Yo, Miss! (No. 13)

Play or Be Played

Last week, Americans were on indictment watch thanks to Trump’s post on Truth Social. His fans sent him $1.5 million dollars in three days after he falsely predicted that he would be arrested on Tuesday. So, once again, he gobbled up the headlines for the whole week culminating in his rally in Waco, Texas and profited handsomely by lying. It is hard not to feel constantly played by him. Even after decades of Trump following a similar playbook, he continues to trick most Americans while feeding the bottomless pit of his ego with attention while also skirting the law.

@saribethroseI hope not #trump #maga #indictments #gop

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

I knew in my heart not to believe anything from him. He is the master of deception and distraction….and his cult eats it up and so does the media. As someone who teaches history, I try to look for other examples from the past to make sense of our current times. However, ever since this Trump Era that I suppose we are still experiencing, I find it especially challenging.

Some students asked me if I thought he would get indicted this week and I was honest with them: I told them that their guess was as good as mine, but probably not. It is okay to not always have all the answers. I try to be as authentic as possible with my students, so they are more prone to trust me.

However, I used their interest in that topic as well as the TikTok Congressional Hearing to hook them into learning.

For the Trump indictment inquiry, I shared with students about the current investigations related to Donald Trump.

In case you are also having tough time keeping track of it all:

1. The Department of Justice via a special counsel investigating the classified documents found at Trump’s Florida estate as well as his efforts to interfere in the 2020 election.

2. In New York state the attorney general is behind a civil lawsuit against the Trump Organization.

3. In Georgia the district attorney is considering changes surrounding efforts by Trump and his people to overturn the 2020 election in that state.

4. In New York City the Manhattan district attorney is working with a grand jury to determine if Trump hid hush money payments to silence Stephanie Clifford (Stormy Daniels) about an alleged affair with Trump.

Then, on Friday we watched clips from the TikTok Hearing and discussed the concerns presented by the lawmakers. For the most part, students shared that they will keep using TikTok because they already have the app downloaded, or they will just access it through a VPN. However, many students are already mindful about the distracting nature of all social media in general.

By the way, I spoke to Time Magazine a few weeks ago when there was a proposal to put a time limit on TikTok for teens.

“We can turn it off,” they told Rosenberg. Yet still, Rosenberg says that we need to give teenagers more credit. “Phones, in general, are distracting, but I think that to be honest, my students are more mindful of it as a distraction than a lot of the adults that I know.”

To tie it all together, I polled students about what they thought would happen first: a Trump indictment or a TikTok ban. Here are the results:

Take what you will from this poll, but I sure hope the kids are right.

Do you agree with my students? Answer this poll:

Also, I scrolled through my TikTok for my students (they wanted to see what was in MY algorithm) and I learned a valuable lesson myself this week too:

@saribethroseTeacher Tip of the Day #teachersoftiktok #teacher #tiktok #tipoftheday

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Thanks for reading. I will be back later this week with recommendations and more updates. If you want to follow me elsewhere or pay for my next coffee/snack, here is My LinkTree.