The Empire Strikes Back
[Continued from When science goes south]
Delaney was all butterflies the morning of the broadcast. I assured her she’d be just fine.
“But I’m talking to THE PRINCIPAL!” she said in mock horror. “In front of the whole school!”
She was secretly adoring the whole idea, we both knew that, but the nerves were no less real. She’d never done anything like this before.
I drove her to school early, then sat in the front office to watch the show on the monitor. After the Pledge of Allegiance (No, Luke — stay on target!), the camera panned to my daughter and the principal.
“I’m here with Delaney McGowan today who won first place in a national contest,” said Mr. Robinson. “This is amazing, Delaney! Tell us all about it.”
“Well,” she said, “I won an art contest.”
Hmm.
I grinned and shook my head. After all that, she called it an art contest. That’s fine, of course — she can call it whatever she wants. But I did think it was a bit odd. She’d never called it that before, for one thing. And I never mentioned Ms. Warner’s phone call to her. What an odd coincidence.
She went on to describe the contest with the kind of engaging, articulate poise she’s always had, but somehow got all the way through without ever saying any form of the word “evolution.” Extremely hard to do, given the nature of the contest. The closest she came was the word “adapted,” which she used once or twice. Again, it’s a non-issue…if she’s choosing her own words.
When she ran off the school bus as she always does, I engulfed her in a hug. “You…were…AWESOME,” I said. “I could never have been so clear and calm when I was nine! Did you think of all that yourself, or did anybody help you with what to say?”
(Subtle bastard.)
“Well, there was one kind of weird thing,” she said. “About two minutes before the interview, Ms. Warner told me I shouldn’t say the word ‘evolution.'”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“Dad?”
“Well…huh. You uh…you did an amazing job, that’s all I can say.”
(I think that’s what I said. It may not have included any actual human sounds.)
“What’s wrong? Something’s wrong.”
“No, nothing, I…well, I’m, I’m, I’m…I’m kind of just wondering why Ms. Warner would say such a silly thing, is all. Why not say ‘evolution’? That just seems weird.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“Didn’t Mr. Robinson say anything to her when she said that?”
“He was out in the hall right then.” Her face knotted up. “But it made me so nervous! During the whole interview, I kept worrying that I was going to say the Word.”
The Word.
Despite my silly graphics in this post — an attempt to keep things from getting too dark — this hit me like a ton of bricks. I’d gone out of my way to keep Laney from getting a negative message about her accomplishment. I’d been low-key and reasonable, and the thing had happened anyway as if I’d never left my chair.
What really hurt was hearing Delaney’s sudden anxiety. My fearless thinker, the one who loves nothing more than a good-spirited tête-à-tête over a plate of theology in the school cafeteria or politics on the playground or current events at the dinner table, who chose freedom of speech as one of the things she’s most grateful for at Thanksgiving, this amazing and unique girl had heard from an educator in her school that one of the great concepts in science was in fact a word she should not use, and by implication, a thought she should not think. Evolution, a perpetual source of wonder to her, had become The Word, a thing to avoid, something vaguely dirty.
Even worse, this woman chose Laney’s moment of excited triumph — of scientific triumph — to display her own likely ignorance of the concept that Laney understands better than most adults in any given room.
Now to fully grasp the complex challenge of that moment for Delaney, a thought experiment: Imagine you’re nine years old. You’ve won the Pillsbury Bake-Off. You are invited to speak to your school principal about it on camera in front of 1,000 of your peers. You’ve practiced what you want to say, over and over. You’re nervous and excited. Then two minutes before you go on, an Authority Figure leans over and says, “By the way: don’t mention baking.”
(Only because the confectionery arts aren’t in the elementary curriculum, you understand.)
At bedtime that night, Laney told her mom something that simply broke our hearts. Mr. Hamilton, Laney’s dynamic and gifted teacher from first grade, a HUGE favorite of hers, had popped into her classroom late in the day. “He said he saw me on the Eagle News,” she said, “but his class was too loud and he couldn’t hear what I was saying. So he wants me to come by his room and tell him all about it some time.” Her eyes watered. “But…I don’t know what I should tell him and what I shouldn’t.”
I hope we’re agreed that this is a very big deal.
I gave myself an hour to calm down, then wrote an email to the principal, still careful with my word choice. For one thing, I was “surprised and disappointed” that this had happened. Why? Because I do not want to waste a milligram of effort defending my tone. “Disappointed” is the go-to word in these situations. If you’re “furious,” the other person stops listening and starts defending. Disappointment says, “I expected more from you, and you let me down.” When someone expresses disappointment in me, I’m mortified and immediately begin trying to make it right. It’s an action word.
I also amended my desire to see Warner slowly strangled with the strings of a thousand Steinways (in the email, if not in the darkest corner of my heart). I made it clear that I was very unhappy and asked to meet with them both, very soon.
As I expected, Mr. Robinson was completely mortified when he heard what had happened. He had not spoken to Warner after our meeting, he said in his reply, “because I assumed that I would be the only staff member discussing the broadcast content with Delaney.” A reasonable assumption. Instead, he had used my input to be sure his interview questions gave Delaney the maximum ability to openly express her ideas. He simply hadn’t counted on Warner taking advantage of the two minutes he stepped into the hallway to push her agenda. There was still only one real perp in this and one clear ally.
No matter how the meeting went, I knew this would make a serious mark on her next performance evaluation. Of course we wanted a whole lot more than that.
We wanted an abject, unequivocal apology from Ms. Warner.
We wanted a school-wide statement explaining what happened and describing the real nature of Laney’s accomplishment.
We wanted Ms. Warner’s head on a platter.
We wanted damage control for Delaney.
We wanted a greatly-reduced chance of this kind of thing happening to another student in the school.
But wants are not the same as needs, and that’s where we sometimes go off the rails. Focusing too much on punishment of the perp shifts attention away from getting changes made and repairing damage. It’s a mistake I have made. It can also put your child in the middle of a struggle between adults in which the original point is completely lost.
Those first three wants would be so satisfying, but we knew we couldn’t allow them to get in the way of the last two.
It was going to be a challenge to keep our heads where they belong — especially when we had such a firm idea of where HERS belonged.
Next time, the meeting. (SPOILER ALERT: it goes well.)
When Science Goes South
My daughter wants to be a scientist. It’s all she’s ever wanted to be. And though she’s only nine, I have a pretty strong feeling she’s going to end up there.
When Charlie’s Playhouse announced an Evolution & Art Contest last fall, she was all over it. Imagine an island with a unique environment. Choose an existing animal to put on the island. Fast forward a million years or so and imagine how the animal would evolve as a result of that environment. Draw a picture of the evolved animal. Awesome.
Soon the sketches were flying. Finally, with just days to go before the deadline, Laney showed me her entry.
“The island has purple polka-dotted trees and bushes and quiet predators,” she explained. “And the only food is hard nuts. So after a long, long time, the monkeys evolve to have purple polka dots, huge ears to hear the predators, and sharp teeth to crack the nuts.”
She might not know an allele if it jumped up and mutated all over her, but her grasp of natural selection outstrips that of most adults. And she got this grasp not through lectures but by observing the results of natural selection all around us, and caring enough to think about it.
I described our approach in Raising Freethinkers (p. 17):
If I’m out on a walk in the woods with my own daughter and we see a deer with protective coloration, I’ll often say, “Look—you can barely see it. What if I was an animal trying to find a deer to eat? That one wouldn’t be very easy to find. And its babies would have the same coloring, so I’ll bet they’d be hard to find, too.”
[Then] imagine a poor adaptation. “Hey, what if it was bright pink? I think I’d have a pink one for supper every night, they’d be so easy to catch.” I step on a twig and the deer bolts away. “Ooh, fast too! I’ll bet I’d have to eat slow pink ones every night. Soon there wouldn’t be any slow pink ones left because I’d have eaten them all!”
When she does eventually encounter allele frequencies, cladistics, the modern synthesis and all the rest, it’ll glide into place on the foundation she’s laid for it. The key for now is to keep her engaged.
Winning the contest didn’t hurt that one bit. She nearly passed out in excitement. We let her teacher know about it, and he showered her with kudos, then forwarded the news to the front office.
Last week we received a call. It was Ms. Warner, an assistant administrator at the school. Becca answered. I didn’t know who she was talking to, but it was obviously good news of some sort.
Until it wasn’t.
When she hung up, she was clearly upset.
“Laney’s going to be interviewed by the principal on the Eagle News” — that’s a closed-circuit TV program that starts each school day — “about winning the Charlie’s Playhouse contest.”
I waited.
“But Ms. Warner said they’re not going to call it an ‘Evolution & Art’ contest — just an ‘Art’ contest. When I asked why, she said, ‘Because evolution is not in the curriculum.’ I said yes it is, it’s in the high school curriculum, and she said, ‘But it’s not in the elementary curriculum, so it’ll just be described as an ‘Art’ contest.'”
The heat started in my neck and spread to my ears, then into my face. Becca began swearing a blue streak. I sat down and wrote the most fabulously profane email of my life to a friend. Venting is good. Not sure if I was madder about the ignorance or the cowardice or the dishonesty — or the fact that this educator was dismissing the truly exceptional nature of what Laney did.
It wasn’t an art contest, you see. Delaney’s accomplishment had been scientific, not artistic. The drawing is dandy, but it’s just a way of expressing her grasp of the science. To have her school — savor that for a moment, her school — not only disregard her achievement, but send her the message that it’s something to be hidden, to be ashamed of…
I know what you’re thinking. Yes, this is Georgia. But as I’ve said before, in the four years we’ve been here, I’ve had far more opportunity to be pleasantly surprised than not. In addition to living in an area even more culturally and religiously diverse than the one we left in Minneapolis, our kids are getting an incredible education in top-ranked schools.
After many years in the national basement, Georgia’s latest science standards are excellent. And when it comes to the teaching of evolution itself, it ranks in the top tier of the Fordham study (see maps) — above Oregon, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Connecticut, and 24 other states.
Science standards don’t have to be in the South to go south. As Lawrence Lerner put it in the NCSE Journal,
although there is a disproportionate concentration of ill-treatment of evolution in the Bible Belt, geography is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for such treatment. Georgia and South Carolina, for instance, treated evolution very well while New Hampshire and Wisconsin did not.
The most relevant anti-science spectrum in the US (and elsewhere) is not North-South, but urban-suburban-rural. The suburbs of Atlanta have more in common with the suburbs of Philadelphia than either has in common with the small towns in its own state. The quality of science education tends to drop in sync with population density.
But that’s on paper. As Ms. Warner and Mr. Taylor clearly show, individuals in the system will do their level best to undercut even the best standards.
A deeply depressing Penn State study released two weeks ago found that only 28 percent of high school biology teachers consistently implement National Research Council recommendations calling for introduction of evidence that evolution occurred. About 13 percent of biology teachers explicitly advocate creationism in the classroom, while 60 percent use at least one of three strategies to avoid controversy: (1) pretending that evolution applies only on the molecular level; (2) telling students it does not matter if they really ‘believe’ in evolution, only that they know it for the test; and/or (3) “teaching the controversy,” which one researcher noted “tells students that well-established concepts can be debated in the same way we debate personal opinions.”
According to the researchers, these conflict-avoiders “may play a far more important role in hindering scientific literacy in the United States than the smaller number of explicit creationists.”
The Principal of the Thing
I like to keep my posts to about 5 reading mins, so last week I posted only that part of the story and promised two more. But the (understandable) outrage began to spread like wildfire in minutes. Since I’m trying to make the case for a certain kind of approach, I didn’t need an online tsunami. So I’m going long today so you can see that it gets better. Then it gets much, much worse. Then better again. But that’s for next time.
I did the whole Mr. Taylor thing by email, which I now think was a mistake. Email lacks tone and visual cues, so it tends to read more harshly, especially in these situations. I decided to do this one in the flesh.
Becca suggested I talk to the principal, Mr. Robinson, rather than Ms. Warner. He’d be interviewing Laney, for one thing. It isn’t about Ms. Warner as such, but about seeing to it that Laney’s accomplishment isn’t misrepresented. Finally, he is among the most skilled, reasonable, and student-centered of the weirdly high number of principals I have known. A likely ally.
I asked for a quick meeting.
I knew that the best approach would be to focus on our shared interest — in this case the students and the educational messages they receive — so I started with the cool fact that a nine-year old girl in his school wants to be a scientist. She entered this contest to demonstrate her understanding of evolution and won. “Sandy Warner called and said you’d be interviewing Laney, but said it would be called an ‘Art’ contest rather than ‘Evolution & Art.’ When my wife asked why, she said evolution was not in the elementary curriculum.”
(I still can’t type that without shaking my head in amazement that anyone would try an explanation quite so obviously silly.)
It’s certainly in the middle and high school curriculum, I said, handing him a highlighted copy of each. If a third grader won a national calculus competition, no one would say, “Dagnabbit, if only that was in the elementary curriculum we could celebrate it!”
“I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not the reason anyway,” I said. “She was trying to avoid conflict. That’s an understandable impulse, but not when it damages the educational environment.” I handed him a summary of the deeply depressing Penn State study suggesting that conflict avoidance is the strategy currently doing the most damage to the scientific literacy of our kids.
Then there’s my kid, and the interview the following day. Among many other problems, I said that Delaney would be completely unable to answer his questions in any terms but evolutionary ones. Even a question like, “So tell me about this monkey” would lead to a description of the three adaptations she devised, since that’s what the contest was about.
He was nodding vigorously. “Absolutely. There’s not the slightest reason for her to hide any aspect of her accomplishment. But the curriculum is irrelevant in any case because…”
Oh my word, he was going to say it himself. Before I could even mount the slam-dunk argument against Warner’s ridiculous attempt, he would say it himself.
“…it’s student-initiated. Teachers have to stay within the curriculum, sure, but if a student initiates a project or has an outside accomplishment, they are absolutely able to talk about it freely without any regard to curriculum.” He explained that he is trying to encourage even more of this, to get the school celebrating outside accomplishments of all kinds to integrate the students’ outside lives into their school life. “This fits into that perfectly.”
See? Principals tend to know things. Actual educational policies. Court precedents. Best practices.
Total elapsed time: 7 minutes.
Now step back a minute and see what happened here. We (GOOD GUYS!) sent notice of Laney’s contest win to her teacher, who thought it was fantastic and submitted it for inclusion in the broadcast. GOOD GUY!
A middle administrator attempted to screw it up (both out of a misplaced sense of her responsibilities and, I have reason to believe, a reflection of her own point of view). BAD GUY!
The principal immediately recognized that the middle admin had screwed up and put it right. GOOD GUY!
Pretty good ratio, eh? But we often take our cue from the one person who did something dumb and respond with a scorched-earth policy that engulfs potential allies and puts everyone in a defensive crouch. Once I do that, they’re only looking to survive the attack. They can’t hear what I have to say, much less see that they have more in common with me than with the perp.
More often than not, the perp is surrounded by people who agree with you that the act was wrong, people who can join you in condemning the act and fixing the problem if you let them.
I’d like to say that’s the end of the story. (Continue to Part 2)
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.)
Evolution & Art Contest for Kids!
Kate Miller, the creative genius behind Charlie’s Playhouse, is sponsoring an evolution art contest for kids. And like everything that comes out of Charlie’s Playhouse, it’s clever and fun.
Kids pick an existing animal, imagine a bunch of them stuck on an island with an environment different from the one they’re accustomed to, then draw the animal after it has evolved to the new conditions. It’s a well-conceived thought problem that underlines the essential principles of natural selection in a fun, accessible way — Darwin’s finches for kids.
Kate has lined up a great panel of judges — Steve Jenkins, author of Life on Earth: The Story of Evolution; Lisa Westberg Peters, author of Our Family Tree: An Evolution Story; blogger Jenny Williams of GeekDad and GeekMom; and cool kids Caleb (6), Izzy (10), and Maiya (9).
Three age categories (4-6, 7-9, 10-12) with awesome prizes for the winner of each.
Deadline for entries is November 15, and winners will be announced December 6.
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.
____________________________________________
*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.
Up the ladder
(Being the ongoing story of a parent responding to non-science in the science classroom. See also Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)
Having given the teacher ample opportunity to put his strange comments in context, and having watched him bob and weave, I moved up the ladder one rung, dropping a note to the principal.
The principal is your ally in this, and s/he will often know that. You both have strong reasons to want non-science kept out of the science classroom. They’re not always the same reasons, and they don’t need to be. I don’t want to transfer my growing irritation at the teacher onto this more receptive set of ears. Instead, I’ll inform the administrator about the situation and be sure he knows why it matters.
Dear Mr. Weatherbee,
I wanted to bring a recent classroom incident to your attention. I was a teacher for 15 years, and my wife still is, so I hesitated before sending this, knowing the aggravation is seldom entirely welcome. But I also know that administrators need to know what’s going on in the classroom, especially when issues of this kind are involved.
Two weeks ago, my son Connor (grade 10) came home puzzled about a portion of the lecture in Harold Taylor’s Physical Science class. Mr. Taylor took the class through a series of overheads, including one that said (in Connor’s words), “Experiments or evidence in the present can’t tell us about the distant past.” Though a paraphrase, this is a common argument of intelligent design advocates.
Connor then quoted Mr. Taylor as saying that this odd claim is “a big problem for the evolutionists,” who have “a lot of little bits of bone but can never really know what they mean.” And so on, at length.
Assuming my son might have misunderstood, I contacted Mr. Taylor for clarification. We had a very polite exchange of emails in which he added another common intelligent design argument: that eyewitness evidence trumps circumstantial evidence, which is quite simply false.
I asked if he might share the overhead in question, and he has not consented to do so.
I am concerned first of all that Mr. Taylor is undercutting Georgia’s excellent science standards, which include clear instructions for the teaching of evolution. I am also unclear why he is addressing a branch of science unrelated to his course and training.
I know that this is a delicate topic. I’m not interested in creating unnecessary difficulties, including for Mr. Taylor — only in helping to ensure that science at Riverdale High is taught in accordance with the carefully crafted state performance standards and the extremely clear mandates of the courts. This includes Kitzmiller v. Dover, which noted that intelligent design serves only a “blatantly religious purpose” and as such does not belong in the science classroom.
Please accept my thanks in advance for your attention to this.
Warm regards,
Dale McGowan
Disinterested in creating unnecessary difficulties, and perfectly willing to create necessary ones. That’s the balance to strike.
My note was sent at 10 pm. Mr. Weatherbee replied at 6:54 the next morning:
Good Morning Mr. McGowan,
Thank you for your email. You are correct that this can be a very sensitive subject but this is something of which I need to be made aware. Please know that my expectation is that RHS maintains its high academic standards and that the state mandated curriculum is being supported in the classroom. Since your email is my first source of this concern, I obviously cannot comment other than to assure you I will investigate this further. If I find that the standards are not being supported, I will implement corrective action to rectify the situation.
Thank you again for sharing this concern.
Sincerely,
Waldo Weatherbee
That’s a very good reply. I thanked him for his prompt response. I plan to give him a reasonable amount of time, then check in to see what he’s found.
We’re not done, but at this point I’ve already achieved most of what I set out to do. Mr. Taylor has surely been shaken out of the complacent belief that he can spin ID-inspired threads in front of a captive audience without consequence. And Mr. Weatherbee now knows who to watch and what to watch for. That’s a win.
While I wait to hear back, I’ll check in with NCSE to bring them up to date and ask a few specific questions. What should I consider an acceptable resolution in this case? What if Taylor flatly denies it to Mr. W? And is it reasonable to insist on seeing the damn overheads that were trotted out in front of my son?
Dear Mr. Taylor (Part 2)
(Continued from Part 1, or start at the beginning)
First, a mea culpa. Richard B. Hoppe of the brilliant Panda’s Thumb blog took me to task for failing to mention (yet) the National Center for Science Education, the premiere organization defending the teaching of evolution in the US. I’ve been a close follower of NCSE’s work for ten years (my funny first meeting with NCSE’s Eugenie Scott is described here) and have a well-thumbed stack of their newsletters and reprinted articles.
My plan was to profile and recommend NCSE at the end of this series. But by leaving it to the end, I give the false impression that my approach comes straight off the top of my head. In fact, it comes from years of absorbing the stories of others and the hard-earned advice of NCSE.
Parents unfamiliar with NCSE should go there FIRST to get tips on responding to challenges to evolution education, suggestions for testifying effectively at a school board meeting, direct advice for a particular situation, and insight into the state of things both nationally and in your own backyard. (Thanks, Richard!)
Previously on MoL: Mr. Taylor, my son’s now-former science teacher, had asked me a common creationist question: wouldn’t you trust the evidence of your eyes more than circumstantial evidence? I answered no, explained why, then asked for a copy of the overhead to which my son had referred.
After three days without a reply, I dropped Mr. Taylor a note:
Dear Mr. Taylor,
I’m guessing my reply to your question about evidence didn’t get through, and I didn’t want you to think I was being rude by not responding. Here it is again (below). Is that the answer you were looking for?
I sure would like to see that overhead when you have a chance so I can show Connor that he misunderstood.
I appended the earlier message.
He answered quickly:
I have been working on a couple of research projects with two chemistry professors at two universities. Like my self they do research but they are both teachers as well. They have not been able to answer my emails to them recently because their school year has started. They are now both extremely busy. As I am.
If you wish to continue this conversation I would like to hear from. Please call me at […] during the evening sometime. Or if you want we could meet some evening in a StarBucks and discuss science and related topics.
Sincerely,
Harold Taylor
I had thought he was unable to effectively respond. I had thought he was unwilling to share his overhead with someone other than a captive high school student — someone who might be able to trace it to the teacher resources available on several creationist websites.
Turns out he’s just busy.
I wasn’t interested in discussing science generally, and certainly not “related topics.” I had made a simple request about something that happened in my son’s science class. I received similar requests from parents when I was teaching, and a prompt provision of context and content was always well-received. Mr. Taylor chose instead to bob and weave, then to faint with busyness.
I am achingly sympathetic to the actual busyness of teachers. Marry one for a while if you doubt that the demands are often impossibly high. But a central part of the job is responding to the reasonable concerns of parents. And despite every opportunity, Mr. Taylor has declined to do that.
I signed off:
That’s very kind of you, Harold. I wouldn’t think of bothering you any further.
If you ever do find the thirty seconds it would take to attach that overhead, I’d be happy for the (pardon the pun) transparency it would provide. Have a good year!
Witty bastard.
So — my son came home with a troubling story of non-science in the science classroom. I responded just as I would if he told me his math teacher called pi controversial or his history teacher insisted that the Holocaust never happened — I asked the teacher to confirm or deny the red flag. By bobbing and weaving, then cutting me off before I could raise the follow-up (about “evolutionists”) that he surely knew was coming, Mr. Taylor essentially confirmed Connor’s account and my suspicions.
Having shown him the courtesy of hearing from me first, I can move on to the next step — getting the principal in the loop. And again, I pause for a minute to wince.
I’ve watched and admired school principals for years. They are busy on a level that would wake Mr. Taylor from his dreams of research in a cold sweat. And a big part of that busyness is a constant stream of outrage from parents on every imaginable issue. I hate to add to that barrage.
But I also know that by speaking up, I am doing the administration an immense favor. Feedback from parents and students is often the only way the administration can learn about malpractice in the classroom. And this particular brand has cost school districts millions in litigation. No sane administrator wants or needs that expensive distraction from the task of educating our kids, so they tend to be extremely responsive to this kind of heads-up — especially since the Kitzmiller decision.
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If you haven’t read the Kitzmiller decision, I’ll have to insist. It’s an incredible document. In clear, gripping, and often frankly pissed-off language, Judge Jones’s decision recounts the legal history of the debate, lays out the stark imbalance between the two sides, and deals an unprecedented blow to future attempts to insert “intelligent design” into the public school science classroom as an alternative to evolution.
Judge Jones — a Lutheran and a Republican, btw — went far beyond the narrow confines of the case. He wanted to give the rest of us somewhere to stand and to rob ID of its time-wasting toehold in the courts. And he did.
No time for 139 pages? Start on page 136, letter H. You’ll suddenly find time for the rest.
Watch the NOVA documentary JUDGMENT DAY: Intelligent Design on Trial
(Next time: Up the ladder.)
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
A tale of two (Southern) teachers
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The teacher was young, hip, and hugely popular with the kids in her Georgia public middle school, a talented teacher in many ways. Everybody wanted Miss Reynolds for seventh grade science.
“You may have noticed in your syllabus that we’re talking about evolution today,” she began one day, a few weeks in. “Now,” she said — I picture the palms out, eyes closed, head cocked, the posture of assured commiseration — “I know this is a controversial thing. But I want you to understand that this is just a theory. There are lots of other theories too. This is just one guy’s idea. M’kay?”
M’kay.
My son Connor was in the class. He was raised on the wonder of natural selection and sees the implications of it everywhere. He felt a bit betrayed to hear a teacher he really liked giving evolution the “just a theory” treatment.
It wasn’t for long. Within days, she was on to something else.
This, it turns out, is standard operating procedure in US classrooms. A NYT article written around the time of the Kitzmiller trial noted that even if evolution is in the curriculum, science teachers nationwide generally downplay, gloss over, or completely ignore it.
Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Alabama recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.
“She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she’d get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it,” he recalled. “She told me other teachers were doing the same thing.”
Dr. Gerald Wheeler, a physicist who heads the National Science Teachers Association, said many members of his organization “fly under the radar” of fundamentalists by introducing evolution as controversial, which scientifically it is not, or by noting that many people do not accept it, caveats not normally offered for other parts of the science curriculum.
It isn’t usually the beliefs of the teacher that screw things up but a desire to sidestep a firestorm from parents. And though opposition is almost entirely religious parents, not all religious parents are opposed. In fact, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education has observed that it’s a non-issue in Catholic schools — at least since John Paul II gave the infallible okie-doke in 1996.
Last year Connor was a freshman in high school and hit Life Sciences and evolution again. Once again it was a teacher he really liked, an affable coach who taught science brilliantly as well. But once again, Connor knew the odds of a strong presentation were not good.
Sure enough, on the first day of the evolution unit, Coach Davis strode to the front of the room, cleared his throat, and said: “Today we’re starting the unit on evolution. Evolution, as you know, is just a theory.”
I can just picture my boy’s eyes, the only part of his face that betrays his feelings when he’s holding the lid on tight.
The teacher paused. “Now,” he continued, “let me tell you what the word ‘theory’ actually means.”
Booyah!
Connor described it to me with obvious relief. “He said a theory is something that explains what facts mean, and that ‘theory’ doesn’t mean something is just a guess. He said there are strong theories and weak theories, and that evolution is one of the strongest in science. He said that gravity is a theory, but it doesn’t mean we’re not sure about gravity. It was awesome.”
According to the ongoing Fordham Foundation studies of science education, it’s not strictly a North/South thing:
But even that map reflects only the quality of state science standards. What happens in the classroom is anybody’s guess. Miss Reynolds and Coach Davis are three miles apart in a state with the highest grade in science standards, yet one of them is hitting it out of the park while the other settles for a bunt. One thing is for sure — by presenting evolution intelligently and in depth, my son’s more recent Southern science teacher is doing better than many of his counterparts, even at the higher latitudes.
It’s not about the defense of the concept for Connor. It mostly just pains him to hear people he likes and respects, and who should know better, saying dumb things. I’ve seen him flash the same disappointed face at me. And half the time he’s right.
Hopefully we’ll both carry away another lesson, something Kurt Vonnegut once said. Considering what a mess of nonsense and bad wiring we are, I don’t get too depressed anymore by the dumb things we say and do. That’s normal. Instead, I’m mostly gratified that we ever get ANYTHING right.
And we do, despite ourselves. Despite the fact that evolution so decisively dethrones us, that it so deflates our mighty self-importance, we still figured it out, and we’re still passing it on. Incompletely and inelegantly, yes. But given the sorry way evolution actually threw us together, I say woohoo.
