Don’t want to wear a mask anymore? I know just the spot where you can shop. Trader Joe’s! And because they trust their customers so much, you don’t even need to show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination.
The Centers For Disease Control recently announced that you don’t need to wear a mask if you’re vaccinated. However, states with stricter rules in place, such as California, take precedence. California said it likely won’t lift the mask requirement until at least June 15, and TJ’s has gone rogue.
What about Walmart? Sticking to the state’s rules.
Now if I’m pro-mask, I can’t go to Trader Joe’s and buy those organic raw cashews. And if I’m anti-mask, I can’t go to Walmart and buy that patriotic American flag T-shirt. What are we going to do?!
The world is topsy-turvy. And so is the Santa Maria-Bonita School District, which apparently decided novels were too time-consuming to teach in the classroom. Consider my mind blown, again.
I’ve been thinking about it for at least three weeks now, and still can’t wrap my head around it. As if Instagram and Snapchat weren’t bad enough for the attention spans of our youth (and adults!), we are now planning on teaching our children reading comprehension by giving them a single chapter out of a book. But not the whole book. Because learning, apparently, happens in a digital vacuum that’s hooked to something called pacing guidelines.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, you’re out! The kids only need one diary entry to fully comprehend what it was like to be Jewish living in hiding during World War II.
Character development and tracing a story over a couple of hundred or more paper pages be damned! They won’t learn what they need to learn! Let’s keep those eyes glued to the computer screen. That’s where the magic happens.
I can’t roll my eyes hard enough at this turn of events. It’s tragic. Maybe we’re trying to cram too much into a curriculum if teaching novels means teachers can’t “hit all of the grade level standards.” That’s at least the reason district Director of Teaching and Learning Jennifer Loftus gives for removing novels from the curriculum.
And do the teachers get to have any say in it? You know, the ones who actually work with the students? Nope, nope, nope—at least not according to them.
In fact, it seems like the teachers don’t get to have a lot of say in anything these days. Not the curriculum they actually have to teach or the way they return to teaching in-person classes. And the teachers are pissed!
A group of 300 teachers and teachers union supporters showed up to a protest that took place before the May 12 school board meeting to show just how pissed they were. The Santa Maria Elementary Education Association (SMEEA, don’t you just love that acronym?) is fed up.
They don’t currently have a contract with the district, which apparently wants more classes, more students, and fewer novels. The union declared an impasse with the district over negotiations, although the district disagrees with that (no surprises there, amirite?).
But I won’t be able to get into the details. That’s all we have time for in today’s lesson.
The Canary is wondering where to find banned books. Send thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in May 20-27, 2021.
