It’s fine to have your own personal standards. But you can’t expect the rest of the world to accomodate itself to your standards.
Of COURSE you didn’t watch Backdoor Sluts 9. Backdoor Sluts 7 was the one with the musical numbers.
IRT the OP, I had a fellow student that didn’t want to watch anything that glorified Israel because she was Palestinian. In a years-old Jewish Studies class. With an established teacher who told her she may find it interesting on the first day when he found out. So, the student would dutifully get up, walk out, and go sit in the Dean’s office when the films came on, then come back at the end of class or when one of us texted her (out of guilt, ironically).
Please tell me you referred to the classrooom as the “occupied territories” in those texts 
I had a Cégep-level (post-secondary, pre-university) humanities class about religious foundations of western civilization which I barely remember, but it was clear from the first day that it would be discussing texts from different eras involving the concepts of god(s) and how those affected the development of civilization and how they changed yadda yadda. At first it was Greek and Roman stuff, but sooner or later you hit Judaism and Christianity, and when it was basically pointed out that Genesis was written over a long period of time and has ambiguity/inconsistencies regarding the singular or plural of the word “God” in the original Hebrew…suddenly these two girls burst into tears and ran out of the room because their beliefs were being questioned and attacked or somesuch. It was bizarre. This type of discussion was the entire point of the course, and tearing apart texts of other cultures was perfectly fine, but when it was their own, they were persecuted. I don’t recall them coming back to the course either, so that was a good half-semester lost.
When I was in high school we went to see Hamlet at the Public Theater in New York. I rather suspect that this wasn’t what Shakespeare intended either. No director - theater or movies - is going to produce what Shakespeare intended. If Shakespeare came back and live in our world, and then directed one of his plays he wouldn’t produce what the 16th century version of Shakespeare intended.
BTW, I suspect the already mentioned Titus Andronicus is a lot nastier than any PG-13 movie shown.
The movie restriction thing was strictly enforced by the parents of my daughter’s Mormon friends. They just didn’t get invited to places where the “wrong” movies would be shown. They were willing participants in this limitation as far as I can tell.
But that was junior high and high school. This “girl” (and I use the term advisedly) should figure out that she is now an adult and can be exposed to adult things. Or else, as the first wave of responses noted, she can retreat to a BYU where everything will be nice and safe.
BTW, hurray for the college officials who stood up for academic freedom and the need for students to face opinions other than their own.
Umm, romance novels?
I’m trying very hard to imagine a college journalism course that might be ajudged anti-Christian a priori based on the curriculum/syllabus. Help me out. What courses did he think might corrupt his morals and how?
OK my information was a little out of date. CleanFlicks, the company that used to provide the edited films apparently lost a copyright lawsuit in 2006 and had to stop making them.
The courses he had problems with were the Introduction to Mass Communications and Media Writing courses, which are the first two in the sequence. The Intro to Mass Comm professor showed the movie Thank You for Smoking and required students to follow the news on more than one source; the kid was apparently offended that he had to listen to NPR or watch PBS to get his news, as opposed to being able to rely on Fox News. (FWIW, when I took the same class a few years before, I had to watch Fox News, but I chose to take it as the learning experience it was intended to be.) I think he also had issues with the language in the movie, and I think his particular denomination forbids the use of alcohol.
I can’t imagine for the life of me why he would have problems with the Media Writing course, except that the professor that semester was a woman, and I really think he had problems wrapping his mind around the notion that not every woman wants to be a housewife. (It’s a shit course, so the junior faculty take turns teaching it every semester. That semester, the lucky prof happened to be a woman.) Instead of admitting to his sexism, he framed it as a religious concern, apparently thinking that he’d get what he wanted. He didn’t.
I do not know the professor or what kind of written material she is teaching in conjunction with the films. Two of the five films are North Country and Inglourious Basterds. I do not know the context for them.
When I show a few films, they form the basis for the fourth of a series of essays. Students learn how to use rhetorical modes. They also must discuss many aspects of each film in class. I give them several essay choices as well. They can choose to write about one, two, or three films, and even make up their own topic as long as it relates in some way to some aspect of what we’ve watched.
Here are some of the films shown in English classes that I know of, having spoken to a number of colleagues:
The Silence of the Lambs, Brokeback Mountain, Supersize Me, Bigger Stronger Faster, Shattered Glass, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Little Miss Sunshine, Election.
Some are based on literary works and others are not.
I’ve never understood this idea. There is no inherent virtue in standing for what you believe in. If she had been complaining about librul films (like To Kill a Mockingbird) being shown at her school and complaining to the school’s administration about it, she’d be taking a bold stand too. But that doesn’t make it particularly nobel or inspiring. It just means she’s not afraid of being a squeaky wheel, damn how it might affect others. In some cases, that’s alright (when in the face of obvious injustice, like racial or gender discrimination). But most times, people confuse righteous indignation with being an obnoxious spoiled brat.
If the administration had not had the prof’s back, it would have been unfortunate.
And students who don’t want to dissect animals, but are taking biology? They get no pity from me either. Especially if they are pre-med. Sometimes you have to just bite the bullet and do things that you don’t want to do. That doesn’t mean being a meek sheeple; it just means it’s wise to pick your battles and fight those things that actually make a difference in the long run. If you’re afraid of guts and gore, you have no business being a biology major. It’s like being a physics major and being afraid of math. Does. Not. Work. Go take a chemistry class to fill your science requirement if biology is too “oogy” for you.
When I was in college English, we not only watched rated PG-13 and R rated films (Bladerunner and Driving Miss Daisy are the ones that come to mind), but we read material that was even more graphic. Even in high school, we were reading stuff that was more “adult” than “young adult”. You can’t read great literature without leaving behind the Judy Blume and Amelia Bedelia. Or The Lion King, for that matter. Some people refuse to grow up intellectually because they think being like a child will keep them innocent and pure. But if you’re as faithful as you proclaim to be, then your faith will not be shaken by a R-rated film or a book that has “damn” in it. Pure stupidity, that’s what this is.
Besides which, some beliefs aren’t worth standing up for. In fact, some of them are downright ignorant. Why should I admire someone who stands up for the belief that say, teaching evolution is wrong?
I think this usually comes up in high school, when you really don’t have a choice to take a different class.
I’m reminded of a conversation I had with a colleague who teaches earth science. I asked her if students ever argue with her about the age of the earth. She said no one ever has–yet–and that she would tell them that they can believe whatever they want, but on the exam, the correct answer is (if I’m recalling correctly) 4.5 billion years. She will not accept 6,000 years or 10,000 years.
The point I mean to make with the anecdote is that college students, including the one in the OP, need to stop expecting everyone else to cater to their individual belief systems. Sure, they can drop classes, but with higher ed being gutted financially, that isn't so smart, and it sure as hell isn't worth standing on principle.Every HS is different, but the only class I ever had to dissect anything was in Advanced Bio, which was an elective. The teacher listed the animals to be dissected in her syllabus (which anyone could see before signing up for the class) and was quite upfront that no alternative assignments would be provided.
monstro nailed it. It’s precisely when one’s beliefs are challenged, when there is cognitive dissonance, when learning takes place. This student is foreclosing this possibility, and there’s nothing noble or honorable about that.
If anything, I could see how taking this course, absorbing the concepts, and filtering it through her belief system might reinforce or strengthen her faith. In essence, she’s saying, “My faith is so brittle it can’t bear any challenge from media.” And truthfully, it doesn’t strike me as the point of the course to needle the Mormon faith.
That’s why I reserve the use of the term “accommodate” for those examples when someone is physically unable to perform and needs an alternate assignment. To kowtow to this student would be nothing more than acquiescing to whining, and the fact that people applaud this makes me weep for the future.
We’re actually getting better at not kowtowing to their crap. A hundred years ago, anyone who openly refused to bow down to the dominant religious authority in a region would have been run out of their job at least, and likely out of their place in society. Practically nobody would have stood up for them, especially not the administration of their university. They would simply have been removed and replaced by someone the religious could stomach.
These days, universities can teach evolution, the correct age of the Universe and of the Earth, that the prior racial theories are pretty much bunk, that women don’t have one more rib than men and are capable of living on their own, that homo- and bisexuals are not depraved subhumans, and that a good number of philosophers have raised very difficult-to-answer questions about the existence of the supernatural and the Abrahamic deity in specific.
It’s getting better.
You’d be surprised. When I was a TA in grad school and taught multiple sections of general biology, you could always count on one or two per section to pop up. They’d go through the act of retching and fainting and crying about the fetal pigs or the frogs or whatever it was we were dissecting (funny, though, they never complained about the crayfish or the earthworms, just the “cute” animals). If they are bio majors, they need to buck up and stop playing around. If they are taking the class as an elective, they need to drop out and take another one because apparently biology is too tough for them.
I remember TA’ing for a field ecology class. We were on a field trip and the professor instructed one of the students to simply touch a tree to get a feel for the bark. She was too scared! After the professor yelled at her to touch the goddamn tree for goodness sake, she did. But it still made me think WTF.
monstro – was it an OCD thing? That’s the ONLY reason I can come up with for refusing to even touch a tree. Jesus.
Well, like I said previously, at my school they had a virtual dissection program that students could use (which would probably be less expensive in the long run), for Bio I. I don’t know if that counts as an “alternative”, though. It too was an elective.
I had a chance to dissect something twice when I was in grade school (either 7th or 8th) – a grasshopper and a crayfish. But since this was a Catholic school and the specimens were so expensive, we had to take a test in order to QUALIFY to do so. I failed the first one for the crayfish. The second one I passed…but ended up getting sick on the day of the disection. Go figure. (I didn’t really have anything against dissection per se, it just happened to work out that way)
I mentioned something like this on the Dope a few years back. Some students in my religion class got belligerent when we started to investigate how the Bible was written and edited and by whom. I don’t fully understand what religion they were, or how they thought the Bible came to be, but they were horrified by the tame, well-known stuff.
WAG without knowing more, but this may be a case of pure ignorance. If she’s had a particularly strict upbringing, she may truly believe that her parents or church forbidding her from watching PG-13 movies is enough anyone would need to provide her an alternative. If she hasn’t spent much time in the public school system, maybe she just assumed her religion would be accommodated. I think it’s fully possible to do the work and get the marks to get into college without much socialization or observance of theories in practice.