Education Matters:

Words, words, words. How beautifully they serve in our search for truth and speaking our minds, and yet how easily they are manipulated to bend to a fixed mind and a personal agenda.

I’ve been the object of some recent attacks that have used and abused words, and I’d like to examine some of those words, from a purely academic standpoint, of course. I’d rather not dwell on the Armenian assimilation thing except to say that I have, from the beginning, objected to only one sentence written into the mission statement of an organization. I repeat, one sentence. Not one people, not one ethnicity, not one nationality — just one sentence that flies in the face of my school’s mission to bring our students together.

The latest attack on my character came from a gentleman who seemed to find catharsis in pillorying a school teacher who had the audacity to question that sentence. I would ask this gentleman and others similarly inclined to find just one student of the thousands I have taught over the years who might have detected even a hint of the prejudice they suggest.

I can save him, and others, the trouble. I’ve had a long love affair with my Armenian students, and my Latino students, and my Filipino students, and my Korean students, and my Vietnamese students and my — I know my shortcomings as a teacher, but prejudice is not one of them.

I would ask also that my detractors come to terms with the hundreds of people who have contacted me throughout the city to offer words of support, not to denigrate anyone, but to express the same frustration that I expressed about the separation in our city and in our schools. So enough of that and on to Allen Freemon, the president of my teachers union who accuses me of “duplicity” and “hypocrisy” (yow!). He’s a very nice man, but I have to challenge his understanding of words.

Having questioned his leadership, he has returned the favor by questioning my loyalty to our union. He claims that I have “refused to sit down to discuss our differences,” and perhaps therein lies the source of his confusion. We were actually standing up when I did indeed face him with my issues with the union. But more on that later.