As I high school English teacher, I had many students from
very religious homes. Generally, it
seemed to me that the more rigid and authoritarian the teachings, the more
likely it was that kids, by high school, would be trying to break free.
I remember a girl I had from a strict Christian Science
family. Before she entered my class, I
received from Guidance a list of topics I was not to talk about in front of
her. She walked in the first day, sat
down, pulled a large bottle of Advil out of her purse, and plopped it on her
desk.
I looked at her questioningly and she glared back and said
defiantly, “I get headaches.” No
students were really permitted to carry around their own medications, but there
was no way I was getting in the way of this one. The bottle sat there for the entire semester.
And then one day we were talking about AIDS. One student explained that the virus had
begun in Africa with monkeys. The girl
immediately said, “See, it’s a punishment for having sex with monkeys!”
I held my breath to see if civility would reign. It did.
Another student gently explained how mutations work. At the end of the semester, in her course
evaluation, she wrote that the class discussions were the best part of the course.
Education is everything.
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