I went to a neighborhood party last night and talked with a 50-year-old woman who is preparing to reenter the workforce after rearing three children and two step-children. She has always loved English (Brittany Spears’s favorite subject in high school because “it is something you can use every day”) and is getting a master’s degree in teaching English so that she can look for a union\/government job as a high school English teacher. She is required to take only six classes over one year to get her degree. One required course out of the six is called “diversity”. She is not doing well in the class. “We aren’t learning any specific techniques that could help us teach people of different races or backgrounds. There is only one correct answer to every question posed by the professor and at first I wasn’t giving it. The professor was pigeonholing me as an ‘old white woman’ who couldn’t adapt, but eventually I figured out what was expected and now I’m saying stuff that I don’t believe just so that I can get a good grade in the class.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went to a neighborhood party last night and talked with a 50-year-old woman who is preparing to reenter the workforce after rearing three children and two step-children. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n