How about this: Should people put vague observances as OPs in GD and then expect other people to come along and frame a debate? I say no. Anyone else? 
So you really are terrified that your daughter might become an Atheist?
It’s none of my business of course. It just seems a bit shocking to me. Especially as I HATE the manipulation of children to believe one thing or another. In my opinion you should be happy for your child no matter what she chooses to believe.
Okay, John. Here’s a few to pick from:
Resolved: This assignment is inappropriate in a public school, especially in a freshman English class when the kids have never before had to defend their beliefs.
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Resolved: It is appropriate because the kids have never before had to defend their beliefs but perhaps a bit more guidance would help them do it more effectively.
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Resolved: dropzone deserves to burn in the deepest pit in Hell for helping his daughter learn about evolution.
I could go on but I have to sign off for a while.
When you have to defend something I think you learn more about it. Like your example with your daughter…she didn’t WANT to be pro-evolutionist, she wanted to go intellegent design. But actually doing the research helped to shape her thoughts on what was a vague subject to her before.
I think in that light it was a great excersize. I’m not sure the TEACHER had such lofty ideas though, but the end result might be different than s/he expected.
Oh, most definitely you shall burn. But then, God is the original terrorist and user of WMD (massive amounts of water to flood out all the people and animals because s/he was a bit peeved at the time), so do you really care?
-XT
It does take into account the calendar changes, but I don’t know about the Joshua Incident.
Unfortunately, those liberal creationists often see that difference because they do not understand either micro- or macro-evolution, beyond perhaps the rudiments. Macro-evolution, for example, encompasses the processes and patterns of extinction through time. One cannot therefore categorically state that macro-evolution cannot occur unless one is also prepared to categorically state that extinction does not occur. Further, speciation is often lumped in with micro-evolution. This can cause quite the stir when a creationist admits to accepting micro-evolution…
I have no real objection to the assignment from the OP. As xtisme noted, forcing (allowing…?) students to defend their beliefs is a good thing in the end.
Nope, everybody missed up on this one. There was no Year Zero. At the time Dionysius (sp?) decided to date things from the supposed year of JC’s birth, zero had not yet entered peoples’ awareness as a number or a digit (in Europe, anyway). Most people seem to assume that x B.C. is -x A.D. But the latter x must be replaced by (x-1). So that you get -(x-1) A.D. Or (1-x) A.D.
Immediately preceding the first instant of 1 A.D. was the last of 1 B.C.! The result of this is that any subtraction to get a span of years must include a subtraction of one year. It’s been nearly 6007 years since the Big Day.
Of course, if you still want to celebrate the triple-zero anniversary you may have missed back in 1997, you can take comfort in the fact that Jewish chronology, for whatever manuscript variance reason calculates Day One as 242 years more recent, IIRC.
… Then again, since most of us do not plan to still be around when it’s 2239 or so…
NEVER MIND!
If he’s teaching them to write, at some advanced stage he should teach them to write persuasively, and the difference between, say, a news article and an opinion piece (and how to write both).
BTW, the 6000th anniversary would have been in 1997. No year 0, remember?
Dumb question: In BC dates, are the order of months reversed as well? Or are modern months even applied to ancient dates??
My problem with the assignment as stated in the OP is twofold–
It presumes someone has a defensible belief in the “origins of everything.”
It only gives four choices.
The OP’s daughter was forced to defend a position she did not believe because “I’m tired of people calling me an atheist.” If all the instructor was doing was testing how well the students could construct an argument there were much better choices open to him. And, as Diogenes has pointed out, he apparently did not know what he was talking about anyway and was therefore unqualified to judge how well the arguments were made.
Public school students should not be asked to state, defend, or otherwise discuss their personal religious beliefs. Period. Besides, there is no reasonable way that a public school teacher could grade such an essay.
I don’t exist yet! I KNEW IT!
Speak for yourself, Jack. I, for one, am planning on being around then. The plan just has a few minor details to iron out before I put it into play… 
The students weren’t asked to justify their religious beliefs. They were asked to justify their beliefs (or, I would suspect, to actually defend, not justify) “as to the origins of everything”. Said beliefs may or may not be religious in nature, and if they are, that would serve as a valid justification.
And a public school teacher could grade such an essay the same way he grades any other; by how well the student writes and/or forms a (albeit brief) logical conclusion. Five paragraphs isn’t exactly thesis material, no matter what one may choose to write about.
I disagree-- it would be naive in the extreme to expect that many, if not most students wouldn’t end up discussing their religious beliefs. And creationism was explicitly listed as one of the options.
A logical conclusion based, in many cases, on personal religious beliefs. Public school eachers should not be grading a student’s religious beliefs in any way shape or form.
Well, I disagree with your disagreement. What may or may not be the case in the majority of instances has no bearing on the actual assignment: “what do you believe and why?” (assuming, of course, that such is the essence of the actual assignment). That in many instances such beliefs are religious in nature is not tantamount to the assignment being that each student is asked to justify their religious beliefs. Creationism may well have been explicitly mentioned as an option, but so was evolution.
Moreover, there is no indication that the teacher is advocating any given belief, or that any paper will be marked down for having beliefs contrary to the teacher’s (if such is the case, then the assignment is indeed inappropriate). It is little different than being asked to defend any other position, from politics to environmental concerns, to personal beliefs about the supernatural or the existence of Santa Claus. The actual belief itself is irrelevant to the assignment: the intent is to get students to think about whatever position they take.
Where it the case that the belief is what is being graded, I might agree with you. But one can grade on the content and presentation regardless of the beliefs contained therein. A five paragraph expository essay is a five paragraph expository essay regardless whether it’s about the causes of the civil war or what one believes to be the origin of all things. And they can be graded in exactly the same way: by how well the ideas are presented, by sentence and paragraph structure, by how well the conclusion follows from what preceded it (e.g., one should not reveal new information in the conclusion paragraph, and all that). And I rather doubt that the logic itself is going to be under significant scrutiny anyway.
Didn’t miss it - duly noted the event on the local BBS of King College, where I was then employed. Lobbied ahead of time for some sort of celebration or official recognition of the anniversary (King’s an evangelical Christian college), but nothing doing, sad to say.
[QUOTE]
The OP as stated did not present the assignment as “what do you believe and why” but rather “justify your beliefs in the origins of everything.” Four options were given, two of which were religious (intelligent design, creationism) and the other two were two in name only and actually just one (evolution) Unless every student chose evolution at least some were having to defend religious beliefs
There is no year 0 in the Christian calendar. Thus you are a year early for the 6000th birthday of the universe.
They were asked to “justify their beliefs in the origins of everything.” Never mind that evolution is not a theory of the “origins of everything,” any request to “justify” creationism is ipso facto a request to justify a religious belief. Neither creationism nor ID can be “justified” or defended by anything but religious assertion.
I also think it’s rather offensive that he is auditing children for religious beliefs (and you can’t deny that’s what he’s doing), as well as grading them on those beliefs. It’s all well and good to say that (ostensibly) he is not really grading them on their beliefs but you can’t tell me that at least some kids aren’t going to perceive it that way. The fact that the OP’s daughter is afraid to be called an atheist already shows that the teachers has not done his job in explaining that evolutionary theory has nothing to do with theistic belief.
And it does bug me that he thinks evolution is a theory of the origin of the universe. If nothing else, he should at least get his damn facts and terms straight.
Okay, kids, while I can quote others letter-perfect, I:
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Cannot be responsible for my daughter’s misquotes, misinterpretations, and oversimplifications of the assignment. I did not read it and some comments here are based on her statements that may or may not be accurate.
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Can’t count, which could explain why I ended up at a Land-Grant college instead of Oxford.
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Now know that Lobsang was, indeed, whooshed
65a. Was wrong thinking my flippant opinion of my daughter’s and my future condemnation was so obvious that a whoosh would not be possible.
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Assume no malevolence on the part of the teacher. He probably gave the four choices in an act of frustration as he realized that a room of kids who were recently middleschoolers needed something more cut and dried than he had originally intended and were not accustomed to thinking for themselves. I’m sure the four choices were not cut and dried and I get the impression the assignment grew out of a class discusssion. And as his job is to teach English and baseball I am not surprised he neither understood nor explained the fine points of evolutionary theory. I was an English major once upon a time, too. believe it or not.
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Believe that keyboarding skills should be pushed harder in the lower grades so kids can make a U-turn and rewrite their papers while still turning them in on time as this skill will serve them well in life as well as school.
CXVI. Am a wee bit disappointed my twins are not the BS artists their older sister is, but that is irrelevant to this discussion. Anyway, they have other qualities.
- Am both surprised and not surprised that she would be so concerned about the opinions of her peers. This is the one who screamed a Wife and me that we had ruined her life because we had introduced her to Monty Python and now she was an outcast because nobody else shared her interests. It didn’t stop her from wearing out the book of scripts she got on Amazon (“That was a proof copy, dear. It might’ve been worth something on eBay.”) nor did it prevent her from becoming a massive Beatles fan.
But back to the debate. Was this too heavy an assignment this early freshman year, even in an “accelerated” program that combines English and world history and is so much cooler than anything offered when I was in high school that it makes me barf? If you were in the teacher’s shoes would you have eased them into it by asking them to explain their preference for a particular sport?