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James Willmot, a former science teacher at our sister school, lays down the law in an opinion piece that appeared in the Sunday Courier-Journal.
It begins:
There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.
It gets better after that. Willmot basically slams down creationism and pins it to the floor. It’s worth reading.
Willmot taught science at St. Francis School in Goshen, Kentucky, a K-8 school that sends a lot of kids to St. Francis High School. He now lives and writes in England.
Needless to say, the fundies among the C-J’s readers were none too pleased. Comments ranged from suggesting Willmot was intolerant to predicting he would burn in Hell for questioning a literal interpretation of Genesis.
We have a long way to go. Religious intolerance and closemindedness is alive and well in mid-America.
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Cocoa Beach (Florida) High School made the news recently when a group of students started wearing peace-oriented T-shirts to school, to which some students objected. Now a tragedy has put the school in the public eye again.
A sophomore soccer player, Rafe Maccarone of Merritt Island, collapsed during practice Friday evening, and later died in Cape Canaveral Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children and Women in Orlando Hospital. He was 15.
CBHS sophomore Skylar Stains, one of the organizers of the Peace T-shirt Coalition, told me over the weekend that the entire school is in shock.
The complete story about Rafe’s death is here.
My thoughts are with Rafe’s family and the entire CBHS community.
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Working in a fairly liberal independent high school shelters me from the kind of close-mindedness endemic to some large public schools, like Cocoa Beach Jr/Sr High in Florida.
At that school, a group of students are being heckled, threatened and insulted for wearing peace T-shirts every Thursday. It’s a reactionary backlash reminiscent of the ’60s anti-war protests.
 Sophomore Skylar Stains (front row, right) and a friend decided to wear peace shirts every Thursday to school. Within a short time, they had 30 other students in their ad hoc Peace Shirt Coalition. Then things got ugly.
Group member Lauren Lorraine told Florida Today that students started approaching the group members, yelling obscene things at them.
“People just turned on us like that,” she said. “At least 10 boys stood up and yelled things at me at once, and we couldn’t even walk through the halls without a harsh comment being made.”
Signs they put up on their lockers promoting peace were defaced with swastikas and white-power slogans, covered up with pro-Bush or pro-war signs, or just torn down. One group of students has taken to wearing the Confederate flag shirts to show their support for the troops in Iraq.
From Florida Today:
However, Cocoa Beach Jr./Sr. High sophomores Lydia Pace and Joseph Marianetti say the Confederate shirts they wear express support for the troops in Iraq, and nothing more. Joseph said the shirts have nothing to do with racism.
Uh, right. Sorry, kids, I don’t see the connection between the Confederate flag and Iraq. Different war, different context. As for the racism thing, all I can say is, these kids must have been raised in a cultural vacuum.
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A surprisingly progressive school board in Portland, Maine, voted last month to allow students at one middle school to receive contraceptives confidentially from the school’s health clinic.
Parents of students at King Middle School have to give their children written permission to visit the clinic, but anything that happens in the clinic, including prescribing birth control pills, would be private, even from the parents.
True to our democratic process, the policy was suitably debated in public meetings, and the school board by majority vote approved the new policy. Since we have a decentralized educational system in the States, the birth-control policy only affects this one school in this one district.
But sex is an emotional subject in the US of A, and handing out contraceptives to pre-teens and teens is even touchier.
O the horror!
Those guardians of all that is pure and holy, the religious right, had to stick their nose in Portland’s business, of course. A Maine legislator is posturing about the whole affair, proposing new laws making it illegal for schools to hand out contraceptives without specific parental consent.
I suppose they hope to save the nation, and the state of Maine, from eternal hellfire and damnation. These are the same folks who push abstinence-only sex ed, after all.
The King Middle School policy, if you check it out dispassionately, is perfectly sensible. Out of 510 students, only five would actually qualify for contraception, according to The Associated Press. Those five are apparently sexually active.
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My latest assignment for my students has been to participate in the Cassini Scientist-for-a-day Essay Content. In the process of working with them, one of my kids told me something I found very disturbing.
She doesn’t care about space and space exploration.
Woof. It’s hard to come back with a short and snappy answer to that comment, other than the standard teacher admonishment, “Well, do the essay anyway.” It was honest, and I suppose a somewhat legitimate reason for not being keen on doing the assignment, but it is simultaneously a sad comment on her intellectual curiosity.
It’s a feeling that is shared by many others, I suppose. It explains why the US public is now so bored by space exploration, almost 40 years after two guys walked on the Moon. The gee-whiz has gone out of space.
[Since writing this post, I discovered Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer, blogged on "Why Explore Space?" He answers the question better than I can.]
Cassini is part of a long-term mission to explore Saturn, its moons and its ring system. Its companion probe, Huygens, landed on Titan, the only moon in our solar system with a substantial atmosphere. Together the two probes have sent back spectacular images of the ringed planet and its moons since their arrival in July 2004.
To connect students with space exploration, the Cassini team is sponsoring a contest in which students have to argue in a 500-word essay why one of four possible imaging targets is the best. They have to provide evidence that their chosen target would provide the most scientifically useful information.
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We have just finished our first five weeks of school, and my Physics First students have had their first run-ins with three of the most basic, yet most confusing concepts in physics: inertia, velocity and acceleration. After 23 years of teaching the subject, I have come to realize that I need to spend quite a bit of time trying to solidify these concepts in students’ minds.
Blame those stinking preconceptions, or the obtuse explanations in physics texts, but it is just really hard to get students to grasp those three concepts. Sure, they can memorize the definitions, but few really understand what they mean. Without a decent comprehension of them, learning later concepts (like force and momentum) is appreciably harder.
One misconception about inertia is that it is a force. That is, to some students, inertia is a force that keeps you at rest. A passable first definition, but then these students fail to realize that inertia also keeps you going. When the idea of force comes a bit later in the course, then they confuse inertia with real forces like gravitation and friction.
Inertia is a property of matter. It is internal, not external. External forces support an object, or resist other external forces, or push or pull an object. Inertia cannot make an object move by itself; it only maintains the motion that the object already has. If the object is at rest, it “wants” to stay at rest. If it’s moving in some direction at some speed, it “wants” to keep that speed and heading.
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After the parent-teacher confab last week, I came home to discover that Turner Classic Movies was coincidentally airing teacher movies, to commemorate the start of school. I unwisely let myself get sucked into the experience. (I overslept the next morning. Oops!)
You know the kind of movie I mean: the slightly schmaltzy, melodramatic kind that features a dedicated, sincere teacher who can see the best in his or her students and brings them (or drags them) to new academic achievements by sheer force of will. The list is practically endless, but there are a few that stand out as really good flicks.
TCM was showing “Goodbye Mr Chips” just as I got home. It wasn’t the silly musical version with Peter O’Toole and Petula Clark from the ’60s, but the original movie version from 1939, starring Robert Donat and Greer Garson. The movie follows the career of Mr Chipping (we never learn his first name) as he reminisces about his life, dozing by the fireside as an old man. It touches on some of the personal sacrifices and obstacles any career teacher makes, without getting too melodramatic about them.
Chips chooses to teach Latin, in some part because he passed over for promotion to housemaster, but largely because he enjoys his craft and working with his form 1′s. Chips seems a stodgy old man, even in middle age, until he falls head over heels for a younger woman, who returns his love. She helps mold Chips into a warmer, less reticent person, in the process opening new avenues of affection between he and his boys with weekly teas. Her death in childbirth leaves Chips stunned, but he soldiers on, leading his classes on the very day of her death, finding solace in the comfortable routine of coaching young minds.
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