welcoming a new First Family into the White House. 

Really, has it come to this? 

I find myself inexplicably shocked and saddened by Melania not welcoming Jill into the home that the voters gave to her to keep and protect. It’s weird, because I think this whole First Lady thing is awkwardly archaic. I simply don’t believe that the role should exist. And in fact, I don’t really believe that the presidency, as it is currently defined, should exist either. But that’s the topic for another essay.

This essay is about sadness. The sadness of knowing that all across America, there are women who approve of Melania Trump’s behavior. They are readying themselves to snub their own neighbors. Maybe they will look across the aisle at a recently divorced mom and decide that her kids can’t play with theirs. Or they’ll look at the charity work they do and wonder if it’s beneath them, the way that such work is clearly beneath Melania Trump.

The fabric of conservatism is now frayed. Conservatism used to be a strong wall that liberals had to push against, thus strengthening both the left and the entire system as a whole. But now, instead of pushing back against tradition and conservative policy, liberals are pushing back against an angry, disillusioned mob who thought that the Trumps would pull them up by their bootstraps. 

Instead, the Trumps have pulled their followers down into the gilded muck where they have spent their lives, wrestling with the slick-skinned demons of their own creation.

It’s a made for TV moment, for sure.

Educated: A belated book review

Posted on by Suki

I have to admit that I resisted reading Educated by Tara Westover when it came out with a big splash in 2018. I was, frankly, so done with the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope that I didn’t even bother picking it up.

But strange things happen in a pandemic, and one of those is you are sitting on the couch in the evening, having finished your latest book, scrolling through your mom’s Kindle account and you come across that book you resisted reading…

And so I read it, and was (perhaps not surprisingly) pleasantly surprised. Westover’s book does not promote the “homeschooling as child abuse” trope in the slightest. In fact, I would suggest that anyone who maintains that opinion read the book as a way to understand the difference.

On the fringe of the fringe

Westover was raised in an Idaho Mormon community in a family way at the fringe of the fringe of their community. Westover considers her father bipolar, though he has never been diagnosed. Whatever his diagnosis, he was clearly manipulative, paranoid, and delusional. Westover’s mother was both victim and then co-conspirator with her husband. The family maintained fragile ties with their more mainstream extended family and community, but they lived largely insular lives where the children had no idea what the outside world was like.

The psychological abuse and neglect from her parents stemmed from their extreme views: about the roles of women, about eschewing modern medical treatment, about blind obedience to the father’s authority. Another source of abuse was the constant psychological distress of living in a household that is constantly preparing for the end—which is always just around the corner. The physical abuse, however, came from an older brother. Himself a victim of their father’s paranoia and manias, the brother takes the “education” of his sisters into his own hands, his physical abuse stopping time and time again just short of murder.

The “homeschooling as abuse” trope would have you believe that this abuse was able to happen because of homeschooling. But throughout the story, Westover documents the complicity of relatives, neighbors, and their community. Homeschooling, it turns out, was neither a cause nor an affect of the abuse.

Through the support of a different older brother, who has escaped to college, Westover decides to “educate” herself. She eventually gains a high enough score on the ACT to go to college, and from there proves a brilliant student who can’t be kept back.

Is this homeschooling?

In some ways, Westover’s “education” at the hands of her parents was classic unschooling. Her mother taught all of the children the basics of the three R’s, and both parents gave them life lessons. Her father put the children to work in his (physically dangerous) business and enlisted their support for his constant preparations for the end of days. From a young age, Westover also acts as assistant to her mother’s (illegal) midwifery and then her highly successful essential oils business.

Since unschooling focuses on releasing children from the tyranny of standards and curriculum so that they can pursue their own passions and do meaningful work, one could argue that Westover was “unschooled,” albeit unconventionally.

However, this is not Westover’s view or mine. What happened to her was not unschooling, but baldfaced neglect. She entered the world only with the skills that she fought for. She often had to hide her studies from her domineering father and her passive or enabling mother. She was lucky to have mentors in her college-bound brother and a friend in town. Any resemblance her education has to unschooling is only on the surface.

The village raised the child

Westover’s story, in the end, isn’t about homeschooling at all. In fact, she makes a point of noting other homeschooling families in her extended family who are giving their children a real education.

Her story is about the strength of the human spirit, the importance of believing in factual truth, and perhaps most of all, the role of “the village” in raising children. Westover’s father’s manias and her brother’s abuse make her family an outlier in some ways. But in other ways, her story is a classic one: what her immediate family couldn’t give she got from others.

An older brother acted like a parent.

A friend in town acted like a brother.

A college administrator recognized a need to meet her where she was.

A roommate patiently educated her in the ways of the world.

As much as Westover’s father believed that it was his family against the world, it was the world that made sure that his neglected children could thrive.

A final rift

There is one sad theme to the book that feels unresolved. Near the end of the story, Westover muses about the fact that her siblings who “got out” are successful, with PhDs and lives in the mainstream. The children who stayed, without even a high school diploma, are still fully within their parents’ sphere of influence, their choices limited.

Westover realizes that this rift forces her to choose between her education and the myths her family survives on. Like many survivors of abuse and growing up in extremist communities, she has to choose between fact and family, a break or a continuation.

In the interview linked below, she draws a connection between the choice she made and our current political environment. It’s worth a read.

The ultimate homeschooler?

Westover’s education didn’t come from homeschooling. But in another way, Westover is the ultimate homeschooler—despite her parents’ influence. She took ownership of her education and her life, a process that is difficult for teens even in the most supportive families. She educated herself, then she let herself be educated.

This isn’t a book about homeschooling, but it is a book about learning, perseverance, and coming to terms with family. It’s well worth a read.

Further reading:

Now available