Should a school teacher slip in fat acceptance instruction any chance she gets, disguising this as teaching her assigned coursework such as reading?
I’m appalled that fifth grade teacher Amanda Martinez Beck, who has posted that her assignment is that of reading instruction, has apparently been spending time indoctrinating her young impressionable students in obesity promotion.
Below is a post on her Instagram, and I’m finding it difficult to believe that she’s been asked these questions by her students – without prompting her students, that is.
Amanda Martinez Beck, Instagram
Something tells me that Amanda Martinez Beck, whose Instagram handle says “Fat activist,” has been finding clever ways to insert narrative about fat acceptance into her classroom.
Why do I suspect this? One reason is because when I was growing up, some teachers were fat – and NOBODY ever asked them about their bodies. NOBODY. I mean n-o-b-o-d-y.
Now, is it possible that kids made comments behind a teacher’s back? Certainly.
But it was unfathomable for kids to outright ask questions straight to a fat teacher’s face so that she was “fielding” them.
Are today’s kids just more rude?
Kids are brutally honest and genuinely curious.
Asking a morbidly obese teacher if she likes salads is not rude behavior. It’s sincere curiosity.
But I’m not buying it that these innocent questions are being formed in a vacuum.
I’m convinced that they’re being lured out, somehow enticed or shrewdly extracted from these young minds.
Amanda Martinez Beck calls herself a fat activist and openly celebrates fat-hood.
Amanda Martinez Beck, Instagram
Doesn’t this sound like the very person who’d jump at the chance to teach fifth grade, seeing it as an opportunity to “get them while they’re young and impressionable” to sway them towards fat acceptance?
Now before you get the wrong idea, I want to make it clear that there’s a tremendous difference between “fat acceptance” and absence of body shaming.
In fact, if I were a teacher and witnessed a few students ridiculing another for being fat – trust me – I’d have those kids down on the floor giving me 50.
But it’s a whole different animal when influencers are attempting to normalize a dangerous state of existence – which in nearly every case is caused by self-harm: the self-harm of food addiction.
NO addiction (or what seems to be addictive behavior that causes an adverse result) should be promoted, celebrated or normalized, be it smoking, illegal drug use, heavy drinking, vaping or overconsumption of ultra-processed foods (binge eating disorder).
Why is body diversity (for lack of a better term) being discussed in a fifth grade reading class?
I wouldn’t put it past Amanda Martinez Beck that she has her students writing narrative or answering questions on paper relating to “fatphobia,” disguised as drills to sharpen their literacy skills.
She’s written two small books that normalize morbid obesity. She’s a reading teacher. It’s a safe bet that she’s had her students read at least one of these books, and then has encouraged them to discuss it.
And when you think even a little bit about this, you’ll easily see that this is a sly attempt at getting 10- and 11-year-olds to think that an unhealthy lifestyle should be acceptable.
On the surface, this may seem like a wonderful thing – for any of her students who are overweight.
But this kind of rhetoric does NOT belong in a fifth grade reading class.
Kids should be taught not to bully or be mean. The frontline of this falls on the parents!
But some parents fall short of succeeding at this, and teachers are in a prime position to prevent bullying or ridicule.
However, this doesn’t mean transform a reading class into a fat acceptance class.
I just can’t believe that these young kids have been freely questioning Amanda Martinez Beck about her enormous size without her encouragement.
Again, when I was growing up, this would’ve been, and was, unthinkable among my classmates as well as myself.
Yes, we noticed that some teachers were fat. But nobody ever asked them about their size!
It may seem that this Instagram influencer is doing her students good by making them feel that being extra large is perfectly okay, but in the long-term, she’s doing them major harm. We absolutely cannot ignore medical facts.
Would she be a better teacher if she were thin?
The second paragraph of her Instagram post (the one above) mentions this.
Amanda Martinez Beck suffers from binary thinking: She believes there’s only two body types: fat and skinny.
She fails to think in terms of “happy medium.” When I was a personal trainer, I actually helped underweight clients gain some weight (via increased consumpton of healthful food and adding muscle).
Nobody says she has to drop to a size 2. But it’s really tragic that at her size (visibly at least 300 pounds on a short frame), she believes weight loss for health and mobility reasons is not necessary.
She even quit Ozempic (prescribed for her type 2 diabetes; she has posted about this) because it made her lose a little weight.
