← Unlearn16: Class is in Session
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:03]
Joanna
Class is in session. Hey, everybody, and welcome to Unlearn 16. Class is in session, guys. Today I'm going to talk about being orange. And you know what's really upsetting about this particular story is now it's connected to the, you know, potato running the United States right at the moment, but has nothing to do with him. Just so you know, it has to do with a childhood story. And the childhood story happens to be in my brand new book. That's not what this book is about. So if you're watching this before July 1, 2025, the book is not out yet. It is coming out on July 1, 2025, and you can go order it on unlearn16.com however, if you have the book and you've clicked on the QR code, then this podcast goes with the specific chapter you have just read. So it's meant to be kind of like a little bit more. A little bit more of a deeper take, a little bit more of me rambling for a little while. And in this particular episode, I'm gonna eat this fudge. So, as the story goes, it's actually a very interesting story. And I want to tell you something sort of that happened, I guess, surrounding it. Vanilla fudge. Vanilla fudge. I don't know. Maple vanilla. How about it? Fantastic. By the way, fudge should be soft, not hard. I don't know who's selling hard fudge, but it's wrong. All right, so when I was a kid, I had an orange snowsuit. And speed up the story because you guys have already read it or you're about to read it. And I don't want to ruin every single thing that I did. People when I was very young, I guess, in that snowsute were speaking about other kids skin color. And in my head, in that moment as they were doing it, the way that I rationalized or thought about it was that, okay, well, if they happen to be black or if they happen, whatever color anybody is, in my head, since I was wearing an orange snowsuit, I was orange. Now, let's not take any more from that other than that, because I know this is a part of the book where, you know, you could read it and be like, oh, Joanna, oh my God, you were three. And just because you didn't have an idea of what racial identity was, doesn't mean that somebody else would have. I understand all that, and please, I absolutely get all of those aspects. The reason why I included it is because there's an innocence about a child. And I don't care what their background is, I don't care what their religion is, I don't care. There is a moment, there is a time of innocence. Now having said that, there are some people, and specifically indigenous cultures speak about blood memory, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna set that aside because I don't know enough about that or to speak in that in a legitimate way. I'm just gonna talk about the moment where you have a family, you are loved, you are safe, and you step out into the world and you start seeing just different. You start identifying things as differences and then what the world does to you, whether they're doing it to you, about the way that you look and about the way you walk and your skin color and your, all of the different things that are going to make up you and they start judging that or whether it is about how the world starts to set up dynamics at a very young age, about how you're supposed to look at other people. Because every kid is going to notice difference. You want to know if you put on a couple pounds, ask a five year old, they'll tell you they're going to notice difference. Here's the beauty of it though. Noticing difference isn't judgment, isn't stereotype, isn't prejudicial. Noticing difference is just a physical or a physiological, a sensory capacity to compare and what looks different and what feels different and what textures and all those things. Nothing wrong with that at all. But at what age? And I don't know the answers to this, so this is going to be one of those ones where I'm going to talk, but understand that I don't know the answers. I don't know how anybody can know these answers. At what age does either subconscious prejudice or subconscious ideas and stereotypes flood into your mindset? And at what age do you start actually listening to what people have to say? The news, the media, your, you know, your, your great uncle at dinner, school. People like, at what age do you then are capable of listening and determining and applying the different things that you hear in this world and the way in which you use them? Because I think the subconscious part happens before war. 5. Isn't that crazy? Psychologists say that 75% of who you're going to be, of what you're going to think of, the intrinsic, instinctual, subconscious makeup of you is formed by five. So there are a lot of people, they don't even go to school yet. I mean, I went to daycare, but for a lot of people that's not the case. So you can have very limited engagement with what's informing that feeling. So if that's true, a lot of probably what forms our ideas are happening before we even for the most part, step outside of our homes. And as soon as we step outside of our homes, I think, you know, like I did on that playground, I think that those moments have big impacts. Now, that story my mom has told me time and time again as every story that you know, you have when you're little. So I have a hard time knowing if I have any memory of it or if it's just, you know, recreated memory as we sit around the Thanksgiving dinner table time and time again or whatever. But I think of the innocence of a child. But I Also, knowing that by 5, 75%, I also think of that often. I also think what gets brought in. So me, if I was a parent, like, what are my issues, my thoughts, my feelings? Because that's what kids are absorbing, right? They're really not absorbing your words, they're absorbing your feeling. They're absorbing the tonality you use with those words. So when they absorb that, as in every house, how is that constructing them? And I think this is all so, so incredibly important. And nobody really wants to talk about it, I don't think, because I don't know if you can control it. And if you can't control it, then as a parent, you don't want to feel like you've done something wrong, like you've passed something on. And not just as parents, right? Extended family. Again, anywhere that that kid goes, they're absorbing. That's all they're doing at that age, every single place they go, they're absorbing ideas, they're absorbing thoughts, they're absorbing feelings, they're absorbing tone. They can tell. And this is why the words you use, you know, when adults, like, spell things, it's not the words you use, it's the tone with which you use them. It's. It's like a puppy. And I don't mean to relegate children to animals. I'm just saying when they don't have a vocabulary, they're not analyzing the words you use. When you get angry, they're analyzing, you know, it's like the swear word. They might replicate it later, but it's not the swear word they're analyzing. It's the way in which you say it. It's. If you're saying it with rage, if you're saying it with compassion, if you're saying it with trepidation, they're feeling that. So all of that Gets spilled out. And we live in a world if we're going to talk about. And in this chapter, you could really talk about anything, right? You could talk about race, you could talk about sex, you could talk about ethnicity, you could talk about religion. We live in a world. And, and I know that lots of people would love to say we live in a colorblind world. No, we don't. Stop it. Stop it. Let's stop denying it. Because the more we deny, the more that we create this false illusion that everybody's perfectly objective. And I don't see color and I don't see religion and I don't see sexual. Stop it. Stop it. As adults, kids can't control their environments. They can't control those feelings. They can't control all that subconscious purse as we, you know, as get put in your head as they start going through school. This is the interesting part. At what moment do you start talking about it? At what moment do you put it on the table? And there's huge debates about this. And I'm not even going to come close to telling you that. I'm a psychologist that understands and. But the conversation's interesting because what we're saying is, at what point could the world be putting things on kids whereby a teacher's role should be to create and acknowledge and teach some type of equity and inclusivity in the classroom? Because there's all of this incredible anger and animosity towards things like DEI in the classroom. And when are you allowed to talk about, you know, the gay community? When are you talking. Allowed to talk about trans rights? When are you allowed to talk about African American experiences about different. Like, when are all those things happening? Because if you have kids that they're not. They haven't processed any of that yet. And then you put it on the table. I get. Some people are like, well, don't put it on the table so young, because they still don't know. But I'm thinking they know. I'm thinking they feel it. I'm thinking that we never went wrong by saying everybody should be respected included. We never went wrong by sitting down and identifying differences. Because differences aren't bad. Differences should be beautiful. They should be powerful. They should be highlighted. And so if we, if we embrace it that way, then those moments can only help encourage, empower, and strengthen all kids. Right now some people are going to say, yeah, but in my culture, religion, background, I don't care where it's stemming from. I don't like that. Well, that's cool. You don't have to. You could still educate and talk to your kid however you want, but the minute you step into, let's say, public education, I truly believe that it's our job. It is the only reasonable method and rational and truthful way of teaching, which is, I'm going to teach about the world as it exists. I'm not going to deny the existence of different people. I'm not going to marginalize, I'm not going to erase. Because that doesn't make sense. I am going to talk about it in a amazing, beautiful, inclusive way without demonizing anybody, without. All of those things can be true at the same time. But if you're going to start saying, I'm opting out, like in the United States right now, they just can opt out of. Parents have the ability to have their kids opted out of reading books that are LGBTQ characters in them. What, so you're saying you have to go to the extent that your kid. In a public school, by the way. And again, if you don't like the idea of public education, if you want a more specific, directed, reflexive education, then you don't have to put your kid in public school. You can put them in a private institution. You can homeschool them. I would never stand in the way of that. What I stand in the way of is this. When you create a classroom and you put down a book for all the kids to read, for all of us to discuss, for lessons to be planned around, for learning to commence, and you have kids that can opt out, what is that saying to the other kids? Why are they opting out? Does that mean that this particular topic is bad? Does that mean that those people are bad? What if there's kids in that class who have, you know, two moms, two dads, whatever, and then what do those other kids do? As a teacher, as I'm teaching this book over here, Shakespeare, for example, because, you know, we know that it is inundated with these types of characters that are being protested all over the United States and Canada, by the way. So I'm teaching this as a teacher. I have 20 kids doing this. I have five kids that opt out. What are they going to do? What are they going to do? Even as a practical problem, how am I supposed to teach to those individuals? Do I create a whole other lesson? Do I split the class? I'm going to talk to you about this. And when you're. When I'm talking about this particular book and we're reading it out loud, because that's what we do. With a lot of our books, please, you can earmuffs. And then I'm going to spend half the time with you, and then I'm going to switch to. I'm going to teach two different classes. And what happens if, out of these five kids, two of them don't like the second book I chose because it taps into something else they don't want their kids knowing about. So do I have a third book that I've chosen? Because the goal of something like this is for the teacher then to say, well, I won't pick any. Any books with these kind of. Well, in this particular case, LGBTQ characters. I won't pick any books like that because it's going to be easier. And I can just teach the one class and nobody's opting out. Nobody's challenging it. You see the problem? The point of that legislation isn't just somebody to opt out of something. The point of that legislation is to erase the subject from school because it's going to make it too difficult. A lot of people are comparing it to health class. Right, Forever. Even when I was a kid, you were allowed, or parents were allowed to, for their kids to opt out of sex ed. Okay, so what do you do? You're not in the classroom, then what? So you're going to get less education. You're not in the classroom. And by the by, none of the kids that ever opted out, or their parents, by the way, opted them out, none of them didn't know exactly what was going on in those classrooms. None of them didn't look at the textbooks. None of them didn't look it up. And in today's day and age, what are we doing? What are we doing? Teenagers can look up anything they want on any phone that they have access to at any given moment. And. And you think we're going to be able to legislate control and narrow what they read and what they know and what they're exposed to. What a waste of time. You want to start telling kids books are banned because, you know that's going on all over the United States, out of the curriculum. We're not showing this. We're not doing this. You. A 15 year old is like, cool. Yesterday, that 15 year old, you couldn't get them read two pages of that book because they don't want to read the book. It's boring. They don't care. Even if there are any characters in it, they'd rather stare at the page and pretend to read for 45 minutes rather than actually read the book. And Any teacher knows that I'm telling the truth. Go ahead and ban it, boys. Go ahead, potato, trump. You ban it. And watch those 15 year olds. Is it a strategy? Learn to read and enjoy reading. All of a sudden you have all of teenagers going to find out all the books that you just banned and reading like there's no tomorrow. Go ahead, ban them. Maybe it's like a. What's, what's that thing when you, when you say to do the thing and then you know, you, you, you say the opposite, so they do the opposite. I don't remember what that's called, but maybe it's a psychological strategy that they're imploring in employing in order, in order to get all these kids to read. That would be nice. I don't think it is, but I think that might be the effect. All these things are incredibly hard to talk about. I mean, I teach at a, at a very diverse school, right? Reverse psychology. I love it when I'm on here because when I'm on here, by the way, and I'm doing this, Anna is listening to me in the other room and she'll like just spout out what the answers are supposed to be. She's not on a more than one podcast. Reverse psychology. Having a diverse classroom is incredibly important. If I'm going to talk about the different, you know, lived experiences of many people, having different people who have lived different lives are incredibly important. I don't think shutting down conversation is ever a good idea. I don't think excluding topics is ever a good idea. I don't think that marginalize or demonizing questions kids have is a good idea. Kids can ask me any question they want, period. I'll do my best to answer it. I will do my best to answer it in school. That's my job. Now if it's something, you know, personal for them and a call home needs to be made, that's a different conversation altogether. But if a kid's gonna ask me questions, and sometimes I've had classes, especially younger years, because this is what else you don't understand or a lot of people don't understand. You have grade six, seven and eights, they're listening to every single thing older kids say, not me, but every single thing older kids say. So when older kids are talking about all of these very, very adult conversations or, you know, young adult themes in, in war and history class and all of these things, it matters and it affects them and they end up coming to me, right? And, and normally what happens in that case is I Answer the question. And then I call home. I call home and say, listen, your kids came in and asked this question. I'm going to answer it. But just so you know, this is how I answered it. This is what I said. You have every right to say everything else. But I will, and I've said this to many parents, I won't not answer a question. I won't give my moral sort of control like scope on it. That's not mine to do. I don't need to tell you whether your question's bad or good. I don't need to tell you whether you're right or wrong. I don't need to give any moral sort of, that's not, that really isn't my job. I want you to be a good person. I want you to be a good person to those around you. I want you to be an accepting person. I want you to be a caring, compassionate person. And outside of that, your choices are your choices. A job of a teacher is to make sure that they're always able and capable of answering big questions and then keeping the doors open with parents. I do firmly believe in that. Understand that. Understand that any parent should be able to know what's going on in their class at any given moment. Understand that. And I'll tell you what, active parents who are a part of their kids lives, who are a part of their education, who take that role seriously and don't just take the role seriously. When they hear that a teacher mentioned one thing, one time that they didn't like and they don't ever want to talk, talk about, guess what? Those parents never have a problem ever. Ever. Shockingly, it's always the parents who don't come to parent teacher night. Not because they can't, not because they're busy. You know, there, there are parents who don't have the time. I get that. I'm saying you just make decisions who think, oh no, that's not, they're fine, they're fine. What's going on in school today? Are you bored? Oh, I'm not going to look online. I don't need to do that. I try to make sure my courses, my lectures are fully transparent. Fully. That's important. But what's not, What I am not going to do is, is censor and limit curriculum as established by the Ontario government. In Ontario's case, in order to fit whatever perception or whatever life that you're choosing to lead In a public classroom. We tell the truth. We try to tell what's the most up to date pieces of information, when it comes to science, when it comes to health, when it comes to history, when it comes to all of those things, Right? And if other things challenge that, cool, we talk about them as well. But I am not going to limit truth. I am not going to limit curriculum in order to pad and manipulate and, you know, sort of create an opaque learning situation for our kids. I just won't do it. And a lot of this, when you're talking about this, and it's funny, a lot of the courses I talk about as I teach, and it's been. It's not been easy. It's never been easy. By the way, the conversations are never easy. Knowing how to have them, when to have them, how to answer. Never, never, never easy. That's not the point. It was easy. Here's what I promised. That kid's never answering, asking that question in the first place. Everything is hard. Everything is nuanced. Everything has a thousand shades of gray. That's what makes it interesting. That's what makes kids want to ask those questions. So when I answer them, a lot of the times, and if not all of the times, I answer with, I don't know it all. I don't know everything. And this is my perception. What do you think? How do you feel about that? Right. How do your parents feel? I think this is something you talk to your parents about too, because I think we've gotten to a point in our society, and I'm really having an issue with it in the classroom with you, of the rise of guys like Tate and the rise of trad wives and all of these people pushing civil rights or trying to push civil rights back 50 years, saying, well, it's okay to joke and make fun and demean, and you can type anything you want on the Internet. And you want to tell teachers that they can't talk about discrimination, injustice, racism, sexism, homo. You want to tell them they can't talk about all of that. Meanwhile, in our society today, it's all been magnified a hundred times over. You want us to tell us we can't talk about it? That's absolute garbage. And I won't abide it. I won't stand for it. And I know a lot of people in the United States could be losing their jobs because of it. No, they're manufacturing ridiculous scenarios of classrooms in order to weaponize, you know, in order to weaponize sort of this cultural war in order to make some people feel terrified and protective and make other people feel like villains, degenerates, and. And the enemy and I won't do it. And anybody that's on that side of the fence, disgusting. And they're only doing it in order to empower themselves, in order to make themselves feel good, in order to make other. Because the only way they can do that is making other people feel small. There's no other point to it. Absolutely not. In a world where joking, you can say, I was just joking. I understand not wanting to always be politically correct. I get it. I get it. I get people getting frustrated for making errors in word choices and feeling like their language is incredibly. Needs to be so incredibly precise that they sometimes feel overwhelmed. I get it. I'm 49. The amount of times I've made a mistake with pronouns. For example, I can't even count anymore. I can't even count anymore. But at no moment does my ineptitude, does my age and does my sort of brain direction or chemistry or the way that I learned that. So at a no point do I say, well, I'm not going to try to do it anymore because what a waste. And I'm going to vilify that because I just don't want to change, because that's too hard for me, because I'm what, Too stupid to learn? Is that it? Right. All of these things that have come out are just highlighting the fact that the way we've grown up and all of the subtleties that have been shoved in our head without our consent have really formed, controlled, and created a picture of the way we think the world should look. So when we get challenges that come at those foundational realities, it makes us uncomfortable, it makes us feel stupid, it makes us feel less than. And some people, rather than getting educated about it, rather than trying to change, trying to grow, trying to, to, to expand their awareness, they instead revert to name calling and, and weaponization of language in order to demean the people that are trying to. That are making me feel less than. And it's simply embarrassing. It truly is. And again, I would never sit here and say it's easy. There are no easy roads to have conversations. But to assume, to assume that our language, and this is one of the biggest things, right? Remember, I was in university and I really started learning about postmodernism. And the premise for most postmodern thinking is the fact that language is at the root of all of our understanding, that the way in which we speak about something, the words we use, the tonality we use, the phrasing, all of it, that is far more important than any other sort of legal or economic or political level of equality, that none of those things happen. That, for example, men and women can't be equal, no matter how equal under the law, equal under economic rule or political ideology, no matter how equal they are there linguistically. If we keep dividing and talking about them differently depending on what we want to say about them. For example, a guy has lots and lots and lots of conquests. He's the man. He's, you know, fantastic. He's a player. Whatever, Whatever. Whatever you want to say. And a woman who does. I'm not going to say those words, but the level of derogatory implications would be overwhelming. Right. Same individual, same actions. Our language says they are different. For those who are talking about, oh, facts don't care about your feelings. The facts of a man and a woman doing the exact same thing and being treated and being described and being weaponized differently. That's the reality. And words do matter. The way we talk about people matter. Stages of dehumanization in order to oppress, control, marginalize, and eventually exterminate altogether. Words are the premise of that. We test it out. Going to see if I can use this word, this expression. I'm going to call them this. I'm going to see how people respond. Oh, people are on my side. Cool. I'm going to go a little bit further. I'm not a fan of censorship, but don't twist that by not understanding that words do matter. They do have power. They do have a need to be watched and discussed and debated and, and, and sometimes argued and put to like, put down a hundred percent. But also understand this. It's why I don't support censorship. I mean, if people would just say one thing to mean one thing and we could censor that and take that out of the vocabulary, that might work. But then it doesn't, right? So somebody tells me, Joanna, you can't use, you know, I really want to marginalize a group of people. And you say, okay, you can't use word A. I'm like, okay, cool. I'm going to think of. And they call them dog whistles. Or I'm going to think of an expression or a term or a whole other word that my community, who wants to marginalize, who wants to dehumanize, those people will all understand what I'm saying when I say it. But it's not going to breach the ever, whatever censorship boundary that people have described or defined as being violent and threatening. Cool. I'm just going to use a different word. During the Rwanda genocide, 1994, the Hutu would get on public radio and would say, it is time to cut down the tall trees. Everybody knew what that meant. Everybody knew that that was a call to violence. Everybody knew what that call to violence should encompass. And you had men going door to door to door and wiping these individuals out. We can't censor that kind of hatred and violence. But the fact that nobody looked at that wording, the fact that alarms weren't raised, the fact that the west just sat around and did absolutely nothing and argued about, at what point is it a genocide? Right? How many people? What's the intent? How do we know somebody's intent? Listen, these are all important questions, but when you change your phrasing, when you create these dog whistles and coded language, you can't negate its power and its ability to mobilize violence. So again, I'm not for censorship, but I'm for the discussion. But I'm sure as hell not for one side controlling the whole thing, saying, I was just joking. Can't you take a joke? These are the hard questions we have to talk about. And the little kids on the playground who don't understand what the hell kind of garbage was coming out of adults mouth, why that energy? Why that anger? Why that animosity? We owe them when they get to school, we owe them a safe, secure environment to have big discussions, ask all the questions, and at the very least, feel safe in that space in doing so, for who they are and who they want to be. And if you want to wear an orange snowsuit while that's happening, then wear it. Thank you guys so much for hanging out. Please go check out my book. That's not what this book is about. It's like the five people you meet in heaven, except I don't go to the afterlife. I become a teacher. Lessons learned. Let's see if we can learn together. Thank you so much, guys. I will see you next time. Same bat time, same bat. Channel dismissed.