Religion in Education

[Katy]

In my AP English class, we're reading "Crime and Punishment" (Part I to be exact). During class, my teacher started bringing up a lot of references to Christianity. After about 20 minutes of listening to all these references, I asked the teacher to politely stop doing it (by raising my hand and whatnot). When I asked this, the teacher got a major attitude with me and this, and told me no, because of a bunch of reasons (I kind of tuned her out after she got an attitude).

Alright well honestly for starters I doubt any of us have the ability to change any sort of curriculum mid-class. On the practical point what would the teacher do even if she did want to stop? End class? Make up a new lesson plan on the spot? She probably got partly mad because that is an awfully difficult request. I also think personally that it is a bit tactless to argue something does not exist or is not a major part of book when you haven't read the book.

I am guessing...and I will freely admit the word guessing here...that the matches between the Satanic bible and Crime and Punishment can be attributed to the idea that the Satanic Bible probably has many references to the Christian Bible. Reactionary books have a lot in common with the things they react to. Sounds like a fascinating idea though...books/movies with Christian influences viewed through the Satanic Bible....*throws The Scarlet Letter, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of The Rings, The Once and Future King and several other stacks of books in* If that was a class I would so take it.

For your math thing I do not quite understand how that got in there but really I do not understand an awful lot of that story. Skipping that to the computer class...I think it is probably unfair to name the rest of the class "ignorant" if the entire goal of this is a flameless friendly thoughtful conversation.

and to no suprise she lost (the people in class are rather ignorant and such....

It would have been nice if it had said "in the Christian/Jewish/Islamic traditions" but I really think there is not much to argue against unless you wrote down "I believe in evolution" or two names according to another religion and your teacher marked it wrong. I think that freedom of religion allows people to write whatever they like in that space and just keeps a teacher from marking it as wrong...as a side note a rather dumb question or a freebie however you like to look at it. You do probably have to answer the question though according to your knowledge of the world...blank spaces are always blank spaces and I can't see how you could get credit for that. I have to ask how that came up in computer science class though.