But what is picking and cleaning cotton teaching children of this era? A bit of history maybe, but that can be conveyed without the physical practice. Maybe humility, and the hardship of labor. That can be learned in so many other ways though.  It certainly doesn’t apply anything else to their studies or future.…

The best part would be convincing the rubes to pay you for the privilege of Marceline’s Whites-Only Slavery Experience (accept no substitute!)

I kind of like this idea. White people keep minimizing slavery and peddling really stupid theories about how kind slaveowners were. I’m all for making white people experience as much reality about slavery as we can get away with. I would happily set up Marceline’s Whites-Only Slavery Experience on an old plantation…

Same here. And I went to school in Virginia.

Cotton picking is removing the cotton fiber from the bolls; the bolls are the hard shelled seed pods that house the cotton and cotton seed.

Or “this is what slaves were forced to toil over in the fields all day in return for being beaten, whipped, and forced to live in barns”.

Still disappointed about that as an adult, tbqh.

The unincorporated areas of Spokane formed a whole new town because they were going to be annexed by the city and residents didn’t want to have to pay for “inner city” problems.

Same here, after a short period of confusion and, ultimately, disappointment that it didn’t actually turn cotton into gin.

Seriously WTF. As I recall the cotton gin story, that invention promoted the continuation of slavery for generations. Before the mechanical cotton gin, cleaning the seeds out of the cotton boll took forever and even with slavery labor costs cotton was not a big economic crop. After the cotton gin was available, cotton…

I remember learning about the cotton gin just fine without having to actually clean cotton myself. 

Same. And my Uncle was a history teacher in Spokane for 40 years. This pissed him off something fierce. Washington basically has a western corridor that’s fairly blue/liberal (The peninsula is it’s own beast.) and everything east is super rural/red.

Two Eastern Washington stories in two days, one about homophobes and one about racists...

Born and bred Washingtonian here. Outside of King county (home of Seattle) and Pierce county (home of Tacoma), Washington’s hinterlands are just as rabidly racist and red as any other state. It is all a city vs. rural numbers game. None of this surprises me, despite Spokane being somewhat bluer than its neighboring…

Obligatory:

As a former 18 year veteran math and history teacher - and also a 51 year old Black man, I would have appreciated an idea of the lesson that was presented and the language used to discuss it. As I would also use props or visual aids to concretize an idea for my kids, Idk if the use of cotton in and of itself is a bad…

Anything that doesn’t fit with the “Great White Savior” narrative these people have been indoctrinated into believing and never questioning cannot be tolerated. And anyone who stands in the way of maintaining the “Great White Savior” narrative is the enemy.

A bunch of old white conservative men sittng around and deciding what “traditonal history” means is why we need CRT in the first place. Intellectually-bankrupt snowflakes. If history doesn’t make you uncomfortable at some point, you haven’t learned anything of substance.

Traditional history. Like how Mao was the most benevolent leader to ever exist. 

Wow, Republicans are goddamned dumb. There aren’t very many amendments! Someone receiving a high school diploma should have learned about every single one! Schools should be doing all that and more.