Just stop the insanity

Parent: ‘Re-creates conditions that evoke so many deeply hurtful things about this country’

TAR, FEATHERS: Teacher forced to apologize for bringing in cotton plants during lesson on slavery.

A San Francisco history teacher allegedly was suspended and then forced to apologize for bringing in cotton plants for a lesson on slavery and the cotton gin.

Last month, the Creative Arts Charter School teacher had brought in the plants, called “bolls,” to show “the sharp edges that had pierced hands while picking cotton and pulling out the seeds,” the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

It took less than a day for the school to begin an investigation into the teacher and the lesson.

Although school officials “declined to confirm” what specific actions were taken, the teacher was absent for five weeks following the lesson. Upon her return just nine days ago, she issued a written apology to school families.

The apology noted the lesson was “sourced from reliable sources” (the report indicates it is “widely available online”) and was “an effort to get the students to understand the difficulty of manually processing cotton prior to the invention of Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin.”

But, the teacher added, “I realize that this lesson was not culturally responsive and had the potential to cause harm.”

If you don’t understand how the cotton gin revolutionized cotton processing, making it profitable, and thus expanding the demand for slaves to harvest more of it, then you don’t understand one of the major driving forces behind slavery in the south. How can even the most stunted, demented “educator” think that teaching history is racist?