Thursday, June 12, 2008

I can understand popularity contests like who is most likely to succeed, but???

What was the teacher thinking? From Middle School Pregnancy Test:

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An irate father in Jackson, Mississippi is demanding that his daughter’s sixth grade teacher at the Chastain Middle School be fired, said pcblogspot.com.
According to Curtis Lyons, the teacher handed out a survey asking students to select which one of their classmates was most likely to contract AIDS, get pregnant or die before they graduated. When she learned that her fellow students thought she would be the first one to get pregnant, his daughter—an honor student—was humiliated, said Lyons.
“Where was the lesson in that?” asked Lyons, who said that in his opinion, this person should not be teaching kids. Lucy Hansford, JPS communications specialist, said that since the school system is investigating the matter, they were not able to release any details at the present time.

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Technorati tags: government schools, public school, public education, education

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Weird. When we did that in school, those things were called "slam books" and (if found) were confiscated by the teacher and destroyed.

Slam books were cruel enough, but to make a survey out of the thing ...?

(apologies if this comes though twice; apparently I didn't type the word verification correctly, or that's the impression I get)

Henry Cate said...

I had not heard of "slam books" before. I probably was too clueless in high school, though I kind of think my high school didn't have them, or at least not on a wide scale.

This is in a whole another issue. Have a teacher conduct the survey gives it more legitimacy. Many students would recognize that "slam books" are evil, but they might not be as critical of a survey given by a person in authority.