Unlearn16: Class is in Session - The One Where I Got 'Dress Coded'...That's Not What This Book Is About

00:00:00.000 class is in session hey everybody and welcome to unlearn 16 class is in session this is a

00:00:09.760 different vibe so right now i am sitting in my classroom and it was important i was going to be

00:00:15.280 sitting in my classroom because i need to talk about something that happened as i was sitting

00:00:20.320 right here uh first and foremost if you are listening to this podcast before july 1st 2025

00:00:27.120 this particular podcast is associated in sort of in tangentially. Is that a word?

00:00:36.060 It's connected to a chapter in my upcoming book. That's not what this book is about. Can you order

00:00:43.540 that book? Yes. On learn16.com, you can order on July 1st. If you already have the book in your

00:00:48.000 hand, then what you've done is you scan the QR code in that chapter and it's brought you to this

00:00:52.900 podcast so I can talk in a little bit more detail and sort of application about what went on in that

00:00:58.780 chapter, the lessons I learned, and, you know, the tangents that we're going to travel along

00:01:06.000 together. All right. First and foremost, I was sitting right here when a student walked into my

00:01:11.820 classroom and sat down, and it was in an era where it was very fashionable for young, for the most

00:01:21.440 part female students wearing like darker colored, you know, undergarments. They'd have shirts that 0.98

00:01:27.640 would be pulled off their shoulder, very flash dance. They didn't know that they were ripping

00:01:32.880 on Jennifer Beal circa 1987, but they were very flash dance. Anyways, at the time there was a lot

00:01:40.020 of, and still to this day, a lot of girls getting dress coded, right? You got to cover up. You got 1.00

00:01:45.280 to, I can't, you can't have that off there. I don't want to see your stomach. I don't want to

00:01:50.180 And so we were telling a lot of young women at the school to cover up.

00:01:56.420 And it became like this thing, like you took off guys wearing hats, you took off their hats,

00:02:02.460 girls were constantly telling you to cover up and this wasn't okay.

00:02:06.620 And I'm not going to lie. 0.94

00:02:08.440 I was definitely one of those people.

00:02:10.720 I'm going to talk about the things I needed to unlearn from that. 0.97

00:02:14.980 But I had a student, her name's Stephanie. 1.00

00:02:19.100 So shout out to Stephanie. Stephanie, funnily enough, doesn't even remember this conversation

00:02:22.580 because we had, we had a conversation after where I told her she was in my book and she's like,

00:02:27.320 Joe, I don't even remember saying that. She sat down and she said, listen, I understand. Like

00:02:33.600 Metro didn't have a dress code per se. There was just things you weren't allowed to wear. Like

00:02:38.420 Wayne really hated ripped jeans and stuff like that. Um, no midriffs. Like it was a lot of, 1.00

00:02:44.840 It was a lot of very specific dress code things, but we didn't have like a school uniform or

00:02:52.400 anything like that. Anyways, Steph came in after probably being told to put on a sweatshirt for

00:02:58.340 the 17th time. Oh, by the way, look at how cool this is. If you can't see that, I just held up a

00:03:05.320 boombox circa 1989. You're listening to it. So she sat down and she said, listen, about this dress

00:03:13.160 code thing. And I'm like, look, Steph, I'm doing it. And again, please understand, this came from

00:03:19.720 a very naive, I think, and in all fairness, sort of anti-feminist stance that I didn't quite

00:03:29.120 understand yet. And she sat down and she said, why are you telling, why does the school tell

00:03:37.200 young women what they can and can't wear. And she goes, it's not, we're not a formal school.

00:03:44.980 So there's no, you know, uniform or anything like that. And why is it that you're always

00:03:49.640 just talking about what women are wearing and what they can't wear? And I said, well, Steph,

00:03:54.800 you know, I want you to be, you know, covered up. And she's like, okay, why? And I said, well,

00:04:03.120 you know, because I want you to be respected for you. I want you to be, you know, kind of

00:04:11.980 protecting your, I don't know, and I'm making all these arguments now. They're so bad, but like

00:04:17.320 your innocence or your youth, and I don't want anybody objectifying you. And I want you to be,

00:04:22.740 you know, and she said, okay. She goes, but why? I stopped. I'm like, I don't, because like we,

00:04:30.940 this is the world we live in. Women get objectified. This is what, you know, patriarchy 1.00

00:04:37.040 has done. And we talked about that a bit. And she goes, yeah, but why? And at this point,

00:04:42.180 I was like, this kid's going to make me insane. And she said, why do I have to change what I am

00:04:52.260 comfortable in, what I want to wear, or how I present myself based on the notion that men

00:05:01.140 predominantly, although we could say the same about some women, men can't control how they act,

00:05:09.060 react, if I'm a distraction, if they then feel a certain level of access, or they feel as though

00:05:17.440 They've been given consent to do whatever disgusting thing they want to do.

00:05:22.100 Why is that my problem?

00:05:25.540 Why aren't you, instead of teaching me what to wear so I don't upset them or distract them,

00:05:31.120 why don't you teach them to not be so easily led?

00:05:36.320 Why don't you teach them how to be human?

00:05:38.120 Why don't you teach them how to have respect?

00:05:44.060 And I was silent.

00:05:47.220 dead silent and I'm looking at her and I'm thinking I spent the better part of my career

00:05:56.240 my life like thinking that I needed to protect students in some way protect obviously younger

00:06:05.260 female students protect women in general like I felt like this thing where I was just like I

00:06:10.540 I need to be that person. 0.86

00:06:13.600 And when in actuality, all I'm doing and all I was doing is feeding into the notion that I need to change something that the oppressed is doing that somehow bothers, enrages, or distracts those who are doing the oppressive.

00:06:40.540 I need to make the victim responsible for the sexualization, for the objectification.

00:06:50.560 I need to make them change their clothes in order to minimize those negative consequences

00:06:57.520 coming from those other individuals, rather than looking at those other individuals and

00:07:03.040 saying, you need to change.

00:07:06.520 They don't.

00:07:08.180 They can wear whatever they want.

00:07:09.780 Now, do I think there's lines? Of course. I once had a student come to school in the other building

00:07:15.360 and it was summer. It was almost summer break. And she came with a blow up pool.

00:07:20.080 She came with her bikini. She filled up the blow up pool. We didn't even know because it was 1.00

00:07:23.740 outside the school. She filled up the blow up pool with nobody noticing. She had a floaty and 1.00

00:07:28.580 she got in it and she was sitting in her floaty come lunchtime with like this little Kool-Aid

00:07:34.140 drink beside her, reading a book, floating in the pool in a bikini. So it's, listen, kids do

00:07:41.320 hilarious stuff. Obviously you're not wearing a bikini to school, but what's fashionable at that

00:07:46.500 time, and I did a whole other thing about identity and fashion and conformity and stereotype and all

00:07:52.620 of that kind of stuff, plays into how people are going to dress in school. This isn't about

00:08:00.260 controlling dress code. This isn't about whether or not it's important to have consistent

00:08:06.900 expectations for all the kids that go to your school. That's not what this is about. Because

00:08:10.320 at the very level of this was talking about patriarchy, was talking about a level of 0.96

00:08:18.200 stereotypical garbage that was in my head about how I think we need to handle the problems 0.97

00:08:27.920 of sexism in society. And rather than me trying to change all those other things, I go directly 0.97

00:08:34.780 to the girls that it's affecting the most, I tell them to change. Well, she wasn't cool with that.

00:08:40.300 And from that moment on, neither was I. I wasn't. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't still struggle

00:08:48.600 with how does a kid have confidence, do what they wear, sort of reflect that confidence,

00:08:57.800 Are they trying to get attention from...

00:09:00.020 All of those things are true,

00:09:01.520 but the funny part is all the kids are doing that

00:09:04.880 with what they wear, how they do their hair,

00:09:07.600 how they walk, where their pants are done on.

00:09:10.260 Like, it's all a part of that.

00:09:13.220 But I fell into the trap, which is hysterical,

00:09:17.020 obviously, considering I'm a woman,

00:09:18.640 considering that the ideas of equity and social justice

00:09:22.180 are my driving forces, which she very aptly pointed out.

00:09:25.620 And she said...

00:09:27.040 you are buying into the system asking us to change in hopes that it won't negatively affect us

00:09:35.980 rather than telling the powers that be or the people that are in those positions that they

00:09:41.120 need to change and demand that they need to change their behavior. You know, and so since then,

00:09:48.960 I've never once, I just won't do it. Now, do I think it's important to talk to young students

00:09:56.020 about empowerment, confidence, being, you know, an individual, a level of self-assuredness,

00:10:02.400 all of those things? Of course, of course I do. But I am no longer going to simply

00:10:08.420 look to people in order to protect them, tell them to change. I'm not into it.

00:10:15.480 I'm just not. And I just don't think it does the job. Because if we're talking, for example,

00:10:21.060 If we're talking about SA, if we're talking about girls, you know, young girls or women in general being targets for violence, sexually violent, if we're talking about that, it's a whole culture, you know, because not too long after that, there was an art exhibit that was on the East Coast.

00:10:45.200 and it was an installation piece and what they had, what this artist had done, and her name is

00:10:52.980 slipping my head right now, which is horrible, but what they, the individual had done is they had

00:10:58.440 put up outfits, full outfits that women were wearing when they were S-A'd and they put this

00:11:08.140 out. So you didn't even know what you're walking into. And they put this outfit up kind of like a

00:11:12.180 fashion display in this case. And beside it, it read the story of what happened to her,

00:11:19.960 what horrible things happened to her, and this is what she was wearing.

00:11:24.720 And outside of it being obviously a sort of a social and cultural reflection of where we are,

00:11:32.460 it was also to tap into this notion that what a woman wears, I think we'll all stand here and say, 0.93

00:11:41.400 what a woman wears has nothing to do with whether she deserves it, right? That's ridiculous. And 0.98

00:11:45.800 those arguments can't even be made in court anymore, even though some people still make

00:11:49.800 them in their own heads. But what it tried to unlearn or help us unlearn was that 97% of these

00:11:58.920 outfits were like jeans and a t-shirt, a hoodie, jogging pants and a zip up because she was running 0.77

00:12:08.680 in the whatever. Rubber boots and baggy jeans and a raincoat. So the funny part is this perception

00:12:21.300 that I had where some people would think, okay, well, there's an implicit consent factor depending

00:12:31.760 on what she's wearing. And this idea that the only people that were facing this kind of violence,

00:12:37.500 only when they're facing this kind of violence, war certain things. I didn't think it was justified,

00:12:41.060 but I thought there was a correlation. And then to find out, guys, there really isn't.

00:12:47.500 That it was a false correlation. That it was a made up correlation. And then you start thinking

00:12:55.300 about why was this correlation made up? Well, it was made up because it's a way to take something

00:13:05.180 horrible that's going on in society and still blame women for it. It's a way to not shine the

00:13:13.400 light onto the actual underbelly of the disgusting cultural, social problems within society as they

00:13:24.180 stood right now. It was a way to switch blame. And meanwhile, and this is how, this is the

00:13:33.920 insidious nature of patriarchy. Meanwhile, it had people who thought themselves feminists 1.00

00:13:43.040 propagandizing for them, against the very women that I thought I was helping to protect. 0.81

00:13:55.120 When you have women telling women how to dress and what to do and what the expectations are 0.84

00:14:00.500 going to be that's a much more powerful, and we see it all the time, and I really want to talk 0.87

00:14:04.680 about this, because it's a much more powerful control factor for women than it is if men are

00:14:11.240 doing it. In a really good system of oppression, you don't have the oppressor having direct control 1.00

00:14:20.980 or direct conversation with the oppressed.

00:14:25.200 No, no, you elevate or you, I guess,

00:14:31.400 manipulate and brainwash elements of that particular group

00:14:35.620 and you empower them to police the rest of their group. 0.99

00:14:41.920 We did it with indigenous people in this country, 1.00

00:14:44.980 created residential schools 1.00

00:14:46.560 and then put former indigenous peoples 0.99

00:14:49.240 in charge of the residential school and said, look, they're doing it to each other. It's not us. 0.98

00:14:55.640 It's not us. Same thing is going on here. And same thing is going on when you have,

00:15:04.740 for example, women running for the highest office in political life. 1.00

00:15:12.300 pre-Kamala Harris. You have Hillary Clinton. I remember how women spoke about Hillary Clinton. 1.00

00:15:22.060 It had nothing to do with her policies. It had everything to do with what her pantsuit was that 1.00

00:15:27.020 day and the fact she stayed with her husband after he was caught being unfaithful. That's

00:15:35.140 what that had to do with. That's what women were saying. Want to know who didn't vote for Hillary 1.00

00:15:40.440 Clinton, it wasn't men. It was women. And unfortunately, I still think the same is true 1.00

00:15:48.380 for Harris in a different way and under a different auspice. But look at what the first

00:15:54.380 thing they start talking about with her. Well, how did she get to that position? Oh, she was

00:15:59.020 dating this guy. And obviously, what? And again, the people spouting these lies and these

00:16:08.240 misconceptions and these flat-out manipulations. They're women. They're women doing that job. 1.00

00:16:20.940 And as a teacher, this is an uphill battle. It's really, really, really hard.

00:16:29.660 and I balance it because on one hand, I'm not interested in telling people how to live their

00:16:39.420 lives, what to wear, what makeup to put on or not put on, how to interact. I'm not interested in any

00:16:44.720 of that. I get that I'm not, but I'm not interested in abdicating my responsibility to having deep

00:16:52.180 discussions about the underpinnings of what we're doing here. And when I see young women 0.99

00:16:59.820 propagating and replicating the same patterns that I've seen, you know, my eyes were opened

00:17:06.200 up to in my younger years or through sort of different feminist waves, how do I have that

00:17:13.260 conversation. Because I think you start thinking about those things and start trying to figure out 0.99

00:17:23.340 how do I have a conversation about social justice without dictating what they need to do? And the

00:17:30.820 same would be true for the LGBTQ plus community. The same would be true for visible minorities,

00:17:37.780 religious minorities, it's across the board. So all of these conversations need to be cracked open.

00:17:47.000 And how do you have that conversation with students? Because I think it's essential,

00:17:52.740 especially the courses I teach, but it's essential across the board.

00:17:58.520 Because what we used to do in a lot of ways, and everybody will understand this, we used to just 0.93

00:18:04.540 heightened women, right? So you'd see like women in STEM, you'd see schools shifting to empower 0.61

00:18:10.740 women, more women getting into universities, educational models shifting so that women were

00:18:16.640 being successful so that you were asking if all the guys raised their hand, you're asking for

00:18:22.540 the young girls, their answer. So all of that is going on, but how is it changing? Because then

00:18:32.760 you've seen, and there's some really cool people, including a guy named Scott Galloway doing work 0.97

00:18:38.560 in this area, you've seen this shift to empower women to the negation of our young boys. 0.74

00:18:48.360 And I've always said that feminism isn't about women's rights, it's about human rights. 0.70

00:18:57.520 That women getting rights isn't to the negation or isn't to the depletion of other people's 0.99

00:19:02.760 rights. But we've kind of seemingly thought women have all of these struggles, all of these things

00:19:11.700 they're facing. We're going to clear the road. We're going to empower. We're going to lift them

00:19:15.080 up. We're going to do all of these things. And everybody stopped talking about our young guys.

00:19:23.020 Now, I'm not asking us to stop empowering our young women. I'm asking us, we need to be able

00:19:29.360 to do both. Because as we know, fewer and fewer guys are going to post-secondary education. Fewer

00:19:38.060 and fewer guys are being successful. They're being labeled as having ADD or ADHD, troublemakers.

00:19:45.900 They're disturbing everything. They're being kicked out. The majority of private schools

00:19:50.540 that are co-ed are filled with boys. Guys are always the higher number. Why? Because they're

00:19:58.200 not fitting in the structure. Why aren't they figuring in the structure? Because we've made

00:20:02.260 the structure fit, empowering young women in a lot of ways. And then we stay quiet. We don't

00:20:11.740 empower these young men. And people will take up leadership in a vacuum. If you don't fill that

00:20:22.240 role, if young boys aren't looking to you for empowerment and, and confidence building and

00:20:29.160 education and a connection, they will find it somewhere. And unfortunately now it's with guys

00:20:36.740 like, you know, Tate or, um, you know, Charlie Kirk or, uh, Matt Walsh, these individuals who

00:20:49.300 are now looking to weaponize the negation or the marginalization of young boys and their feeling

00:20:59.200 of feeling pushed out and alone and not supported and all of those things, there's reason these men

00:21:06.320 have become popular. It's not because their ideas are good. Their ideas are absolute garbage. It's

00:21:12.280 because nobody else is filling that space. Now, there are men like, again, Scott Galloway, who I

00:21:16.900 have nothing but incredible respect for, and hope to do something with, hope to work with at some

00:21:24.300 point in some way, because I think what he has to say is powerful, is true, and is necessary.

00:21:30.700 But when everybody else is quiet, you know, a 14-year-old guy is going to put on something

00:21:37.100 Tate says, talking about how they're the man, how masculinity is all that matters, how it's all you,

00:21:43.620 You got all the power. You got all the control. Time to take it back. Why are women voting? Why? This is ridiculous. Put them back. All of this is happening in real time right now. And it's not happening because we've empowered women. It's happening because we haven't educated men.

00:22:04.340 So, boys, really. So, in the moments where we're giving women all of these opportunities,

00:22:12.000 right, because they've been kept out. So, there's different kinds of learning, right? Let's just

00:22:16.500 separate, for example, social and emotional learning over here and academic learning over

00:22:21.460 here. So, if we separate those two out, we, women for a very long time and young girls have been

00:22:29.320 social and emotional learners, right? Talking about team dynamics, cooperation, nurturing,

00:22:35.820 all of those kinds of things, multitasking, and now we're pushing the academics, right? That's

00:22:41.320 what we did. Women can be doctors, women can be lawyers, women can be president of the United 1.00

00:22:46.340 States, whatever it is. And it's all very, very, very much true. However, we didn't at the same

00:22:52.500 time push, a same level of healthy support for young boys' social and emotional learning.

00:23:00.820 Why didn't we do that? Here's the funny answer. Sexism.

00:23:06.780 Isn't that a ridiculous answer? But it's true nonetheless. 0.99

00:23:11.020 Because we thought we just needed to lift women up. Men were already here, but they weren't. 0.71

00:23:18.340 they weren't. We were just judging everybody from sort of a capitalistic, educated,

00:23:27.180 how do I get a job kind of way rather than a holistic individual. Because if we were judging

00:23:32.020 them all by holistic individuals, women were successful in one way because that's how we 1.00

00:23:36.340 train them. Men were successful in another way because that's how we train them. What we should

00:23:39.960 have done is elevate both differently. That's social and emotional learning. The ability to

00:23:48.060 regulate their emotions. Listen, everybody thinks women are emotional. It's ridiculous. Of course, 0.89

00:23:54.480 they are. All people are emotional. That's what makes us human. But just because you can see a

00:24:00.960 girl maybe cry doesn't mean they don't have control over their emotions in a more healthy way.

00:24:08.500 Because I'll tell you right now, young men and their inability to regulate their emotion

00:24:14.620 and then control their emotion that's usually expressed in one primary way, which is rage and

00:24:24.100 violence, anger. Well, that's just how guys are, because of testosterone. What?

00:24:33.480 If guys are prone to rage, anger, and violence because of testosterone, then we need to mitigate

00:24:39.060 that with actual education about how to control that. I'm not saying anger isn't a part, everybody

00:24:44.980 feels anger, but how you deal with that anger, well, that says something about you. And we didn't

00:24:50.820 do any of it. Want to know why? Because I still don't think to this day, do we really understand

00:24:58.560 in value social and emotional learning? We should start. We should start as we see a rise of all of

00:25:05.480 this trad wife and all of this kind of garbage that's going through and trying to make sure that 0.98

00:25:10.820 men are men and women are women and you stay over there and you stay over there. And then the 1.00

00:25:15.020 negation of the trans community, they're negating the trans community because if they don't negate

00:25:19.500 the trans community, they don't have, they don't have these carefully defined boxes to throw people

00:25:25.600 in. The trans community just like obliterates their ridiculous notions of binary truth, 1.00

00:25:33.620 which have never been true a day in their life. Ever. So when we pushed all of this education for 1.00

00:25:43.540 women and access for women, and we didn't equally push this access and education for young boys

00:25:51.980 and what they need differently, because by the way, I teach them, I mean, different students

00:25:57.480 need different things. And generally speaking, and I don't mean, I'm not stereotyping, but

00:26:03.080 Generally speaking, you know, when you're looking at a kid, a young boy in 7, 8, 9, when they're at the sort of the height of puberty and testosterone is flying off the map, they need more physical activity.

00:26:16.760 It's hard.

00:26:17.540 It's not an emotion they're regulating.

00:26:19.240 It's an actual energy.

00:26:20.640 So you got to figure out how to direct that because if you don't direct it, then it pops off in class.

00:26:25.120 They get deemed to be having ADD or ADHD.

00:26:27.700 I understand some people actually have ADD and ADHD, but I think a lot of the times it can also

00:26:32.700 be misdiagnosed. They get, you know, in trouble. They're, they're moving around, they're touching

00:26:37.920 other kids. They want to go to the walk. They want to go to the bathroom. They get,

00:26:41.480 and that's like a physiological response. We're not making space for that. We're just kicking

00:26:46.060 them out of class. Whereas we've created a whole different way of getting at young women in the 1.00

00:26:54.640 classroom as students so that they have a different system in order to draw out and encourage and 0.99

00:27:02.020 build them going forward in the academic world. We changed the game. We just said, this is the

00:27:16.040 goal. So the goal is, and again, very anti-feminist, the goal is we want girls to be able to do

00:27:21.440 everything boys can do. That was a bad goal. That was a weak goal. In all fairness, it was 0.93

00:27:28.480 an unintelligent goal because the goal should be everybody. If historically we were a very

00:27:36.540 functionalist society, we were very, you know, cookie cutter, you do this, you do this. If that's

00:27:43.120 who we were and still are for a lot of moments, then our goal should be elevating everybody out

00:27:50.920 of that monstrosity of a limitation. Our goal should be, how do I get all kids, all adults

00:27:59.740 to understand that they need the entire scope of their personality, their mentality. They need to

00:28:08.720 figure it all out in order to become more holistic, balanced, useful individuals that

00:28:15.340 can go on and do great things. And they're not being held back by academic, educational, financial,

00:28:22.200 or emotional, mental health kind of ways. If we really cared about things like mental health,

00:28:28.880 we wouldn't talk about it so much. We'd have things in place that actually do something.

00:28:35.580 Your mental health matters. Take a day off. That's not fixing anything. That's not adjusting

00:28:40.020 anything. That's not talking about it. That's not giving any sort of real strategies to mitigate

00:28:50.140 the impacts of all of those feelings that are completely and utterly okay. And again, it's a

00:28:55.780 big shift, right? We've gone from when I was young to nobody had an IEP, nobody had mental health

00:29:01.540 issues, nobody had anything because we never talked about it. We never got tested for it.

00:29:05.320 And if you didn't fit the mold, cool. You left school. You got bullied. That's what happened.

00:29:12.780 Now, everybody has an IEP. Everybody has a thing that they rely on. Everybody maybe will have a

00:29:20.460 different learning ability and an excuse to not get the job done. That's a problem too.

00:29:30.300 that shouldn't have been the solution. The solution shouldn't be, oh my gosh, you know,

00:29:36.780 you struggle with dyslexia. Okay. I'm going to give you all the books audio wise. What?

00:29:42.620 That's not solution. When I was a kid, you had dyslexia. Nobody noticed. They called you

00:29:49.460 horrible things and they just thought you to be stupid. Ridiculous. Now you see this push 1.00

00:29:55.680 other way. Oh, well, it's the thing they struggle with. Let's just make, let's just modify stuff

00:29:59.760 for them. No, no, no, no, no. How do we help mitigate? How do we help them overcome? How do

00:30:06.040 we help individuals get better at the things they suck at? Isn't that the job? Shouldn't that be the

00:30:12.900 job? Because I promise you, I promise you guys, if all of us were tested, we would all have a thing.

00:30:18.900 We would all have a thing we're not good at. A thing we need to get better at. A thing we need

00:30:23.940 to strategize for. But what do we do? We avoid it like the plague. I just won't take that class

00:30:28.420 anymore. I won't play sports anymore. I'm not going to do music. We avoid it like the plague.

00:30:34.920 And the only kids that get penalized when they avoid are the kids where they're avoiding courses

00:30:39.820 that we've deemed important, right? English, math, science. Oh, you got to avoid,

00:30:46.960 you're going to avoid science. Oh no, you have to do science. Again, science is very important.

00:30:55.520 So are all subjects. We've just prioritized what's more important. We say you're going to

00:31:01.300 take English every single year, but phys ed, you can just do that for grade nine because who cares

00:31:05.400 about your bodily, physical health and strength? What? What? But it goes back to my original

00:31:14.980 contention is this idea that we have decided what the story is, what we need to fix in society,

00:31:28.360 and why we need to fix it. And what needs to happen is there needs to be a lot more open

00:31:35.260 dialogue. So if we're really going to talk about equality and equity amongst the sexes,

00:31:41.060 what we should be talking about is equity amongst people.

00:31:45.660 And what we should be really speaking to

00:31:48.180 is how we have geared society to do A and B,

00:31:52.460 but really we're going to need the whole,

00:31:53.980 all 26 letters of the alphabet

00:31:55.600 in order to have different paths

00:31:59.360 to get out the best potential from each individual

00:32:03.380 and make people accountable

00:32:06.920 for the bad things they put in the community.

00:32:10.060 they put in the ecosystem, they put into the world around them, rather than making

00:32:18.160 individuals responsible who are the victims of that kind of mentality. That's the goal.

00:32:31.000 So my lunch hour conversation with Stephanie really did set me on a whole new way of looking

00:32:39.720 at education, a whole new way of looking at the gender division of how we treat and how

00:32:45.940 we educate and what we prioritize, it really made me think very hard of how I was lured

00:32:57.620 in as somebody who thought they were fighting for women and lured in, but what I was lured

00:33:04.120 in to do, which is still control women. So I might not understand that subjectively when it

00:33:12.320 comes to indigenous peoples or African-Americans or Asian-American or any minority. I might not

00:33:21.680 understand, but then the question becomes or the direction should be when you have students in your

00:33:29.760 class of different backgrounds like that, let them speak. Let them hear my perspective on my

00:33:38.820 experience on this. And then let them, because this is what critical thinking is all about,

00:33:43.540 let them apply it to the world in which they see, to their lived experience.

00:33:49.920 And at what point are we controlling minorities? And at what point do minorities have to assume

00:33:57.760 and take a level of accountability for how they're progressing within it? And are they

00:34:04.240 using their relative power to oppress and control other people? Incredibly important.

00:34:12.020 And that whole conversation started with a simple fashion trend. Jennifer Beals made famous,

00:34:21.340 not Beals. Yeah, Jennifer Beals. She in Flashdance? Yeah, Jennifer Beals. I get mixed up

00:34:27.400 with jessica beals jennifer beals later from the l word shout out to jennifer but a but a fashion

00:34:35.160 trend that made me try to control and that in invariably like almost by kismet made me sit down

00:34:44.840 and face something incredibly real not just in our society but in our schools our education system

00:34:52.900 our cultural world as it exists today.

00:34:57.160 So thank you so much, Steph.

00:35:01.780 The fact that I need to learn and unlearn things,

00:35:05.940 absolutely essential.

00:35:07.580 And I promise I will always have that conversation.

00:35:12.860 And on that note, thank you guys for hanging out with me.

00:35:16.020 Go check out my book.

00:35:17.080 That's not what this book is about.

00:35:18.420 Coming out on July 1st, 2025.

00:35:22.060 You can get it on Learn16.com.

00:35:26.100 But until I see you again, have a great day.

00:35:31.680 Try to unlearn something a little bit.

00:35:33.960 I'll see you next day.

00:35:35.300 Same bat time, same bat channel. 0.98

00:35:38.600 Dismissed. 1.00

Unlearn16: Class is in Session - June 27, 2025

The One Where I Got 'Dress Coded'...That's Not What This Book Is About

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