Keep Kanye out of the classroom
The first week of the new school year is over.
It was nice to see all the other parents on Day 1, looking as anxious as I felt. First-day jitters. This is a part of parenthood nobody ever warns you about. Nobody ever says, “When your kids begin a new grade, it will feel like you are starting that new grade. All those creeping fears from your once-forgotten life as a student will return like flashing images in a fever dream. Then they will be projected on your offspring.”
It makes sense. Modern-day parenting is 10 per cent joy and 90 per cent worry. We want our kids to learn, progress and ultimately succeed in life. And since classrooms will be the setting for much of this personal growth, we never want to hear our kids say, “Our new classroom is a shrine to Kanye West!”
That’s exactly what some parents heard this month in Mendota, Calif.
It seems Adrian Perez, who teaches Grade 4 at McCabe Elementary School, is a big Kanye West fan. So he spent a month this summer redecorating his classroom in Yeezy motifs, including album-cover bears, red colour schemes and posters with tweaked song titles, such as “Math Monsters,” “I’m Amazing,” “New Job Flow,” “Story of a Champion,” “Touch the Sky With ELA (English Language Arts)” and “What Did I Learn All Day, All Day?”
As Perez declared: “I want to be the Kanye West of teaching.”
As professional ambitions go, this sounds paradoxical, like hearing a chemical metallurgist say, “I want to be the Miley Cyrus of ore extraction.”
Kanye may be a successful rapper. He may even fancy himself a designer, a claim that becomes suspect when he shows up during Paris Fashion Week in desert boots, a white suit, black topcoat and red balaclava.
But whatever he is in the world of popular culture, he is no role model for children. Not unless you want your kids to constantly interrupt their classmates or throw temper tantrums when someone else gets a gold star or think a nutritious breakfast involves sipping the sizzurp.
No, Kanye is not worthy of academic deification, even if you ignore his album titles ( College Dropout), lyrics (“back to school and I hate it there, hate it there”) and boasts (“I am a proud non-reader of books”). Just listen to him wax modestly for 30 seconds — “My greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live” — and it’s clear he is to education as spaghetti is to footwear.
He’s not a teaching tool. He’s just a tool.
So not surprisingly, school officials this week asked Perez to de-Kanyefy his classroom and make it a neutral place of learning where 9-year-olds might learn to read and write without pondering, “I am a God, hurry up with my damn croissants!”
Perez complied. He may be a fantastic teacher. I have no idea. But when it comes to judgment, let’s give him an F on this. And you know what? This is becoming a problem for some people with jobs that involve interacting with the public.
Personal interests, political affiliations, cultural beefs, hobby horses, favourite rappers — all of this used to be kept private. What’s next? Is a doctor going to remove her scrubs and enter the surgical theatre in a Princess Leia costume because she’s really jazzed about the upcoming Star Wars film? Is the courier going to leave your package in the bushes because his favourite TV show is Just for Laughs: Gags?
Once this Pandora’s box is pried open, the next thing people start bringing to work is their religious beliefs. Then suddenly you’ve got a transit employee in Calgary refusing to drive a rainbow-painted bus. Or a county clerk in Kentucky declining to issue marriage licences to samesex couples. Or a flight attendant in Atlanta claiming that she was suspended for refusing to serve alcohol on flights.
Suspended? She should be fired. This is what happens when the twin forces of political correctness and endless accommodation wreak havoc on secular democracy. Shared values are the glue in society.
By all means, believe what you want to believe. But if your beliefs interfere with your ability to do your job, that’s on you, not the rest of us. And if your beliefs stand between me and a mini-bottle of Grey Goose at 30,000 feet, we’ve got a real problem.
As Kanye would never say, “Class dismissed.” vmenon@thestar.ca