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the modern version of witch trials
[Poll #948913]
"The fact that my principal chose door #3 explains why I get called into his office so often," says my fake-big sister Lisa, who teaches English in rural Virginia. According to her, this isn't an isolated incident: there are many people in her town who worry about witches and who might be one.
She reacted to the principal's calling her into his office about whether she was a witch as you, I, and most sane people would probably be hard-pressed not to react: she laughed in his face. He was disapproving of this reaction, since he wanted to have a serious conversation. The end result was she had to modify how she taught The Crucible. What, exactly, was the cause of concern?
Her lesson plan included an interactive internet game in which her students were in a webquest which resulted in all of them being hung as witches, duplicating the manner of the Salem witch trials. Even though they've been taught explicitly how the witch trials worked, and also have read a book about them, her entire class were too stupid to come within miles of grasping the point of this exercise, and instead explained that her "glee" about the entire class being found to be witches meant that she was obviously a witch (since no one else would think hanging was funny).
Of course, this obviously means that the book has also missed its mark, and perhaps the school should look into requiring some alternative reading, such as Harold and the Purple Crayon.
"The fact that my principal chose door #3 explains why I get called into his office so often," says my fake-big sister Lisa, who teaches English in rural Virginia. According to her, this isn't an isolated incident: there are many people in her town who worry about witches and who might be one.
She reacted to the principal's calling her into his office about whether she was a witch as you, I, and most sane people would probably be hard-pressed not to react: she laughed in his face. He was disapproving of this reaction, since he wanted to have a serious conversation. The end result was she had to modify how she taught The Crucible. What, exactly, was the cause of concern?
Her lesson plan included an interactive internet game in which her students were in a webquest which resulted in all of them being hung as witches, duplicating the manner of the Salem witch trials. Even though they've been taught explicitly how the witch trials worked, and also have read a book about them, her entire class were too stupid to come within miles of grasping the point of this exercise, and instead explained that her "glee" about the entire class being found to be witches meant that she was obviously a witch (since no one else would think hanging was funny).
Of course, this obviously means that the book has also missed its mark, and perhaps the school should look into requiring some alternative reading, such as Harold and the Purple Crayon.
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I really feel for her. People often comment on how my line of work (studying to become a special needs teacher for children with multible disabilities, in the meantime working with children who are refugees from other countries and/or from families with a history of abuse and neglect) must be really hard for a teacher - but really, personally I believe teachers like your sister have got a much harder job, because at least with my students, I will never have classes who are supposed to be halfway intelligent and yet turn out to be stupid like that. (Of course, I will probably also never have to teach more or less controversial stuff either, seeing as "Harold and the Purple Crayon" might actually be appropriate reading material for my students...)
I really hope she won't have any more classes of that sort!
Sadly, America is not the only country where that kind of thing might happen, though. I remember that when Michael Ende's "Der satanarchäolügenialkohöllische Wunschpunsch" ("The Night of Wishes: or, The Satanarchaeolidealcohellish Notion Potion" in English) was published in 1989 there were people here in Germany, including school principals, who wanted the book forbidden on the accounts that it dealt with witchcraft and satanism and had human villains and animal heroes... There are stupid, medieval-minded people everywhere.
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I also had a fundamentalist Christian friend in middle school who was forbidden by his parents to read stories, watch movies/tv, or play video games which included any dragons (including, like, The Hobbit and the entire fantasy genre...) because they held that dragons are symbols of the devil.