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Пишет DK ([info]k_d_s)
@ 2021-08-29 11:46:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Настроение: sleepy
Entry tags:lustig, usa, zensur

‘Lobster claws’ test questions land Crowden School principal in hot water
It hinges on a series of comical classroom vocabulary tests in which Johnson would ask students to complete fill-in-the-blank sentence worksheets. Johnson said he’d used the exercises as a teaching tool during his entire tenure at Crowden and the same sentences had been in use for about a decade. Johnson aimed to teach his English students words like “aberration” and “lethargy” by including them in purposely outlandish sentences relying on gory imagery and absurdist humor — mafia hitmen, a student getting hit in the head with a shovel, an exploding toilet, etc.

In a further attempt to engage his pre-teen students, he’d insert their first names at random into the sentences. Sometimes he’d string sentences together, such as in the story of “Crazy Lobster Boy” — a student who grabs two pairs of pruning shears, declares himself a lobster and runs around terrorizing his classmates while teaching them words like “simulating” and “alleviate.”

Most students adored the vocab questions, multiple parents told Berkeleyside. Even the executive director’s own child had participated without incident, they said.

But every so often, the tests have rubbed a parent or student the wrong way.

The parent who filed the complaint with the school felt that his son was being mocked for his speech impediment in a sentence describing “his tendency to babble like an idiot and drool on his classmates.” (Johnson insisted the boy’s name was picked at random for the sentence and said he didn’t know the child had a speech impediment.) The parent was also furious that his Jewish son was made the protagonist of the “lobster boy” story, arguing that a joke that the boy probably “had a crab or crayfish somewhere back in his ancestry” was evidence of Johnson’s “thinly veiled antisemitism” because the sentence connected the boy’s violent behavior to his crustacean DNA.

“Humiliating a young boy on the verge of puberty by calling him a crustacean and referring to his ‘lobster claws’ at a time already complicated with fears and ambivalence about body image and sexuality is utterly shocking from any adult, let alone the Head of School and English teacher,” the parent wrote.

The parent told Crowden he was pulling his son out of the school and threatened to sue — demanding two years of free tuition, free homeschool and French tutors, compensation for his son’s emotional distress, assistance with getting his son admitted to another private school and a change of his grade from a B+ to an A- in Johnson’s class.

Less than two months after the parent’s complaint was filed, Johnson had been fired.