Maybe he’s coming for some remedial education?

Joel Osteen, he of the nice tan, the big white teeth, and the megachurch of the prosperity gospel, is dropping by an elementary school in Washington DC. He and his wife will be ambling about, looking well-groomed and expensive for the cameras, and…I don’t know what. They say they’ll help out with the landscaping and read a book to the kids, but it sounds more like grandstanding to no purpose other then their own self-promotion to me. They claim they’re solely there for a purely secular promotion of education, but somehow, the school is going to be giving away books by the Osteens that yodel on about Christ.

It’s a funny business. I think it would be wonderful if more people were to participate helpfully in their schools…but the Osteens have no connection to this school, and honestly, no particular skills or knowledge that they could share with their students (weird theology and relentless glad-handing and begging for money don’t count). So why?


LIARS. The Osteens claimed they would read to the kids from Seuss’s The Lorax — of course they didn’t. Ms Osteen instead read from her own book, a Christian parable called Gifts from the Heart.

It’s like they’re not even trying to hide their deviousness and dishonesty.

I propose that states seize all the Catholic schools

I will never understand Catholicism. On the one hand, they claim to be all about the babies: procreate wildly, let nothing interfere with the spawning. On the other hand, though, they promote deep ignorance and confusion about sex and reproduction, as if they’re afraid of it.

So here’s this lovely case of a teacher at a Catholic school in Indiana who was evaluated as excellent in her work, but who, in her lawfully married and entirely conventional life with her husband at home, wanted to have children — something that ought to be fully copacetic with Catholicism. Except…she had a medical condition that made her infertile, so she and her husband were going through in-vitro fertilization.

Which meant, of course, that the priest at the local Catholic church had the right to meddle.

“On May 24, 2011, Herx, her husband, and her father met with Msgr. Kuzmich and [St. Vincent Principal Sandra] Guffey,” the complaint states. “Msgr. Kuzmich repeatedly told Herx that she was a ‘grave, immoral sinner‘ and that it would cause a ‘scandal’ if anyone was to find out that St. Vincent de Paul had a teacher who received fertility treatment. Msgr. Kuzmich told Herx that this situation would not have occurred had no one found out about the treatments, and that some things were ‘better left between the individual and God.'”

The end result: despite the priest saying that “her performance had nothing to do with the decision to terminate her employment”, she was fired for “improprieties related to Church teachings or Law.” An appeal farther up the hierarchy failed as well, because she’s just plain evil.

“Bishop Rhoades refused to renew Herx’s contract, stating that ‘The process of in vitro fertilization very frequently involves the deliberate destruction or freezing of human embryos,’ and ‘In vitro fertilization … is an intrinsic evil, which means that no circumstances can justify it.’ Herx’s appeal to the Bishop was the final step in the administrative appeals process within the Diocese.”

There’s a bit of lashing out going on now, too.

Herx says she was fired even though the defendants still employ teachers who do not regularly attend Catholic mass; who are divorced (including Guffey); who have had hysterectomies, vasectomies and other procedures that have altered their reproductive organs; and who use contraceptives.

Nobody should be fired for those things, either.

It seems to me that the problem is that the church is playing the role of a secular employer in what ought to be a secular profession, the education of children, while trying to impose arbitrary and obsolete medieval religious rules on its employees. I propose a simple change: seize the Catholic schools, remove the priests from control, and manage them as assets of the community’s public school system.

Do this everywhere for all religious schools, not just the Catholic ones. The strengths of those schools have always been in the teachers, not the dogmatic nitwits in the religious hierarchy who mismanage them. It also ought to be considered a violation of basic civil rights when an employer decides that they have the power to regulate the private, personal behavior of all employees at all times, even when they are not on the employer’s time and property — they have no right to interfere to such an egregiously excessive extent.

I hate Thursdays

Mondays aren’t bad—I’ve had the weekend to get ready and get some of the backlog cleared away, so I can go into class prepared and confident. Wednesday’s pretty good, too, since that’s actually the day with my lightest teaching load. Tuesdays and Thursdays, though, my morning is effectively blocked out with nothing but teaching, and then there are the committee meetings, and to cap it all off, there’s a seminar class from 5 to 6pm…and worse, by Thursday all the momentum I had acquired over the weekend is exhausted, and I’m scrambling to do the prep work for my Friday classes.

Friday is Friday, and you’ve got to love Friday. But Thursday…oh, man, it’s the armpit of the week.

And today is Thursday.

Never mind me. I just had to get that gripe off my chest.

Perhaps they should also remove the word “education”

Because someone doesn’t understand the word. The New York City Department of Education wants to ban the use of certain words on standardized tests — because they might make students feel uncomfortable or unpleasant. Jebus. If an educator isn’t making a student uncomfortable, isn’t pushing his or her students to be stressed by new concepts and difficult processes, they aren’t doing their job.

What words, you might ask, are they sheltering impressionable youth from?

Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological)
Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs
Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
Bodily functions
Cancer (and other diseases)
Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
Celebrities
Children dealing with serious issues
Cigarettes (and other smoking paraphernalia)
Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or library setting)
Crime
Death and disease
Divorce
Evolution
Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
Gambling involving money
Halloween
Homelessness
Homes with swimming pools
Hunting
Junk food
In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
Loss of employment
Nuclear weapons
Occult topics (i.e. fortune-telling)
Parapsychology
Politics
Pornography
Poverty
Rap Music
Religion
Religious holidays and festivals (including but not limited to Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan)
Rock-and-Roll music
Running away
Sex
Slavery
Terrorism
Television and video games (excessive use)
Traumatic material (including material that may be particularly upsetting such as animal shelters)
Vermin (rats and roaches)
Violence
War and bloodshed
Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.

If you really want to make high schoolers uncomfortable, how about “algebra” and “molecules” and…and…homework?

Removing any mention of the word “evolution” from the curriculum rather effectively decapitates the teaching of biology; “celebrities”, not so much, but it’s bizarre that they put that word on a par with “slavery”. How do they talk about American history without mentioning slavery?

I guess she really doesn’t like evolution

I’m giving a midterm exam on evolution this morning. I hope none of the students snap.

Associate Professor Stephen M. Kajiura was reviewing with his evolution class in GS 120 for a midterm when FAU student Jonatha Carr interrupted him: “How does evolution kill black people?” she asked. Kajiura attempted to explain that evolution doesn’t kill anyone.

And then, Carr became violent.

A fellow classmate, Rachel Bustamante, was sitting behind Carr prior to her outburst and noticed she had been avoiding looking at the professor until 11:35 a.m. — that’s when she snapped. The classmate reported that Kajiura was discussing attraction between peacocks when Carr raised her hand to ask her question about evolution. She asked it four times, and became increasingly upset each time Kajiura’s answer failed to satisfy her.

…fuckin’ evolution, I hate this shit.…You better shut the fuck up, before I fuckin’ kill you!

Exam time really is kind of stressful for the students.

Are you 4th year med students experiencing stress or something?

Tomorrow is match day for med students — they’re all competing for residencies, and apparently, it leads some of them to make comparisons with the upcoming movie, The Hunger Games.

(That’s a former student of mine, Katie Glasrud, playing the role of Katniss. She’ll do fine. If the Match is anything like the Hunger Games, though, her fellow students ought to worry about getting killed!)

I am so glad I’m a science professor

I assign a fair bit of writing in my courses, but because it’s all about biology, the papers I get back might be full of cryptic words like mek and src and neoplasia, but they tend to have a straightforward narrative and avoid ambiguity…and since I’m at a good liberal arts college, most of the students are competent writers. But then every once in a while I get a glimpse from my colleagues of the world outside my mechanistic and straightforward world, and I feel a small thrill of horror. You should read the whole student essay, but here’s the concluding paragraph.

Because knowing what it knows now, it will never know peace. It will only know humiliation. For there are no limits on the number of Grade Change forms I can request, or if there are, I plan to collect them like an ignorant naturalist on a well-trodden shore and submit them in perpetuity.

Yeesh. The tortured syntax, the ambiguous referents, the vague threat of drowning the poor victim in paperwork…I do not want to live in that universe.

But still, this one is still the all-time champion worst.

Segregation lives!

The Dallas Independent School District spent $57,000 to send students on a field trip, which sounds like a lot, but given that 5700 kids went on it, it isn’t that bad, and is a fairly routine expenditure. So the story is OK so far.

They went to see a movie, Red Tails, as part of Black History Month. Now it’s getting a little sketchy: that’s a commercial, Hollywood piece of entertainment, and a new release. But OK, I’d let it slide as an opportunity to couple history with an entertaining story. (If it had been for English and a chance to learn about the language from George Lucas’s dialog, though, there would be hell to pay.)

Here’s where it goes really, really wrong: only boys were allowed to go on the trip, and girls had to stay behind under the supervision of substitute teachers.

Their excuse: “it was something the boys would be interested in because it was about African-American men” and:

“There is only so much available space at the movie theater, so the decision was made for boys to attend the movie. Girls stayed at school but principals were given the option to show them ‘Akeelah and the Bee.’”

The girls’ movie is an uplifting story about a girl going to a spelling bee. The boys’ movie is a big-budget sfx-fest with explosions and airplanes. The girls’ movie was an inexpensive afterthought shown in their classrooms. The boys’ movie involved an expensive field trip.

Oh, yeah, that sounds like an equal opportunity for both.

What are colleges good for then?

I wish I’d had these data yesterday. I gave a creationist-bashing talk, and my introductory slides were intended to show the generally deplorable state of science education in this country. I used some national data, but what would have been more dramatic would have been to use something local and even more extreme. Walla Walla University, a Seventh Day Adventist college, did a survey of student views on origins. There is lots and lots of data in chart form on that page, and all of it is depressing and disgraceful.

Perhaps you wonder how many students think a magic man in the sky did it:

Or how many students stopped learning about science when they stopped watching the Flintstones:

Or whether these devout kids find the clergy sufficient, or have deluded themselves into believing their wacky ideas are supported by science?

I thought about raging about how WWU wasn’t doing their job as a university (but clearly, they’re doing great as a church), but then I was stopped short — what would a similar survey at other American colleges look like? What does the student body at my university think? I dread finding out.

But I want to find out. Hey, student freethought groups out there, here’s a project suggestion for you all: do a similar survey. Put together a questionnaire, table at your student union and gather respondents, and post the results somewhere. The reward is that you’ll almost certainly make your science professors cry.