I love Goodfellas. Yes, that is an actual quote from Chris Columbus.
I don’t know how people can be depressed. There’s so much to be angry about. – me to my therapist.
One of my accomplishments as a father is that my children have a tendency to call out crap from authority figures. They have internalized what Carl Sagan called Baloney Detection Kit, and they are willing to tell you when said lunchmeat is found.
A boy wrote in his school journal what he thought of the day’s lesson and his teacher.
Check it out.
This little piece of wisdom blew up on Twitter this morning. I had to share it with you all.
I related news is The 10 Blackest Things About This Kid’s Journal Entry Roasting His Teacher for Lying About Christopher Columbus. I’ll give you a sample of the piece:
3. “You said something wrong and I can’t listen when I hear lies” is totally going to be my reply the next time Tucker Carlson invites me on his show.
Needless to say, if I were the teacher, I’d be more supportive of a young person speaking out. I’m definitely in the If I’m full of crap, please point it out club. It’s a difficult club to be in, too. More than once I had to do some deep (for me) thinking when one of my kids asked How do you know what you know?
And for those of you who don’t think teachers teach White America’s biases, let me share you a story about my son.
One day he rolls into the house after school and tells me about a game they played in social studies. It’s all about the race for Africa, that time in the 19th century when European powers sought to carve out territory in Africa like it was a Thanksgiving Day turkey.
The students got to play (oh, my freaking fictitious God, I’m not making this up) colonial powers. Their goal was to seize territory and explain how they were going to do it. This led to some of the white boys to bravely state “Machine guns!” After such declaration, they made sounds reminiscent of the Maxim Gun mowing down Zulus.
I calmly (?) went into a dialogue with my 15-year-old why that was motherflocking wrong. I don’t think I ever talked about the moral implications of a school lesson with so many motherflocking motherflockers ever.
The next day my son calmly informed his teacher his moral reservations with the project. (The project, unfortunately, was already completed.) The teacher went on to talk to the class the “issues” with the game.
Speak out. Silence is complicity.
Andrew Hall is the author of Laughing in Disbelief. Besides writing a blog, co-hosting the Naked Diner, he wrote two books, Vampires, Lovers, and Other Strangers and God’s Diary: January 2017
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