Archive for Controversy
12 May 2007
Posted in Controversy, News at 6:57 pm by Miss Fox
Lately, I’ve heard quite a bit about year-round school vs. traditional calendar school in the local news:
Superior Court Judge Howard E. Manning, Jr. ruled Thursday that the Wake County school system can not force students into year-round schedules.
Which leaves a lot of people wondering - where are these kids going to go? They can’t build schools fast enough, and the students keep coming. According the article, they’re trying to come up with all kinds of options, but the only other one that seems possible is splitting the day - having an “early shift” (approx. 7-12:30) and a “late shift” (approx. 1:30-7) for students.
Parents don’t want that, either.
So perhaps a little background is important. Year round school is generally nine weeks on, three weeks off. This means that students and teachers would be in school for nine weeks (already the typical grading period), with three-week breaks between. For a lot of families, it’s hard to find childcare every two months for a month. I can see the issue there, though don’t a lot of parents typically have to find childcare for three months once a year, anyway? Seems like that would work itself out (highschoolers looking for babysitting jobs, camps that would cater to year-round school schedules, etc). And, I would think that typical family vacations are three weeks or less, anyway.
There are always exceptions, but on the surface, year-round schooling doesn’t seem to be a problem. There are a lot of opinions as to the actual benefits regarding retention, but nobody seems to think academics are suffering due to year-round schedules.
However, Wake County and a lot of other overcrowded school districts are using the year-round scheduling on a track system to help maximize the number of students that can learn in a given building. It sounds like a good idea, but it becomes a clusterfuck when you realize that parents with multiple children will sometimes have kids on different tracks. Teachers have to share classrooms - moving out of their room every nine weeks and moving into a new room three weeks later.
As a future teacher, the notion of moving all my crap every grading period does not make me happy. I’d rather have it all there, organized, where I need it. Part of the appeal of teaching is having my own classroom… it just seems so temporary…
But what are these school systems supposed to do? This is a lose-lose situation for everyone, and compromise isn’t coming easy. I know that Wake County is doing everything it can to accommodate these kids, but there are just too many.
Tempers are flaring on both sides of this issue, as parents fight for both sides, school systems struggle to come up with a good plan, teachers worry that they’ll be shuffled around…
The saddest part is, it’s the kids who are caught in the middle.
This is a pretty good resource for the pros/cons of year-round school… it appears to be fairly balanced.
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3 May 2007
Posted in Controversy, Immigration, News, Politics at 11:09 am by Miss Fox
Immigration is a hot political topic, lately - specifically dealing with the Latino population, more specifically Mexican immigrants, and even more specifically undocumented Mexican immigrants.
So many people want to do away with immigrants - send them back to their home country to fix their own problems. What if we’re causing some of those problems? Yup, that’s right - the United States is selling our cheap corn to Mexico, and wondering why the 1.3 million Mexican farmers that have been priced out of work are coming up to the States for work.
Oh, and those dirty Mexicans don’t pay taxes, right? They come up here and make all that money, and then give it to their fat families in Mexico and don’t even have to pay taxes… wait, what? You mean that’s wrong, too? Most of them don’t even make minimum wage, but a good portion of them pay taxes, and even file federal returns. Also, most states have sales tax - every time they buy something, like food, they are paying taxes. Do they get tax refunds? Or the same benefits that legal US citizens get? Nope.
Alright, so perhaps I should get to the education connection before I get shoved down off of my soapbox. North Carolina has one of the fastest-growing Latino populations in the country - 393% over ten years from 1990 to 2000, according to the 2000 US Census. I’ll be teaching in North Carolina for at least four years, and have lived here my entire life.
As a teacher, it is illegal for me to ask the immigration status of my students or their families, according to Supreme Court Case Plyler v. Doe.
In the eyes of a school, there is no difference between legal or illegal immigrants. They are entitled to the same education as American citizens.
The 14th Amendment Equal Protection Clause does not allow public schools to ask about immigration status. Source.
Personally, I agree with this decision - why should children suffer because of the disagreements of adults?
Also, the Supreme Court says that “sink or swim” education is unconstitutional, according the the case Lau v. Nichols - this means that if a student does not know English, schools and teachers are required to adapt their instruction and/or supplement the student’s learning to help them succeed.
I agree with this, too - ignoring them doesn’t make the problem go away, and creating ignorant citizens makes it worse.
So, why all this ranting? Because I feel that our nation’s views on immigration - illegal or not - are generally founded out of ignorance and misunderstanding, and that most United States citizens cannot be bothered to learn the truth.
I intend to brush up on my weak Spanish over the summer, and hopefully I’ll be conversationally fluent by the time I’m teaching, in a year. And I wish people would stop trying to tell me that I’m wrong because I’m “catering to the illegals”. Would it really hurt to do some research and give some support to our neighbors? Really?
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2 May 2007
Posted in Controversy, News at 3:11 pm by Miss Fox
So, despite the amusing title, this story has me pissed off. According to Lancaster Online, in an article dated 27 April:
A 27-year-old Millersville University graduate filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the college for denying her an education degree and teaching certificate after a controversial Internet photograph surfaced last year shortly before graduation.
The picture shows Stacy Snyder of Strasburg wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic “Mr. Goodbar” cup. The photograph taken during a 2005 Halloween party was posted on Snyder’s MySpace Web page with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” [...]
[...] “The day before graduation, the college confronted me about the picture,” Snyder said Thursday. “I was told I wouldn’t be receiving my education degree or teaching certificate because the photo was ‘unprofessional.’ ”
[...]
[Dean] Bray met with Snyder May 12. She accused Snyder of “promoting underage drinking through her ‘drunken pirate’ photo. Bray then stripped Snyder of her education degree and teaching certification, according to the lawsuit.
Snyder graduated the next day with an English degree.
This irritates me for several reasons. First of all, Snyder was 25 when the photograph was taken. Even in Pennsylvania, the legal drinking age is 21. How, then, does this photograph promote underage drinking? Why are educators often held to a higher “moral” standard? And, really, what the hell does that mean, anyway? Moral clauses are so very vague, because morals are different from person to person. Professionalism is the same way - ten different people will give you ten different definitions of professionalism.
If education programs and school districts want their students and teachers to hold themselves to some standard, then we need to know what that standard is.
However, I have the need to know everything about everything, so I dug deeper. While I don’t feel she should lose her degree or certification for this, I did wonder - did they ask her to remove it? Was she showing this to her students? Who found the picture and why?
My questions were quasi-answered in a second article, dated 2 May:
[...]Snyder was given a poor evaluation based on her performance while teaching at the high school and was warned not to direct students to her MySpace page, which contained the questionable photographs, [school district solicitor Howard L.] Kelin said.
Despite being warned to maintain a professional relationship with her students Kelin said, Snyder continued to direct students to her Web page.
“Snyder required ’significant remediation’ as a teacher, and her evaluation reflected serious performance problems,” Kelin said.
[...]
Kelin also said the photograph released along with the lawsuit was not the same one Buffington and Reinking submitted to the university.
The photograph they submitted, Kelin said, shows Snyder holding a plastic cup and making a hand gesture while wearing the pirate hat.
Snyder mentioned on her Web site that she had been warned about posting online messages to students, Kelin said.[...]
Alrighty, so the picture is different, but that’s really not the issue. And, while I still think she should be awarded her degree, she also should have listened to her superiors. While I don’t feel that communicating with students through your MySpace is necessarily unprofessional, I do think she should have been smarter as to what she shared about herself with her students. If they gave her warning, it was poor judgment for her to continue to do it.
And, according to this second article, she kind of screwed herself over with the apology she wrote in response to finding out they were going to refuse her degree:
“This incident has caused me to open my eyes and realize that I am the only person to blame. I have to take full responsibility for my actions and live with the consequences determined by the administrative staff from Conestoga Valley High School and Millersville University.”
She’s suing for her degree and money, but given the fact that she pretty much said she would deal with what the university did to her, I’m not sure she’ll win.
“I dreamed about being a teacher for a long time,” Snyder said. “When I was growing up, I spent more time with my teachers than my own parents, and it inspired me to someday make a positive impact on children.”
Such a shame, I bet she would have been a really great teacher, too. Guess we’ll never know.
While I still think a majority of things like this are a result of holding teachers to a faulty system of professionalism for which we don’t know the rules, this case seems to be a result of a student teacher knowing the rules, disagreeing with and disregarding them, and being punished for it. It sucks, but she should have known better. So, future teachers, be smart about what you tell your kids about yourself. It might ruin your career.
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7 April 2007
Posted in Controversy, Government, Politics, Religion, Science, Theocracy at 10:18 am by Miss Fox
I really don’t need to go on about this. You can read a lot of funny, well written, and intelligent posts by visiting Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog, James Randi’s internet home, Skepchick.org, and The Flying Spaghetti Monster site, among others.
I just want to put it simply - religion is not science. I’m not not necessarily saying they’re opposites (though they often are portrayed that way), just that they are not the same thing. The differences are obvious, and I don’t think I need to lay them out for you.
We learn a lot of things in history and science class that aren’t absolute truths. I remember a textbook in high school that said that Spain blew up the USS Maine to start the Spanish-American War. We now know that the Maine blew itself up, tragically, and that Spain had nothing to do with it.
As new discoveries are made, information is changed and the things we teach evolve. There are now 8 planets, not 9. We’ve discovered more moons around Jupiter. The agreed upon model for an atom changed several times when I was growing up. And, yes, along with the information we’re teaching children, we need to say that nothing is absolute - that just because scientific evidence and research supports x theory above all others, now, doesn’t mean that will always be the case.
That’s part of teaching - instilling within your students a love of learning and a thirst for knowledge, and making them realize that “It just is” or “Because I (god?) said so” are wrong answers to any question. I firmly believe that children (and adults) have the ability to think for themselves and things don’t have to be oversimplified for them to understand. Of course some things aren’t developmentally appropriate, but that doesn’t mean the answer to a question should be a lie. When a child asks why something is so, telling them “it just is” is damaging - it sets them up to believe that anything they’re taught “just is”, which we all know is never true.
That being said, perhaps the Big Bang never happened and evolution isn’t really happening. I suppose anything is possible in the realm of all possibility. However, right now there is more evidence (by far) to support those theories, and most scientists agree that they are valid. Thus, they make it into text books and are taught in science class.
If somebody has beef with that, then they can make observations, perform experiments, and pour over research papers to back up whatever mechanism they claim happened, instead. Then they can write their own research papers, submit them for peer review, and start a scientific discussion about their findings. If it turns out that some other explanation has more supporting evidence, then texts will be rewritten, scientists will shift their support, and I will teach it to my students.
Until then, keep your religion out of my classroom. (And my body, my government, my pharmacy, my doctor’s office…)
This post is a part of Blog Against Theocracy 2007 - a chance for those who believe in the separation of church and state in the United States to speak out about how they think that separation has been or is being compromised. Anyone can participate, click the logo for more information and links to other such posts.
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6 April 2007
Posted in Controversy, Government, Politics, Religion, Theocracy at 8:59 am by Miss Fox
“…[when] church and state are separate, the effects are happy, and they do not at all interfere with each other: but where they have been confounded together, no tongue nor pen can fully describe the mischiefs that have ensued.”
Isaac Backus (Baptist Minister), 1773 source
I’ve written about this before, but an article in Time Magazine titled “The case for teaching the Bible” in conjunction with this weekend’s Blog Against Theocracy “blogswarm” makes me think I should give it another go.
I’ll make this as brief as my angry little brain will let me (I’ve lost sleep over this post, trying to figure out how to word things so that I sound informed, intelligent, and reasonable rather than just angry and opinionated).
It appears as though the author of the Time article, David van Biema (Time’s senior religion writer), believes that public schools should offer a class that teaches the Bible as a textbook because it is such an influential text. He cites examples of Bible references in politics, pop culture (a feature of the magazine article not included in the online version), etc, and uses these as evidence of why knowing the Bible is important (so we can understand these references).
In an example of “Bible ignorance,” he talks about a case in which the Supreme Court was forced to overturn a jury’s sentence because they used the Bible, particularly the “eye for an eye” passage, as a resource during deliberation. Van Biema suggests that the fault here could lie with anyone involved “who perhaps hadn’t noticed that in the Gospel of Matthew Jesus rejects the eye-for-an-eye rule.”
Or, perhaps, the fault lies in the fact that the Bible was brought up at all - not that there wasn’t full understanding of the text. Religion has no place in government proceedings, and ignorance of the Bible should not be a disadvantage in those proceedings.
He goes on to mention statistics that support the idea that we are “a nation of biblical illiterates” (George Gallup), because,
“Only half of U.S. adults know the title of even one Gospel. Most can’t name the Bible’s first book. The trend extends even to Evangelicals, only 44% of whose teens could identify a particular quote as coming from the Sermon on the Mount.”
I don’t know where he got the statistics - the mention of George Gallup implies the Gallup Organization (home of the Gallup Poll), yet I couldn’t find that information on their website.
I want to spin this a different way. Perhaps the fact that a seemingly increasing number of United States citizens are ignorant of the religious text is not proof that we need to force schools to offer a Bible course, but that the Bible’s influence is waning. Regardless, the government is not allowed to endorse any religion (hello, first amendment - it’s not just about free speech). These classes, however secular they say they are, endorse one particular religion (the article notes that many such classes focus only on the positive influence of the Bible and ignore its negative influence). I would be less up in arms about a class on world religion that included multiple religious texts as sources, but I still feel that those are classes that should be reserved for college. Partly because I feel that finding teachers who are able to teach multiple religious texts in a balanced manner is difficult, but mostly because I feel like a lot of schools don’t have the resources to support core instruction, let alone a class that focuses on religion.
There is no mandate stating that every school must offer music, art, drama, dance, etc as electives, why should the Bible get special treatment? Schools are fighting for decent teachers and the money to teach students the basics - to add to all this the arguably constitutional elective of a Bible class is ridiculous, unnecessary, and (I believe) unconstitutional.
There is nothing preventing people from studying any text outside of government-funded programs - if you want to learn more about the Bible, there are many ways to do so that don’t involve chiseling away at the already eroded wall of separation between church and state (a wall deemed “absolutely essential in a free society” by Thomas Jefferson).
Read my other post in this series, here.
This post is a part of Blog Against Theocracy 2007 - a chance for those who believe in the separation of church and state in the United States to speak out about how they think that separation has been and/or is being compromised. Anyone can participate, click the logo for more information and links to other such posts.
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5 April 2007
Posted in Controversy, Journal-related, Religion, Theocracy at 4:46 pm by Miss Fox
Many do it, anyway. Because we’re fed up and we want honesty in our government, again. But - there is a movement. One that I will be joining with my insignificant internet presence.
I encourage anyone else who would prefer to go back to the good old separation of state and church that we are promised by our Constitution to write about it this weekend. I will be.
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26 March 2007
Posted in Controversy, My education, Racism at 4:19 pm by Miss Fox
So, something got me thinking, today, about all the random things I did/said as a kid. Well, not all of them (as that would be a lot of things…), but some of the more strange ones. Take, for instance, Army dodge ball, a game that even my ex-Army friends don’t know about (which makes sense - I imagine soldiers don’t sit around playing dodge ball all day.). I grew up in Fayetteville, NC - a military town right outside of Fort Bragg, NC, so Army dodge ball was the only kind of dodge ball I ever played as a kid. It seems so strange to me that so many people have no idea it even exists.
But, I also thought of a couple phrases I used to say that were not only random, but also very wrong. For instance, I remember being told, as a child, to sit “Indian-style”.
Now, as a student teacher, I know that phrase is no longer used, and instead teachers say “criss cross applesauce” or just “cross-legged”. (I hate cutesy phrases, so I’ll be using the latter when the time comes.) It’s not a particularly hurtful phrase, but it’s not very descriptive and relies on stereotypes of cultures for its meaning.
I also used to use the phrase “Indian giver”,
which I didn’t understand at the time I used it. I’m still not entirely sure why it’s such a widely used term… weren’t we the ones who kept taking away things (land) from the Native American tribes after we had so graciously given them? (Because, you know, the Native American totally had no land before we came along, and we were so awesome to give them ours, even if we did take most of it back. We disgust me.)
There’s one more, though, that I tried to research, today, for which I couldn’t find a source. The phrase is “Chinese skipping”, which apparently references a jump rope game. When I was little, though, it had nothing to do with jumping rope - to “Chinese skip” somebody, was to skip them in line, in a rather clever and sneaky way. Say you’re standing in the lunch line. Mary is in front you. Joe comes up and tries to skip you in line. “NO! Joe, you can’t skip me,” you say, “go back to the end of the line.” So, he whispers to Mary for a second, and they snicker. Then Mary lets Joe skip her in line. Then, Joe lets Mary skip him, putting him in front of you. Thus, you have been “Chinese skipped”. It sounds like just another made up phrase, still racist even though it has nothing to do with any stereotypes of the Chinese culture (that I know of).
In my searching for that phrase, I did run across a whole bunch of “Chinese ____” phrases, such as “Chinese fire drill”.
According to the article, “Chinese here comes from British military tradition of using the word to mean clumsy, inept, or inferior. It is likely that this was not intended as a slur on the Chinese people, but rather a play on the phrase “one wing low” which referred to a clumsy pilot and was thought to sound Chinese.” Regardless, it is yet another insensitive, and stupid term.
Luckily (or not), I had no idea I was saying anything racist at the time. Hell, even now I’m not entirely sure why anyone even created those phrases. If you aren’t racist, it makes no sense. I don’t hold the belief that the Chinese are confused or chaotic… I don’t think all native people sit cross-legged… and I don’t think Chinese men pee in Coke bottles. I never did. Yet, I remember hearing and using these phrases, because that’s just what you did. I didn’t know why it was called “Chinese skipping”, it just was. I didn’t know why we sat “Indian-style” on the magic carpet for storytime, we just did.
I’m not a very P.C. person - I hate having the sidestep issues by using euphamisms and cutesy phrases to keep from offending people (what about apples, huh? Maybe they don’t like “criss cross applesauce” so much…), but I also don’t understand why we use such mindless phrases.
So, what’s going around the playground, these days? Are we making fun of Muslims and Iraqis, now? I don’t want to be surprised when one of my fourth graders blurts out some off-the-wall, seemingly random yet racist phrase.
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24 March 2007
Posted in Controversy, Feminism, Sex, Student teaching at 11:28 pm by Miss Fox
This is an old argument - the sexualization of little girls. Where does it come from? Why is it encouraged? How can we stop it?
A quiz on PBS (“Is Love in Our DNA?”) referencing another article (named below), makes a good point:
Beautiful young women are sexually attractive to men because beauty and youth are closely linked with fertility and reproductive value. In evolutionary history, males who were able to identify and mate with fertile females had the greatest reproductive success … A 14-year-old woman has a higher reproductive value than a 24-year-old woman, because her future contribution to the gene pool is higher on average.
–David Buss, “The Strategies of Human Mating,” American Scientist, 1994
It’s not a pleasant thought, but if you think about it scientifically, it makes sense. A 14 year old girl is (typically) sexually mature… in nature, that’s usually good enough. So, if you look at it that way, it’s pretty much going against nature to say being attracted to young girls is wrong.
Does this mean we need to encourage it? Of course, not. It’s an evolutionary thing that has, like pinky toes and the appendix, become obsolete in the human race. Why? It’s not like we’re hurting for people, here - there is no immediate, urgent need to perpetuate the species. So, while there are reasons why men are attracted to younger females, there aren’t really any good reasons to act on it.
So, then, we tend to view men with this attraction as evil predators. While I agree that men who actively pursue underage girls against their will are wrong, I do have issues with this. It’s perfectly natural for men to be attracted to young girls. It’s how they act (or don’t act) on that attraction that makes the difference.
Dressing little girls up in “sexy” clothes and putting all the responsibility on men is a problem. Again, there are some men that actively pursue young girls… but the girls aren’t always innocent in the matter. Today, I heard a story about a group of fifth grade girls who saw their teacher’s IM window, in which she had been talking to her boyfriend during downtime. A few days later, said teacher gets a call from her boyfriend, asking her who all these girls are who are IMing him. Apparently, they were having a sleepover, and one of them remembered his name, so they IMed him pretending to be adult women and hit on him. He was smart enough to know that something wasn’t right, but I’m sure that this isn’t the only time that men have been pursued by underage women. Just because these girls wouldn’t have known what to do in the event this man really did show up at their house ready to have sex, doesn’t take the blame off of them completely.
So, who is to blame? Mothers? Fathers? Advertising? All of the above?
Parents need to pay attention to their kids. Easier said than done, but still true. They need to say no, and enforce it, when girls want to do/wear/watch things that aren’t appropriate. They need to be honest and open with their kids about sex (boys and girls), so that they learn more from their parents than from a porn site. And, they need to stop letting their little girls wear things like this:
(Yeah, that says “wink, wink” and “eye candy” - and they’re sized for girls ages 10-16)
and this:
It’s not “cute”.
There are others, but I (obviously) can’t find pictures on the ‘net without going through some rather unsavory channels. And, quite frankly, I don’t want to see little girls who could be my students wearing skin tight ass pants, shirts with phrases like “little hottie” and “sexy princess”, and padded bras for six year olds.
Alright, so what does this have to do with education? All this came from an experience I had with my fourth graders. They are all learning how to write letters for a purpose - they’re writing to somebody to ask for something. One girl is writing the president to ask for peace, a boy is writing his apartment manager to ask them to clean up the apartment complex he lives in, and several are writing celebrities to ask for autographs.
A rather large group of girls has decided to write Hannah Montana (warning: link goes to a Disney.com site) (or, more correctly, they’re writing to Miley Cyrus, the actress that plays her). I had no idea who she was (I really should brush up on my pop culture to keep up with the kids), but I learned very quickly that finding her address was hard.
Actually, it was impossible.
The Disney website says on its FAQs page that they can’t “…provide contact information, forward e-mail, or grant meetings or interviews on their behalf…” because “the performers you are referring to are not permanent employees of The Walt Disney Company…” and, instead, they recommend you “start your search [with the] Internet Movie Database.” So, knowing the joy of imdb, I decided to go there. I had to click on the link to her official site pretty quickly, though, because at the bottom of the page, where the discussion forums are, there happened to be a topic titled “She’s Got a Really Great Ass!!!” This girl is 15.
But, when you dress her up like she’s 18+:
I can see how people might be confused.
So, yeah, I finally got so frustrated with having to tell the girls, repeatedly, “no, that’s not really her address” and “that’s not really her website… you really shouldn’t send your letter there” that I gave up.
I’m not really surprised that Disney is using sex to sell its kids’ shows… I mean, look at The Cheetah Girls:
So, yeah… anyway. This post has been entirely too long, already… mostly, I’m angry because (1) the girls in my class deserve better female role models than that (2) Disney should take some responsibility and at least give an address to send mail to the studio - I wonder how many little girls have written letters to creepy pedophiles trying to get to “Hannah Montana” (3) viewing women as sex objects is already a problem - do we really need to shift this pressure to 10 year olds?
I do hate to sound prudish, but seriously, this is a problem. My 10 year old girls are wearing ass-pants and writing letters to girls who look like they should be starring in porn. What ever happened to characters like Clarissa?
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12 October 2006
Posted in Controversy, News at 9:05 am by Miss Fox
So, an article in People Magazine was brought to my attention, yesterday. Before I describe it, I have to ask - do you find Michelangelo’s “David” offensive?
What about Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus”?
Would you shield your children’s eyes from these and other, similar works of art?
In Dallas, Texas, a teacher was let go for taking her children to an art museum. (NY Times article, as I can’t find an online version from People.) Sydney McGee has taught for 28 years - she teaches art - and she was fired for taking fifth graders to an art museum.
Raise your hand if you went to an art museum in the fifth grade (or anytime in school). *raises own hand* Were you traumatized, shocked, or otherwise harmed by what you saw? Apparently, one of the students in this class was, and his or her parents complained to the principal, who then fired the teacher. What piece of artwork is responsible for the no doubt lasting damage on this poor, innocent soul? It wasn’t mentioned - at least not in this article. Why? Perhaps it’s because People Magazine isn’t the best source for meaningful news and they neglected to research that far into it.
But, perhaps it was because it could have been any number of pieces of art - because art sometimes contains - gasp - nudity.
As a future teacher I am well aware that there are fine lines between appropriate and inappropriate, but I firmly believe that we have become entirely too prudish about nudity.
There, I said it. Nudity is not the problem, we are.
I could go on and on about the sexualization of our culture - the abundance of sex in television and movies, clothes marketed for children that are modeled after adult lingerie, toys popular among little girls that look like they belong in an adult-only shop, etc. And those things are problems, I agree. But we are extending our censorship too far when we start banning works of art that expose the human form.
Last I checked, children have bodies. And as far as I know, they are at least aware of what their own bodies look like. And, of course, fifth graders are starting to get interested in what the other half has - all the more reason to show them.
What? Show kids nudity? Has she gone crazy??
Possibly, but think about the last time you were curious about something… if you went looking for the information you wanted and one source adamantly refused to give it to you, would you give up? No! You would keep searching until you found satisfaction. Would you rather these kids see nudity in an art museum, or in their friend’s brother’s stash of magazines?
And that’s not even what this teacher was trying to do - she was just trying to teach art. It’s not even stated that the art she was pointing out contained any nudity, just that the museum (The Dallas Museum of Art, by the way) had artwork on display that contained nudity that some of the children might have seen.
This is ridiculous. Right now, I can only imagine that field trips are being cancelled all over the country, art museums are being asked to cover certain questionable pieces of art, and permission forms are being amended to cover the school in the event a student sees something controversial.
What is happening to us?
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1 April 2006
Posted in Controversy, Religion at 11:51 pm by Miss Fox
[Edited at the end.]
It’s been a debate for a long time, now, whether the Bible has a place in public schools. Several people agree that it does hold some very rich literature, but others try to push it as a historical resource, as well.
I disagree with both. While some Biblical stories are interesting, I have to say that they are too far-fetched for me. I’d rather read “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey”, Shakespeare, or Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. The Bible’s stories tend to be rather tedious to read, and rely too much on faith to be interesting to me as a nonbeliever. They are also a bit “preachy” at times, as well as repetitive and long-winded.
And as a history text, it is completely awful. There are no reliable resources, and the facts are skewed by religious influences - it was never meant to be a history book. Perhaps the Bible, itself, has made history, which is worthy of studying (the first printed book, the many translations, its affect on different cultures, etc). It was particularly interesting to study in my “History of Books” class my freshman year of college, but we didn’t study the content. History textbooks are inaccurate enough without adding the Bible to the list. Besides, I thought teachers and parents were pushing for more up-to-date history texts, anyway. The Bible was put together centuries ago - talk about outdated!
Even if certain stories do make it into a literature or history class, I think they should be a part of a course of a study, and should not make up the entire class. Most high schools don’t devote entire classes to studying any one particular work or author - the point of high school seems to be to get as much general knowledge as possible into students so they might go off to college and explore the specifics on their own. There simply isn’t time for a “Bible as literature/history” course in high schools. And the monetary resources aren’t there, either - we can barely fund music and art classes, let’s not waste time and money on textbook versions of the Bible and the teachers to teach it. Besides, I’m sure the Quran has some history and literature in it, too, but I don’t see anyone pushing for that to be taught in our schools. One or two stories in a class that focuses on literature in general is okay, but an entire class devoted to it is just ridiculous.
Disagree if you must, but make a good point for your argument.
21 March, 10:39pm EDT - I wanted to respond to Alan’s comment, below. This entry was pretty general, but there are groups (somewhat successfully) trying to get the Bible taught in schools; the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, the Bible Literacy Project, and Bible in the Schools, among others. According the first organization, “The Bible course curriculum has been voted into 373 school districts in 37 states… 190,000 students have already taken our course.” North Carolina is on the list.
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