Boots & Sabers

The blogging will continue until morale improves...

Owen

Everything but tech support.
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0829, 08 Oct 21

Hostile Workspaces

This is a letter in the student newspaper of my Alma Mater:

I am an instructor at Texas A&M, and I have always loved my job. But this semester, the classroom feels like a very unsafe space. In fact, it feels actively hostile.

 

[…]

 

If you walk around campus, enter an academic building or participate in a classroom exercise, you would assume that everything is back to normal. Very few people — students, faculty and staff — are wearing masks. Almost no one is exercising additional social distancing. Northgate bars and restaurants are as crowded as ever. Our football stadium and tailgate venues attract thousands of fans for every home game.

 

Everyone is behaving normally. But things are not normal.

There’s a phrase in Aggieland that says, “Highway 6 runs both ways.” I’m sick of people forcing their fear on everyone else. If this guy (assume it’s a guy… it’s unsigned) is too afraid to teach in that environment, then he can go to another place of employment that takes more precautions. Clearly the vast majority of people are comfortable being mostly normal. We don’t need to all bend our behavior to make the most skittish among us feel better.

And as for this part:

I can’t require my students to wear masks. Our governor and our school have outlawed mask mandates. I can “strongly encourage” mask usage, but students can ignore my encouragement, and many do. Furthermore, every time I encourage the use of masks in the classroom, the atmosphere of the classroom changes. The facial expressions of my students harden. They lean back in their seats and cross their arms. Several of them sneer at me. The belligerence is palpable. It’s uncomfortable. It feels dangerous.

Perhaps they are done taking medical guidance from some rando instructor and are capable of making their own choices.

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0829, 08 October 2021

4 Comments

  1. MjM

    ~sigh~

    “ cases in Brazos County have skyrocketed”

    “Cases” is a meaningless number. Even so, as recorded, they have been going down over the last few weeks. The main reason for the “skyrocket” is due to a three-week long mandatory testing rush at T-A&M at the start of the fall semester. 79,000+ tests resulted in 3388 new “cases”. This in a county with a population of about 230,000.

    As we all know the tests can create false positives and also report inactive virus particles as “positive”. There is no information provided by either the county health department or T-A&M on how many of those 3388 “cases” where asymptomatic, but a good guess would say the vast majority simply because people were forced into the tests rather than going voluntarily to be tested because of symptoms, or even simple curiosity. Nor is there any info provided on any of new “cases” who might also have already been vaxed.

    As for the instructor who wrote the opinion, if she (obvious by the verbiage) is one to have strictly adhered to the wholly made up dart board CDC recommendation of six feet “social distancing” during the onset of this situation, she had already demonstrated her innate uncontrollable and illogical fear.

    Her continual attempts to instill her fear into others is the real sickness.

  2. Tuerqas

    “Her continual attempts to instill her fear into others is the real sickness.”

    I think you are exactly correct, but she is just a symptom. The ‘real sickness’ is Government. While the overt policies to gather all real power to the Government are Democratic policies, the Republicans do little to block them, knowing that when they are voted back in they will have the reins to that power. So the liberal education machine pushing programming rather than learning plows on, and the stooges (teachers and the majority of students) understand little of what they are repeating and even less of why they are wanted to repeat the lies.

  3. MjM

    T, most of what you wrote is agreed, but the writer is not a symptom. She does, however, shows signs of symptoms of what she is; a result.

    Years of indoctrination, group think, living in a nice tight little bubble. The result is an unthinking lemming who subscribes to the leftist notions of elitist – and authoritarian – expertise.

    And why? Well, because it is obvious she sees herself the same. She been teaching for 25 years, you know, so she is an “expert”, too! And it matters not what the “expertise” is. Its a circular confirmation. I believe the “experts”, I am an “expert”, therefore others must believe me.

  4. Tuerqas

    “T, most of what you wrote is agreed, but the writer is not a symptom. She does, however, shows signs of symptoms of what she is; a result.”

    I’ll agree…the teacher is a result of modern curriculum so she is a result. But if Guv is the sickness, and I still believe it is, contributions to the sickness are symptoms so it is a sort of bosium strip there. So if not a symptom in the analogy, I guess the products of today’s educational system would be the mucus? They would certainly be the germs that spread the sickness…Eww, that fits a lot better doesn’t it?

    “And why? Well, because it is obvious she sees herself the same. She been teaching for 25 years, you know, so she is an “expert”, too! And it matters not what the “expertise” is. Its a circular confirmation. I believe the “experts”, I am an “expert”, therefore others must believe me.”

    Haha! If that doesn’t define most every teacher I have known as an adult. They may say things like they don’t know it all, but the attitude behind any discussion is that they do certainly know more than me.

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