Karen Keller is a kindergarten teacher at Captain Johnston Blakely Elementary located in Bainbridge Island, Washington. She sat down with the Bainbridge Island Review to discuss why she refuses to allow boys to play with Legos, and why she straight up lies to their faces and tells the boys they’ll get a chance to play with the toys when secretly she tells herself ‘Yeah, when hell freezes over’.
They can have their pick of Tinkertoys and marble tracks, but the colorful bricks are “girls only.”
“I always tell the boys, ‘You’re going to have a turn’ — and I’m like, ‘Yeah, when hell freezes over’ in my head,” she said. “I tell them, ‘You’ll have a turn’ because I don’t want them to feel bad.”
Although her approach might anger some parents, Keller is sticking to her guns: It’s all part of a plan to get girls building during “free choice,” the 40 minutes of unstructured play time embedded at the end of every school day.
Just let it sink in for a moment that kindergarten teacher is straight up lying to children, telling the boys they’ll get to play with the toys when secretly they have no shot in hell at playing with them. Somehow this teacher thinks ‘COMPLETELY BLOCKING ALL MALES FROM TOUCHING LEGO BLOCKS’ equates to gender equality. Stupid ass teachers like this are why the United States doesn’t even rank in the top 10 worldwide in education.
Now for the part about why she thinks this is fair…
She asked for funding to purchase LEGO Education Community Starter Kits for three Blakely classrooms, writing that “while it’s not necessary to board up the playhouse and adopt the babies out, concrete steps can be taken to ameliorate the gender gap in the kindergarten and present engaging ways to develop girls’ spatial skills.”
What she didn’t tell BSF, however, was that the boys wouldn’t get to play with the new 1,907-piece sets.
“I had to do the ‘girls only Lego club’ to boost it more,” she explained. “Boys get ongoing practice and girls are shut out of those activities, which just kills me. Until girls get it into their system that building is cool, building is ‘what I want to do’ — I want to protect that.”
In Keller’s mind, it’s a fair practice “because fair is getting what you need to succeed or to get better.” Fair doesn’t have to be the same, and she says her kindergarteners get that.
So ‘getting what you need to succeed or to get better’ only applies to her female students? Do the male students still not need the same fucking tools in order to enhance and expand their skill sets? How in the hell has this lady not been fired yet for being a complete moron?
I could go on and on like this forever, but the fact of the matter is that teacher is a moron, she is hurting the development of all the males in the classroom, and she should not be in charge of molding young minds.
For more on this story you can click on over to the Bainbridge Island Review and/or CBS Local.