Two Notes for Monday

First, readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn this. I predicted as much on several occasions.

Recently, the executive coaching crowd developed a new concept-- bring your whole self to work. Ignore for now that this is an idiot concept, concocted by people who do not know how to think.

As I have sagely remarked, if you bring your whole self to work you will be bringing your sexual peccadilloes and proclivities. At a time when the workplace suffers far too much sexual harassment, we gain no advantage by encouraging people to talk dirty. Because talking dirty will inevitably be understood as an invitation to see people in more sexualized terms. This is precisely what we should not want in the office.

Now, Rachel Feintzeig reports in the Wall Street Journal that my predictions have come true.

Here is the bad news:

Maybe it’s our newly casual attitudes after the pandemic, maybe we’re more determined to be ourselves at work, but some office conversations now include details of sex lives.

Workers accustomed to posting secrets on Instagram and TikTok, or who just have lower personal filters, are dropping risqué emojis in team Slack channels, asking bosses for advice on condoms and detailing the rules they use for “swinging” with other couples, unprompted in the hallway, according to employees and managers I talked to.

Oversharing has come to the office.

At the office, we’re sharing our mental-health issues, fertility struggles, politics and salaries. The only intimate thing left is, well, intimacy. 

“Should we be talking about this at the workplace?” one manager in her late 30s told me she thought when a conversation in a meeting turned to birth-control methods. Others said the chatter makes them uneasy about whether a dirty joke or explicit anecdote could tip into sexual harassment.

It is fairly obvious that this new habit will aggravate an ongoing sexual harassment crisis. It will undermine office morale, cause colleagues to see colleagues as less than professional, and will damage career prospects.

Fair or not, opening up at work has the potential to earn you a reputation as the office oversharer, or even harm your career.

Some advice-- discretion should be the rule in all workplace interactions.

Second, some good news from the race wars. The New York Post reports some news that everyone else is apparently afraid to report. While we are looking for societal fixes for minority children’s chronic underachievement, in one place, in New York charter schools, called Success Academies, minority children have become overachievers.

Think about it, it has nothing to do with the Supreme Court or affirmative action.

All Success 8th-graders took multiple Regents, tests meant for 11th- and 12th-graders. These charter kids — mostly low-income black and Hispanic students, i.e. the children the left claims simply can’t be expected to do well on standardized tests — knocked them out of the park.

Some 99.8% passed the algebra Regents; 47% scored a 5, the highest mark. In English, 94.6% passed; in biology, 96%.

And younger kids kicked butt too, with Success 7th graders taking the global history and geography Regents and 90% passing.

To put this in context, the pass rate for city high schoolers on the algebra test was 57% in 2022, 65% on bio, 73% on English and 74% on global history.

This tells us that our educational system is failing children. But you knew that already. If you want to improve performance on standardized tests and if you want minority children to overperform, there is one quick and easy fix: break up the teachers’ unions.

As you know these unions are not only responsible for shutting down schools. They are working with their Democratic Party supporters to shut down charter schools. Apparently, they do not care about the quality of education provided to children. 

And let’s not forget, thanks to the Obama administration, it has become increasingly difficult to discipline children in public schools. If such is the case in the classroom, no one is going to learn much of anything anyway.

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