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JISHOU, HUNAN — Texas is a big state, with about 6 million schoolchildren. When the Texas State Board of Education speaks, textbook publishers listen. After all, if the publishers can sell their texts to Texas, it’s a big deal. It means money.
So, when the Texas BOE met in March to discuss controversial changes to the state’s proposed science standards, science educators all over the USA were worried. Would the BOE, chaired by an unapologetic creationist, introduce language into the standards to allow the teaching of creationism and and its clone, Intelligent Design, in the Texas schools?
To do so would be seriously damage science education in the Texas public schools. It would also likely influence textbook publishers’ treatment of evolution in biology texts, thereby affecting schools all over the USA.
The Texas BOE is nearly evenly composed of creationists and more sensible members, so the results were by no means predictable. In the end, the original changes, as proposed by the openly anti-evolution chairman and board members, were rejected. Instead, the BOE passed more coyly worded standards that still could be used to introduce pseudo-science and religion into Texas classrooms, but did not exactly trample science teaching.
Whether the new standards will induce textbook publishers to edit their books to make them more palatable to Texas remains to be seen.
A lot of bloggers have capably covered the Texas fracas already, so I will not go into the details here. Rather, I’d rather provide some background as an interested observer.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Social scientists seem to have a knack for spending huge amounts of time and effort to state the obvious. The most recent example is from a study funded by the MacArthur Foundation: teens spend a lot of time online and on their cell phones communicating with others, and it’s good for them!
Dudes, like I didn’t already know.
Seriously, I respect the John D. and Catherine T. MacArtur Foundation. It funds a whole slew of wonderful pursuits, like National Public Radio, a really nice oceanside nature reserve in Florida, and many others.
Spending three years to conclude what seems to be patently obvious may seem to be time and effort misplaced, but the conclusions of the report should give us educators something to think about.
Led by Mizuko Ito of the University of California-Irvine, a team of researchers interviewed 800 teens and young adults and spent more than 5,000 hours online to investigate youth media use.
They refute the oft-cited scourge of Internet predators out to abscond with our children’s virtue. In fact, the overwhelming majority of young people use electronic media to talk with one another, or with people they know.
Despite adult fears that all this time spent texting, chatting, and such is a waste of time, the researchers concluded that young people are actually developing extant and new social connections, learning on their own, and fostering their own independence. All good stuff.
This is a preview of Researchers: kids use the Internet; adults should get with program . Read the full post (791 words, 3 images, estimated 3:10 mins reading time)Possibly related posts:
The Panda’s Thumb has been keeping a close tab on Ohio science teacher/religious fanatic John Freshwater even since he got into trouble last year, allegedly burning a cross on a student’s arm with a Tesla coil.
Freshwater and school officials have been making their cases in adiministrative hearings since then. There have been six days of testimony so far, spread over several months. So far, the testimony suggests Freshwater was an insubordinate teacher who resisted his superiors’ efforts to bring him in line, perhaps because he believed God’s authority trumped theirs.
Members of the science department were supposed to bring their Tesla coils to the front office; Freshwater kept his. He was supposed to remove his Bible from plain sight of students; he put additional religious materials in his classroom instead. Ohio’s scope and sequence of science instruction places the teaching of evolution in the 8th grade and later, and forbids the teaching of creationism; Freshwater was telling his seventh graders that evolution was bunk, that the world was only 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed for a time.
Freshwater, who apparently is a very popular teacher and has won teaching awards in the past, is associated with rightwing Christian organizations, particularly the kind that just can’t seem to accept that old “separation of church and state” idea enshrined in the Constitution. They try to weasel their church teachings into the public schools in defiance of federal (and state) law anyway.
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Luis Soriano is a primary school teacher in the little town of La Gloria, Colombia. Every weekend, Soriano loads a selection of books from a 4,800-item collection onto his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, and heads into the hills to deliver books to remote villages.
He has broken a leg falling off his mount and been stopped by bandits, but Soriano keeps his voluntary Biblioburro service running despite his woes.
“This began as a necessity, then it became an obligation, and after that a custom,” he explained, squinting at the hills undulating into the horizon. “Now,” he said, “it is an institution.” – International Herald Tribune
The project started small, with 70 books, but his letter to a famous author and radio personality brought a deluge of donated books, which Soriano has stacked floor-to-ceiling in the house he shares with his wife and three daughters. An adjacent library is awaiting additional funding to be completed.
It’s a great story of how one teacher can make a difference. Click the IHT link above for the whole story.
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John Freshwater had his first day of an administrative hearing today, to determine whether he should keep his job. The Panda’s Thumb has a detailed account, if you’re interested.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — The border police in Berkeley, California, must have been napping. A proselytizing teacher slipped into town long enough to traumatize her class of eight-year-olds.
She told them that Harry Potter, the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus were ALL fictional characters, and that God was the only thing they should believe in.
Nice. And I wonder what grade she got in ed psych?
She also reportedly told her third graders that she didn’t believe in evolution or the Big Bang either. I suppose none were able to shoot back a counter-argument, since they were all in tears about the Santa Claus/Easter Bunny revelation.
The teacher, a new hire over the summer, is now being investigated by the Berkeley Unified School District for possibly (!) violating laws against the separation of Church and State. The details are here.
I’m not sure which is worse, burning a cross onto a teenager’s arm with a Tesla coil or demolishing an eight-year-old’s belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny. Is the US this desperate for teachers?
Thanks for Pharyngula for this story.
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JISHOU, HUNAN — Last spring, I was following the case of one John Freshwater, an Ohio science teacher accused of proselytizing his seventh-graders a little too zealously. Freshwater was relieved of his duties when an unnamed student and his parents filed suit, charging Freshwater with civil rights violations.
Freshwater allegedly burned a cross on the student’s arm with a Tesla coil, a common science lab demo device that generally should be kept far from human flesh. (I speak from personal experience.)
Anyway, this teacher, who subscribes to some kind of wacko right-wing Christianity, wants the names of the student and his parents made public. In a town where folks are already polarized over Freshwater’s “I will keep a Bible in the classroom no matter what” crusade, revealing the names of the family would be tantamount to inviting people to burn crosses in their front yard.
Yeah, it’s that bad in mid-Ohio. Land of the free, and all that.
Ed Brayton at Scienceblogs has the gory details.
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