I am 25 and when I was in the 10th grade we had to take biology and when the class reached the point of learning about evolution my teacher says " by law I am required to teach you about evolution and I want to know what you all know about it?" so a few of my classmates gave answers about evovling from apes and other things. so after about 10 minutes of discussing it he says well that is enough of that junk and moved on the the next chapter in the textbook and that is about all I learned about evolution in high school.
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If your story is true, that teacher should be fired for failing to do his job properly.
Which explains why you don't know a damn thing about evolutionary theory.
@Berny: Technically, in a private school, teachers aren't held to the same standard. You don't have to be certified, hell, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those teachers had never been to college, let alone earned a degree. There are a lot of excellent teachers in private schools, but a bad private school teacher tends to be much worse at his/her job than a bad public school teacher.
You were done a great disservice by an ignorant man who didn't understand the essential beauty, parsimony, and power of the evolutionary theory.
I recommend that you seek the knowledge on your own, if you ever break free of your comforting platitudes.
And now, you're a christian.
I think that proves what we've all been saying about education being important and all.
So you're ignorant to evolution (big surprise), your teacher knows nothing about evolution and neither to the students in your class.
Sounds like you were homeschooled.
It sounds like the teacher is the fundie here.
Of course, chj doesn't seem to remember anything of those ten minutes, so he probably wasn't paying any attention.
So, it was pretty much something like this?
"In the beginning, we were all fish. Okay? Swimming around in the water. And then one day a couple of fish had a retard baby, and the retard baby was different, so it got to live. So Retard Fish goes on to make more retard babies, and then one day, a retard baby fish crawled out of the ocean with its mutant fish hands... and it had butt sex with a squirrel or something and made this retard frog-sqirrel, and then *that* had a retard baby which was a... monkey-fish-frog... And then this monkey-fish-frog had butt sex with that monkey, and that monkey had a mutant retard baby that screwed another monkey... and that made you! So there you go! You're the retarded offspring of five monkeys having butt sex with a fish-squirrel! Congratulations!"
This is what happens when christians become teachers.
Is this an American phenomenon? In Canada, we learned about evolution as we were learning about biology. In fact, I'm fairly certain we were introduced to the ToE in elementary (on a very basic level of course). It wasn't a separate module in the class it was interwoven with everything else we learned.
Wow... reminds me of one of the teachers at my HS. I wasn't in any of his classes, but from what I hear he would teach evolution, and then say "but that's all bullshit because god created us."
Luckily I had a much more intelligent and professional bio teacher, who didn't try to inject religion into any of the lessons.
@Sisyphus
Now the teachers have to teach the theory of evolution, but apparently only in as far as they believe in it.
So stuff like this is still going on, as posty pointed out, and I know there is an English teacher (thankfully ONLY an English teacher) at a local college that is like this.
Edit: Quick link to Wikipedia's article on the Scopes Trial.
If you went to a hospital with a sick child, and the doctor said "By law I am required to tell you about all sorts of medical treatments that scientists say will cure your son." Then after 10 minutes of very shallow discussion, along the lines of "they put stuff they've cooked up in a lab into pills and then stuff your kid full of them" or "they stick needles full of chemicals in your kids' arm", he said "That's enough of that junk, now I want to talk to you about what voodoo spells might be appropriate here." What would your reaction be?
You didn't have biology until the 10th grade? I don't really remember, but I think we had some kind of Nature Knowledge from first class and up, getting more and more advanced an specific for each year, of course.
Evolution was not plucked out and taught separately, no more than the Periodic Table was plucked out of Chemistry and taught separately. We also learned verbs as an intertwined part of language studies, and not as a separate subject. Revolutionary, yes, I know.
I always find it amazing that fundies concentrate on one way or the other : how life appeared, and how men appeared.
It... It explains SO MUCH...
My AP Bio teacher last year pussy-footed around evolution like you wouldn't BELIEVE. Well, to be fair, I do live in Jesusland and he's a Roman Catholic, but still. He was politically correct("this is what the scientists BELIEVE happened...") to the point of being disinformative, and the Evolution chapters were deliberately glossed over as quickly as humanly possible. But what'll you do?
The rest of the class was spot-on, though. Which is how my friend got to be in the top of the class with me and yet retain her young-earth fundyism.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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