The experiment is great. What an apt lesson in life!
Worry about the woman’s religious beliefs only if you doubt your own ability to influence your children’s thinking. Otherwise, don’t give it another thought. There’s nothing wrong with a teacher declaring his/her personal preferences in reading material.
If the teacher wanted to teach science, after the toothpaste lesson, she could explain the concept of entropy. Toothpaste inside the tube is more ordered than out. It takes additional work to return to the ordered state from the disordered state.
“Teacher, can I borrow your scissors?” Cuts end off toothpaste tube, puts toothpaste back in.
(Or, smartass method) How to get the toothpaste back in the tube:
Buy two identical tubes of toothpaste. Be sure the brand has an old-fashioned twist-off cap, not the flip-top style. Use one up as you would normaly, but don’t throw it away when empty.
Cut the very end off the twist-off cap
Thread the cap 1/2-way onto both the empty and full tubes, connecting them.
Squeeze all the new toothpaste into the old tube
Squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube
I won’t debate the place of religion in the classroom, but shit, can’t we educate a few engineers once in a while?
I think that it was a visual lesson that will stick far longer than “Be nice, children!” Kids can be mean little buggers and if something actually gets them to think and remember that actions (or words) have consequences, that’s a good thing. The spelling and punctuation, OTOH, is not. How is she supposed to teach English if she doesn’t have a fair grasp of it herself?
As for the bible, since it seemed to be part of a mutual “Getting to know each other” exercise, I wouldn’t be too worried.Was she supposed to lie to be politically correct?
StG
Originally posted by fessie:
A great thought. Perhaps that is exactly what she was up to. And I applaud that, absolutely.
Originally posted by Slithy Tove:
Okay, I know that was a bit tongue in cheek, but … I actually agree. Another thing that is driving my concern is that the school adamantly refuses to meet my son’s intellectual needs through any added/advanced coursework (I’m not imagining his intellectual capacity; the kid tests at 99th percentile on nearly all of his standardized tests). This teacher is infantalizing the kids in a few ways I won’t go into here (I’ll just say “stuffed animals for 4th graders?” and leave it at that) and I fear her emphasis on “morals” reflects her personal comfort zone (since as an activist Christian, she has, I trust, spent a lot of time thinking about ethical and moral situations), whereas my son has memorized the Dewey decimal code for physics so he can more quickly find the science books he inhales. I’m not saying “oh, he likes science, so his teachers should never address social or ethical issues.” I’m saying I want him to have a teacher whose primary focus is academic, and I’m afraid that may not be what he’s getting here.
Originally Posted by Dung Beetle
If I’m losing you because you don’t see the errors, believe me, “privilege” is not spelled “priviledge” and you have a certain number of “brothers and sisters,” not “brother’s and sister’s.”
If you wonder why I felt compelled to mention it, that’s legit, since I’m supposedly talking about whether her religious beliefs will have an unhealthy influence on her teaching, not her ability to punctuate. I just couldn’t resist, is all.
I had a job interview where as an ice breaker, we shared our favorite authors (I was interviewing for a position as a librarian, similar questions are common, although usually the information flows only from me to them). One person shared that his favorite author was “God”–because he doesn’t really read fiction. It’s a hard response to follow up on, even as a Christian.
Although, there is a difference between “my favorite author is God” and “my favorite book is the Bible” and I don’t really see much harm in the teacher responding to her own question the way that she did . . . even as I’ve been guilty of trying to figure out answers to similar questions which are mostly honest and yet give the impression I’m want people to get.
I still don’t get why revealing that the teacher is Christian is supposed to ‘change our feelings’ about the toothpaste demonstration… What’s the connection there?
Also, the toothpaste tube is a well designed tool. The funnel at the end guides material in one direction. The tube itself encloses the paste and allows force applied to the tube to be transferred to the entire contents of the tube equally, with the opening the only direction in which the paste can move.
Working from the outside would require additional tools to do the work of the tube with its funnel. You’d need another funnel and a means of applying force to the paste while containing it, such as a spoon or plunger. Entropy would mean that, even with the tools, you wouldn’t get all of the paste back in. There would be some mess left over.
But the main reason you can’t get the paste back in the tube is that you have a tool helping you get it out and no tool helping you get it back in. Moral - always use the right tools for the job.
If he’s already fast-tracking his science education on his own (maybe with your help?), then a touchy-feely socialization teacher might be a GREAT thing for him right now. This teacher may not have the skills to push him academically, but there’s a whole lot else he could learn.
There’ve been a zillion threads here saying “Sure, I was smart as all get-out, but I didn’t have social skills, and therefore I was miserable/didn’t get as far in my career/can’t get laid now/etc.”
That’s not to say he should be utterly bored. You say the district isn’t supporting your son’s needs - have you spoken with this teacher about your concerns and desires for him? Or is there some way to circumvent the school system entirely in order to quench is thirst for knowledge, maybe by having him volunteer in a science museum or in some kind of lab? Any open-minded professors available?
Slithy, this is beautiful. May I borrow it for a story sometime?
Why did I have a feeling the spoiler box was going to say something about 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and evolution? Just m, I guess…?
Oh no! I meant, I had no problem with the toothpaste thing, I’m a little worried about the Christianity thing, and next you tell me she can’t spell? Now I’m ready to fire this lady. 
Wouldn’t a better memory be the one where Ramona gets bored and squeezes out an entire tube of toothpaste in the sink, pretending to make a birthday cake?
And count me in with those that thinks it’s a fine lesson. You don’t have to be religious to know that words can hurt, and you should think before you say something.
I know that I’ve read recently that the toothpaste-in-the-tube analogy has been used by whacko abstinence-only “sex ed” programs to show young women that they can never reclaim their virginity once they give it up.
Here, I found something about it on somebody’s blog:
*In situations like that, most of the youth pastors I knew did “object lessons” like this one: you give each of two or more teams a tube of toothpaste, and you tell them that the object of the game is to get all of the toothpaste out of the tube. Once the tubes are empty, you give them all toothpicks, and tell them that the first team to get the toothpaste back in the tube wins. They try for a while, and eventually concede that it’s impossible. And then the youth pastor says, “Aha! And that’s what losing your virginity is like; once you lose it, you can never, ever put all of that mess back in the tube.” *
That was great. I’ve always wanted to do that.
I found the “experiment” a little glurgey. I’ve always disliked these lessons where something intangible is related to food or weather or animals because the comparison is so arbitrary. I mean, you could say that saying words is like toothpaste, but does that invalidate the whole comparison if you are able to put the toothpaste back in?
Zoggie - Well, you’re able to apologize for hurtful words, too. But that doesn’t make everything back to the way it was before.
StG
See, this is what bothers me about these analogies. Anyone can come up with an image and then apply something (virginity, hurtful words) to it. I think an even more important lesson here would be learning to question, to say, “Uh, wait…how is toothpaste like words/virginity?”
Saw a similar ‘demonstration’ on the Penn & Teller BS program about abstinence, only it was with a piece of flash paper (‘virginity’) and a lit match (‘raging fires of passion’). Oh, how clever. All it does is teach kids to be tolerant of sloppy thinking. (The conspiracist in me wonders if that’s the point.)
I don’t have much to add about the object lesson–I think it was fine–but if you’re looking to supplement your kid’s science education at home, I can email you some resources to look into. And, remember that everyone says nowadays that one of the primary aims of school is socialization–the days of “We are not here to socialize, young ladies!” seems to be over.
I’d be VERY concerned about the Bible thing, but not the toothpaste thing.