But but but… ETF, you don’t know that he was trying to advocate alchemy. He could, in fact, be referring to vaporizing the lead then passing it through a neutron flux, then passing it through a mass spectrometer to seperate out the newly minted gold atoms, then repeating until all the lead has been transformed. Sure it’ll take a little while - and be the most expensive gold on the planet, but it’s still possible.
Seriously, with the situation in the OP, this is not suitable for a science classroom. Especially since if the bozo teacher wanted to criticize Shrub there are so many legitimate science-related criticisms to be made. Of course, I’ve got a slight issue towards teachers trying to brainwash students anyways. (Asking second graders to pay attention to a Ted Kennedy stump speech, because he’s “your candidate for president” is cruel and unusual punishment, dammit.*)
*Emphasis is Mrs. Louden’s - the teacher in question. She was genuinely horrified that any student in Massachusetts might not want to hear anything a Kennedy might care to say.
Thanks for the link. A mildly amusing clip, nicely tied to the song, for someone who already holds those opinions. Puerile stupidity for someone who disagrees. In either case, hardly likely to sear the souls of the seventh-graders who saw it, but utterly inappropriate for a science class.
It might have been acceptable for a social studies class examining use of the media – public and private – to advance political agendas, though I suspect even then some parents would find it objectionable.
If the teacher was trying to milk some publicity out of showing it and the predictable brouhaha that would ensue, he’s an idiot.
This teacher is just 31 flavors of stupid. It’s discouraging to think that he’s trying to teach science, a subject that’s supposed to be based on rational thinking. Science teachers have (rightfully) been complaining that people have been trying to force them to choose their curricula based on something other than a concept’s scientific basis. The primary objection to the ID brouhaha is that ID is not science. Apparently, this bozo didn’t stop to consider that bringing a political attack into a science class undermines that objection, at least as far as his class is concerned. It certainly can’t help anyone else on “his side”, either.
Today I presented a lesson for a math class on a variant of the card game Casino, suitable for second-graders to play as a way of practicing their single-digit and low double-digit addition facts. I renamed the game “Vacuum Cleaner,” in part to assuage concerns about gambling among the hypothetical parents.
The professor still cautioned us. When she was a middle-school principal, a student had a little gambling ring going on, using a deck of cards he stole from a math teacher (who’d used them in a lesson). The boy’s parents tried to blame the school for providing him with the gambling materials, and apparently it caused a minor scandal.
If parents get offended over the presence of playing cards in a middle school, you can imagine what they’re gonna do over a video repeating teh word “asshole.”
Meh. When one becomes outraged over that, the outrage says more about the person offended than the offense. It amuses me that the basic truth of the video seems to be implicitly accepted both in the article and in this thread. I am especially amused by the suggestion that scientific thinking is neither a skill to be taught nor something that applies across the board to one’s opinions and views of the world.
I often see examples of people who are skilled and educated in one application of critical thought and still have a complete inability to transfer that ability to other aspects of life. A science teacher’s job necessarily includes teaching scientific thinking, because science is not a canon of facts to be inculcated, and assertions that he is there to teach chemistry and chemistry only belies a failure to grasp the importance of science education. If one doesn’t like the video because it doesn’t match one’s ideology and ::gasps in horror:: there are a couple swear words in it, yet fails to make a cogent argument as to why the video is so horrific, or why it was inappropriate, then one is making no point at all. A few minutes off topic is not irresponsible or shirking responsibilities, and the notion that teaching politics should be left to the logic-impaired parents is a non-starter. If one is so afraid of a little video like that, one should meditate on one’s ideological beliefs, because they can’t be well grounded.
I’m skeptical that the intent of the instructor was any more immoral than Massimo Pigliucci’s Great Unicorn Debate. At the worst, one might say that the instructor performed poorly, but we don’t even know what sort of discussion surrounded the video, so that conclusion would be unwarranted. If a video like that can help to generate intellingent discussion in a classroom, where the value of critical thought can be demonstrated and exercised, then damning the instructor is the moral failure, not the showing of the video.
Absent more information about the classroom experience surrounding the video, one can conclude nothing.
It’s a Saturday Night Live joke from a “Weekend Update” sketch. Jimmy Fallon says that creationists now demand dinosaurs be referred to as “Jesus horses”.
