For the record...

I cannot believe a student said that! It just goes to show you that conservatives are not interested in facts/history/anything that contradicts their narrow world view.

I would like to think that after that outburst, the student would have not only been expelled, but also escorted to the edge of campus and given a list of fast food restaurants that were hiring.

Never had students who held their hands over their ears whenever you discussed evolution? My bro had one or two students who did that in his bio 101 courses when he taught in Oklahoma...he was flabbergasted.

"but also escorted to the edge of campus and given a list of fast food restaurants that were hiring."

You know, I hate to tell you this, but snobbery aside, there are real human beings who actually have no other option that have work in those joints. Some of them may hail from different lattitudes and longitudes than those that geo reference the ole US of A. My guess though is that this particular student would have a very tough time in any of those environments. Working in such a place might do her a lot of good and teach her some humility as well. Nah, on second thought just buy her a brand new Lincoln Navigator and give her a gas allowance of twenty bucks a week, heh heh!

OmegaMom--There was a piece in the L.A. Times about some Douchebag of Piety--a grown man, mind you--who lectures to Sunday School kids about how to sass their teachers about creationism.

Y'know, some parents actually pay good money to send their kids to etiquette class. Might not be your or my cuppa tea, but it's not an insane thing to do.

No, insane would be parents who send their kids to what is essentially Rudeness Class. It's like these people all came from the Bizarro World.

I got great comments this semester from tons of students that enjoyed the hominid evolution unit in my class. Many of them particularly enjoyed looking at actual fossils (casts, but ya know). One even wrote a paper about how he used to be a fundamentalist, but changed his mind during a freshman anthropology course. Stories like that just warm my heart:)

Actually, my favorite bit was this:

"I don't know where he's getting all of this," she complained,"we never discussed any of this in high school."

????

Um, yeah. We go to college to review the things we learned in high school, because everything important was already covered in high school classes ... For some reason, I never thought to try this in my senior quantum electrodynamics class. :-)

You know, I hate to tell you this, but snobbery aside, there are real human beings who actually have no other option that have work in those joints. Some of them may hail from different lattitudes and longitudes than those that geo reference the ole US

Oh, I know. And in fact, I'm always very nice to people who work in such places, since I realize it's such a shit job. But my point is that the person under discussion here has an opportunity to benefit from a college education, and has essentially come out and said that if any information doesn't sit well with her socio-political biases,she prefers not to know about it. She's coming out and saying that she WANTS to be ignorant. She seems like the kind of person who won't even benefit from college education. Hence working at, say, Wendy's seems quite appropriate for her. Let someone who wants to learn have her space.

Yeah, that was published in Flagpole, our local indie. My wife and I read it today and our response was "What high school did this person go to that didn't teach about the civil rights era?" We're pretty sure that it is a very sketchy, private, religious school.

Of course he doesn't have to listen to whatever it was. He's an adult and has a perfectly good right to leave the classroom at any point, or not to show up in class to begin with.

Of course, he has no right to avoid the consequences of those actions. Specifically, he can't complain that he fails the course exam due to not being able to answer questions about the objectionable material.

I'm amazed that no one seems to have yet pointed out that Abraham Lincoln, who arguably had a fair amount to do with the civil rights history that she was so annoyed about, was a Republican.

George,I did get your point with respect to this particular student's head in the sand attitude about the benefits of higher education. I'm sure you are a decent person and are careful to respect other people. However my point was partly to alert you to the fact that we all have subconcious biases, myself included, and sometimes they come to surface. In any case I concur with your with your general premise. I also think Wendy's is probably too good for her and that scrubbing latrines in a homeless shelter is where she really needs to be. That's just my bias... Cheers!

Argh! @#$%&* where is the grammar and spell checker when you need it? Go to the blackboard and write subconscious subconscious subconscious...

At least in history students have encountered the subject matter previously. In philosophy, most students have never encountered a philosophy course prior to one in university. You can predict the sadness and grief that sometimes provokes ... another one is the elementary logic classes that are "too mathy" for a lot of people.

Apparently a significant number of British physicians consider ignorance one of the top ten "lifestyle" (as opposed to medical) diseases.

We on the other hand seem to revel in our ignorance.

Sad sad sad

I assume this woman is getting an F in the class. She thinks talk about civil rights is supposed to be relegated to some leftwing conspiracy?

Talk about a slap in the face to Rosa Parks, MLK, and on and on and on...

I'm sick of this conservative movement to play the sore loser because history proved them to be so utterly off the mark. They are intentionally tainting the waters so people forget what has really happened, and why it happened. I suppose I should expect it though.

Yep, they grow 'em dumb in Georgia. Not too long ago, a state senator tried to run up a bill that'd ban the teaching of ALL scientific theories because, and I quote, "hearing about evolution all week and the Bible on Sunday confused me as a child." The guy was in his sixties, which was the funniest part of the whole thing. And, of course, our friends in nearby Cobb County and their lovely little sticker. People are proud of it, too, which is what boggles my mind.

Course, my Mississippi education was nothing to brag about. The textbook the school gave us for our class on the Magnolia State's history was printed in the early '60s and called the Civil War "the War Of Northern Aggression". I'm not sure how it's done now, but as late as the early '90s (1993 graduate here) the whole Civil Rights era, as well as the days of Reconstruction and Jim Crow, was basically given little more than a nice glossing over each February and pretty much ignored the rest of the year.

It's almost like Southern white people have collectively decided the whole deal - that is, the screwing over of African-Americans from slavery right on up until Dr. King was shot - wasn't really all it was made out to be, "black people had it better anyway", and even if it did happen to be bad, it was only because of a few nasty white people and not, emphatically NOT an intrinsic part of the culture.

Given how some Creationists like to refute evolution by asking "WERE YOU THERE?", and given how Conservatives have basically politicized all history, I wonder if there are (or some day will be) conservatives who deny that the Civil Rights movement happened? I mean, there are already Holocaust deniers and Slavery revisionists. Are we just one generation away from people who will claim that Blacks always had the right to vote and that Martin Luther King was never killed?

It's almost like Southern white people have collectively decided the whole deal - that is, the screwing over of African-Americans from slavery right on up until Dr. King was shot - wasn't really all it was made out to be, "black people had it better anyway", and even if it did happen to be bad, it was only because of a few nasty white people and not, emphatically NOT an intrinsic part of the culture.

It's rather the same way the History Channel programs aimed at a militophilic audience treat the Vietnam War: very little discussion about the motivations on either side, and lots of talk about how "we respected the enemy" and how we need to honor the sacrifice of the soldiers killed.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, wants to confront unpleasant truths.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, wants to confront unpleasant truths ...

Not quite tue.

The old West Germany manged quite well, and now the ossies are coming to terms with it. The French have woken up to the Algerian war.
Japan .. some, but officialdom won't budge.
Russia - ambivalent - soviet = bad, but mother Russia = good.

The trend in the USA is worrying though.

I'm not a Democrat! I don't think I should have to listen to this stuff!

Meanwhile, back at the bubble:
Bush not Likely to See Gore's Film.

For the record, I had a student tell me that the Civil War was entirely about the tariff and not about slavery.