VLVL II: "What is Fascism?" (fwd)

[Terrance]

> How the West should deal with Muslim fundamentalism and the head-scarf
> (or other religious symbols) in public classrooms is a conundrum.

I let students wear Ché T-shirts and doo-rags, colors, bandanas, met
hats, yankee hats, rangers suck hats, whatever. I wear a Baltimore
Orioles hat with my Long Island Duck's sweater vest (both orange on
black) and on halloween I just strap on a pair of black pumps and carry
a matching purse. I teach for the State and the City of NY. At the City
school, where the kids are our best and brightest ("Gifted") a seventh
grader sat up and looked serious for a week after I saw the Ramones at
CBGBs a few times. He was wearing a Ramones T-shirt, black with the band
ironed on to the front, a safety pin in a small tear. Another kid has
"Hip-Hop Sucks" magic-markered on his back pack. I asked him about it
and he dais it was a phaze he was sure to get over soon. Of course
adults can wear head gear to school and lots of them do. Some because
their hair is a mess. Some because they have no hair. We let our kids
and adults wear religious head coverings and other religious stuff. But
some schools don't. Like everything else in school in NYC, we try to
make the policy that makes the most sense for out students. Students
change ge so fast it's mind-blowing. One day your school is called Bread
and Roses and the next day its a new comers school cause 40% of the
students just arrived from The Dominican Republic. Out in the real
world, we wore hard hats that told everyone who we were and what we were
supposed to believe in, but that didn't prevent a pissed off carpenter
from flinging a hammer at an electrician every now and then.