Sunday Soapbox

My church and many others are pushing this miserable piece of manure laden celluloid.

• I've never liked Ben Stein because he has made a career out of disrespecting teachers.
• When we first had T.V.'s added to our classrooms and started showing Channel One I dutifully took time out of my schedule to let the students watch it. Every school I've worked at has set aside time in one period for announcements and Channel One, the only thing is that announcements usually eat up all the time alloted for this and Channel One is then discretionary on the part of the teacher. About four or five years of watching Channel One and the obligatory disciplinary problems of trying to get the students to stop talking and actually watch the news show, a commercial came on with Ben Stein doing his monotone boring teacher schtick and that was the match that lit my short fuse. I've never bothered with Channel One since. I'LL BE DAMNED IF I'M GOING TO MAKE STUDENTS BE QUIET AND LISTEN TO SOMETHING THAT CUTS ME OFF AT THE KNEES.
• Now Mrschoolissoboring has a Michael Moore documentary style clone trying to prove to everyone that Science is bogus and superstition  is what students need to be learning. He is the last person on this planet to be pushing anything relating to education.
• What next a documentary advocating the belief that the world is flat, the Sun revolves around the Earth, and that the mustard seed is the smallest seed?
• Sophistry has a place in education, the humanities. English, history and electives are tailor made for debating both sides of any issues and students should be encouraged to develop their minds by looking at different viewpoints, but science and math are empirical by nature. You don't debate if 2 + 2 = 4 or the fact that germs and viruses cause illness, and you don't muddy it up with a viewpoint offered by someone who has  intentionally assassinated their intelligence to accept a fundamentalist doctrine intent on conformity instead of learning.
• Adding Creation Science or Intelligent Design to a science curriculum would move our schools back to pre-Sputnick, and the cost to our children and this country as we fall scientifically and technologically behind other countries would be too great to count.
• Last point, if we need to add Genesis with Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden to our Biology and history books, what about every other major religious creation story? Are we to start teaching the Greco-Roman myths as truth? Norse mythology? Hindu? Buddhist? Then the class becomes a comparative religion class instead of science. Science is hard enough for students to learn without all this extra baggage.