From kindergarten through eighth grade, I attended a private all-girls school in New York City. But today, being 41 years old, with kids of my own in school and daycare in Toronto, I cannot say I give my years in a green plaid jumper a tremendous amount of thought—apart from the school building’s tendency to serve as a backdrop to some school anxiety dreams. The past is always present.

Anne Protopappas taught at @spenceschool for 25 years. She was beloved.

Then, last year, a student asked her about why France banned the hijab.

And Protopappas was fired.

Now she is suing.

Proud to publish @MJ_Koch's debut piece in @TheFP:https://t.co/Npkl2fp8xm

But there it was, in The Free Press: a story about a French teacher at The Spence School, Anne Protopappas, who was apparently fired for hosting an open-discussion-style seminar for high school students about France’s anti-headscarf legislation. I did not overlap with this seemingly legendary Madame Proto, but I can attest to Spence’s strengths in French.

For reasons to do with a finishing-school-type legacy, and therefore unrelated to Canadian bilingualism, French was more popular than Spanish as a second language, a quirk of my life that indirectly led me to doing a doctorate in French, and to spending much of my coursework at New York University… discussing, in seminars, what the deal was with France and veils. (Laïcité but not just that; a compelling topic but not ours here, or not directly.)

Teacher at elite Spence School fired after answering question about French hijab ban from head’s daughter, making her cry: suit https://t.co/36OVyhdkGU pic.twitter.com/69ViU0TtB7

The short version of events, as initially reported by the New York Post, is that Madame Proto, at students’ behest, started this headscarf discussion. The daughter of the school principal, also a student in that class, found this Islamophobic, and yadda yadda yadda, Madame Proto, 62, is now old, unemployable, and suing the school. It is example number lost count of someone cancelled for ‘bigotry’ who seemingly didn’t do anything worthy of that charge.

In a real twist for Spence, none of the women here—not Madame, not the kid, not the kid’s mother—are white. In the pre-online days, as I recall, Spence was always big on putting photos of the handful of non-white students in their brochures, selling a diversity you wouldn’t actually experience at a school where a Jewish-looking white Jewish........

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