In her May 3 letter, “I’m a teacher. ‘Edutainment’ won’t solve the deeper problem.,” Diane B. Norton observed, “The fourth-grade students I teach today are much less focused and attentive than those I taught 15 years ago.” She correctly stressed that “if parents want their children to be able to focus, they need to spend meaningful chunks of time focusing on them. Put down your phone. Get your laptop off your lap and replace it with a child and a book. Talk to your children in restaurants and teach them how to behave rather than handing them the panacea of a phone to play games on.”
But as a longtime teacher in the medical field, I disagree with her contention that a teacher should only be “an educator, not an entertainer.” Teachers can no longer be just teachers. They must find ways to engage and activate learners, using games, simulations (case studies, role-playing, etc.), movies and other means to capture learners’ attention, which indeed has faded over the years. Norton related this lack of attention in part to online learning, and perhaps that is true. However, being animated, challenging, stimulating and inspiring are important attributes in any context.
Casting oneself as an entertainer can be taken too far. Classic publications in medicine describe “the Dr. Fox effect,” in which faux professors (actors) who solely entertain students get rave reviews, despite the lecturers offering no content on the topic they address. There is a happy medium for teachers: Be engaging and provide good content.
Larrie Greenberg, Washington
The writer is professor emeritus in pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
In his May 6 Wednesday Opinion essay, “Chicago schools’ May Day field trip was wildly inappropriate,” Nicholas Kryczka pointed out that “on May 1, the Chicago Public School system waded into uncharted waters: School officials used taxpayer funds to transport schoolchildren to participate in May Day demonstrations, including a protest over the policies of President Donald Trump.”
As a mentor, I’m aware of the increased levels of anxiety and emotional stress that kids are experiencing, and a contributing factor is episodes like this, where teachers took students on a field trip to attend a political protest disguised as a joyous festival. We all know it’s easier to persuade children with entertainment. Many of these kids are being targeted on issues they have not yet developed the intellectual capacity to understand, such as the historical context for why May 1 was chosen. A field trip that involved students I work with was framed as a “civic action,” and a student told me that his teacher said it was a form of civic duty to attend.
Kryczka described how, spurred by teachers, the children “held signs and bobbed along to a drum circle of chants” as a slate of union activists and Democrats, including the Chicago mayor, delivered partisan speeches. This is another example of the systemic policies and priorities of teacher unions that have undermined students’ academic achievement. Our schools are not supposed to teach political ideology.
Greg Raleigh, Washington
Mapping out fairness
I agree with the May 9 editorial “Virginia Supreme Court right to strike down gerrymander.” It’s unfortunate that the ruling was 4-3 and based on a process issue. The editorial explained that under the Virginia Constitution, “the state House and Senate need to vote to put a measure on the ballot in two consecutive legislative sessions, with an intervening election of the House of Delegates. … The justices concluded that this requirement wasn’t met because the state’s General Assembly voted for the first time on Oct. 31, four days before Election Day, to put the constitutional amendment to voters. By that time, more than 1.3 million people had already cast ballots.”
It would have been much better if the attempted gerrymander had been invalidated because it violated Virginia’s constitutional requirement that districts be “compact.” Republicans did take the referendum to court on those grounds, before voting began. Despite expert testimony on how dismally uncompact the proposed districts were, Richmond Circuit Judge Tracy Thorne-Begland ruled against Republicans, opining that the districts’ compactness was “fairly debatable.” Yes, in the same sense that there is still debate about whether the Earth is flat. If only the lower court had upheld a meaningful interpretation of the compactness standard, we would have a yardstick to distinguish between inevitable but acceptable partisan jockeying and egregious gerrymandering that violates accepted norms of fairness.
Tom Guterbock, Crozet, Virginia
The Virginia Supreme Court’s overturning of the state’s redistricting referendum is an outrage. Shifting additional districts to the right nationally will likely disadvantage voters of color, an especially dismal prospect with the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent gutting of certain provisions in the Voting Rights Act.
If the commonwealth’s referendum was not prosecuted properly, in the view of Virginia’s justices, why did they allow it to move ahead on April 21? The May 9 front-page article “Voter-passed Virginia map overturned” reported that “the state Supreme Court could have ruled on the process before the election, but chose not to, partially at the request of Democrats who hoped a victory would add weight to their legal arguments.” Apparently the justices were not moved by approval of the referendum at the ballot box.
Jack Greer, Shenandoah, Virginia
I don’t necessarily disagree with Jason Willick’s May 4 column, “Kagan’s peculiar idea of voting rights,” but I think he’s missing the point. Most people are. Mandated majority-minority districts were a Band-Aid solution to a more fundamental problem. Every two years, when Americans go to the polls, they try to map their political will to 435 discrete, single-representative districts with first-past-the-post elections. This method produces our polarized two-party system and yields a set of representatives that almost no one is happy with. Instead of constantly fighting over boundaries, we should minimize their importance by increasing the number of districts, implementing ranked-choice voting and maybe even adopting proportional representation. Willick concluded, “Representative democracy isn’t about perfect fairness, which is impossible.” That may be true, but it should still be the goal.
Ross Adelman, Takoma Park
Regarding Theodore R. Johnson’s May 7 Thursday Opinion column, “What the Supreme Court wants to pretend about democracy”:
The 1787 Constitution did many things poorly, but giving redistricting power to state legislatures is probably the worst. Thankfully, redistricting occurred only once every decade. In our wildly partisan new era, politicians view redistricting as anytime, anyhow, anything goes. I am surprised the parties don’t try to redistrict after ballots have been cast.
Of course, district boundaries must be altered as population changes, but districts should be reasonably stable and continuous with the past, just like states. Being a minority (of one sort or another) is part of life and doesn’t automatically require boundary adjustment. Do we require that Texas’s borders be adjusted in the name of representation? Of course not. What should adjust is the political parties and their nominees.
We need to take redistricting away from state legislatures and craft solid nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Even better, we can use artificial intelligence to do the bulk of redistricting, because at this point, I don’t trust the human hand.
William N. Hoke, Manhattan Beach, California
Ted talk
Regarding the May 7 front-page obituary for Ted Turner, “Cable TV visionary who created CNN”:
We were living in the Atlanta area when Turner took over WTCG, using the tagline “Watch This Channel Grow.” Turner himself broadcast the news, ripping and reading straight from the newswire. In contrast to the local NBC affiliate, which boasted “The South’s Largest Newsgathering Network,” WTCG claimed “The South’s Smallest Newsgathering Network” — ironic given what it became: TBS.
Suzanne S. Barnhill, Fairhope, Alabama
As a resident of Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the growth of CNN, I often heard a story about Ted Turner from when he attended boarding school there. It was said that one night, after “lights out” in the dorm, a prefect confronted him about a light being on in another dorm. “Who’s responsible for that light being on in that dorm, Turner?” Ted replied, “Edison, T., sir.”
Paul Knapp, Palm Coast, Florida
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