"Guys, you're rewriting history now!"

[vanitashaze]

Courtesy of sheafrotherdon:

OH MY GOD EW CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICANS. This is not the first time that secularism has been sacrificed in the Texas Textbook Debates, but this is definitely one of the scariest examples I've seen yet. There are so many things I could say about the new curriculum - how it's likely going to be sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, religiously discriminatory, just discriminatory in general, and oh yeah, PARTISAN BRAINWASHING - but I think this shit is self-explanatory, and there's just way too much fail to properly document. Really, I think one of their fellow Republicans said it best: "Guys, you're rewriting history now!" Though this bit deserves a special notice for sheer RAGE INDUCING FAIL:

McLeroy moved that Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, be included because she “and her followers promoted eugenics."

In conclusion: Yuck.

ETA:

Comments

[mithrel.livejournal.com]

High school English, hopefully, although at the moment I'm tutoring elementary school kids in reading and math. Gotta love this economy.

[vanitashaze]

Ooh, cool! Along with history, art, and theatre, I'd think that English would be one of the most enjoyable subjects to teach. (Though, of course, simultaneously not, because so few people actually appreciate literature. Sigh.)

GO ECONOMY GO! WHOO!

[mithrel.livejournal.com]

I'm also semi-qualified to teach German, since I minored in it, but I haven't spoken it consistently since like 2006, so I've forgotten a lot.

[vanitashaze]

Huh. Why German?

[mithrel.livejournal.com]

Not as random as it seems. In high school they decided to offer more languages than Latin and gave us a choice: we continue with Latin and later Greek, or learn Spanish, French or German. My family came from Germany, and we sang a song in German in choir and I liked the sound of it, so I decided to take German.

My parents wanted me to take Spanish, and I'm starting to see why, tutoring ELLs. I took a year of Spanish in college, but that was like eight years ago and it didn't stick.

[vanitashaze]

The language choices in high school do seem to be expanding (which is good!). When I was goin' through the system, it was only Spanish or French. I chose Spanish, because though my extended family is the whitest thing since the invention of the potato, and conservative Christians to boot*, a lot of them were missionaries and so speak Spanish fluently. Also, because I think it's a beautiful language, and very useful. Where was this going? Oh, right. Now that I'm in senior year, the board also voted to include Arabic and Mandarin Chinese in the curriculum. Too late for me, but yay nonetheless.

I've heard that German is easier to learn that some Romance languages because of its structural resemblance to English. Is that true?

*Needless to say, my particular branch doesn't get invited to many family shindigs.

[mithrel.livejournal.com]

I thought it was. There are a lot of cognates, and you only have to deal with four cases, unlike Latin which has six basic cases, and I think more in the advanced grammar. Yeah, a lot of IB schools are starting to include Mandarin, which is awesome. I went to a charter school, so there weren't that many students, and we went in for "traditional" curriculum. Good, as far as it goes, but man did I get a shock once I started taking ed classes.

In which I sound like an idiot.

[vanitashaze]

Ed classes?

Ahh! Too many grammar terms! *hides* Though I suppose I'll take the plunge: what's a case?

Re: In which I sound like an idiot.

[mithrel.livejournal.com]

Ed=Education. And cases...well it's kinda hard to explain, since English has lost most of them. English uses word order more than inflection, but cases are a way of telling what the noun, pronoun or in some cases adjective is doing in the sentence.

Like with the subject: "I went to the store," I is nominative. But if it's the object of the sentence the pronoun you use changes. In "He likes me," me is accusative, since it's the direct object of the sentence. Same with he/him and she/her. Most languages have more than those two cases, and English did too up to about 500 years ago, but since the order of the sentence tells you what the word is doing we didn't need them and they dropped out.

Re: In which I sound like an idiot.

[vanitashaze]

Okay. I... am attempting to understand this, and I think I'm doing pretty well. (Thank you!) But hey, linguistics and grammar in high school? Pfft. That's what college is for.

Re: In which I sound like an idiot.

[mithrel.livejournal.com]

Heck I got my BA in Linguistics I'm trying to use layman's terms. And it's not so much grammar as "This is the way the language works and the terms you need to know to learn it."

Re: In which I sound like an idiot.

[vanitashaze]

...Okay then?

Re: In which I sound like an idiot.

[mithrel.livejournal.com]

LOL, it's just easier to understand if you're actually working with the language rather than talking in abstracts.

Re: In which I sound like an idiot.

[vanitashaze]

Ha. It's like TOK all over again.