Be Careful of What You Ask For

Does this sound familiar:

I just wish those administrators would get out of my way and let me teach the way I want. Then everything would be just fine.

There was just one thing I forgot. Crazy-assed parents. In the past month I've had 2 parents complain about different lessons I did.

I've been using Kids' Urgent Actions from Amnesty International this school year. Once a month they send us a situation happening somewhere in the world and we write letters to leaders in that country - basically asking them to make sure the kids are OK. It works on their writing - letter writing specifically, geography, current events, history, ethics, blah, blah, blah. It's a great activity.

Oh, on a quick aside...I have way too many kids who don't know how to write a letter. There are a bunch who don't know what a zip code is and I have a few who seriously, don't know their own address...6th & 7th graders. Freakin crazy.

Anyway, I get the latest Urgent Action. It's about what's going down in the Gaza Strip. OK, it's an Israel - Palestine thing. Sticky, but good. The kids should know about what's happening there as what goes down in Israel drives over half of the crap going on in the world today, even though no one talks about it.

But I foresee one potential problem. We have one student whose family is pretty hardcore Jew. That's fine, but knowing how touchy the subject is, I thought I'd be polite and send her the activity ahead of time, just so she can ask questions if she wanted.

Of course the kids waits until the day before I'm going to teach it to give it to Mom, who freaks. She comes back with a letter from Mom. Let's just say Mom was not a happy camper. And in the letter she decided to start detailing all the Palestinians I should call terrorists, etc. Remember, we're just asking the Israeli ambassador to make sure the kids there are OK. No politics.

So I consulted with Mark (the school's director). He actually helped me craft a way to present the issue with the kids that was pretty good...more complete than where I was going.

The parent was also kind enough to e-mail me an article from a newspaper I hadn't heard of before (I'm sorry, I can't find it right now, but it was from Toronto) about Christians in Israel being afraid of Palestinians killing them. Well, my first reaction was "Yeah. Everyone's afraid there." Then I checked out the newspaper and it turns out it's a right-wing rag that has gone into bankruptcy twice and was the one who put out a false story about Jews in Iran being forced to wear ID cards. Of course the lemmings on the news wires picked it up and ran it unchallenged until a week later the original paper had to retract it. But of course no one paid attention to that.

So I did the lesson and I thought it went well. Obviously not. I get an e-mail telling me how disappointed she was etc. I just dropped it. But I did save the letter for my teaching portfolio.

Last week, I had an acquaintance of mine come in as a guest speaker. Joycellyn is amazing. She's been one of a small group of Hawaiians who have taken the US to court about land that rightfully belongs to them...or their families is the better way of saying it. And they've won! But of course the state Attorney General doesn't know what to do about it, because the court's basically telling him to screw rich people.

So Joycellyn came in and talked about her family. She showed a chart that traces her family back to biblical times. She explained how the US Government not only apologized to the Hawaiians in 1992, but admitted that Hawaiians had never given up their land. It pretty much says that Hawaii shouldn't be a state any more. Which is interesting. Peggy called her our best presenter so far.

Well, not everyone agreed. Mark got an e-mail from a parent asking what he was going to do to present a balanced side. Mark sent me the e-mail and told me to deal with it. I professionally told him that he was full of shit. I said professionally. So I guess I was supposed to teach his daughter that it's cool for governments (or corporations in this case) to take land from people before killing them. Mark's reaction was that Dad doesn't want us to teach his daughter anything that she can believe. Am I hearing a call for "intelligent" design?

How come when a parent disagrees with something we discuss in class I'm "indoctrinating" his/her child? No wonder there's so many stupid MF'ers out there. I'm not saying what I know is best...well, I sort of am, but we discuss stuff in my classes. I tell my kids to disagree with me, to check out stuff that we talk about. But to do the same to what they see on TV, hear at home, any place.

My next teaching job, I want to teach orphans.