Dear Mr. Taylor (Part 1)
(Continued from “Science, interrupted“)
There are a few good ground rules for approaching a classroom issue. The first is to start with the teacher. Going straight to the principal or superintendent instantly escalates things. This is especially important if there’s any doubt about what happened — and there almost always is.
I don’t usually suggest email, since tone is hard to convey, but I used it this time to have a record of the exchange and took care that my tone didn’t become the issue. I’m trying to ensure that kids in our community are getting science in the science classroom. For that I need information, period. Is this teacher undercutting our state’s excellent science standards by tub-thumping against evolutionary theory in his (unrelated) class…or not? Is he inserting “intelligent design,” which the judge in Kitzmiller v. Dover said serves only a “blatantly religious purpose,” into a public school science class…or not? That’s what I need to know.
If he is, I want to use the information not just to spank him (which changes too little), but to make it less likely to happen again in any science classroom in the district.
It’s best to focus on a single question. His rant about “evolutionists” can’t be explained away, so there’s no need to give him an opportunity to muddy it. I stuck that one in the file for later. First, I wanted to check on that other red flag.
“Dear Mr. Taylor,” I wrote:
I was so pleased to see that my son Connor is taking science this year. He’s always had a great interest in the subject, and we often discuss what he learns in class each day.
Last Tuesday he came home a bit puzzled over something from the lecture, and I’m hoping you can clarify it. I’m puzzled as well, so perhaps something was lost in the translation.
He recalled you saying something like this: “Experiments (or evidence) today can’t tell us anything about what happened in the distant past. Since no one was there to see it, we can only guess.”
I’m not a science educator myself, just a fan, so I’d appreciate your clarification. It seems to me that much of science is devoted to examining the present for clues about the past. I remember learning about the 19th century debate between catastrophism and uniformitarianism, for example, two theories that attempted to understand Earth’s past by examining present clues. A strong consensus eventually converged on uniformitarianism, which is now the cornerstone of modern geology.
Can you point me to a citation or two so I can further explore this idea that we can’t use evidence in the present to understand the past? Or, if he misheard, I’d appreciate knowing that.
Best,
Dale McGowan
I Googled him for kicks that night (as I’m sure he Googled me). Found him on a social networking site of a sort. “I love God,” said the first sentence of his self-description. “He is the center of my life.” Of course this alone is not the slightest problem. I had a dozen colleagues and friends in my teaching days who were Christians and brilliant science educators. But combined with the odd evidentiary notion and the anti-evolution rant, I was starting to get the picture about Mr. T — a probably decent, hardworking man who is letting his private views compromise his professional responsibility to the kids in this community.
He replied the next day:
You can most definitely use evidence found in the present to understand some things that have happened in the past. Just like in law evidence found in the present can help prove a crime that occurred in the past. That would be nonsense to think otherwise. Let me ask you this question. Which would be considered more reliable evidence to you, you personally seeing something happen in front of you over and over again or you not seeing this event happen but you find circumstantial evidence indicating the event happened?
Mr. Taylor
Even without citations to the Institute for Creation Research, there’s our smoking gun. This is a hamfisted set-up for a creationist punchline: Evolution relies on “mere” circumstantial evidence, while God witnessed creation and wrote about it in his Book.
I replied, answering his question but quickly returning to mine:
Dear Mr. Taylor,
Oh good, thank you. I suppose he misheard. One way to be sure — he said it was on an overhead. Perhaps you can share that to help clear it up?
Your question is an interesting one. First, I’d note that what seems reliable to me is often not, including the apparent evidence of my eyes. That’s why eyewitness testimony is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions in the U.S. Circumstantial evidence is often misrepresented in popular culture to mean “weak” when it actually means “indirect.” DNA is circumstantial, yet one of the strongest types of evidence.
To answer your question: If my eyes told me Mary entered an apartment over and over, but the DNA indicated it was Susan, I would certainly go with the circumstantial evidence, as would the legal system.
Another example: my son witnessed your statement about our inability to know the past from the present, but I’d like to see the circumstantial evidence of the overhead — when you have a minute.
I do appreciate your time and help.
No answer for three days. Apparently I spoiled his punchline.
(Continued.)
Science, interrupted
Connor (15) came home on the second day of school and collapsed on the sofa with a defeated look I’ve come to recognize.
“Uh…good day?”
“No.” He looked up at me. “Science.”
He had enrolled for physical science and was looking forward to it, thinking it was physics. Turns out it’s actually basic mechanics and other concepts he’s already had. But it was the teacher himself who had made the biggest impression — and not a good one.
“He did this whole thing with overheads, and a bunch of it just didn’t make any sense,” he said. “This one overhead said something like…” Connor paused to remember the wording. “‘Experiments and evidence in the present can’t tell us anything about the distant past.'”
I’m not sure how much time passed as the wind-up monkey in my head banged his little cymbals. That my son’s high school science teacher was almost directly quoting the favorite trope of young earth creationist point man Ken “Were You There?” Ham was not encouraging.
“Then he goes off on this thing about ‘If no one was there to witness something, we can only guess about it. This is a big problem for the evolutionists…’ And he goes on and on about how they’ve got all these little bits of bones but how they can never really know what they mean.”
Hello.
I began to consider my options, the first of which is always “Let it go.” It’s taken me years to learn that accepting a certain base level of facepalming human malpractice is one of the keys to passing my short vivre with some degree of joie. But there are also options that involve me getting out of my chair. Just a few things to weigh first.
I’m serious about not using my kids as pawns in my personal and professional quests. I would do nothing without Connor’s permission. I also have to consider the possibility that he misunderstood somehow, or that this might have been a momentary lapse in an otherwise stellar career for this teacher.
Then there’s the question of outcomes. If I did pursue this, what would the goal be?
Well that’s easy. The goal in this case is to see that the long, patient slog of science, our astonishing attempt to see the world and ourselves more clearly, doesn’t proceed through centuries of observation and experimentation and debate, crawling uphill through the morass of our ancient fears and biases, inching toward tentative answers, finding them, testing them, discarding bad answers and reinforcing sound ones, weaving isolated facts into theory, strengthening the theory, building consensus, then finally, wearily carrying the hard-won knowledge up the steps of our schools — only to be smacked to the floor with a flyswatter, just inches from the ears of our kids, by a “science teacher” who wonders how that icky, sciency thing ever found its way into his classroom.
Let’s call him Mr. Taylor.
Becca and I talked it over at dinner, and she was much more decisive. “I’m sorry, that’s just crazy,” she said. “You have GOT to do something.”
I knew she was right. And on reflection, I found a solid reason to do something, and to do it effectively and well — my daughter Delaney (8).
Last year, Delaney’s second grade teacher shared something with me at conferences. “I asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grow up,” he said. “We went around the room, and it was football player, firefighter, teacher, the usual things. Delaney was the only one who wanted to be a scientist. But she said she isn’t sure yet whether she wants to be an astronomer or a paleontologist or a marine biologist. Isn’t that great?”
Yes it is. A year later, her heart and mind are still set on science.
If she wanted to be a mathematician and I discovered that the middle school math teachers were presenting 4 as a prime number and pi as “just a theory,” I’d do something — NOT just to spank the offenders and make myself feel big and strong and right, but to fix the problem. If she loved history and the high school history teachers were hamfistedly rewriting history to suit their political preferences, I’d dig in to correct that.
So is it really too much for Laney to expect that three years from now, when she reaches her first actual class in the subject she loves most of all, she’ll be able to learn about science, the real thing, from a science educator who is motivated not by fear, or conflict avoidance, or ignorance, or the pursuit of a religious agenda, but by a love of and respect for science itself?
So I would look into this Taylor thing, not for a quick fix, but to do some lasting good.
(Continued.)
Added: An incredible story of an inspiring Georgia science teacher
Help bring IT’S ALIVE! to life
- August 10, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In action, Science, wonder
16
Remember BANG! The Universe Verse, the brilliantly conceived and illustrated comic book I blogged about in April, the one with the cartoon Einstein explaining the origin and development of the universe in verse? ‘Member?
Well a sequel is on its way. And to bring it to life, series creator Jamie Lu Dunbar needs a little help from his friends.
Jamie isn’t backed by a powerful international consortium of science comics moguls. He creates and publishes these beautiful things himself. And to make the second volume everything it needs to be, he needs a bit of venture capital.
Volume 1 was gorgeously illustrated in black and white. The setting was space, so that worked out just fine. But the second in the series, titled IT’S ALIVE!, is about the origin and evolution of life on Earth, so it’s crying out for full color. And producing spectacular four-color illustrations will require a wee upgrade in Jamie’s technology.
That’s where we come in. Jamie has set up a Kickstarter website with a five-minute video making his case and a button where we can chip in to help him create life. (If Jehovah had had a Kickstarter drive behind him, he might have managed a better design.)
Here’s the kicker: If Jamie raises the $5000 he needs, he will make the second book available as a free pdf on his website, just as he did for the first. He’s about a third of the way there. (Note: The Kickstarter site shows his goal as $1000. As Jamie’s text explains, that was only the first phase. The total needed is $5K, and we can help him get there, $5 and $10 and $20 at a time.)
Jamie’s work is clever and accessible and accurate and great fun. So let’s click through and help spark that primordial soup!
Progress on corporal punishment?
The possibility of a comprehensive ban on corporal punishment in U.S. schools has the issue back in the spotlight where it belongs.
I wrote about corporal punishment quite a bit in 2007 and 2008, noting among other things that I once spanked my kids. Though seldom and long ago, I’m still aghast and ashamed in the face of the evidence against it — evidence that made me stop on a dime.
A quick rehash of those thoughts before we look at the new developments:
Every time a parent raises a hand to a child, that parent is saying You cannot be reasoned with. In the process, the child learns that force is an acceptable substitute for reason, and that Mom and Dad have more confidence in the former than in the latter.
A second failure is equally damning. Spanking doesn’t work. In fact, it makes things worse. A meta-analysis of 88 corporal punishment studies compiled by Elizabeth Gershoff at Columbia found that ten negative outcomes are strongly correlated with spanking, including a damaged parent-child relationship, increased antisocial and aggressive behaviors, and the increased likelihood that the spanked child will physically abuse her/his own children. The study revealed just one positive correlation: immediate compliance. That’s all. So if you need your kids to behave in the moment but don’t care much about the rest of the moments in their lives–hey, don’t spare the rod!
(From “Reason vs. the Rod,” Humanist Parenting column, Oct 17, 2007)
I later addressed the well-meaning but false claim that the Bible’s reference to using “the rod” is about guidance, not beatings, and linked to a very nice piece by a Christian parent who decided not to spank her children and gave the reasons why.
Still, influential Christian parenting author James Dobson is one of several voices on the religious right continuing to applaud the practice. In his book The New Dare to Discipline, Dobson writes that “Spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause genuine tears” (p. 35). He recommends painful squeezing of the trapezius muscle on the neck to obtain “instant obedience” (36) and using paddles to hit children as young as 18 months old. He advises parents to hit a toddler whenever he “hits his friends” (66), and if a child cries more than a few minutes after being spanked, Dobson says, hit him again (70). “When a youngster tries this kind of stiff-necked rebellion,” he adds, “you had better take it out of him, and pain is a marvelous purifier” (6).
His advice frequently lapses into sneering contempt for the child. “You have drawn a line in the dirt, and the child has deliberately flopped his bony little toe across it,” he says (p. 21). “Who is going to win? Who has the most courage? Who is in charge here http://levitrastore.net/? If you do not conclusively answer these questions for your strong-willed children, they will precipitate other battles designed to ask them again and again.”
Carefully avoiding reference to actual research, Dobson prefers to blame the media for the growing consensus against corporal punishment. “The American media has worked to convince the public that all spanking is tantamount to child abuse, and therefore, should be outlawed. If that occurs, it will be a sad day for families . . . and especially for children!”
We now return to the sane(r) world, currently in progress.
In Spring 2008, I was asked to draft a resolution on corporal punishment for the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). On June 8, 2008, the resolution was passed unanimously by the General Assembly of the World Humanist Congress in Washington DC. Humanism now has a formal consensus position on this important issue, and I am honored to have been a part of that.
This year, on the heels of new research suggesting that regular spanking has a measurable negative affect on IQ, Congress is due to consider the Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act this year. The proposal would “prohibit the Secretary of Education from providing education funding to any educational agency or institution that allows school personnel to inflict corporal punishment upon a student as a form of punishment or to modify undesirable behavior.”
Thirty states currently ban corporal punishment in public schools. Only two of those ban the practice in private schools. Over 220,000 kids were subject to violent punishment in U.S. schools during the 2006-07 school year, with three states managing to do more than half of the total damage: Texas (49,100), Mississippi (38,100), and Alabama (33,700).
The federal act would ban the practice in all public and private schools that receive federal funds of any kind, which is virtually all.
The big news is the inclusion of religious schools in the ban. But despite recent warnings of pushback from that direction, there’s been very little. Though the practice was common just a generation ago, many religious schools have voluntarily joined public schools in abandoning corporal punishment abandoned hitting as a punishment. “Whether you believe it’s right or wrong, it’s just too big of a liability or legal issue,” said Tom Cathey, a legislative analyst for the Association of Christian Schools International, in a recent RNS article.
So we can and should oppose the undue influence of Dobson et al in the debate. At the same time, we should notice the quiet progress of the mainstream, both religious and secular, toward the obvious. It’s how most social progress happens.
[Hat tip to Secular Coalition for America for great work on this issue!]
-My Nov 2007 interview with Elizabeth Gershoff
-Learn about the Ending Corporal Punishment in Schools Act, contact your representative
-Resources from Center for Effective Discipline (incl. alternatives to corp. punishment in schools)
-Dobson’s views fascinatingly juxtaposed with those of actual experts in the field
The Foundation Summer Drive!
It’s been 18 weeks since Foundation Beyond Belief was born in a flurry of humanistic generosity. Through monthly donations in the amount of their choice, our 400+ members have contributed nearly $25,000 for such outstanding organizations as Refugees International, the Point Foundation, the National Center for Science Education, ActionAid International, SMART Recovery, and the Haitian Health Foundation.
If you’d like to learn more, or to join this great experiment in humanist philanthropy, click on the handsome new JOIN US! badge in the sidebar or to the right.
If you’d like to help promote the Foundation, grab one of 22 badges and banners for your own blog or website from our new Help Us Grow page.
Finally, if you can spare a few bucks to help keep the Foundation itself up and running, we’d be grateful for your support in the Summer Drive. Click here or on the big blue widget in the sidebar to give us a hand.
Thanks for your help!
Foundation Beyond Belief in NYT
Atheists’ Collection Plate, With Religious Inspiration
BY SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
ALPHARETTA, Ga. –– Four or five Sundays in 2005, his own atheism notwithstanding, Dale McGowan took his family into the neo-Gothic grandeur of St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis on a kind of skeptic’s field trip.
Mr. McGowan went because he wanted his three young children to have “religious literacy.” He went because his mother-in-law, Barbara Maples, belonged to the congregation. He went because, as a college professor with a fondness for weekend sweatpants, church gave him the rare chance to wear the ties she invariably gave him for his birthday.
Something else began to strike Mr. McGowan on those visits. He listened to the vicar preach about ministering to the poor, and he learned that the cathedral helped to sponsor a weekly dinner for the homeless. Most importantly, he watched as the collection plate moved through the pews and as his mother-in-law, who volunteered at those dinners, dropped in her offering.
All those details added up to a nonbeliever’s revelation. The theology and the voluntarism and the philanthropy, Mr. McGowan came to realize, were part of a greater whole, a commitment to charity as part of religious practice. And on that practice, this atheist felt lacking. To put it in church slang, he was convicted.
Rather than adopt faith, however, Mr. McGowan set out to emulate it, or at least its culture of giving. He set out to, in effect, create the atheist’s collection plate. By now, five years later, that impulse has taken the form of a nonprofit foundation that solicits donations from atheists and bundles them into contributions to organizations in fields like public health, environmentalism, gay rights and refugee aid.
Within the next week or so, Mr. McGowan expects to cut checks for a total of $12,025, the first benefits collected and disbursed by the Foundation Beyond Belief.
“To focus, encourage, and demonstrate”…what the Foundation is (really) all about
by Dale McGowan, Executive Director, FBB
[First appeared in the Foundation Beyond Belief blog]
It’s been interesting to watch news of Foundation Beyond Belief spread around the blogosphere. Most of the descriptions I’ve seen are pretty accurate, but there’s one persistent misconception: that the sole purpose of our charitable giving program is to demonstrate the generosity of atheists and humanists.
Time to fix that broken meme.
Our mission statement includes not one but three main purposes—”to focus, encourage, and demonstrate the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists.” Demonstrating our generosity as a community is important, but it’s arguably the least important of the three. Far more important is focusing and encouraging that generosity and compassion in the first place.
FOCUS
“I am a humanist,” said Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without a Country, “which means in part that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.” And most of the time, this is how humanism plays out—in a million individual acts of decency, generosity, and kindness. The Foundation exists in part to create from those million individual decent acts a powerfully motivated community of philanthropic humanists, making the world a better place not in spite of, but because of, their worldview.
ENCOURAGE
As I’ve noted before, when it comes to charitable giving, churchgoers give a much larger percentage of earned income to discretionary causes than non-churchgoers. Arthur C. Brooks (author of Who Really Cares) sees in this statistic “evidence of a gap in everyday virtue” between the religious and nonreligious (p. 40).
There’s a more obvious explanation. Fifty-two times a year, churchgoers pass a plate full of the generous donations of their friends and neighbors and make the decision whether to add to it or not. Non-churchgoers have no such regular and public nudge. So it seems reasonable that the difference in overall giving has much more to do with whether or not you have systematic opportunities for giving than some “gap in virtue.”
One of the central purposes of Foundation Beyond Belief is to create that opportunity, thereby building a systematic culture of giving among nontheists. By doing this, we hope to encourage humanists to be better humanists and to energize a previously under-represented sector of philanthropic giving.
It’s not a zero-sum game, taking dollars that individuals already donate on their own and “putting an atheist stamp” on them. The idea is to create new income for good charities by encouraging the nontheistic community to give more.
DEMONSTRATE
Our worldview makes our virtue no better or worse than anyone else’s. But when we focus our efforts and encourage each other to express the best impulses at the heart of our worldview, that will demonstrate to others the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists.
Tell your friends and family about the Foundation. And when you do, be sure to mention all three purposes. We’re not just looking for credit—we’re also creating a focused community of giving and encouraging each other to the best possible expression of our inspiring worldview. We think those are things worth doing and hope you’ll agree.
And if you haven’t joined yet, NOW’S THE TIME!
First large-scale secular parent survey
Foundation Beyond Belief has two sides — a humanist charitable giving program, and an education and support program for secular parents.
The intrepid and talented Ute Mitchell (of CFI Portland’s outstanding secular parent program) has signed on as our Foundation’s Parent Community Coordinator. Her first task is taking the pulse of the secular parenting world — finding out just who we are and what parents need who are raising their kids without religion in a predominantly religious world.
I’ve spent the last four years immersed in this topic — talking to hundreds of nontheistic parents across the US and elsewhere, reading, analyzing, hanging out on the PBB Forum — but now it’s time for something more systematic. We’ve created a 10-minute survey to get a better sense of who you are and what you need. The first of several, this one focuses on general questions including parents’ background and current attitudes, family practices, and specific needs. A survey next week will go to existing secular parenting groups to see who and where they are, what’s working for them and what’s not, and what they need in terms of support. Other individual surveys will focus on specific topics including science, dealing with death, and kids’ peer experiences.
Over 400 600 700 1100 1400 1800 people have already taken the survey since it was posted two weeks ago. We’ll close it down shortly and let you know what we find.
Click here to take survey, or under the red arrow in the sidebar.
And if you haven’t yet joined the Foundation itself, now is the time! Our webmaster has installed a brand new, fully-secure donation system (now including a PayPal option) and made several other lovely upgrades to the site. Help us meet our April 1 goal of 1000 contributing members supporting ten charities working to improve this life and this world.
Full launch at last
Foundation Beyond Belief — a non-profit charitable and educational organization created to focus, encourage and demonstrate the generosity and compassion of atheists and humanists and to provide a comprehensive education and support program for nontheistic parents — is alive.
Foundation membership is now open, and our first slate of beneficiaries is in place.
And what a slate it is. There’s an organization of scientists committed to biodiversity, another providing health care to marginalized communities on five continents, and a secular alternative for addiction recovery. There’s a non-profit bringing safe drinking water to five countries in desperate need, an advocacy group for refugees fleeing war, and an advocacy group for asylum seekers fleeing torture. There’s a scholarship fund for GLBT students who have been disowned by their families, an organization protecting children in war zones, and another protecting the environment by working toward “greener” buildings and cities.
Selecting these has been a challenging and powerful experience. In the end, we chose a wide range of organizations in size, budget, mission, and scope. Members will now in turn choose which of these organizations they will support with a percentage of their monthly donations—which in turn will inform our future selections.
It’s a chance to watch the evolution of humanist philanthropy.
No more words. Time for pictures:
Now go. Join up.
UPDATE: As is to be expected with a site and project as complex as FBB, we’ve had some technical hiccups. If you’re having any trouble signing up, give it a couple of days and our brilliant webster Airan will have it all ironed out.
Hey bloggers, we need ya!
We’re getting ready for a big blog bonanza to announce the full launch of Foundation Beyond Belief on January 1.
An estimated 1.4 zillion bloggers will receive the text and video for the announcement on December 29 to be posted on New Year’s Day.
If you’d like to help make the big cyber-yawp that announces the Foundation to the world, go here to give us your contact information and we’ll send you the post on the 29th.
Thanks!
