Putting aside the question of whether schools should react to threats in this way, as all the schools in LA did, recently, this is seriously one of the more ridiculous tempests in a teapot I’ve heard about.
I might question whether including a religious phrase was acceptable for about two milliseconds. But the reality is it’s very clearly a lesson about another religion, region, and culture. That phrase appears on Saudi Arabia’s flag. This is a geography class about the world as we live in it.
Jesus Hatfacingbackwards Christ. If you believe that your kids are getting secretly converted by copying down a statement they don’t understand, you need help. It’s not a contract for their soul.
They were SHOWN COPIES OF THE QU’RAN??? That school is clearly a den of terrorists, and they need to be all extraordinarily rendited to Saudi Arabia for interrogation!!! /s
In other news… how can people this dumb actually exist…
“She taught English and said had she asked children to copy passages from the Bible, she would have been fired.”
Why must I not only have to live on the same planet as people this dim-witted, but also cursed with living in the same country? After reading TFA, I’m leaning toward people in that town truly believing in witchcraft. The lack of critical thought and preponderance of magical thinking is right there in the quoted residents.
Sounds like the entire conservative world is cracking up, having been hastened along by the Tea Partiers and their ragged ilk of conspiracy theorists, and then finding common cause with Donald Trump’s …biz-nihilism approach. Two large tablespoons of xtian persecution theory, the trumpeting of real and imagined violence spread throughout a 24 hour news cycle, and the potential for robot nerds with computers to use the Intertubes to steal your FaceFook profile…CHAOS!
Huh. When I went to public school an AP teacher regularly used religious texts. For the simple reason that they are quoted, alluded to, or incorporated into about a billion other texts. There were two problems:
the students who were vehemently against religion
the students who brought their own personal religious texts
Neither group, until a few weeks in, could grasp that this had to do with literature and history, not indoctrination. And this was the AP class.
I took a university course on the Bible. I went up to the professor on the first class and told him I didn’t really know that much about the Bible, because I was never raised Christian. I didn’t know if I was at a disadvantage compared to most. He told me that I was at a distinct advantage, because people who have read the Bible all their lives and really believe in it have a hard time looking at it in new, especially secular, ways. Sure enough the class was full of very Evangelical Christian types and while the Old Testament portion of the class went by fairly smoothly, the New Testament brought out a lot of orthodox (and I daresay much less interesting) interpretations. It was a great class, and I’ve gone back to read a lot more about the Bible since. I would avoid discussing it with religious people though.
In glorious socialist Minnesota, we had less difficulty with previously indoctrinated youth in our AP classes. But I have grave doubts that the irate english teacher in question is certified to teach AP.
Probably everyone is stupid in this situation except maybe the kids whom I’ll give a free pass.
The teacher was stupid because she should have definitely known that asking the students to copy the text of the Shahada in Arabic would have opened the school system up to all sorts of separation of church and state lawsuits.
The parents who over reacted? Stupid.
The school system who over reacted by shutting down the school? I’m gonna go with stupid.
To be honest I expected more stupid from the comments in this thread. Y’all are letting me down. Not enough venom and rage at all.
C’mon, you can do better! I’m the local iconoclast capitalist religious guy. I’m the guy who would make PIkety actually work for a living, the one who can actually quote commentary on torah verses.
