Education Idiocy
Northwestern Univ Professor Defends Explicit Sex Toy Demonstration
This is ‘higher learning”? Our universities can have an explicit sex toy demonstration, but they dare not mention God in the classroom. Mind-boggling.
Northwestern University Professor Defends Explicit Sex Toy Demonstration After Class
Fox News on March 3, 2011 By Joshua Rhett Miller
<Excerpt>
A Northwestern University professor is defending an explicit after-class demonstration involving a woman and a motorized sex toy, saying, “thoughtful discussion of controversial topics” is a cornerstone of education.
Professor John Michael Bailey, who has taught psychology at the Illinois university since 1989, said the Feb. 21 after-class presentation on “networking for kinky people” to his 600-student human sexuality class was entirely optional. Students were also warned prior to the demonstration that the material — which would not be covered on examinations — wasn’t for the faint of heart.
“The demonstration, which included a woman who enjoyed providing a sexually explicit demonstration using a machine, surely counts as kinky, and hence, as relevant,” Bailey said in a statement issued to FoxNews.com late Wednesday. “Furthermore, earlier that day in my lecture I had talked about the attempts to silence sex research, and how this largely reflected sex negativity … I did not wish, and I do not wish, to surrender to sex negativity and fear.”
Bailey allowed a guest lecturer, Ken Melvoin-Berg, to narrate the use of the sex toy — referred to as a “f—saw” on a woman who was not a Northwestern student. Melvoin-Berg, who operates a local sex tour, told MyFoxChicago.com that the woman’s boyfriend assisted in the demonstration, which he described as “appropriate” and educational.
“We weren’t doing it to shock them,” he told MyFoxChicago.com.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Principal Threatens to Fire Teachers Who Help Christian Club
More religious freedoms being taken away. If you’d like to contact the principal to let him know how you feel about this, you can email the principal at: ddcurtis@augusta.k12.va.us
Principal threatens to fire teachers who help Christian club
Earns warning from civil rights organization
September 03, 2010
By Bob Unruh
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
A principal who reportedly threatened to fire any teacher who helped with the organization of a campus Fellowship of Christian Athletes club is getting a warning letter from a civil rights organization.
The Rutherford Institute, a Virginia-based civil liberties group, sent the letter to Don Curtis, principal of Wilson Middle School in Fishersville, Va.
“By intimidating teachers, through threat of termination, into refusing to provide the same types of administrative assistance to the FCA as are made available to other student groups, Principal Curtis has pitted himself in direct opposition to the spirit of the First Amendment,” said Rutherford President John W. Whitehead.
“School administrators need to act immediately to correct the erroneous impression conveyed by the principal’s e-mail that religion has no place in the public schools,” he said.
According to a report from WHSV-TV in Harrisonburg, Va., Curtis denied he meant for the note to teachers to stir up controversy or deter the group from forming. He told the station the “tone” of his memo to faculty members “was taken out of context.”
The note, according to WHSV, explained students were trying to form a Fellowship of Christian Athletes.
“As I trust common sense and your elementary knowledge of the law should remind you, the Constitution includes an amendment that expects ‘The government will not establish any religion.’ This has been legally stated and supported through case law, interpreted to mean for schools that the school or its employees will not perpetuate, support or establish any religion at school,” the principal’s note said.
“This means teachers can’t support or participate in religious activities while in the official role of a teacher. … Be as religious as you want when you’re not in your official role as a teacher. Your official role as a teacher starts anytime you’re involved with students.
“Please check with me or your attorney if you need clarification so I can avoid termination proceedings for those of you that don’t believe me or wish to test this concept,” Curtis wrote. “I’m being somewhat of a smart a&*, but I trust ‘You’re feeling me!'”
He subsequently explained that the e-mail was sent to faculty to remind teachers “to be professional.”
“I presented this in my candid style, intended for my faculty. I’ve been told it was intimidating but I had no intention other than to remind the staff of my expectations of their legal and professional behavior,” he explained.
There’s actually a little more to it than that, Whitehead wrote in his letter today to Curtis.
“While the First Amendment does prohibit the government from establishing a religion, it likewise prohibits the government from exhibiting hostility toward religion, interfering with the free exercise thereof, and discriminating against expressive activities based on the religious viewpoint of the expression,” he explained.
“The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment does not permit government – including school officials – to subject religious individuals or groups to unique disabilities,” Whitehead said.
“The United State Supreme Court has specifically addressed the issue of faculty involvement with religious student groups, and has ruled that such involvement does not conflict with constitutional principles where teachers or other school employees are merely involved with the club for purposes of administration or oversight,” he said.
“I hope this information is helpful to you, and that you will use it to immediately correct the impression conveyed by your e-mail that the budding FCA group should be shunned by your staff,” Whitehead wrote.
LINK: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=198621
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Highland Park Basketball Team Trip to Arizona Scrapped
Unbelievable! This is so ridiculous! If I was a parent I’d be furious at this school and I’d force them to take the team on this trip!
Highland Park basketball team trip to Arizona scrapped
Chicago Tribune
Jeff Long
May 12, 2010
Reveling in its first conference championship in 26 years, the Highland Park High School girls varsity basketball team has been selling cookies for months to raise funds for a tournament in Arizona. But those hoop dreams were dashed when players learned they couldn’t go because of that state’s new crackdown on illegal immigrants.
Safety concerns partly fueled the decision, but the trip also “would not be aligned with our beliefs and values,” said District 113 Assistant Superintendent Suzan Hebson. That explanation, though, smacks of political protest to parents upset by the decision.
The news, which was broken to the team Monday by coach Jolie Bechtel, comes as critics of Arizona’s controversial law call on professional athletes and others to boycott the state.
Last month a New York congressman asked Major League Baseball to pull next year’s All-Star Game from Phoenix, and protesters recently picketed Wrigley Field when the Arizona Diamondbacks played the Cubs.
But tossing a high school team into the heated debate has left parents and players baffled and angry.
“Why are we mixing politics and a basketball tournament?” said Michael Evans, whose daughter Lauren is a junior on the team. “It’s outrageous that they’re doing this under the guise of safety.”
Lauren Evans said she thought the concern was probably that one of the players could get stopped and questioned.
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. “I don’t think it makes much sense. We shouldn’t be a threat. We just want to play basketball.”
District 113 Superintendent George Fornero declined comment, saying it “wasn’t just my decision.” He referred calls to Hebson.
Hebson said Arizona is off-limits because of uncertainty about how the new law will be enforced. Signed by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer last month, it makes it a crime to be in the country illegally and requires police to check suspects for immigration paperwork.
Hebson said the turmoil is no place for students of Highland Park High School, which also draws from Highwood.
“We would want to ensure that all of our students had the opportunity to be included and be safe and be able to enjoy the experience,” Hebson said of the tournament, which will be played in December. “We wouldn’t necessarily be able to guarantee that.”
Asked if there are undocumented players on the team, or if anyone associated with the team is in the country illegally, Hebson said she did not know.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Detroit School Board President Can’t Write a Coherent Sentence
Oh my word! And we wonder why kids aren’t learning in our public schools?? We don’t set a very high standard anymore, and nothing shows it better than this story of the president of the Detroit school board who CANNOT even write a coherent sentence. This is the role model?? You’ve got to be kidding me!
Does DPS leader’s writing send wrong message?
The president of the Detroit school board, Otis Mathis, is waging a legal battle to steer the academic future of 90,000 children, in the nation’s lowest-achieving big city district.
He also acknowledges he has difficulty composing a coherent English sentence. Here’s a sample from an e-mail he sent to friends and supporters on Sunday night, uncorrected for errors of spelling, grammar, punctuation and usage. It begins:
If you saw Sunday’s Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason’s he gave for closing school to many empty seats.
The rest of the e-mail, and others that Mathis has written, demonstrate what one of his school board colleagues describes, carefully, as “his communication issues.” But if these deficits have limited Mathis, as he admits they have, they have not stopped him from graduating from high school and college. In January, his peers elected him president by a 10-1 vote over Tyrone Winfrey, a University of Michigan academic officer.
“I’m a horrible writer. I know that,” says Mathis, 56, a lifelong resident of southwest Detroit. His difficulties with language were spotted as early as fourth grade, when he was placed in special education classes. His college degree was held up for more than a decade because he repeatedly failed an English proficiency exam then required for graduation at Wayne State University.
In another city, these revelations might be grounds for disqualification. But Mathis is liked and defended by many of his peers, who cite his collegiality, lack of defensiveness and leadership as more important than his writing skills. Even Winfrey, his defeated rival for the presidency, declined to criticize his qualifications.
But the story of Mathis speaks directly to Detroit’s educational conundrum, as officials try to raise standards and the proficiency of its students.
Is Mathis a success story? A man who beat the odds to win political success and career opportunities on the strength of his personality and judgment? Or is he an example of the system’s worst failings — a disinterested student who always found ways to graduate, even when he didn’t meet the requirements — likely to perpetuate lax academic standards if the board wins its court battle with Bobb over control?
“It’s kind of scary to even talk about,” says Patrick Martin, 49, a Detroit contractor whose 12-year-old son is a student at Noble Middle School.
“If this is the leader, what does it say about the followers? It explains a lot about why there’s so much confusion and infighting with the board and Robert Bobb.”
Another e-mail
Here’s another mass e-mail from Mathis, from Aug. 11, 2009:
Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row’s, and who is the watch dog?
“I told him just last week that he should have his e-mails read by somebody before he sends them out,” said fellow school board member LaMar Lemmons Jr., who praises Mathis as a leader he can trust.
“I said, ‘If somebody gets ahold of this, it will become an issue that you “ can’t read or write. It will go around the world.’
Can Mathis read?
“Yes, I can read. I’m capable of reading a lot of information and regurgitation,” says Mathis, who told me he sometimes needs to read documents two or three times to fully comprehend their contents but then masters — and memorizes — them.
Engaging and honest
Mathis is an engaging man. When I asked him about the grammatical deficiencies in his e-mails, he didn’t waffle or grandstand, instead honestly answering questions about his difficulties in school.
High school saw him bouncing back and forth between schools. “I was kicked out and kicked in and kicked out,” he says with a chuckle. He credits a high school English teacher with encouraging him to graduate, getting him to attend school “once a week instead of every two weeks” by giving him an audio version of Alex Haley’s “Roots,” one vinyl record at a time.
He graduated from Southwestern High School in 1973 with what he says was a 1.8 grade-point average but was previously reported as a .98 average. After serving in the Navy, Wayne State placed him in a special program to help academically unqualified students move forward, on the G.I. Bill.
He stayed at Wayne for 15 years, as a student and a counselor, becoming a virtual “prisoner of Wayne,” as he jokes, unable to graduate.
Mathis and another student unsuccessfully challenged the use of an English proficiency test as a requirement for graduation. In 1992, when the case went to trial, the lawsuit gained national attention. Mathis said then his failure to pass the test “made me feel stupid.” The requirement was eventually dropped in 2007, and Mathis applied to get his degree the next year, after his election.
Understands struggling kids
Mathis, who can be a persuasive public speaker, retired from Wayne in 1995. He’s served as a substitute teacher in Detroit schools, run a nonprofit and served on the Wayne County Commission.
In his career, Mathis has compensated for his rudimentary writing skills by seeking help from others and working on his listening and speech skills. “We picked him (to be president) because we thought he has the intelligence for it and the tolerance for disruptive behavior,” says Reverend David Murray. “He has that type of calm.”
Is it absurd for a man who cannot write a simple English sentence to serve as the board president? Or to lead the elected board of a district that ranks at the nation’s bottom for literacy?
The questions are more likely to elicit complex answers than criticism of Mathis.
“I know he’s a terrible writer. Oh wow, I’ve seen his e-mails,” says Ida Byrd-Hill, a parent and activist who runs a nonprofit and is a member of Mensa, the high-IQ group.
“His job, though, is to represent the community. His lack of writing skills is prevalent in the community. If anybody does, he understands the struggles of what it’s like to go through an institution and not be properly prepared.”
Mathis and some of his supporters say his story is about someone who manages his limitations, just as others manage physical disabilities.
“Instead of telling them that they can’t write and won’t be anything, I show that cannot stop you,” Mathis says. “If Detroit Public Schools can allow kids to dream, with whatever weakness they have, that’s something. …It’s not about what you don’t have. It’s what you cando.”
Because of his struggles and perseverance, Mathis describes himself as a role model.
But is he?
http://www.detnews.com/article/20100304/OPINION03/3040437/DPS-leader-s-bad-writing–Wrong-message?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 9 so far )Organizing Kids for Obama
I don’t even know what to say about this. It honestly just makes me sick!! It makes me want to puke! GAG!! Obama, get your hands off of our kids!! We, the parents, will teach them and guide them, so you don’t need to!
This really just gives me an icky, creepy feeling.
Organizing Kids for Obama
by Phyllis Schlafly
President Barack Obama’s budget has added more than $100 billion of federal taxpayers’ money to what is called “education,” so that means it will be spent by alumni of the Saul Alinsky school of radical community organizing and/or the Chicago Democratic machine. We’re indebted to Pamela Geller of AtlasShrugs.com for exposing the shocking use of some of these funds.
Obama is using the public schools to recruit a private army of high-schoolers to “build on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda.” We now know that Obama’s “agenda” is to move the United States into European-style socialism.
Obama’s Internet outreach during his campaign, Obama for America, has been renamed Organizing for America (OFA) in order to recruit students to join a cult of Obama and become activists for his goals.
Geller discovered that the teacher of an 11th-grade government class in Massillon, Ohio, passed out the sign-up sheet, headed with Obama’s “O” logo, asking students to become interns for Organizing for America.
These interns will be given an intensive nine-week training course using comprehensive lesson plans. Assigned readings include Saul Alinsky’s notorious “Rules for Radicals,” “Stir It Up: Lessons From Community Organizing and Advocacy” by the left-wing activist Rinku Sen, and particular sections of “Dreams From My Father” dealing with Obama’s days as a community organizer in Chicago.
Republican students will be filtered out of the intern program by requiring applicants to answer questions that reveal their politics. One example is, “What one issue facing our country is important to you and why?”
Geller said the purpose of this training to become Alinsky-style community organizers is, “of course, to elect more Democrats.” The internship program is specifically geared to get the kids working in the 2010 elections.
The sign-up sheet for Organizing for America starts with this instruction: “Organizing for America, the successor organization to Obama for America, is building on the movement that elected President Obama by empowering students across the country to help us bring about our agenda of change.” The application explains that this national internship program is “working to make the change we fought so hard for in 2008 a reality in 2010 and beyond.”
This is not the first time Obama has tried to enlist schoolchildren into an Obama cult. Last fall, the instructions mailed to every school by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan added a very political dimension to Obama’s speech that was broadcast to public school children on Sept. 8.
Geller explained the extensive political dimension of the new intern program. The OFA student interns will be trained in the goals and language of the left: “antiwar agitation, anti-capitalism, Marx, Lenin, (Bill) Ayers, LGBT agenda promotion, global warming, soft-on-jihad and illegal immigration.”
Another item on OFA’s reading list is “The New Organizers” by Zack Exley. It brags about “an insurgent generation of organizers” inside the Obama campaign that has “almost without anyone noticing … built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people’s organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.”
The 10-page “National Intern Organizer Curriculum” is very specific in describing the tactics that interns will be taught. It includes these components: “Using Story as an Organizing Tool, Building Relationships and Building Teams, Mobilizing to Win on the Issues (issue advocacy), Health Care Service Project.”
Passage of Obamacare is one of this intern project’s major goals. The curriculum promises to provide “insight on the strategy and plan behind the health care campaign” and “further motivate them to work on the issue.”
The sign-up sheet states that the “purpose” of training these students is “to build community” among the interns and teach them “to be leaders in OFA’s organizing work.” After all, Barack Obama knows a great deal about being a community organizer — that was his only real job before he got into politics.
Job prospects may be bleak for many Americans, but they will be rosy for alumni of Obama’s intern program. After the students have been fully trained as Alinsky-style community organizers, they will be eligible for jobs in Senior Corps, AmeriCorps or Learn and Serve America.
Those three so-called “service” organizations, which annually dole out millions of dollars to left-wing groups, are overseen by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The U.S. Senate just confirmed this Corporation’s new chief executive, Patrick Corvington, who was a senior official of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which has given over a million and a half dollars to the ACORN network of organizations.
LINK: http://townhall.com/columnists/PhyllisSchlafly/2010/02/23/organizing_kids_for_obama
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )12 Year Old Girl Arrested for Doodling on Desk
Somebody please let me know when common sense returns to this country!! I am sick to death of idiots running things!
Girl’s arrest for doodling raises concerns about zero tolerance
By Stephanie Chen, CNN
February 18, 2010 10:22 a.m. EST
CNN.com
(CNN) — There was no profanity, no hate. Just the words, “I love my friends Abby and Faith. Lex was here 2/1/10 scrawled on the classroom desk with a green marker. Alexa Gonzalez, an outgoing 12-year-old who likes to dance and draw, expected a lecture or maybe detention for her doodles earlier this month. Instead, the principal of the Junior High School in Forest Hills, New York, called police, and the seventh-grader was taken across the street to the police precinct.
Alexa’s hands were cuffed behind her back, and tears gushed as she was escorted from school in front of teachers and — the worst audience of all for a preadolescent girl — her classmates. “They put the handcuffs on me, and I couldn’t believe it,” Alexa recalled. “I didn’t want them to see me being handcuffed, thinking I’m a bad person.” Alexa is no longer facing suspension, according a spokeswoman for the New York City Department of Education. Still, the case of the doodling preteen is raising concerns about the use of zero tolerance policies in schools.
Critics say schools and police have gone too far, overreacting and using well-intended rules for incidents involving nonviolent offenses such as drawing on desks, writing on other school property or talking back to teachers. “We are arresting them at younger and younger ages [in cases] that used to be covered with a trip to the principal’s office, not sending children to jail,” said Emma Jordan-Simpson, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund, a national children’s advocacy group.
Snip-
But one thing is sure: Alexa’s case isn’t the first in the New York area. One of the first cases to gain national notoriety was that of Chelsea Fraser. In 2007, the 13-year-old wrote “Okay” on her desk, and police handcuffed and arrested her. She was one of several students arrested in the class that day; the others were accused of plastering the walls with stickers.
At schools across the country, police are being asked to step in. In November, a food fight at a middle school in Chicago, Illinois, resulted in the arrests of 25 children, some as young as 11, according to the Chicago Police Department.
The Strategy Center, a California-based civil rights group that tracks zero tolerance policies, found that at least 12,000 tickets were issued to tardy or truant students by Los Angeles Police Department and school security officers in 2008. The tickets tarnished students’ records and brought them into the juvenile court system, with fines of up to $250 for repeat offenders.
The Strategy Center opposes the system. “The theory is that if we fine them, then they won’t be late again,” said Manuel Criollo, lead organizer of the “No to Pre-Prison” campaign at The Strategy Center. “But they just end up not going to school at all.”
His group is trying to stop the LAPD and the school district from issuing the tickets. The Los Angeles School District says the policy is designed to reduce absenteeism.
And another California school — Highland High School in Palmdale — found that issuing tardiness tickets drastically cut the number of pupils being late for class and helped tone down disruptive behavior. The fifth ticket issued landed a student in juvenile traffic court.
In 1998, New York City took its zero tolerance policies to the next level, placing school security officers under the New York City Police Department. Today, there are nearly 5,000 employees in the NYPD School Safety Division. Most are not police officers, but that number exceeds the total police force in Washington, D.C.
In contrast, there are only about 3,000 counselors in New York City’s public school system. Critics of zero tolerance policies say more attention should be paid to social work, counseling and therapy.
“Instead of a graduated discipline approach, we see .. expulsions at the drop of a hat,” said Donna Lieberman, an attorney with the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
We see … expulsions at the drop of a hat.
–Donna Lieberman, ACLU attorney
“If they have been suspended once, their likelihood of being pushed out of the school increases,” she said. “They may end up in jail at some point in their life.”
One of Lieberman’s clients was in sixth grade when police arrested her in 2007 for doodling with her friend in class. The child, called M.M. in court filings to protect her identity, tried to get tissues to remove the marks, a complaint states.
Lieberman says police subjected M.M. to unlawful search and seizure. A class-action lawsuit, filed in January on behalf of five juveniles, is pending. It maintains that inadequately trained and poorly supervised police personnel are aggressive toward students when no criminal activity is taking place.
Several studies have confirmed that the time an expelled child spends away from school increases the chance that child will drop out and wind up in the criminal justice system, according to a January 2010 study from the Advancement Project, a legal action group.
Alexa Gonzalez missed three days of school because of her arrest. She spent those days throwing up, and it was a challenge to catch up on her homework when she returned to school, she said. Her mother says she had never been in trouble before the doodling incident.
New York attorney Joe Rosenthal, who is representing Alexa, plans to file a lawsuit accusing police and school officials of violating Alexa’s constitutional rights. New York City Department of Education officials declined to comment specifically on any possible legal matters.
“Our mission is to make sure that public schools are a safe and supportive environment for all students,” said Margie Feinberg, an education department spokeswoman.
Several media outlets have reported that school officials admitted the arrest was a “mistake,” but when asked by CNN, Feinberg declined to comment specifically on the incident. She referred CNN to the NYPD.
The NYPD did not return CNN’s repeated phone calls and e-mails. It is unknown whether charges will be pressed against Alexa.
Kenneth Trump, a security expert who founded the National School Safety and Security Services consulting firm, said focusing on security is essential to the safety of other students. He said zero tolerance policies can work if “common sense is applied.”
Michael Soguero recalls being arrested himself in 2005 when, as principal at Bronx Guild School, he tried to stop an officer from handcuffing one of his students. A charge of assault against him was later dropped. He says police working in schools need specific training on how to work with children.
In Clayton County, Georgia, juvenile court judge Steven Teske is working to reshape zero tolerance policies in schools. He wants the courts to be a last resort. In 2003, he created a program in Clayton County’s schools that distinguishes felonies from misdemeanors.
The result? The number of students detained by the school fell by 83 percent, his report found. The number of weapons detected on campus declined by 73 percent.
Last week, after hearing about 12-year-old Alexa’s arrest in New York, he wasn’t shocked.
“There is zero intelligence when you start applying zero tolerance across the board,” he said. “Stupid and ridiculous things start happening.”
LINK: http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/02/18/new.york.doodle.arrest/index.html?hpt=C1
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )8 Year Old Boy Suspended and Ordered to Get Psych Evaluation After Drawing Jesus on the Cross
Unbelievable!
School goes ballistic when 2nd-grader draws Jesus
Boy, 8, said to gets psych evaluation after sketch of Christ on cross called ‘violent’
Posted: December 15, 2009
By Chelsea Schilling
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
An 8-year-old boy has been suspended from school and forced to undergo a psychological evaluation after he drew a picture of Jesus Christ on the cross, his father claims.
A teacher at Lowell Maxham Elementary School in Taunton, Mass., allegedly said the second-grade student created a violent drawing, the Taunton Daily Gazette reported.
The boy’s picture portrayed a crucified Jesus with Xs over his eyes to indicate that he had died on the cross.
The child’s father, outraged at the school’s action, asked to remain anonymous to protect his son. He said his boy drew the picture after returning from a family trip to see the Christmas display at the National Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette, a Christian retreat.
He said when the teacher asked students to draw something that reminded them of Christmas on Dec. 2, the boy recalled his trip and created a portrait of Christ on the cross.
“As far as I’m concerned, they’re violating his religion,” he told the newspaper.
Associated Advocacy Center educational consultant Toni Saunders said, “I think what happened is that because he put Xs in the eyes of Jesus, the teacher was alarmed and they told the parents they thought it was violent.”
Saunders said the boy has special needs, and the school reacted inappropriately.
“They made him leave school, and they recommended that a psychiatrist do an evaluation,” she said.
But the boy’s father told the newspaper the school required an evaluation – at the parents’ expense – before the student would be allowed to return.
“When she told me he needed to be psychologically evaluated, I thought she was playing,” he said.
However, the school district claims the boy was never suspended.
“This incident occurred nearly two weeks ago,” said a statement from the district. “It was handled appropriately, and the school staff and family had been working together in a cooperative and positive manner.”
The district also claims the picture published above is not the same drawing that was discovered by the teacher and that the teacher did not assign the students to sketch a picture that reminded them of Christmas.
The father stands by his story. He said his son, who receives special reading and speech instruction, has never shown a propensity toward violence.
“He’s never been suspended,” he said. “He’s 8 years old. They overreacted.”
The boy returned to school on Dec. 7, but he said his son has been traumatized and will be transferred to another school in the district.
The district said its actions were not religious and nature and were based solely on the wellbeing of the student.
“At this time of year, Christmas is one of many religious and secular holidays,” the statement said. “Taunton, known as the Christmas City, takes pride as a community in celebrating this Christian holiday together with Hanukah [sic], Kwanzaa and many others.”
Bloggers have overwhelmingly demanded that the teacher be fired. They posted the following responses:
• The Taunton School District needs to be examined. How could a teacher’s concern get this far? Let’s not forget that several administrators had to agree with the teacher’s reaction in order to have the child sent home and request exam. What do they have to say for themselves?
• This was not a mistake. It is an intentional anti-Christ slap in the face at Christmas. If something like this was done to a child of any other minority religion the teacher would be fired.
• I hope the parents consider transferring the child to a parochial school where his religious understanding will be more sensitively recognized. Shame on the school administrators.
• I would like to start a petition to suspend this teacher immediately pending a full investigation into whether or not she should be terminated. Some parents try very hard to instill the values of religion in their children, and for this teacher to tell this student he did something wrong is disgusting. If my kids were in her class, I would pull them out and demand a new teacher or a change of schools.
• I’m a liberal, non-religious individual and even I think this is totally ridiculous! Since Christmas is a religious holiday, the teachers should have expected some religious imagery from little kids!
• How does one make the crucifixion non-violent?
• Teacher needs a lesson in church. Jesus Christ’s death was violent.
• The teacher is the one with the issues; this qualifies as abuse.
• I believe that this teacher needs to be removed from teaching put in a mental institution. This teacher is mentally disturbed and a psycho and danger to society.
• This teacher needs to be fired! She traumatized an 8-year-old, Fire her! No discussion necessary!
Concerned individuals may e-mail Maxham Elementary School or call Principal Rebecca Couet at (508)821-1265, or fax to (508) 821-1274. The Taunton Public Schools district office may be reached by calling (508) 821-1100 or e-mailing Superintendent Julie Hackett.
LINK: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=119079
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Obama’s Safe Schools Czar Should Make Parents Furious: Kevin Jennings and “FistGate”
Kevin Jennings should be nowhere near children, much less be the “safe schools czar.” Once again we get a glimpse of Obama’s complete lack of judgment when it comes to choosing his advisors.
Jennings is a militant gay man who pushes inappropriate, over the line garbage on kids in schools. Several years ago I sent out an email telling people about one of his events at a school in Mass. and luckily it’s being put back in the limelight. They were handing out very explicit gay materials to jr high and high schoolers (how-to guides) as well as a list of bars and other places where they could meet up with gays. This man should NOT be in charge of our school kids.
Read the article below, but if you really want to see what he’s about and see why you should be so furious, follow the link in the article below (biggovernment.com) to get the details. It is pretty explicit which is why we should be sickened that he gave this info to school kids.
Kevin Jennings and “FistGate” Should Make Parents Furious
by Doug Giles
Man, am I about to sound like an uncool, homophobic, bigoted zealot who should be on a terror watch list (according to the paranormal progressives). Why is that, you ask? Well, I think Obama’s G-boy, Kevin Jennings, should not be the Safe Schools Czar for many egregious reasons. Here are just a few.
I believe anyone who thinks it’s okay to teach 14-year-old boys how they can jam their fist up another 14-year-old boy’s tailpipe, or provides “fisting” kits for the kiddos, or thinks it’s neat-o to urinate on one another during teen sex, or passes out literature to your young ones on how they can find old pedophiles to hook up with at “gay leather bars,” or talks to your teen about the tricky pros and cons of spitting versus swallowing should not be the Safe Schools Czar.
Maybe Kevin Jennings could be the “Adam Lambert Eye Liner Czar” or Cher’s “Do You Believe in Life After Love Czar,” but not the Safe Schools Czar. But then again, there I go being extreme. Shame on me for not being a hip parent who’s totally cool with adult flamers filling our fifth grade kids’ heads with filth. I am truly an ignorant, puritanical, buckle-shoed killjoy, ain’t I? By the way, what the heck is up with liberals? They have their hands in our pockets, their noses in our business, and now they want their arms up our backsides.
How crazy of me that I would have the audacity to go public with the notion that someone who headed up an organization (GLSEN) that proselytizes confused kids on how they can insert their knuckles up someone else’s anus should not be the determiner of what is “safe” at school, eh? Hello!
Hey, Kev… last time I checked, trying to make your mate a hand puppet didn’t fall within the city limits of SafetyTown. Sounds kinda dangerous to me. Oh and here’s an aside for the butt pirates: Our rectums are an exit, not an entrance.
In addition, Mr. Jennings, apart from the “arm in arse” thing, from what I remember during 9th grade health class many moons ago, it’s also not wise to place one’s reproductive organ in the end of another’s digestive system.
A fist up a rectum? Are you kidding me? You guys sound like you have way too much time on your hands. If you’re in need of an idea regarding what to do with your fist, here’s one: Why don’t take your fist and smack yourself in the face with it for poisoning America’s kids with your perverted crap?
For those not in the know, Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings, who was cherry picked by Obama, is not having a good week as whistleblowers are righteously shouting this guy down and trying to get him removed from calling the shots regarding what is nontoxic in your kids’ scholastic lives.
Why are watchdogs barking this dude down? Well, it’s not because he’s mildly gay but because he’s wildly militant in his homosexuality, and both he and his hombres at GLSEN have had no problemo whatsoever filling your kids’ heads and bodies with weirdness galore. For the unbelievable full list of what this man and his organization have advocated and continue to advocate, check out the fantastic work Jim Holt has done on “FistGate” at http://biggovernment.com/.
Also, don’t miss Jennings/GLSEN’s “Little Black Book” for your sons! Hellish.
I’ve gotta warn you, mom and dad: What you’re about to read (at biggovernment.com) regarding “FistGate” is very sick and twisted. You’d better brace yourselves. I hope it thoroughly ticks you off that such baseness is being peddled to your babies. In addition, I hope you raise major hell with your elected reps about permanently removing Jennings from anything that has to do with your children and our schools.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Coming to a School Near You – Celebs to Kids: America Stinks!
Beware America!! Here are more America-hating liberals who want to spread their hatred to our school children (even more than they usually do). It makes me sick! If they don’t like America I invite them to move somewhere else. We are not perfect, but we are the best country in the world and I’m sick of these jackasses spouting this kind of crap!
Celebs to kids: America stinks!
’55 rich white men drafted Constitution to protect their class – slaveholders’
Posted: December 14, 2009
By Drew Zahn
© 2009 WorldNetDaily
Hollywood celebrities and education gurus have teamed together to distribute to schools across the country a dramatic new curriculum that casts American history as an epic march of victims seeking to shrug off the shackles of the warmongering, racist, capitalist, imperialist United States.
The History Channel’s airing of the “The People Speak” last night marks the public coming-out party of a movement that has been in place since last year to teach America’s school children a “social justice” brand of history that rails against war, oppression, capitalism and popular patriotism.
The television special featuring performances by Matt Damon, Benjamin Bratt, Marisa Tomei, Don Cheadle, Bruce Springsteen and others condemns the nation’s past of oppression by the wealthy, powerful and imperialist and instead trumpets the voices of America’s labor unions, minorities and protesters of various stripes.
The accompanying curriculum guide for schools that show “The People Speak” in classrooms, for example, highlights an 1852 reading from abolitionist Frederick Douglass:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
The program and discussion guide is the most ambitious resource among many offered to America’s schools by the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration of Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, as part of a push to encourage history instruction based on educator Howard Zinn’s 1980 tome exposing the abuses of America’s past, “A People’s History of the United States.”
The project states its goal is to “introduce students to a more accurate, complex and engaging understanding of United States history than is found in traditional textbooks and curricula. … Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’ emphasizes the role of working people, women, people of color and organized social movements in shaping history. Students learn that history is made not by a few heroic individuals, but instead by people’s choices and actions, thereby also learning that their own choices and actions matter.”
The History Channel, furthermore, touts “The People Speak” as a program that “gives voice to those who spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history, forging a nation from the bottom up with their insistence on equality and justice. … ‘The People Speak’ illustrates the relevance of these passionate historical moments to our society today and reminds us never to take liberty for granted.”
The celebrities featured in “The People Speak” claim the stories of bold protesters and oppressed minorities and workers are “inspiring,” while Zinn himself has stated that casting history as a people’s movement toward change offers hope.
Critics of the Zinn Project, however, warn that the curriculum is more about pushing Zinn’s admitted pacifist and socialist agenda on the next generation.
Michelle Malkin blasts “The People Speak” as an effort to promote “Marxist academic Howard Zinn’s capitalism-bashing, America-dissing, grievance-mongering history textbook, ‘A People’s History of the United States.’ … Zinn’s work is a self-proclaimed ‘biased account’ of American history that rails against white oppressors, the free market and the military.”
-snip-
A new approach to patriotism
While critics have alleged Zinn’s education plan tears down America and its famous founders, a lesson plan titled “Unsung Heroes” begins with “an essay by Zinn defending his philosophy of education.
Zinn writes, “A high school student recently confronted me: ‘I read in your book “A People’s History of the United States” about the massacres of Indians, the long history of racism, the persistence of poverty in the richest country in the world, the senseless wars. How can I keep from being thoroughly alienated and depressed?’
“It’s a question I’ve heard many times before,” Zinn writes. “Another question often put to me by students is: ‘Don’t we need our national idols? You are taking down all our national heroes – the Founding Fathers, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy.’ Granted, it is good to have historical figures we can admire and emulate. But why hold up as models the 55 rich white men who drafted the Constitution as a way of establishing a government that would protect the interests of their class – slaveholders, merchants, bondholders, land speculators?”
Curriculum writer Bill Bigelow further explains of the popular perception of what it means to be patriotic, “There is a lot of ‘us,’ and ‘we,’ and ‘our,’ as if the texts are trying to dissolve race, class and gender realities into the melting pot of ‘the nation.'”
But Bigelow rejects the idea of identifying America as one, solid union.
“A people’s history and pedagogy ought to allow students to recognize that ‘we’ were not necessarily the ones stealing land, dropping bombs or breaking strikes,” he concludes. “‘We’ were ending slavery, fighting for women’s rights, organizing unions, marching against wars, and trying to create a society premised on the Golden Rule.”
His point is crystallized in a lesson plan he created for the Zinn project about the Pledge of Allegiance called “One Country! One Language! One Flag!”
The plan points out that the lesson’s title was actually a chant that followed the original Pledge – written in 1892 – as schoolchildren saluted with an extended arm, palm downward. The traditional gesture was replaced by a hand to the heart, the lesson points out, after Germany’s Nazis began using the same salute to shout “Heil Hitler!” in the 1930s.
“It seems to me that teachers ought to know something about the history of the Pledge before we ask our students to repeat it,” Bigelow writes. “How has it been used, and by whom? Why not lead kids in the original Pledge to the Flag, including the ‘One Language!’ chant and the Nazi-like salute, and then lead a discussion about the politics of the Pledge.”
The curriculum itself instructs students: “Read over the original words of the Pledge. In 1892, who did and did not have liberty and justice in the United States? (In the 1880s in the South, over 100 African Americans were lynched yearly; segregation was the norm and would soon be ratified by the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson. Women could not vote. In the previous 50 years, Mexicans had been stripped of land and property in what had been their country. Discrimination and violence against Chinese immigrants had grown increasingly severe. In the summer of 1892, 8,000 Pennsylvania National Guardsmen had helped Henry Clay Frick break the union at the Carnegie Steel Co. in Homestead, Pa.) How about in the 1920s, when the Pledge was introduced more widely into the schools?”
The spread of the Zinn Educational Project
According to a Zinn Educational Project report, in April 2008, with support from an anonymous donor, ZEP partnered with 32 organizations to offer 31,000 teachers and teacher educators free packets for instilling the “people’s history” in schools across the country. The ZEP reports it quickly received requests for its available 4,000 free packets, nearly half of which were sent to schools in California, New York and Illinois.
The ZEP website boasts many of the teachers have begun implementing the curriculum and has published the following testimonials:
“These resources are an asset,” reportedly responded Meaghan Martin, an elementary school teacher in Manassas, Va. “We are always looking for ways to offer students a critical perspective. The unsung heroes unit is outstanding! I have tailored it to meet the needs of my 2nd graders when we study American biographies.”
Lara Emerling, a middle school teacher in Baltimore, Md., reportedly replied, “Knowing that resources like the Zinn Education Project exist make me feel so hopeful about the network of people who are engaged in this kind of dialogue with their students. I am a young, white female living in Baltimore and teaching at an all black middle school. These resources are so valuable to me personally and to the relationships being built between the students and the faculty. Thank you to everyone involved in keeping this collaboration evolving!”
Zinn himself has testified of his hope that the project will continue to spread.
“We’re dreamers,” writes Zinn. “We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.”
LINK: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=119046
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