A in-class conversation caught by students on their phones has led to the investigation of a teacher at Island Coast High School in Cape Coral, Florida.
The videos, shared on TikTok, do not reveal the teacher's identity. They do, however, share audio of a classwide conversation about racism, slavery, and hate speech. Exasperated students argue with the teacher, who defends slavery, says that the N-word is simply another word for ignorant, and says that hate speech is a matter of opinion.
Naturally, as the videos gained popularity, parents were outraged at the revisionist history being taught to their kids under the guise of an AP Government class. Now the district is investigating the teacher, who remains unidentified.
Island Coast High School students have had enough of a biased AP Government teacher. One student decided to take matters into their own hands with a selfie video recording the audio of the discussions that take place during that class. The series of three videos shares some very disturbing viewpoints that the teacher is passing off as a lesson.
In the first video, a student is talking about how white slave masters would whip slaves. The teacher refutes that.
"They wouldn't do that to the slaves," the teacher says.
"How do you know that? Were you there? Like, how do you know?" a Black student fires back.
The teacher then threatens to kick the student out of class. He then says he wants the class "to have an honest conversation about it … That's what I want. That's what we're here in AP for."
In the second video, the teacher asks what the N-word means. A student in the background can be heard saying "ignorant."
"The N-word just means ignorant," the teacher agrees.
"It doesn't have any other meaning in any other vocabulary other than you are a stupid person. You are ignorant. You are not well read. You are not well educated. That's what it means."
In the third video, the class discusses the meaning of hate speech. The student reads a piece of writing that says women should be doing "the household cooking and cleaning" and says it could be construed as hate speech.
"To you, that’s hate speech," the teacher responds.
"But that could be hate speech to a lot of other women because that would have offended me. That would have offended a lot of the other girls in the room," another student argues.
The high school addressed the videos in a tweet assuring the matter is under investigation. According to Fort Myers News-Press, the Lee County School District has also launched an investigation into the teacher. A spokesperson for the district would neither confirm nor deny that the teacher in the video was removed from the classroom.
School board members have also been made aware of the incident. Gwyn Gittens, chair of the Lee County School Board and a former teacher herself, shared some strong feelings. While she notes sensitive and triggering subjects can be difficult to broach with students, teachers are trained to rely on fact.
"I'm not there to teach you how I personally, Gwyn Gittens, feel and what I believe," she said.
"I'm there to give you facts and teach you how to dissect and pick it apart and look at it and define it and use it going forward in your future to make our world better."
She also lamented the "broken communication" between different areas of the education system that make investigating such a matter difficult.
"I could have defended that the district is looking into it and they are investigating," she said.
"When everyone is left to their own devices to figure out what's going on, that's when you start getting problems. We have to communicate better and quicker."
This isn't the first issue with a teacher that Island Coast High School has had. A few weeks ago, a math teacher was dismissed for an inappropriate relationship with a student that occurred during the 2017-2018 school year. There was controversy for this matter as well, not only because of the nature of the incident but because the school board found out about it from constituents rather than the district.
