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Teacher gets terminated; Twitter explodes but there's way more to the story

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Teacher gets terminated; Twitter explodes but there's way more to the story

Reasonable people can consider all the facts and debate whether or not he should have been fired; too many talking heads are doing the opposite

Erika Sanzi
Jul 10, 2021
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Teacher gets terminated; Twitter explodes but there's way more to the story

sanzi.substack.com

All of us who opine publicly and use Twitter as one way to communicate with the world are likely guilty of hitting “send” on a quick take that we later realized was based on a misleading headline or a poorly reported story. I know I’ve done it.

I woke up this morning to lots of tweets (from mostly blue-check Twitter accounts) that included this local news link about a teacher from Tennessee who was fired last month by a county school board in a 6-1 vote. The teacher’s name is Matthew Hawn.

The claim I kept seeing as I scrolled was that his termination was either solely or mostly based on his decision to assign an article written by Ta-nehisi Coates and show a video of a poem recitation about white privilege in his class on Contemporary Issues. A tenured teacher of eight years losing their job and baseball coaching position for those two assignments seemed implausible (but not *impossible*) to me— it took me all of two minutes to discover there was much more to the story.

First, here are a few Twitter takes that felt off to me right out of the gate:

Twitter avatar for @jessesingal
Jesse Singal @jessesingal
Teacher fired in part because he assigned as reading a major story published by a mainstream magazine. Some parents are just the fucking worst, man.
wjhl.comSullivan County school board approves teacher termination charges, supporters outragedWARNING: Links in this article contain graphic language UPDATE – The Sullivan County Board of Education Tuesday voted 6-1 that the charges of dismissal against teacher Matthew Hawn are true and warranted. Supporters and former students gathered at the meeting wearing light blue and holding placards …
1:38 AM ∙ Jul 10, 2021
206Likes23Retweets

Twitter avatar for @RadioFreeTom
Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom
Cancel culture is real, at least the version in which which panicky right-wingers fire high school teachers for assigning an article from The Atlantic and a poem.
Twitter avatar for @donmoyn
Don Moynihan @donmoyn
This really seems extreme and a harbinger of what is to come: veteran (and tenured) high school teacher and baseball coach dismissed from school after he assigned a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay and poem about white privilege. https://t.co/3tFpH4g7gl
2:56 AM ∙ Jul 10, 2021
1,926Likes489Retweets
Twitter avatar for @mattyglesias
Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias
The charge against this teacher is that he assigned a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay that the complaining parent says (accurately) “paints the former president in a negative light.”
wjhl.comSullivan County school board approves teacher termination charges, supporters outragedWARNING: Links in this article contain graphic language UPDATE – The Sullivan County Board of Education Tuesday voted 6-1 that the charges of dismissal against teacher Matthew Hawn are true and warranted. Supporters and former students gathered at the meeting wearing light blue and holding placards …
9:29 PM ∙ Jul 9, 2021
770Likes144Retweets

The best and most informative source I came across (thanks to others who shared it online) was the Facebook page of a guy named Dave Gilbert.

If you don’t want to take Gilbert’s word for it, all of the documents he references and quotes from are available here because the school district shared them with the local news station.

It seems that some (many?) want to make this story about “cancel culture” and/or the hotly contested “anti-CRT” bills being debated and passed in some state legislatures but both of those claims seem to be wrong. To me, this is the crux of the issue:

Robert Pondiscio, former teacher of 5th grade and high school civics (and my personal friend!) sums up the problem better than I could:

People don’t recognize lack of viewpoint diversity when their side is represented. And if you resist intellectual diversity and demand conformity, it’s an indication that you don’t think your ideas can withstand competition. In this teacher’s case, taking his comment seriously at face value, it’s evidence he’s incapable of even recognizing the legitimacy of another point of view, which is troubling.

Reasonable people can debate whether or not this teacher deserved what happened to him. I personally would like to spend more time looking at all of the materials before I take a definitive stance on this particular case.

But I do know that, despite much evidence to the contrary, I have to hold out hope that most of us are fair minded enough to agree with Pondiscio that viewpoint diversity is essential in education, especially in a high school class called Contemporary Issues. Is a teacher who comes right out and says “there is no credible source for a different point of view” on a thesis like Coates’ in The Atlantic up to the job of educating other people’s children in a public school?

An easy case can be made that the answer is no.

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Teacher gets terminated; Twitter explodes but there's way more to the story

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3 Comments
zbird
Jul 16, 2021

I would agree that the teacher should have exposed the students to multiple points of view but firing seems an awfully harsh punishment for missing a couple additional sources in a single day's class. something else/more must have been going on.

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Goodman Peter
Writes Ed in the Apple
Jul 11, 2021

Would you teach the other side of Christianity? The other side of Capitalism? The other side of traditional marriage?

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