Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
There is no "Lord's time" in public school. Unless this is a Catholic or otherwise Christian school, you need to keep YOUR religion out of it, too, lady. I don't think some people realize how hypocritical they are.
She'd be hypocritical only if the curriculum/teacher forces non-Christian students to write that Jesus is God, a non-Christian objects, and she won't empathize with the objecting parents.
I haven't read the entire thread so I don't know if this has been stated before, but if you really want to practice calligraphy you should be writing shufa - Chinese calligraphy. That is a centuries old art form.
El Nox
All in good time - maybe when they get to China in the geography course. That's assuming that they're still using the same curriculum worksheets, & the same teacher is in place in the course.
& of course, the practice of calligraphy wasn't the point of the exercise on Islam anyway. It was more of an esthetic exercise, IMO.
... however I do wonder why learning this difficult calligraphy is necessary. I find it completely useless. They can learn more about the headscarf and Koran itself than they can in having to copy the calligraphy...
I cut this out of the middle of your excellent post because it needs to be re-emphasized that this class was a GEOGRAPHY class, not an ART class. Maybe "LaPort" is not a moslem name ... but the actions sure look that way. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... it must be a COW.
If they are simply teaching Arabic calligraphy, why not use a phrase like "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog"?
The class probably has to learn the 5 Pillars of Islam. What she had to write is one of the pillars. Two birds with one stone ? Writing Arabic and learning a pillar.
Back to the topic., Why are people not upset when kids say the Pledge Of Allegiance? One nation under God? Really? Not everyone in the U.S believes in God but that's ok to push on kids? Double standards. Religion & Politics have NO place in school people need to understand this!
If you look up the history/evolution of the Pledge, you'll see that Congress has put its fat fumbling fingers on the text various times. under God - was added in the bad ol' 1950s, as a jab in the eye of them nasty Commie atheists & their Godless heathenish ways. (Or to conflate Capitalism & God & the US, depending on which source you look @. Wikipedia has a nice article - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pledge_of_Allegiance)
Pretty sure its been pointed out already that nobody wants schools to teach their kids a religious anything. Calm down ffs, no need for a jihad.
Yah, public schools in the US, anyway. Private & parochial schools, & homeschooling, are - of course - entirely different critters. The parochial (R. Catholic) schools were set up to avoid the Protestant-tinged flavor of the public schools as they existed then.
She'd be hypocritical only if the curriculum/teacher forces non-Christian students to write that Jesus is God, a non-Christian objects, and she won't empathize with the objecting parents.
I think it's funny that she's objecting so strongly (she hasn't sent her kid back to school yet and says she will take this to the Supreme Court if necessary) to her kid learning a little about Islam and writing some calligraphy, but then goes on to be quoted in the article talking about "the Lord's time" in school. Come on. There is no Lord's time in a public school, whatever that even means. Public schools are supposed to be secular. Kids aren't praying, they're not attending a mass or other religious observance, they're not discussing how Jesus parted the Red Sea or multiplied fish to feed a whole population. All I'm saying is there is no "Lord's time" at all in that school and to me, her saying that after complaining up and down about some Islam is just funny. She's an idiot IMHO.
Sorry, but I'm a moderate, not so religious Catholic from NJ (I am a Republican but socially more liberal on a lot of issues) and I think she just sounds like a hypocritical idiot. She was fine with her concerns in my eyes until she started going on about her own faith and saying crap like "Lord's time." Please.
Quote:
Originally Posted by El Nox
I cut this out of the middle of your excellent post because it needs to be re-emphasized that this class was a GEOGRAPHY class, not an ART class. Maybe "LaPort" is not a moslem name ... but the actions sure look that way. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ... it must be a COW.
Just a thought.
El Nox
I agree that the calligraphy was unnecessary just because I think it's useless for the kids to learn it. I don't think there's any agenda going on here, and like the article said, what the teacher is teaching is in line with the state of Virginia's standards or guidelines so according to them she did nothing wrong. A few parents reacted negatively (and one of them seems extremely religious and is identified as a "devout Christian" so hmm I wonder why she's so pissed ) and this made the news. I'm sure there were more parents and kids who didn't really care.
And I wonder what they learn about other religions. This is only an issue because it was Islam and a lot of Americans are offended by Islam, scared of it, and have a problem with it. I would be interested in knowing how exactly other religions are taught in this school. People only see issues with things they dislike. It's possible the curriculum goes similarly in depth/hands on with other religions but no one cared until it was Islam.
I do think that teaching about the headscarf and other traditions is much more effective than making these kids copy some difficult calligraphy. I mean, look at that picture. That looks hard, and if I were a high school student I think I would be frustrated I had to copy that for no apparent reason. I would not learn much from that at all, and I would never, ever use it again. But I would like to learn about why women cover their hair, because I do encounter Muslim women in almost daily life and it doesn't hurt to learn in that way about other cultures and religions.
This whole lesson has no place in school. Something STEM would be fine. English vocabulary would be fine. Grammatical construction would be fine. Civics. History
Calligraphy in art class ok but not religion based script
Teacher needs some serious retraining in curriculum planning
See thread #20 above.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Nihil obstat
