In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.Like every teacher who fled the profession during the woke era, I have a conversion story — a moment the veil lifted and the truth became impossible to unsee.I was not popular among my co-workers in my final years of teaching. Groans shot up during faculty meetings when I would ask for clarifications about certain woke terminology. They finally stopped speaking to me altogether after I questioned the concept of “equity” in a faculty-wide email.
“Does equity mean that everyone gets the same grade in the end?” I asked the vice principal.The withering response I received — I was accused of “intellectualization” — with the entire staff copied in was meant to discourage me or anyone from piping up in the future.But then I received an extra credit paper from a student near the end of what turned out to be my final year.One of my better students submitted a paper originally written for her biology class, arguing that Christianity was to blame for humans’ fear of snakes. She wrote that snakes were venerated in many indigenous cultures — but the Genesis account of the serpent in Eden poisoned human-snake harmony.I asked her, “Are you saying there’s no biological component to fear of snakes? That it’s entirely a social construction?”She became agitated, searching for a response before landing on, “Yes, primarily.”Incredibly, she hadn’t considered the question from a biological perspective despite writing it for biology class — and was so proud of her effort that she submitted it for extra credit in English.I sent an email to her teacher asking what grade she’d received for the paper. Her teacher was eager to share that she’d gotten a perfect 100%, saying that it had been “well-researched.”The sheer absurdity of the episode jarred something loose in me. I had previously resisted the conclusion many other teachers around the country had come to by then, that education had been totally captured by a malign ideology.But it was impossible to dismiss this episode as merely another isolated overreach. A paper like that isn’t written by an apparently intelligent person and then rewarded by another apparently intelligent person by accident. Both of them had been trained.The woke creation myth
