One of the regular readers of the blog alerted me to the fact that there were several comments today (January 5) that contained vulgarity and profanity that are not allowed on this blog.
These disgusting comments were written in response to a post I wrote on June 1 called “I Am Woke, You Should Be Too,” in which I asserted that I care about justice, equality, freedom, and other fundamental ideals of our society. I took issue with those who would censor the views of those who disagree with them. I specifically criticized Florida Governor Ron DeSantis for passing laws to silence those who don’t agree with his censorious views.
I wrote:
One of the hot-button words that has been appropriated by rightwing politicians is “woke.” They are trying to turn it into a shameful word. I looked up the definition of WOKE. It means being aware of injustice and inequality, specifically when referring to racism. I strive to be aware of injustice and inequality and racial discrimination and to do whatever I can to change things for the better. Shouldn’t we all do that?
My acronym for WOKE is “Wide Open to Knowledge and Enlightenment.”
What would you say about someone who is not WOKE? They are “asleep,” “unconscious,” “indifferent.” They are “Mind Closed, Mouth Open.”
Yes, I am WOKE. I want Dr. King’s dream someday to be true. It is not true now.
Apparently, this post was reprinted on a rightwing site. Consequently, I have received quite a few hostile, vicious, profane comments, especially today.
I regret that several such profane comments got past me today. I was busy and did not carefully screen every comment.
I apologize for allowing profanity on this site.
I will try to block them as soon as possible.
Yes, I am woke. I am proud to be woke. I hope someday everyone will care passionately about justice, equality, and freedom. Curse all you want. But not on this blog. I will delete them as soon as I see them. I won’t back down.
Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ms. Ravitch, don’t be too hard on yourself. I had the exact same experience you just had when I had a blog about 15 years ago – it happens. You never know where someone has re-posted your blog post, who it will anger, etc. And, as you know, not everybody on the Internet is sane.
Glenn,
What I’ve learned is that the internet brings out the worst in people. Esp anonymity. People say things that they would never say in person to your face.
The saddest factor that inhabits the human being is the internecine battle between good and bad . What seems to be so clear to one side us completely obfuscating to the other side . I hear people ceaselessly rating that without bad , we would not know what good is .
Just once , I would like to extirpate the bad and test the validity and veracity of what is left .
That is today’s problem: anything goes and too many people just shrug their shoulders…”oh, well these are the times”. “Social” media is anti social and poisoning society. And all the cowards who don’t have the gonads to show their faces.
I understand why working teachers use a pseudonym. They fear for their jobs. I don’t understand the trolls and cowards who use a fake name to spread venom and hide behind anonymity.
A rather sad and dangerous situation…Teachers…who are supposed to educate and guide their pupils and set the good examples…being muzzled and having to hide from the very authorities we are taught to respect. As I stated before…anything goes and too many see nothing wrong with it. Freedom has its limits too or we descend into chaos.
I am proud to be woke, too. The extreme right has decided, by their behavior that’s on display daily across the country, that they prefer to be ignorant and hateful, the extreme opposite of “Wide Open to Knowledge and Enlightenment.”
Yup.
You do not need to apologize. It’s not your fault that some people’s chosen demotic is profanity. Keep up the good work.
❤️❤️❤️
Thank you. You may need some help from someone who can monitor comments and delete obvious inappropriate comments. Or maybe more people than you already have.
However, you do not have to apologize for the misdeeds of those who don’t know how to comment in a civil manner. That’s all on them.
Rob,
I do everything myself. I have read all 600,000+ comments and written every post. If any reader sees offensive comments, please let me know with another comment. I’m not giving out my personal email, as I don’t want hate mail.
❤
I appreciate all that you do! Stay woke and keep your readers woke; our children deserve an enlightened future.
The ugly comments say much more about the creeps who send them than they say about Diane Ravitch. Not your fault.
Exactly
You are a consistent model of thoughtfulness and decency. Continued thanks for being the inspiration that you are.
Ditto! This, this, this!!!!
Thank you. I assure you I will never respond in kind.
Thanks for the definition of “woke” which always made me feel uncomfortable whenever I read it because it felt very politically opposite of my feelings.
Now that I know, I am glad to be called woke.
Sorry about the profane comments…they are so childish and easy. Your readers understand you can’t control everything that those who would comment have to say.
Thank you for bringing so much good information to us…I don’t know how you do it!
OK, I admit it. Sailors can only dream of cursing as I do. I have often though that I should volunteer to teach an advanced course in the subject at the Naval War College.
When I returned to teaching, I had to be especially careful not to curse randomly in my speech to students, so engrained was this habit in my quotidian, nay, hourly, nay, moment-by-moment verbal display in ordinary conversation. Lord knows that it would have damaged my students terribly if they had turned from listening to Kodak Black on their iPhones to hearing me use the dreaded d word, their having never, ever heard anything like this before.
I read years ago, in the journal Verbatim, I think it was, though it might have been in The American Scholar, a learned essay about the paucity of curse words in ancient Greek and Latin. They had to resort to graffiti and circumlocution. Hippocritas’s goats were sired by mudpuppies! He is a blight, as upon an olive tree! That sort of thing.
English, in contrast, is extraordinarily rich in curse words, having borrowed promiscuously from the cursings of peoples worldwide. I have embraced the full richness of our tongue in this regard, and I supplement with a fine library on cursing in other languages that I have accumulated over the years. One of those things that a treasure about cursing is that as with the piano or the guitar, there is no end to learning about and perfecting this artform. Oh, for a Muse of Fire that I could sufficiently curse the likes of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Greg Abbott, and Lindsay Graham! Shakespeare is an especially rich source of novel cursing.
I love Diane Ravitch heart and soul, and so I forgive her this slight failing, that she does not fully appreciate a good curse. There are worse failings, to be sure, and this is but the slightest stain upon her character, the slightest diminution of her otherwise embodiment of the finest traits of human character.
cx: have often thought
cx: One of those things that I treasure about cursing
And, of course, English started out brimming with fine cursing born among Teutonic and earlier Northern peoples, adapting themselves to the nasty, cold climates up there and the frigid sea and ground and the long, brutal winters and short, foggy, cloudy, rainy, mud-stuck nonwinters, and the paucity of light and food, creating environs especially fertile in their accursedness. So grateful to have that base to build upon!
correction: mud-and-muck-stuck
The Curse of the Curse”
It helps to live a cursed life
When curse is your desire
A life of want, and hurt and strife
Will really light the fire
While life of plenty and of esse
Will never lead to curse
Instead to stuff like “pretty please”
From birth to funeral hearse
And of ease
Its easy to get away with cursing when no one knows you are doing it.
Shakespeare is a cursed bard
That no one understands
Cuz reading Shakespeare’s really hard
Except by Shakespeare’s fans
You are also a master of this art, SomeDAM! The Poet with the Poison-Tipped Pen!
Bob
I especially liked your use of Shakespeare to skewer David
Coleman.
I even have it bookmarked for easy reference
https://dianeravitch.net/2017/12/05/robert-shepherd-pens-a-meditation-to-david-coleman-in-honor-of-shakespeares-450th-birthday/
I thought all those were good, but for some reason “canker blossom” seems to fit Coleman the best.
Although I would make a slight modification to “chancre blossom”
I could link to images to demonstrate the striking resemblance , but this is a family blog and Diane might not appreciate that.
The Common Core: the chancre blossom
The Curse of Deform
By curses, we’ve been foiled
By curses, we’ve been fooled
By curses, we’ve been boiled
By curses, we’ve been schooled
The Common Core
Common Core ‘s a chancre blossom
David Coleman lore
Both are gross and simply rotten
Oozing on the floor
What do you call a woke president who falls for David Coleman, Bill Gates, and Common Core, and continues to support their zombie ideas to this day?
The Woking Dead.
Gosh, thanks SomeDAM!
Nothing like cursing”
There’s nothing like a curse
To energize a joint
It’s always very terse
And always to the point
There’s nothing like a curse
To really say your piece
It never is rehearsed
And always is release
Verse works too, at least for me
“Nothing like a Verse”
There’s nothing like a verse
To energize a joint
It’s always very terse
And always to the point
There’s nothing like a verse
To really say your piece
It seldom is rehearsed
And always is release
Thank you, Bob. If everyone cursed as eloquently as you, I would have no objection. Sadly, the cursing that arrives in comments is the wail of illiterates who can have no other way to express themselves.
Good on you!!! One can also express strong sentiments without the ‘help’ of profanities.
It’s funny that some people get far more indignant about criticism (by Diane and others) of the actions of people like DeSantis than they get about the actions themselves.
Civility is about more — far more — than just words written on a blog or Twitter.
Civility
Civil gist?
Or civil buzz?
Civil is
As civil does
Is it civil to lure migrants with false promises onto a plane or bus and then drop them off in Marthas Vineyard (Or Kamala Harris’s house in DC on Christmas Eve) with no food , no water and no place to stay?
Is it civil to attack people because of their gender or sexual choice?
You are smoking today, DAM!!!
It’s ironic too, that these trolls who say these horrible things are the same trolls who want to ban books that say far less offensive language.
Thank you Diane Ravitch for your continued leadership in the fight for social justice and equity in education despite an occasional burp of profanity from the Un-Woke.
Are the Unwoke related to the Undead?
Haaaaaa!!!!!
OMG. Rolling on the Floor. Will I recover?!?!?!?!
HAAAAAAAA!!!!!
Thanks for getting the pun. There are so many parallels between the anti-intellectual (undead) and the extreme Maga GOP. There is certainly an allusion to noted spiritual journeys thwarted by ignorance.
Shameful, and I am sorry it happened to you, Diane. Keep doing what you’re doing–please!
Diane, your leadership here should be a model for Elon Musk. That is because you, the true moderator, are a human type person. You have a heart. You have kindness and respect for others. You have wholesome, American values: an appreciation of freedom from tyranny, a thirst for truth and justice, and a scholarly sense of our place in history. Twitter and TikTok should be held responsible for the content that appears on their sites. You should not. Don’t apologize.
Musk believes he is theTechnoKing when in reality he is
Just another technoclown
He called himself tge Chief Twit in jest.
The Chief Twit
Musk is a jester
In Court of the Twit
And any investor
Should pay heed to it
Let that sink in, Elon.
Sink is the Theme
Sink is the the theme
With Elon and Twitter
But Tesla, it seems
Is more of a sh***er
To anyone who doesn’t get the last joke, Tesla stock valuation has dropped by over 50%in the past year and is currently swirling down the toilet.
Meanwhile Elon continues to tweet sweet nothings.
Elon tweeted yesterday that McCarthy should be elected Speaker. Who cares what he thinks?
He’s a rocket man, burning out his fuse up there alone
That’s a lyric from an Elon John song, for anyone who didn’t recognize it
Sorry you had to endure their nastiness. They can dish it out but they can’t take it. Your writing is beyond helpful to me. I’m so happy to have someone like you on the same wavelength as me. Thank you for your work, Diane.
The internet has given cowards a very public place to hide.
Hang in there.
You are much loved.
One of the reasons I gravitated away from social media was because of people who wanted to YELL and CURSE. Ask any person and they will say,”Uh, oh here comes Mr. Charvet he is going to talk to me forever and try to motivate me.” Yeppers, me. I have found a few blog sites that are “discussion based” where we all agree, disagree, agree to disagree then say, “Hey, enough for today; let’s get coffee” while we watch hummingbirds buzz the sky. I always told my students, “I agree, profanity can be used for impact but in most cases, that is “garage talk.” Build your mind and use a better word to get your point across. We never attack people, but concepts. I remember one of my “rough kids” wrote a rap song. He asked me what I thought then the other kid chimed in, “Dude, pick a different word. You use the same “F word” over and over.” I chuckled, “Sort of an adjective deficit, eh?” “Yeah, that’s right Mr. Charvet.” I, too, get frustrated when I look to read one thing (and it is everywhere) when someone cannot intelligently have discourse without resorting to “You are a doo-doo head” talk. Dianne, you and your family of bloggers are why I am here and why I feel I can post what I have learned from my life in education and beyond. Happy New Year.
Thank you, rcharvet. Reasonable discourse matters. It’s even possible to persuade others. Insults don’t persuade anyone.
Do not apologize Diane. Those trolls are the ones that bear the blame and you shouldn’t have to live your life checking the comments. Thank you for all you do!!
And to those trolls, go out and find someone to serve. Much better use of your time.
Cursing is like breathing to me, so if I let something fly here, I do apologize. I won’t let it happen again. I love this blog.
I curse too. But seldom if ever in print. The cursing I blocked was directed at me and readers of the blog. They were insulting.
Cursing’s like breathing
And sometimes like sneezing
To hold it all in
You’ll rip your lungs, Jim
Thank you for your courage and leadership