When youre a teacher yourself and you have children in school — being taught by other people — you regularly experienced frustration, incomprehension, and the emotion best designated by the initials: WTF? But this week I experienced a new emotion: blood-thickening rage and an urge to strangle, followed by a vow: ...he wont get away with this. This is a science teacher in my daughters high school who is a climate change denialist. My daughter is a senior in a private school that is dual curriculum: secular subjects + Jewish subjects. Her teacher introduced the evidence for climate change (anthropogenic global warming) as one of those scientific questions that has two sides, and that students have to keep an open mind about. My daughter spoke up against a he said, she said treatment of a matter about which there is solid consensus. No other student supported her, which makes me sad... and mad. The teacher rejected her intervention. She told me later that she made the point I make so often at my blog. (About the irresponsibility of he said, she said when there is a verifiable truth.) Need I say that I am proud of her? Later the teacher sent a note to the class: Not surprisingly, we will be discussing some controversial subjects this semester. It is critical that you keep an open mind... We ask for just one thing. Forget what you have been taught regarding certain current events and now judge the issues by the facts and with an open mind. This completely enrages me. The denier of fact is lecturing the students he miseducates about the holiness of facts. Its the teach the controversy subterfuge. In my own daughters classroom! The nerve of this man. But he wont get away with it. In poking around about this problem I discovered that one of the original uses of teach the controversy was among Holocaust denialists. The people who run this school wont be able to ignore that. Meanwhile, I suggested to my daughter than maybe this should be the follow up to our first co-bylined article: A Teenager Gets Grilled By Her Dad About Why She’s Not That Into Coding. ( https://medium/matter/you-should-learn-to-code-is-the-new-you-should-go-to-law-school-talk-dads-love-to-have-b03bd22b3c99 ) What do you think?
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 22:35:07 +0000
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