Sunday School Science Teacher Costing Schools Credibility and Cool Half-Million

Remember this guy?

Creationist John Freshwater, branding kids for Christ while on the public payroll as mild-mannered public school science teacher. . .

(Evidence of the monstrous harm done when kids are taught alchemy, that leaden lies can be transformed into golden truth, if only you believe hard enough and get a bunch of other people to believe it too?)

But wait, there’s more! This true story keeps getting less believable and more costly as the hearings drag on and his attorney plays games.

Freshwater is expected to be the last direct witness in the hearing that has been held, on and off, over about 14 months and has cost the school district more than $500,000 in legal fees. Rebuttal witnesses might be called in coming weeks.

The latest plot twist being reported this festive Christmas week is that Freshwater taught his creationist ideology as science not just with cool magnetic lab equipment, but by rigging “experiments” to exploit the awesome intelligence built into playful, wholesome, trustworthy kid-magnet Legos — sacrilege!

Freshwater described using Lego blocks to show that cars, buildings and other structures cannot build themselves.

I beg to differ.

Did you know the word “lego” is a creative fusion of the Danish words leg and godt, which my playful mind notes with glee, literally means “play well” and not the seemingly obvious “shin and calf of deity” that an illiterate literalist might insist on imagining is factual?

. . .[Celebrating Legos] gave me a gift too, a story with power to play with in the real world, imagining how all the elements of man’s myth and reality can connect to build the most wondrous cities . . .Legos are limitless fishes and loaves in every room of OUR house, how about yours?

Freshwater’s religion belongs in his church and if he wants to get paid for teaching holy truth to kids who want to learn it, that’s fine too. Let his church put him on the payroll, not the school district. As for what my own children are learning, the true meaning of intelligent design taught through Lego power of story was found under our secular Christmas tree by unschooled and unchurched Young Son.
On a t-shirt of course.

Please know the message war is not just about “science” class any more (never really was, you knew that, right?)

So forget curriculum; today’s lesson is education by t-shirt. And if you and yours are on holiday from dogma and curriculum, at least this week if not permanently, then please enjoy this intelligently designed gift together free from church or state politics, the gift that truly keeps on giving:

Cobbling Together the Best Real Learning We Can

Political Power of Story in Smacking, Hitting, Punching

Matalin to Palin: Quit Bitching, That’s Just How The GOP Treats Its Women

If someone isn’t in tears every day, that day wasn’t all it could be advancing the campaign. I once witnessed an experienced (big) man slap a professional female colleague across the face over an ad buy… and no one thought anything of it, starting with the woman. In fact, she would have been insulted if anyone told her she should have been insulted.

. . .the reason the modern GOP mindset is broadly accepting of the physical brutality Matalin shrugs off so easily, is the work of child psychologist / reactionary Christian leader James Dobson. Nearly forty years of Dobson’s abusive child-rearing strategies have produced a modern far right wing filled with smacking, punching authoritarians who learned from childhood that might alone makes right.

Legitimizing this mindset depends on enablers like Matalin, who extend the aura of civil acceptability toward violence against women and co-workers. When this violence persists, we should remember who “thinks anything about it” and who does not.

Snooking on smacking as effective:
Can you go all day without hitting a child?:

Can anyone really deny that we are perpetuating and endorsing the lesson of “might makes right” when we rule over our children using physical punishment?

Stop every kid-hitter you can — teach ‘em a lesson!

Thinking about hitting and children

Child abuse is not home education:

Spankings were a minor part of the allegations. Hitting with objects and . . .in anger, yes, but there is much more to this
story than that. . .

Fear of fashion and it’s not even a man-purse!

[S]chool policy doesn’t have to be about religion–much less Christmas–to be soulless . . .
Sooner or later, unthinking policy at school or home–from labeling children to make them tolerant of differences, to hitting children to make them stop hitting, to clipping their wings to teach them to fly–achieves its own natural consequence, a new unthinking norm, normally to the detriment of the very children the stupid rules are meant to “save.”

Is your love for your kids controlling?

JJ’s Got a Naughty and Nice List

It’s a good thing I am not in charge, she muttered darkly . . .
Most public figures* including everyone with more money than morals would be in BIG trouble this year!

Although I heard Andre Agassi* answering some questions after a speech on NPR today and he makes the Nice list regardless of his clueless youthful excess, for honesty and modesty and public service and decent fatherhood, having reached his senior emeritas status.

Congressional Christmas List: Stop Child Abuse at School

Congress isn’t always the enemy and bipartisan help for people in need isn’t always a cruel joke:

Across America, children are restrained, confined in seclusion rooms, and subject to aversive interventions. Roughly half of all states have little or no legal protections against restraint and seclusion in school. In several states, efforts to pass laws and adopt regulations have failed.

On December 9, 2009, the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act, HR 4247 was introduced by Congressman George Miller (D-CA) and Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). A companion bill was also introduced in the Senate by Senator Chris Dodd and is numbered S 2860.

This issue of the Special Ed Advocate contains a comprehensive overview of the proposed legislation in a new article by Jessica Butler, Esq. You’ll find the provisions of H.R.4247 and will learn about the safeguards in the bill, what is prohibited, how it will impact children with disabilities, and the requirements for compliance and data reporting.

Please don’t hesitate to forward this issue to other friends, families, or colleagues. . .

Holiday Fun in TV Family Dys-fun-ction

Favorite Daughter and I have been watching Christmas movies, lots of them. Hilarity ensues. We grade them by a complicated and quirky power of story checklist we’ve developed over years of good, bad and ugly Christmas film fiction fare.

The other night we sat up late to wallow in a recorded made-for-tv movie that promised to be a twist on It’s a Wonderful Life, where a mom sees how differently her life could have turned out if she literally had been someone else by building her life on different values and choices, called Holiday Switch.

But for us, it was a moral morass and no one deserved a visit from Santa, much less a Christmas Angel to magic away their misery and make their dysfunction fun. Unlike the Cratchits or Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, who were just as fun and functional rich or poor, this woman was dysfunctional rich or poor! What a pill she turned out to be. We were so annoyed after sitting all the way through it that we’ve nominated it as top rival to our Worst Christmas Movie Ever:

From FavD’s 2007 review of “One Magic Christmas” –

This movie features Mary Steenburgen as a desperately poor mom at the end of her rope with two guilt-ridden children and an emasculated out-of-work husband. Needless to say, they can’t afford a merry Christmas. Enter Happy Christmas Angel to show them how much they love each other! Right? Well, almost.

The angel, a hangdog Harry Dean Stanton in a trenchcoat and fedora which make him look just like the polygamous cult leader I always think of him as, is not exactly Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life.

Harry decides that the best way to make Mary appreciate what she’s got is to magically disappear what little money there is in the family bank account. As you may imagine, this turn of events only makes Mary more shrewish, snapping at her kids, screaming at her useless husband, and generally raging at God.

Since she failed to respond to this brilliant tactic, the angel magics a bank heist next to Mary’s work. Mary’s husband gets shot, and the robbers try to run away his car, in which the kids were waiting. The robbers drive the car into a river in their haste, drowning the kids. Yes, you read that right: the Happy Christmas Angel just killed Mary Steenburgen’s entire family in front of her.

Feeling jolly now, Mary? Are ya?

Ho ho ho. . .
Let’s put more bourbon in those bourbon balls next batch, shall we??

But at least that’s all just made-for-tv dysfunction. Real social and economic dysfunction delivers no holiday fun despite its spelled center, and there’s no honest-to-god redemption at the end of a real greed and exploitation story for the rich OR the poor — not even on Christmas Morning.

C.S. Lewis once explained power of story as real, writing about his friend’s

Latest Palin Lies Exposed: The Aunt Was a Peacock

Couldn’t resist the scholarly book pun, for yet another Republican/conservative calling out the ridiculous Sarah Palin for her self-aggrandizing and self-serving public lies. The original Ant and the Peacock is about complex and nuanced scientific truth. Want to lay odds about whether she’s read it? (I have.)

And speaking of Sarah Palin and science thinking, she who claims that God has everything planned out for her and wanted her to run for vice-president (and wanted her son off to war, her daughter pregnant, sister divorced etc etc?) — what a fitting exemplar of the effect discussed in this next story, frisky cock of the snook to Daryl via PZ Myers: divining the divine mind is really about probing the echo chamber of one’s self, how Dan Brown! [see chapter 118-133 note at link]

Epley’s research calls the worth of this counsel into question, for it suggests that inferring the will of God sets the moral compass to whatever direction we ourselves are facing. . .

The brain scans found the same thing, particularly in a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that’s been linked to self-referential thinking. . . The three images below show the differences in brain activity between the three tasks and you can see that the ‘God’ and ’self’ scans had little to distinguish them. . . . many people, from Rousseau to Twain to Voltaire, are credited with the line: “God created man in his own image and man, being a gentleman, returned the favour.”

Epley’s results are sure to spark controversy, but their most important lesson is that relying on a deity to guide one’s decisions and judgments is little more than spiritual sockpuppetry. . .

Is Cheerleading a Sport? Don’t Answer Too Quickly

In keeping with the sports-is-to-politics foul play analogy of my last post: Is cheerleading a sport and why should it matter?

And can we adults think that through logically and meaningfully, answer with integrity and fairness to all students both boys and girls, cheerleaders and football players or not, instead of competing like warlords to score the most money never mind the human or social costs, as the insurance companies do? My state’s high school athletic association apparently can’t –

. . .Cheerleading, you see, is deeply embroiled in gender politics, and given the demographics of college attendance, cheerleading is surely going to remain a flashpoint.

It all traces back to Title IX, the 1972 law which mandates that, in sports, athletic representation on campus must mirror student enrollment. . .

. . . the Florida High School Athletic Association wanted to make substantial reductions in all sports except two: football and cheerleading. . . by claiming that football, like cheerleading, was a co-ed sport because, of the thousands of football players in the state, three were girls.

Not surprisingly, this bizarre logic didn’t fly. A federal lawsuit forced the association to accept a settlement to apply cuts equally across the board to all sports. Most cheerleaders, of course, are female.
. . .two-thirds of all catastrophic injuries to females in high school and college occur in cheerleading.

And so, if cheerleading can be accepted as a legitimate sport instead of just as an “activity,” then colleges can eliminate another, more traditional, more expensive women’s sport. In this way, male-dominated athletic departments can

Do Media Refs Do This Too? It Would Explain a Lot

If “winning” and not good governance is all the most vicious partisans care about, their political game plan would look just like the Illini’s foul play and it would work out for them, especially on tv. A theory with excellent predictive value!

ESPN dot com
November 23, 2009
Associated Press

They don’t all need glasses. But if you always suspected basketball referees are biased — well, you’re right, according to a couple of professors who’ve studied the matter.

Refs favor the home team, the academics say. They’re big on “make-up” calls. They make more calls against teams in the lead, and the discrepancy grows if the game is on national TV.

The professors studied 365 college games during the 2004-05 season and found that refs had a terrific knack for keeping the foul count even, regardless of which team was more aggressive.

Exhibit A:

The Liar, The Witch, and the KKK’s Wardrobe

Sarah Palin’s presidential-ambition-blessing pastor was a real, literal witch-hunter and witch-persecutor.

No joke.

Now comes another no-joke witch story, one I saw earlier today in the Chronicle of Higher Education weekly round-up by Don Troop, under the irresistible and accurately newsworthy headline, “The Liar, the Witch and the KKK’s Ridiculous Wardrobe.”

(Just ask if you want to know more about the Liar and the Wardrobe*.)

A woman who sued the University of Nebraska saying the school fired her after learning she is a witch has agreed to settle the case for $40,000.

The university made the offer “solely to compromise the claim … without admitting the validity of plaintiff’s contention or any allegations of wrongdoing by the defendants. . .”

Jane Doe said she took a job with the university in 2007 directing a youth program. But an associate dean terminated her, despite her satisfactory performance at work, after learning she was a witch and her religion was

Religious Left Emerges, Religious Right Erodes

From my hometown newspaper this morning at the heart of Gator Nation, in the South! — even though it’s something I can be proud of this time rather than apologize for, like what passes for good communal citizenship just down the road from UF, in a giant corporate enclave of relatively wealthy, morally pious old folks called the Villages.

UF study: Religious left emerging to oppose right

Research shows growing influence of liberal Christians in politics.

By Nathan Crabbe
Staff writer

A new University of Florida study finds the religious left is emerging as an alternative to the Christian right.

Gainesville can be seen as a leading indicator of the trend. Faith-based liberal activism has long been a community tradition, from advocacy for the homeless to protests of executions.

“This is a town where there is certainly a religious left,” said UF political science professor Ken Wald, who collaborated with two other researchers on the study.

The research found that Christians who value being active members of a religious community tended to vote for Democratic candidates in 2006 and 2008. The research contradicts the “God gap” theory that white religious Christians are conservative and likely to vote Republican, Wald said.

He said the religious left is becoming more influential with the election of Barack Obama and his experience in community organizing and expansion of a White House office on faith-based initiatives. At the same time, Wald said, young evangelicals are placing more emphasis on traditionally liberal issues such as addressing climate change.

“I think you’re seeing the religious right erode a bit, and at the same time the religious left gets more aggressive,” Wald said.

In case you weren’t riveted to Snook’s comments this weekend, a discussion of Catholic homeless and soup kitchen services sprang up here, debating the social effects of believing in the higher moral authority of “church doctrine” that would refuse help to those living in sin. This story adds texture to

Speak Up When Pro-Child Politics Are Attacked as Anti-Parent

Here we go again. Families, child-rearing and home education publicly
stereotyped as conservative extremism and anti-human rights, sigh. If
you parent and/or educate children and don’t fit this stereotype, make
your voice heard too. Don’t let this define your principles.

Parental rights rally on Washington planned: Your stories needed!
November 11, 11:01 AM
by Lynda Ackert

The Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by the General
Assembly of the United Nations on the 20th of November 1989. As part of a celebration, internationalists backing this UN Convention have
declared November 20th of this year as ‘Children’s Day.’

In response, ParentalRights dot org will rally in Washington, D.C. on that day. The rally will be held at the U.S. Capitol from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., on the East Lawn across from the Rayburn House Office building.

Speakers during the rally will include Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Sen. Jim
DeMint, the lead sponsors of the Parental Rights Amendment; Gerard
Robinson with Black Alliance for Educational Options; William Estrada of
Homeschool Legal Defense Association; Dean and Julie Nelson of National Black Home Educators; and Steven Groves of Heritage Foundation.

Whether you homeschool or not, parental rights have been and are
continuing to be under attack.

Want your voice heard? ParentalRights.org wants to hear from you. If you have experienced any assault or threat to your parental rights, make your story known by emailing ParentalRights. . .

Homeschooling is a parental right…Let’s keep it that way!

Source: ParentalRights dot org

For more of JJ’s thoughts on the UN and this political meme setting up “parental rights” in opposition to child and human rights, start with:

Homeschool freedom fighting: It’s so not about the UN

Parental Rights and responsibilities: Parenting sex and parenthood

Latest Homeschool Freak-out from World Net Daily

Tough case: Church v State for the life of Daniel Hauser

Capitol Hill Mad Hatters Show Up for More Tea Partying

Tea Partiers Hit Capitol:

They arrived as early as 8:30 a.m., by bus, car and plane — from Bluffton, S.C., Des Moines and Dorris, Calif. — to rally with conservative lawmakers and possibly roam the halls of Congress.

“Can you hear us now!” they chanted from the foot of the Capitol, as they awaited the arrival of their heroine — [Michele] Bachmann.

“She’s very brave,” said Nancy Holmberg of Dorris.

“Palin/Bachmann 2012,” came a shout from the crowd. The crowd is also chanting Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s name and demanding that she come address them on the steps of the Capitol.

. . . Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) shook hands at a wall line like a presidential contender.

“This is too great,” he said.

Btw I heard this fellow Rep. King, on MSNBC this morning hyping the event. He specifically said it was a show of force meant to make moderate Democratic reps “more afraid of their constituents than they were afraid of Nancy Pelosi.”

Well, okay. At least we’ve now clearly established in your own words that the Republican goal is not good governance but FEAR. Now we’re just haggling over the price . . .