His new baby Juniper
This seems like a very insane thing to do to young children:
Kids in a primary school have been told to refer to their gender-neutral teacher as “they” in the classroom. The Third Class pupils returned to school last week to be informed their new teacher wants to be referred to by first name only, or the pronoun “they”.
The children from the Dublin Educate Together school – aged 8 and 9 – were told this on their first day back, according to parents. They have since been corrected by the teacher for saying “she” and taught to say “they” instead.
Look, these are children. They’re still learning the language. It’s idiotic to teach them a wrong version of the language they’re still learning.
Also: the point of schools is to teach the children. It’s not to give fuzzy-feels to the teachers or administrators or kitchen staff. It’s triply not to give fuzzy-feels to one narcissistic teacher who wants to force the children to think way too hard about how to refer to that narcissistic teacher.
One guardian said: “The schoolkids shouldn’t be corrected for using ‘she’ or ‘he.’ These children are eight years old and it is confusing for them.
It’s confusing and more to the point it’s wrong. We do say “she” and “he” in English, and it’s an error to refer to a known person as “they.” It’s normal idiom to refer to an unknown person [whose sex/gender is unknown] as “they” but it’s not normal idiom at all to refer to a woman or man in the room with you as “they.” It’s novel political coercive idiom to do that, and it’s terrible pedagogy to do it.
Psychologist and campaigner Stella O’Malley believes the teacher is putting their needs ahead of the welfare of children.
That’s not even a belief, it’s just a fact. You could think it’s an awesome progressive thing for the teacher to do it, but you can’t honestly say it’s not what’s happening.
However People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy said it is “positive” the school is supporting the teacher. Murphy – who told this year how he is raising his new baby Juniper as gender-neutral – said: “It’s basic decency, respect and politeness to refer to people as they want to be referred to.”
Within reason, yes. Without reason, no. Teachers can tell students to call them by their last name or first name or perhaps a friendly classroom nickname, but beyond that, no. It’s not “basic decency” for teachers to tell students to call them Joan of Arc or Mary Mother of Jesus or Donald Trump or Donald Duck. There are limits on what teachers should be demanding of students, especially when the demand is purely personal and nothing to do with the education of the students.
I once told my students to call me “Great Squid Overlord”. I got a good laugh, we moved on, and they called me by my name (or by their close understanding of my name, which for some reason stumps some people) for the rest of the semester.
I was teaching college kids, though. If I were teaching third graders, they might have taken it seriously.
I can’t think of a single teacher I had, K-12, who would’ve told me, or even ~allowed~ me, to address them by their first name. I believe in younger grades it’s now common to use “Honorific First Name” (so, “Miss Susan”). But first name alone? Hell, no, one of the things being taught at that age is boundaries and respect for elders who aren’t actively abusive. You don’t do that by getting overly chummy.
Freemage, i was horrified to discover that my students had been calling teachers by their first names since the beginning, so apparently the honorific has disappeared. But it’s worse than that…
My students, who insisted on calling me by my first name even after I told them not to, were calling male profs by Mr. [X]. One of my students was saying that “Mr. [X] told us to call him by his first name, but I just can’t bring myself to!” This was a student who had been calling me by my first name all semester, even after being told not to. There are different rules depending on the sex of the teacher, apparently.
I read a column (actually, my husband read it – it was in a sports magazine, and I don’t read those) from a sportswriter talking about how sportswriters tended to refer to white players by their last name, and black players by their first names. This, he said, was to infantilize the black players, show them less respect.
Students today are being told that they shouldn’t respect people, even those who have done things worthy of respect. So I see Rosalind Franklin constantly referred to as “Rosalind” in papers by my students (though the instructions for writing clearly state to say their whole name the first time, then refer to them by last name). When I ask students to name someone they respect in history, they come up blank. Once in a while, some student will say Jesus.
Several of my colleagues that are younger have the same attitude. You shouldn’t refer to ideas or discoveries by people, because…I’m not sure why. I guess because a lot of them have more than one person working on them. But it hasn’t always been that way. Mendelian Genetics is rightfully named. He worked alone in the monastery garden, and blazed a path others have followed since. And I respect him. I do not worship him, I do not idolize him, he is not a hero. He is someone who did something worthy of respect.
Apparently there are a lot of people (probably in the humanities) equating respect for accomplishments with hero worship and deciding we should do neither. I agree hero worship is problematic, but respect for accomplishments is not.
I always think about how this attitude arose now, at the point when a lot of women are doing things worthy of respect, and we are uncovering women of the past that did things worthy of respect. I imagine it’s coincidence, but maybe not.
By the time kids are in school, they’ve pretty much figured out the language. They lack a lot of vocabulary, of course, and some of the more intricate bits of the grammar, but they certainly know their pronouns* (including how to use singular “they”), and they know how to differentiate between men and women, boys and girls. (And of course for the most part they’ve absorbed gender stereotypes by then, even if those stereotypes don’t fit.) They also tend to be little moralists at that age, with a very strong sense of what’s right and wrong. So the danger of this sort of policy isn’t so much in their linguistic development as in their social development. They may well get reinforcement of the message at home, in which case they’ll probably do as they’re told, or they may for one reason or another be discouraged from using “they” for the teacher, and then they’d have to decide which side they’re on.
*Assuming that they’ve learned the language from a very young age. For later learners, it tends to be the little things that trip them up–the bits of grammar that aren’t very salient and don’t carry a lot of semantic weight. The most extensive literature I know about in that regard was on first language English speakers in French immersion schools in Canada in the ’90s–by the time they entered middle school, they were pretty good speakers of French, but they had a hell of a time keeping the gender of nouns straight. So for kids learning English as an additional language, trying to navigate the “correct” use of “they” when they often confuse “he” and “she” would just add to their confusion.