Brickbat: With Honors

Following an outcry by students and parents, the San Diego Unified School District said that some, but not all, of the honors classes at Patrick Henry High School that had been cut will be restored. Principal Michelle Irwin said she was cutting the classes for equity reasons, saying she wanted to remove the stigma from non-honors courses and citing racial differences in honors course enrollment. Irwin also claimed it is redundant to have both regular and honors courses in the same subjects.

Comments

[IceTrey]

Michelle Irwin is a racist for working at a school named after a slave owner.

[perlmonger]

Irwin also claimed it is redundant to have both regular and honors courses in the same subjects.

I mean, I'm sure there wasn't any difference back in high school in terms of what she experienced...

[mad.casual]

He and all the slaves he owned are pretty equitably dead.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Was this principal the beneficiary herself of some equity hiring? Filling the quota for woke lemmings in the school district?

[Deep Lurker]

"Irwin also claimed it is redundant to have both regular and honors courses in the same subjects."

Because of course the students are all ANSI-standard widgets, rather than anything resembling individual persons with individual differences. And so naturally it's both "fairer" and "more efficient" to apply a one-size-fits-all instruction set to those child-shaped widgets.

[cgr2727]

As if anyone in the educational system is familiar with ANSI, and she’s probably going to think “widgets” is a racial slur.

[MatthewSlyfield]

Not a racial slur. She probably thinks "widgets" is a slur against vertically challenged adults. 🙂

[Inigo Montoya]

Her tenure as principal has been such a well known disaster that she should consider adding Allen after her name to become Michelle Irwin Allen.

[Outlaw Josey Wales]

+1 a Poseidon Adventure (the first one)

[Rich]

she wanted to remove the stigma from non-honors courses

Oh, FFS! Just dub *every* course an "Honors Course" and be done with it!

[mad.casual]

Hell, you could even label the insufficiently woke or equitably-studied courses "dishonors history/math/science/chemistry/physics" as long as you don't say who can and can't attend based on anything except academic criteria and allow colleges and employers to hire/admit disparately based on achievement in dishonorable courses. A 4.0 in 'Dishonors Chemistry' sounds kinda bitchin'.

[TangoDelta]

I assume my high school chemistry class wasn't much different from most but it was fun learning what not to combine in the first week because poison gas, explosive, etc. The nitrogen triiodide preparation was a bit dull until it dried sitting in the sun of the window and suddenly blew up on it's own.

[Tyval Dayall]

Did anyone else notice the picture with this story is of a black teacher, and the credit is from "monkey business images"?

That has to be racist, right?

[mad.casual]

It was a funny joke until I realized that the two white kids in the photo have their hands up and the black kid has a bewildered look on his face. Pretty conclusively racist.

[Unicorn Abattoir]

Patrick Henry High School

Give me equity or give me death!!

[Jerry B.]

You'd think that someone who believed that certain minorities
didn't have the capability to get into an honors course would be considered a racist.

[mad.casual]

You would think that a principal who regards a regular curriculum and an honors curriculum as redundant would be unemployable... as a principal and maybe even as a fast food worker (Why do we have double Whopper when it's redundant with ordering two Whoppers?).