Tuesday, November 21, 2006

You have to be kidding me about what these turkeys are doing

Can't we just teach without a slant any more?

Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.

Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.

He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.

Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But "what I am trying to portray is a different point of view."

Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme.

Read the whole story at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061121/ap_on_re_us/teaching_thanksgiving

I realize there is 400 years of bad history to deal with, but jamming this much in to a small kid's brain drops to a new low when you throw in standardized testing, it gets really ridiculous.

Saturday, November 18, 2006

Too bad about Bo...

Too bad Bo Schembechler died the day before the biggest day in the history of Ohio State pkaying the Team Up North as his mentor and nemesis Wayne Woodrow Hayes called the Wolverweenies.