Check out how some elementary school teachers are approaching discussions about Thanksgiving to their students:
LONG BEACH, Calif. - Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he “discovered” them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.
Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.
He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.
Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But “what I am trying to portray is a different point of view.”
Riiight. The fact that this is happening in a San Francisco elementary school tells me all I need to know about Morgan’s motivations.
Continuing:
Becky Wyatt, a teacher at Kettering Elementary School in Long Beach, decided to alter the costumes for the annual Thanksgiving play a few years ago after local Indians spoke out against students wearing feathers, which are sacred in their culture. Now children wear simple headbands.
“We have many mixed cultures in Long Beach, so we try to be sensitive,” Wyatt said. “What you teach little children is important.”
Laverne Villalobos, a member of the Omaha tribe in Nebraska who now lives in the coastal town of Pacifica near San Francisco, considers Thanksgiving a day of mourning.
She went before the school board last week and asked for a ban on Thanksgiving re-enactments and students dressing up as Indians. She also complained about November’s lunch menu that pictured a caricature of an Indian boy.
The mother of four said the traditional Thanksgiving celebrations in schools instill “a false sense of what really happened before and after the feast. It wasn’t all warm and fuzzy.”
After she complained, it was decided that pupils at her children’s school will not wear Indian costumes this year.
After one woman complained??
Morgan, a teacher for more than 35 years, said that after conducting his own research, he changed his approach to teaching about Thanksgiving. He tells teachers at his school this is a good way to nurture critical thinking, but he acknowledged not all are receptive: “It’s kind of an uphill struggle.”
Don’t you just love the way PC moral relativists try to bury their revisionist agendas by claiming all they want to do is to ‘teach the students how to think critically? What turkeys. I think he’s absolutely full of stuffing.
Hat tip: Michelle Malkin
ST, you’re being far too nice, by half. Does Mr. Morgan leaven his painfully balanced approach to American history with any information regarding wars between Indian tribes for territory predating the arrival of the evil Europeans? Critical thinking, indeed.
Comment by geezer @ 11/21/2006 - 10:44 pm
- Maybe he could “round out his presentation” with the inter-tribe wars that preceeded the arrival of the Pilgrams, as geezer pointed out, and maybe a few paper mache’ examples of scalped woman and children would balance things out nicely. You think?
- The kids could do some really “critical thinking” in between trips to the bathroom to barf.
- BECAUSE OF THE INDIAN IDENTITY WIGWAMS!!!!!!
- I like that Ad running on TV right now, with a rather bad portrayal of the Pilgrams stealing ect ect, ending with the little boy saying:
“….and afterwards we ate a big meal and watched football…..”
- Bang
Comment by Big Bang Hunter @ 11/21/2006 - 11:01 pm
We as Americans created the greatest hybrid blend of humans that ever existed on the planet Earth! Happy Thanksgiving Everybody! The menu here will be as mixed as it was in Plymouth, there will be turkey along with the shellfish and vegetables, corn of course! Pilgrims and Injuns tipping the ol’ fermented fruit jar, and forgetting what ancient differences we ever had!
Comment by Tom TB @ 11/22/2006 - 5:31 am
I just feel so bad for any little kid that has to grow in California, nothing for them will ever be normal.
Comment by Drewsmom @ 11/22/2006 - 8:52 am
I little known fact about the pilgrams is that there were almost no sailors in their midst. They had to hire people out, and since this was to establish a settlement, the only sailors they could find to help with this trip were mostly criminals. There is alot these teachers are not teaching. Ohhh also the “wearing of feathers” thing. 8 months ago I was in a seminar that had a Lakota Medicine Woman in it and she was saying only Eagle Feathers were sacred, that is why in the movies you see actors that are not native wearing Owl feathers. - Lorica
Comment by Lorica @ 11/22/2006 - 10:16 am
This is an interesting teaching technique - taking away the kids’ stuff. They should use it in Civics class to teach about government and taxes.
Comment by Dan @ 11/22/2006 - 11:07 am
Jeebus up a tree on a crutch…
Anyone who gets a lump in their pants at the mere thought of Thanksgiving ought to either grow up, or else pick a date (I suggest June 25th, anniversary of Custer’s Last Stand), throw a big feed, and call it Forgiveness Day, to piss off the white people, because there is nothing more annoying than to be “forgiven” for something in which one had no involvement.
The more I think about it, the more I think such an idea might take off. June 25th is more or less halfway ’round the calender from Thanksgiving, and would be during BBQ season. It is close enough to the Fourth of July that self-flaggelating Leftists, as well as Euro-hating post-Americans, could adopt it as an ersatz ‘anti-Fourth’, as well as the ‘anti-Thanksgiving’.
Since it would be another excuse for a big feed, there would probably be some spill-over participation by people who don’t hate America—meaning enough yellow-hairs to give a good performance playing cavalrymen during the traditional Forgiveness Day ‘No Prisoners’ pageant.
Local retailers would benefit from one more holiday during which they could sell tacky crap to put up on the walls, feather bonnets and cavalry stetsons, and of course the inevitable turkeys, cooked in a brand new traditional way I just thought up, impaled on a spike and burned at the stake out in the yard.
I call it a winner. Guess I better get busy copyrighting, trademarking, and patenting stuff…
Comment by Mike James @ 11/22/2006 - 1:02 pm
Interesting that this Morgan considers stealing the students’ stuff to be “realistic.” Because that’s just, y’know, totally like what the, like so-called “Pilgrims” did, maaaan. And why do the rest of us have to pay attention to a bunch of whining losers. anyway? And modern day Indians that want to return to a pre-industrial state of savagery are welcome to do so. I don’t notice a whole lot doing it, though.
I spent several years, off and on, in the California educational system in the sixties and seventies. As I recall, most of my teachers were not self righteous officious morons. Must have been some later kind of affirmitive action on behalf of idiots.
Comment by Steve Skubinna @ 11/22/2006 - 2:55 pm
Long Beach is actually in the Los Angeles area; however, being that such PC activity is taking place in California in general is no surprise to me.
Comment by D.C. Thornton @ 11/22/2006 - 4:30 pm
My bad, ST. I just did a re-read and noticed that the first teacher in the article is from ‘Frisco…
Comment by D.C. Thornton @ 11/22/2006 - 4:35 pm
Just saw this bumper sticker this evening:
“Too bad the people who really know how to run the country are too busy teaching school”
Comment by Steve Skubinna @ 11/23/2006 - 12:14 am