This teacher of pallor, Dana Dusbiber, reveals her inner racist …
I am a high school English teacher. I am not supposed to dislike Shakespeare. But I do. And not only do I dislike Shakespeare because of my own personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early form of the English language that I cannot always easily navigate, but also because there is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.
I do not believe that I am “cheating” my students because we do not read Shakespeare. I do not believe that a long-dead, British guy is the only writer who can teach my students about the human condition. I do not believe that not viewing “Romeo and Juliet” or any other modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play will make my students less able to go out into the world and understand language or human behavior. Mostly, I do not believe I should do something in the classroom just because it has “always been done that way.”
I am sad that so many of my colleagues teach a canon that some white people decided upon so long ago and do it without question. […]
Shakespeare lived in a pretty small world. It might now be appropriate for us to acknowledge him as chronicler of life as he saw it 450 years ago and leave it at that.
What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important. […]
So I ask, why not teach the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior? Why not teach translations of early writings or oral storytelling from Latin America or Southeast Asia other parts of the world? Many, many of our students come from these languages and traditions. Why do our students not deserve to study these “other” literatures with equal time and value?
So far this teacher wants to dump Shakespeare because:
1) White
2) Old
3) Weirdly written with words we might have to look up
4) White
5) Only taught because other white people said so and what do they know?
6) I personally don’t like him
7) White
In addition,
If we only teach students of color, as I have been fortunate to do my entire career, then it is far past the time for us to dispense with our Eurocentric presentation of the literary world. Conversely, if we only teach white students, it is our imperative duty to open them up to a world of diversity through literature that they may never encounter anywhere else in their lives.
… Dusbiber fetishizes the students of color she teaches. She believes they should be studying and exposed only to writers of their own melanin level while students of pallor should also be studying writers – who we are to judge first by their #rightskin – because DIVERSITY!
Dusbiber doesn’t want to challenge her pet minorities because she doesn’t really believe they are capable.
Such is the White Woman’s Burden.
I think she is too focused on the story being told in a Shakespeare play and ignoring the language and structure etc, all that academic stuff that school is suppose to be about. In other words same old progressive lefty approach. She wants to teach you what to think not how to think.
You teach yourselves the law, but I train your minds. You come in here with a skull full of mush; you leave thinking like a lawyer
“wonderfully curious modern-day students”
We puzzle: are these students “wonderfully curious” because they are “modern-day”? Or are they “modern-day” because someone else was “wonderfully curious”?
We puzzle again: does this teacher Dusbiber (an imbiber of Dus?) have any idea where “modern-day” comes from, or how it came about? Any idea at all? What if it should happen to be the case that Shakespeare himself sits at the origin of her “modern-day”? Surely her devotion to curiosity wouldn’t drive her to wish to find out. No. This is because TheDrinkerOfDus has no curiosity herself, no devotion to curiosity. She’s a simple fraud.
She’s a simple fraud.
Yep. One big tell is the juvenile “truth to power” bit she pulls about challenging the status quo.
Re-bib-sud.
So’s it’ll slug both directions: someone else drinks it down, pukes it up, and she’s ready to have her taste.
So I ask, why not teach the oral tradition out of Africa, which includes an equally relevant commentary on human behavior? Why not teach translations of early writings or oral storytelling from Latin America or Southeast Asia other parts of the world?
Um, because it’s an English course, you idiot. Translations of other literature are not English or American. Reading Thomas Mann in English translation is not the same as reading his works in German.
As for the rest of it, someone should tell this twerp that trying to mask one’s ignorance in a patina of social justice doesn’t work. I don’t care how many op-eds you write, you’re still a cretin if you purport to be an English major but refuse to read or understand Shakespeare.
And another thing . . .
This reminds me of my college years when one of our younger professors decided to teach a Holocaust class under the auspices of the German Literature department. At the time, there was an emeritus professor in the law school who’d worked as a prosecutor throughout the various Nuremberg Trials. The Holocaust professor, however, refused to invite him to give a lecture to her class because, and I quote, “he’s too old; he won’t excite the students in the class.”
Consider the lunacy in such a statement in all its glory.
Um, because it’s an English course, you idiot
That’s why they invented “World Lit” classes … ;-)
Look, honest teachers are students. This woman is no student. She doesn’t know anything and doesn’t care to know anything. She’s an incompetent babysitter, that’s about it. Pay her accordingly, both in remuneration and in respect.
Conversely, if we only teach white students, it is our imperative duty to open them up to a world of diversity through literature that they may never encounter anywhere else in their lives.
But the same does not hold with black students who may never encounter Shakespeare anywhere else? So much for diversity.
Well I for one think teaching African oral tradition in English class is brilliant. It’s right up there with teaching math through the counting of fingers and toes.
You haters just don’t understand progressive education.
It’s right up there with teaching math through the counting of fingers and toes.
aka Common Core
Fingers and toes.
Fingers and toes.
Frickin’ mouth *burbles*
!parC
And she’s an English teacher. I can only imagine how she’d feel about trying to read Spanish, let alone Chinese or Arabic.
The great film Something About Mary taught us the proper response to “I’m not going to teach Shakespeare because….x”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb7FgSzeGqg
“Step into my office. ‘Cause you’re fuckin fired.”
Well, her job title is “English Teacher.” She isn’t really one, though.
She’s probably neither, in fact…
Dusbiber doesn’t want to challenge her pet minorities because she doesn’t really believe they are capable.
I am constantly fighting with teachers that want to limit minority students to a cultural ghetto instead of educating them on Western Civilization to prepare them to compete.
The English teachers at my school hate me, because I mock them for not teaching Shakespeare.
She’s an incompetent babysitter, that’s about it. Pay her accordingly, both in remuneration and in respect.
You don’t mean that. (I am a teacher, and if you paid me the way we pay babysitters my salary would at least double.)
You’ve got me gahrie, dead to rights, since I confess I honestly don’t know what either babysitters or public school teachers are paid today, but ignorantly assumed what I didn’t know based solely on four decades old experiences.
On a normal day, I teach five classes of students for an hour each. The average pay for babysitters watching multiple children is approx. $5 an hour per child. (This is conservative) If I average 30 students a class, (that is conservative) that would be $150 an hour, $750 a day, which is about twice what I make.
Interestingly enough, if I have a class with more than 35 students, I get paid extra for each one (more than 35 in a period, more than 180 in a day)…but it’s less than $2 per child/hour.
How many people would have gotten the Shakespearean themes in Game of Thrones last night if they hadn’t read Shakespeare?
The death of Jon Snow was straight out of Julius Caesar.
I’ve remarked before that the ClownDisaster himself is straight out of Othello: he is Iago.
For some reason I’m reminded of the joke Harvey Mansfield likes to tell, which I think goes like this:
Q: “How many students are there at The Ohio State University?”
A: “About 1 in 100.”
If only he’d sounded like the cartoon parrot Iago, maybe we’d have been spared his political career.
I got a month (as I recollect) of Shakespeare in middle school English! The Merchant of Venice. Mrs. Whatshename read and explained every sentence while still maintaining flow to create interest in the story. By the end everyone was reading along with little need for explanations. It was interesting and very enlightening beyond Shakespeare, in the way tackling a seeming impossible challenge and mastering it does. One learns far more than the sum of the lessons, is what I mean. Anyway, I liked it and this woman should not teach.
Jon Snow died?
Well shit, I hope that’s not in the books too, because then my whole theory of Martin’s story arc is shot to hell. And I was rather proud of myself for thinking I’d figured his story out without having read more than 50 pages of it.
In this case, I think that’s just the excuse to disguise her own failure to adequately master her subject (“I dislike Shakespeare because of my own personal disinterest in reading stories written in an early[!?!]* form of the English language that I cannot always easily navigate[.]”) and incompetence as a teacher (“[T]here is a WORLD of really exciting literature out there that better speaks to the needs of my very ethnically-diverse and wonderfully curious modern-day students.”)
If you can’t make Shakespeare, who said more and better about the human condition than any other author in history, you shouldn’t be teaching.
You know, it’s interesting. English teachers got out of the business of teaching English and into the business of teaching english language literature because grammar was haaard, and teaching kids who to read and spell correctly was boooring. Now we got a teaching saying the same thing about english lit.
*If she thinks Elizabethan English is hard, I shudder to imagine her reaction to Chaucer. Privileged Princess of Pallor probably thinks Beowulf is German
Brush up your Shakespeare
Start quoting him now
Brush up your Shakespeare
And the women you will wow
Just declaim a few lines from Othella
And they’ll think you’re a hell of a fella
If your blonde won’t respond when you flatter ‘er
Tell her what Tony told Cleopatterer
If she fights when her clothes you are mussing
What are clothes? Much ado about nussing
Brush up your Shakespeare
And they’ll all kow-tow
Well shit, I hope that’s not in the books too,
Actually, Jon does die in the books too. I believe his death is the cliffhanger for the last book so far. But you must remember, death is not a permanent kind of thing in Martin’s world. plenty of people in both the books and the series have already come back from death.
Time was we used to hear
Euclid alone had looked
On Beauty bare.
Time is, we ought to note —
Euclid never looked on
Shakespeare
> I think that’s just the excuse to disguise her own failure to adequately master her subject <
indoctrination with its talking points is much easier for an edu grad. but the union jobs must be preserved at all costs.
I was all set to do the first line of a limerick, but I needed to check where this dim-bulb teaches.
Sacramento. At Luther Burbank no less. People who grew up in towns that didn’t have a school named after him might very well have no idea who he was — other than the namesake of that city in greater L.A.
Dammit.
I bet none of the kids who go to the school know who Luther Burbank was. I teach at a school named for a person, and almost none of the students know who he was.