The children of the revolution
One thing is pretty much guaranteed for any social movement that struggles against the mainstream: the children of the activists won’t understand what the big frackin’ deal is.
U.S. civil rights pioneers often end up with kids who (while enjoying the fruits of the struggle) ask their parents, “Why is it always about race with you?” Second-wave feminists spent their youth breaking glass ceilings, only to have their daughters (who’ve never known a time when they couldn’t vote or play hockey or run a corporation) roll their eyes with embarrassment at Mom’s “obsession with gender.”
Without putting myself anywhere near the same plane as those, I’ve started getting a taste of that second-generation thing myself. It’s a good thing for the most part, a likely sign that our own efforts have made it possible for our kids to transcend our obsessions, to find the next beast that needs struggling against instead of tilting with ours — or just to enjoy living in a better, saner world.
When Becca recently brought up the idea of starting a secular parenting group in our area, my 15-year-old son — a classic apatheist — said, “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“I kind of don’t get why you need something like that. Just don’t believe. Why do you have to get in a group with other people who don’t believe?”
“You don’t have to,” Becca said. “But some parents who aren’t religious find it helpful to see how other nonreligious parents handle the issues that come up.”
“Like what?”
I offered an example. “I just got an email from a mom this morning. Her family is going to church with her parents for the first time, and she wanted to know what her son should do during communion. You know, when the congregation goes to the front for the…”
“But that’s so obvious!”
“Oh? What’s the obvious thing to do?”
“You just do it! You’re in a church, so you do what the church people do. That’s respectful.”
I remember being fifteen, seeing things so clearly, constantly stunned at the density of others.
“Okay. Do you know what communion is?”
He paused. “Well…not really, no.”
“It’s a re-enactment of the Last Supper. Most important part of a Christian service. It’s a way of saying, ‘I believe in the divinity of Jesus, and here’s the moment I’m closest to him.’ So some people feel it’s more respectful to not do it if you don’t believe it.”
“Huh.” Another pause. “So you told her not to let him do it?”
“Well no, I said I’d explain to him what it means and let him decide what to do. He can see what it’s like to stay sitting when most people go to the front, or to take part in a ritual that means you believe when you really don’t or aren’t sure. It’s good experience.”
Two weeks later we visited my mother-in-law’s Episcopal church. I reminded the kids that they could choose to do whatever they wanted. They could sing or not, pray or not, kneel or not, commune or not. And if they had any questions, they could ask us.
Delaney (9) noticed the Stations of the Cross before the service. I told her it was the story of the last hours of Jesus’ life, and we walked the circuit. As a second-generation freethinker (in the lower case), she didn’t have to recoil or push against it. To the kid who was Athena for Hallowe’en, it’s just another cool mythic story.
During the service, Erin (12) was obviously pondering her choices. When the first kneeling moment came, she looked at her Grandma (kneeling), then at the padded kneeler, then at me (sitting), then at the kneeler again. She half-knelt, looked uncertain, then dropped back into the pew. The second time, with a deep breath, she went for the full kneel. Third and fourth times, she sat.
Trying something on for size is classic Erin, and she left the church knowing what both feigned conformity and sore-thumb honesty felt like. Much better than just yakking about it.
Communion came and went, and Connor stayed in his seat. We exchanged wry smiles. Yeah yeah, his eyes said, whatever.
A mindgasm of scientific proportions
This is quite simply one of the most astonishing, original things I have ever seen. Ever.
I’ve said too much. Set aside 15 uninterrupted minutes.
It’s filled with phrases that express what I often find inexpressible. Add your favorites to the comment thread.
(Profound thanks to my step-nephew Dan Nolan for this one.)
cul de sac
What a few weeks it’s been.
In the midst of the hectic usual, two people my family loved died. One, my wife’s 97-year-old grandmother, was expected. The other, my stepfather — though 84 — was not.
The kids have done really well. Deep sadness, especially at bedtime, but also that lovely working-through, that profound engagement.
Great-Grandma Huey was first, and they stared into her casket with the same combination of grief and wonder I felt when my dad died. She’s clearly not there. So where is she?
The girls had been a blur of questions and commentary since her death days before, including a tangent into reincarnation. I think it was Laney who eventually connected that idea to our natural cycle — that every atom in us has been here since the beginning of time, part of planets and suns and animals and plants and people before coming together to make us. That every bit of us returns to the world to fuel the ongoing story is a gorgeous natural symmetry that never ceases to move and even console me, and my kids have long been enamored of it.
The service was personal and emotional in that Southern Baptist way, including the usual fluster of assurances that she was now in the very Presence.
After all that, I was perplexed to hear the minister read from First Thessalonians at the grave:
We believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
For an hour we’d heard about Grandma’s current seat in heaven. Now Paul tells us she will sleep in the ground until the Second Coming, only then rising to meet the Lord.
It’s the single greatest gap between common belief and actual binding scripture, and the minister had put it right out there. I looked around. No one else was listening for content.
I quietly cursed myself for never being able to do otherwise. Once in a while would be nice.
As the crowd dispersed, Delaney suddenly pointed at the casket and whispered, “What is that thing on the outside?”
I’d been wondering too. The coffin was sitting in what looked to be a solid metal outer box. As Laney spoke, the cemetery workers closed the lid (of what I’ve since learned is called a burial liner, a fairly recent innovation used in the U.S. and apparently nowhere else), cranking down hard on four handles, sealing it tight.
Erin looked at the sealed apparatus, appalled. “So much for returning to the earth,” she said. “She’s never gettin’ out of there.”
After all of our talk about the beauty of going back into the system, of being a link in an endless chain, Grandma’s atoms end up bicycling in a cul de sac until the end of time — or until the sun goes nova, I suppose. Until then, the license to dance is revoked. I think it struck us all as just…wrong.
Now all three kids want to be cremated. Laney wants to be scattered from a cliff over the ocean. I’m following other processes with interest. But one way or another, I want my atoms on a through street.
(More later.)
“My Christian wife” – a guest spot by Larry Tanner
A self-described “hard-line Atheist” interviews himself about his strong, loving marriage to a fervent Christian. A great read, and plenty to discuss.
My wife is the most special and wonderful person. She is a Christian of deep belief. She enjoys being part of an evangelical church. She likes the people of the church, the community, and the many opportunities for participation.
She and I are very different in some respects, but together we work. We met in 1995 and have been building a life together ever since.
I figure some might be curious about the relationship of a hard-line Atheist and a fervent Christian, so I put together a self-interview. That is, I wrote some questions and answered them myself below. If folks like the subject and format, perhaps I’ll ask the wife if she would be willing to answer questions from y’all.
1. Let’s start with an obvious question: How is it that two people of such different–perhaps even opposing–beliefs get together and build an apparently happy marriage?
My wife and I actually share many beliefs in common. Our values are fundamentally similar, and our differences are often complementary rather than contradictory. Religion and religious belief are places of difference between us, but in most every other place, we are in just the same place.
Anyways, I think people make more of religious difference than there needs to be. My wife and I are different people, and we always have been. We have different jobs and different backgrounds. We don’t always vote for the same people. We like different foods. Our tastes in music and art can be way off.
As far as I can tell, religion is just another difference. It’s something that each of us has and keeps in the household, but it doesn’t really define our home. It doesn’t dominate our relationship at all. Rather, our lives together are dominated by just living. We try to be together in the morning. I leave for work, and then I come home at night and we try to be together with the kids until their bedtime routine starts.
Maybe if we had both been Catholic or Jewish when we started dating, things would be different today. But since we started out with difference, I think that religion quickly and necessarily became bracketed as a personal thing and not a universal thing.
When we first met, my wife was a practicing Catholic and I identified as Jewish. I don’t remember the state of her belief, or my own. When we moved in together in 1997, she took a spot teaching Sunday school at the local church, and I eventually got involved with my local Hillel house. I even taught the kindergartners in Hebrew school!
If we ever saw our religious differences as a problem, we didn’t see it as a big problem or as a relationship problem. We wanted to be together; that was always the important point. We didn’t even need to say it. From the beginning of our relationship, being together was implicitly understood and not being together never entered our minds.
2. You both went through changes in religious thinking, right?
Very much. In the 2001-2003 timeframe, my wife started to move away from the Catholic church. We were back in the Boston area by then, and the child sex abuse scandal had started to hit. The response of the Church to these horrific acts perpetrated by priests and then knowingly covered up at the highest levels of the institution–well, it was too much to take. The Church’s position on homosexuality was probably also an issue for my wife. Our oldest daughter was confirmed Catholic–that was in 2003–but I don’t think my wife went to church very much in those days.
It wasn’t until 2006 that my wife found a Christian religious community that she liked. This community called itself non-denominational. She found many people there who were about her age and also having children. The religious message was personal and positive. The services were energetic and carefully crafted. I think my wife felt that this community had a lot of people who could understand some of her questions and problems in a way that I never could have.
I won’t go over my changes here, since they are pretty well documented in this blog.
3. Surely, you and your wife must have strong disagreements about religion.
No doubt. We don’t talk about it very much. She has her space to express what she believes, and I have mine. It’s hard for us to talk about these disagreements with each other because I am not able to convey the sense that I take Christian belief very seriously. I take it seriously to some extent. I know that lots of people call themselves Christian, and I am familiar with a lot of the history and background of both early and established Christianity.
But I have limits to the deference I’ll give ideas that I feel have been demonstrated faulty. I can’t make it sound as though the story of a virgin-born-of-a-virgin who was impregnated by a ghost and who birthed a miracle-working human sacrifice makes any sort of sense to me. And I know the arguments around the story and the history of some of its details. Once I feel I’ve thought through a question and seen it resolved satisfactorily, I generally prefer not to revisit it and rather move onto some other question.
For my part, I have no desire to make Atheist arguments or to force Dawkins and Hitchens on my wife. What’s the point? She’s an intelligent human being and I’ve got my work cut out for me just defining the contours of my own thinking. We both have our own “spiritual” questions that we’re pursuing, and it’s enough that we support each other in our respective pursuits.
At the end of the day, our religious differences and our different rationalizations for our beliefs have very little to do with the practicalities of our love and our household. Maybe, after the kids have grown up and we’re retired, we’ll spend our days debating the lack of evidence for gods and the ridiculousness of all religious beliefs. I suspect we’ll rather spend our days having more fun together, but who knows?
4. How do your differences in religion and Atheism apply to the way you raise your children?
In terms of how we raise the kids, I don’t think there are any issues. I don’t openly scoff at Christianity or Judaism in front of my children. I also don’t push Darwin’s Origin of Species or Dawkins’s The God Delusion on them. The fact is that I don’t need to do this. The reality of my Atheism will become apparent to my children when they are old enough to see it. They’ll notice I don’t go with them to church and that some of the books in my library make cases for Atheism.
Parenting is a practical art. It’s hard to get kids to believe or to know things in the exact way you want. They develop beliefs and knowledge through their own doing and their own experiences. Neither my wife nor I is interested in controlling our children’s intellectual environment to the extent that they can only have these-or-those thoughts or only come to such-and-such conclusions about the world. So, we both parent in the day; that is, we try to handle each day as it comes and enjoy it as best we can.
Honestly, I don’t think personal religious or atheistic beliefs have much impact on what we parents need to do as parents. We need to be with our kids. We need to play with them, teach them, help them, encourage them, and show them we enjoy all that. To me, in marriage and in parenting, togetherness is the name of the game.It’s all about being in the same place at the same time.
It’s not about using the children as my personal social experiment. It’s not about making the children live out my dreams and my ideas. It’s not about coercing the children to think and act like me. It is about enabling and empowering them to grow according to their own reasoning and desires.
We parents are an extension of our children, not the other way around. We are their conscience until it becomes their responsibility to tell themselves what’s right and necessary. We are heir butlers until they are fully able to get the items they need and can clean up after themselves. We are their cheerleaders until they learn how to develop their own confidence and motivation. We are their counselors until they are able to take the lead in making the tough decisions that affect them.
My wife and I share this fundamental outlook in most ways, if not in every single way. We agree on the major things and differ in some of the details. We want the same seeds and are comfortable with however the flowers develop. This is why it has worked so far for us, and why I have no reason to be anything less than very optimistic about the future.
[First appeared at Textuality.]
Larry Tanner will now take your questions!
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Larry Tanner is senior proposal lead for a New England-based robotics company. He is currently preparing a dissertation in Anglo-Saxon literature and textuality. A married father of three children, he teaches English literature and composition at a local community college. He can be contacted via email at lartanner[at]hotmail[dot]com.
Dazed and confused
Erin (12) is in the middle of a nice comparative religion curriculum in her social sciences class. Looks to be much better than the usual slapdash.
The units are tied in with geography and culture. They’re currently on Southwest Asia, so at the moment it’s the three Abrahamic monotheisms. As usual, minority religions — Bahá’í, Gnosticism, Druze, Zoroastrianism, et al. — get the short straw, with no mention that I can see. I’d especially like to see Zoroastrianism covered, if only for all the yummy Christian parallels.) But three is ever so much better than one.
I know from Connor’s middle school years that they’ll get into the other two of the Big Five as they move east, and I told Erin as much.
“So what religion is in China?” she asked. She’s taking introductory Mandarin at the moment, so it’s a natural first place for her mind to go.
“All of them,” I said. It’s an annoying answer that happens to be true. I try to resist the tendency to paint countries with a single religion, a practice as misleading as Red and Blue states.
Most people equate China with Buddhism, but the country has a long history of pluralism of belief. Buddhism, Taoism, and various folk religions account for about half the population combined. Christians and Muslims are estimated at 2-4 percent each, with a metric smattering of Jews, Hindus, and others.
And the rest? I told Erin the largest single belief group in China is the nonreligious, clocking in at 40-50 percent — not a consequence of Mao, but a strong tradition going back 2200 years.
“A lot of those follow a philosophy you might hear about next year when you study China,” I told her. “It’s called Confucianism.”
She puzzled on the word a moment.
“Is that because they don’t really know what they believe?”
In school, out of the classroom
I’m about ready to be done with church-state issues in schools for a while. I’m in the mood to go well off-topic for a bit, to talk about child-eating mermaids and why trying to get the great works of Western civilization through the 19th century intact is like passing the Louvre’s collection of French Impressionism through a preschool on Fingerpaint Day. But since I blogged the Taylor situation last month, y’all keep sending me good on-topic questions. So as long as mine inbox groans under requests for counsel, the kid-noshing merperson will have to wait.
It seems some of you are running into the presence of outside youth evangelizing groups in your public schools, including Young Life and The Good News Club, and wondering you should be concerned. I can’t say “ask NCSE,” since they rightly confine their work to the science classroom. So I’ll weigh in, then give a plug for the folks who DO handle this end of things.
The Good News Club, a group with the stated purpose “to evangelize boys and girls with the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ,” has begun meeting in the public school attended by the daughter of one of my readers. Turns out this is another situation on which the courts have weighed in.
Good News Club was the plaintiff in a 2001 Supreme Court case (Good News Club vs. Milford Central School). Even though it allowed other clubs to meet, Milford School had prohibited the Good News Club from meeting in the building after school, thinking it would violate the establishment clause to allow it.
The court ruled 6-3 in favor of Good News Club, the majority stating that Milford Central School was not endorsing a particular religion or even religion in general by allowing them to meet.
Here’s the case doc, a legal commentary on it, and a good article by Wendy Kaminer. And the opinions are nicely summarized and worth reading on the Wikipedia page for the case.
Parenting Beyond Belief contributor and former American Atheists president Ed Buckner once noted in a discussion forum that “Bible clubs and clubs based on religion in other ways are permitted in public schools, though with real limits (not always adhered to): such clubs cannot be endorsed by, or even be given the appearance of endorsement by, the principal, school system, etc.”
The Good News Club meeting in the school after hours is legally kosher, and I for one think it should be, with reasonable restrictions. But the fact that GNC flyers were also coming home in the backpack of this parent’s child is perilously close to endorsement and oversteps the limits Ed referred to. And there’s the rub — that these groups can so often be relied upon to overstep whatever reasonable restrictions they are asked to observe.
I recommended having a chat with the principal, who probably doesn’t know the flyers are going home. And I pointed her to an outstanding source of information.
There are several such resources, and, if necessary, sources of direct assistance in cases like these. PBB contributor Stu Tanquist described receiving quick and effective help from The Freedom from Religion Foundation, run by the brilliant team of Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor. There is of course the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that has earned the labels “un-American” and “traitors” for defending the constitutional rights of American citizens.
Please don’t get me going.
Then there’s an organization with which I’m constantly impressed: Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU). In addition to solid advice and long experience, AU provides a spectacular set of online resources. If you’re running into a church-state issue of any kind in public schools, you can’t do much better than starting on AU’s Public Schools page to get quick, intelligent answers.
Read the label
A study released today by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has Keith Olbermann scratching his head, some religious bloggers moving the goalposts, and most atheists…unsurprised.
The U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey asked 32 questions to assess religious literacy. Protestants on average answered 16 correctly, which was also the average for Americans overall. Fifty percent. Catholics brought up the rear with a dismal 14.7 — below the U.S. average.
Top honors went to atheists and agnostics, with an average of 20.9 correct. Not surprising, really. It’s not so much that non-believers learn a lot about religion, though that is also true. It’s mostly the other way around: knowledge of religion, especially comparative religion, leads to disbelief in any version. Another argument for religious literacy, parents.
When it comes to questions about Christianity, Mormons do best (7.9 out of 12) — interesting, since many other Christians do not consider Mormons to be Christians — while Jews and atheists/agnostics stand out for their knowledge of other world religions. Out of 11 such questions on the survey, Jews answered 7.9 correctly and atheists/agnostics answered 7.5 correctly. Atheists/agnostics and Jews also did especially well on questions about the role of religion in public life, including a question about what the U.S. Constitution says about religion — a thing worth knowing, in my humble.
By every measurable standard, the U.S. is the most religiously faithful and religiously ignorant country in the developed world. Europeans, by contrast, tend to be tremendously knowledgeable about religion (thanks in part to religious education in schools) AND very secular. Bright light doesn’t flatter the creature. That’s why all the candles.
According to the survey, forty-five percent of U.S. Catholics do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. Over half of Protestants (53%) could not correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions birthed their half of Christendom.
Fewer than half of Americans (47%) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist, and only 27 percent correctly identified Islam as the primary religion of Indonesia — the largest Muslim population on Earth.
There is something to the argument that religion is not just the sum of its facts, or even of its beliefs. It is also a question of community and identity, and yes, experience. But to pretend as some commentators are now doing that the details don’t matter is simply false. If you sit in the pew of, raise your children in, give your offerings to, and proudly wear the label of a given denomination, you lend credence to the beliefs and practices of that denomination. Some of those beliefs and practices just might be harmful or fatal if swallowed. So read the label.
Speaking of Pew studies, are you even in the right pew? Take the Belief-o-Matic Quiz!
Get your own religious literacy on
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Post script: What should Taylor’s colleagues do?
A reader question on the “final” post in the Mr. Taylor series:
I’m curious about what you would say to a teacher with concerns about a colleague’s coverage of evolution. We have a science teacher who is evangelical, doesn’t believe in evolution or global warming, and “teaches the controversy” from what we hear. The problem is, I’m not in a position to have proof about what he teaches or how he does it. Any suggestion? — teacherlady
Boy that’s a good one. Teachers have an obligation to be responsive to parents. They have no such obligation to colleagues, and pointed questions from a faculty peer can (and probably would) be seen as galling presumption.
I forwarded the question to NCSE, and once again Glenn Branch provided what seems like a solid, reasonable answer:
It’s a little delicate, obviously, since this is a problem with a colleague, and there may be complicated workplace politics involved. But she should take the problem upstairs, to her department chair (if there is one) or her principal, whose job it is to worry about whether the teachers are doing their jobs right.
She should keep in mind that by doing so she’s going to be serving two interests: not only do the kids in the school need a decent science education, but also the district needs to be able to protect itself from possible lawsuit, as case law is clear. It’s difficult, we know, but she needs to do what is right, both for the kids and the district.
Any discomfort a teacher might feel in raising the question pales when weighed against those two interests.
In a later comment, teacherlady notes that the principal is also Christian and so might be disinclined to act. I wouldn’t assume that. In addition to the possibility that the principal is a sane, moderate Christian, the professional recognition of legal liability will generally trump personal leanings in all but the densest administrator.
Recognizing good results
(Last in a series of six. Start here.)
I wanted to blog the process of confronting non-science in the science classroom in part to lay out a few basic principles for parents to consider. Situations vary, so principles are better than a script.
My particular situation took place in a top-ranked high school in a top-ranked district with a (mostly and so far) sane and competent school board that is in the U.S. South (Georgia) but not really (Atlanta).
Thanks to a recent surge in business transplants, the area is surprisingly diverse, including an impressive worldview mix. School administrators here tend to be smart and responsive. The Fordham survey puts the relatively new Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) for science in the top tier nationally. The teacher’s excursion into ID was somewhat subtle, though his anti-evolution rant was anything but. By the time we began our exchange, my son was no longer in his class.
Some of these mattered more than others. If I had less reason to trust the good sense of our school and district administrators, for example, I might have wielded the double-edged saber of GPS and Kitzmiller more strongly from the start. And if I had reason to believe serious incursions of religion into the science curriculum were a more endemic issue in this district — as it is, I have reason to believe otherwise — I might have used this opportunity to build a further-reaching case.
Instead, I tried to apply just enough pressure to wake the principal to a possible liability time bomb in his midst, to let that time bomb know that the clippers are now poised over his red wire, and to get myself connected to existing efforts to keep good science in our classrooms.
I know some of you wanted to see Mr. Taylor’s head on a pike at the gates of Down House, but I’d suggest it’s the wrong goal. Among other things, that creates an irresistible victim narrative for ID folks to rally around and distracts from the issue of keeping good science in the classroom and non-science out.
So some principles, IMO, for approaching this kind of situation:
Even without the severed head, and even if I never get my hands on those damn overheads, I think the results in this case have been plenty gratifying:
1. A science teacher who thought he could undercut good science standards without consequence has learned otherwise;
2. A high school administrator with plenty of incentive to do the right thing now has a weather eye on one of his teachers, as well as a heightened awareness of the issue and a positive relationship with a parent science advocate;
3. I learned that my son is capable of recognizing bad science when he hears it;
4. I discovered and applied to join a citizen’s coalition dedicated to integrity in science education in our state;
5. I learned that Georgia’s science standards are unusually strong and clear, and that they include explicit, repeated references to evolution by natural selection at all three school levels;
6. I stumbled on the wonderful story of Pat New, a middle school science teacher in Georgia who courageously resisted pressure from her community, colleagues, and administrators for 14 years to drop the teaching of evolution, choosing instead to weave it into every unit and topic in her course, and how much easier the new state standards of 2004 made things for her;
7. I fell in love all over again with the Kitzmiller decision, which has given both parents and educators the strongest foundation ever on which to stand when fending off non-science in the classroom;
8. I was reminded that the judge in Kitzmiller was a Lutheran Republican, which nicely blurs the bright line we too often draw;
9. I re-connected with brilliant resources like Panda’s Thumb and the National Center for Science Education;
10. I took the opportunity to model an approach to parent-teacher conflict that has seldom been articulated.*
In talking to hundreds of secular parents over the years, I’ve heard countless stories of the intrusion of a particular religious view into the public school classroom. Parents are often stopped cold at the thought of speaking up — worried about the repercussions for their kids, worried about the response of their neighbors, unwilling to get into a public shouting match or even a legal challenge.
In some situations, a public row is exactly what’s needed. If a few courageous parents in Dover, Pennsylvania weren’t willing to go to the mat, I wouldn’t now have the privilege of speaking softly while carrying the big Kitzmillian stick. If I ever find myself in their shoes, out on the bleeding edge instead of back here reaping the rewards of their courage, I hope I’d rise to the occasion.
But I wanted to blog this Taylor situation to demonstrate to those parents who are hesitant to speak up that it’s often possible to do so in a way that is both low-key and effective, that yields positive results for the long term, and that moves us closer to the day when we can simply expect science, and nothing but science, in our science classrooms.
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*One excellent example: Stu Tanquist’s essay “Choosing Your Battles” in Parenting Beyond Belief.
Checking in with the Mother Ship: NCSE
(Part 5 of several. Start here.)
After dropping a note to my son’s high school principal about some apparent shenanigans in the boy’s science class, I flipped open my communicator to check in with the Mother Ship — a.k.a. the National Center for Science Education. Do this sooner in the process, do it later, but do it. NCSE has seen it all.
I started with a brief summary of events (as if they hadn’t already been following along on the blog, which of course they had), then asked four questions. Within an hour, I had a reply from NCSE Deputy Director Glenn Branch. He confirmed that I have “been handling the situation very well indeed.”
The backs of my wrists snapped to my hips, and I did a preen-and-strut around my office, head pistoning, uh huh, uh huh, uh huh. An important ritual, not to be skipped.
My first question: Is it reasonable to insist on seeing the overheads my son was referring to?
The request to see the overheads is reasonable, he said. “It still makes sense, I think, for you to pursue the overheads, to put the teacher on notice that he can’t ignore a reasonable request like that.” He added that union restrictions might protect the teacher in this situation. Georgia teachers are not unionized (with mostly unfortunate results, from what this husband of a teacher has seen, oy!), so that is not an issue here.
He then added a point I would not have considered: If the overheads were downloaded from somewhere (as opposed to self-prepared), they might be subject to a district policy which requires review and approval of supplementary materials. He suggested I check with Connor. (I did — Connor said the overheads were “very homemade.”)
I spent some time on the district and state DOE websites and was unable to find a specific policy regarding parents’ rights to see classroom materials. Such a thing would be helpful, so without going into the current unpleasantness, I’ve dropped a note to the area superintendent asking if such a policy is in place.
Second question: What should I expect by way of report from the principal?
Not a lot, as it turns out. “You probably can’t expect much in the way of a report from the principal, who doesn’t have much incentive to share information with you (and is probably constrained by law, to some extent, in what he can share about employee discipline, in any case). In the absence of evidence for a sustained and serious attempt at undermining the integrity of science education on the teacher’s part, it probably isn’t worth insisting.”
Question #3: Does the fact that the course was not biology make a difference?
Hell (or words to that effect) no, Glenn said. “If Connor’s home ec teacher said the same thing, you’d still be right to be concerned! Moreover, general physical science courses are typically the first (or early) in a sequence of science courses, where ideally the latter courses build on the earlier courses; if the physical science teacher is miseducating students about the nature of science, he is impeding their ability to learn in their later courses (as well as in college science courses).”
Excellent point. I had been inclined to cut Taylor if not a lot of slack, at least more than I would someone showing ignorance in his own specialization. But Glenn is right to note that the damage done to the science sequence is arguably even greater because it can pre-fit students with a warped lens.
And finally: The teacher is now on notice, and the principal knows who to watch and why. Do you consider that a sufficient resolution in this case?
“As noted above, there’s a bit more that you could do, if you were so inclined…But in the absence of evidence of a sustained and serious attempt at undermining the integrity of science education on the teacher’s part, I think that what you’ve done is enough.”
If I encounter this again, there are a few things I will do differently. I’ll cover those next time in the post-mortem. But it’s helpful to hear from folks who’ve seen this kind of thing from every possible angle that I’ve done all right.
