Sherry Chandler

High School Vigilantes

Last February after the State of the Union address, a Colorado high school history teacher Jay Bennish was taped by a student when his lecture turned anti-Bush. Well, anti-Bush foreign policy anyway. Bennish and his family received death threats. Bennish was not fired but you could argue that he was muzzled:

On March 10, 2006, the Cherry Creek School District announced that it would reinstate Bennish; he returned to Overland the following Monday. Cherry Creek Schools Superintendent Monte Moses said that “Bennish doesn’t deserve to be praised, nor does he deserve to be fired” and that “Jay Bennish has promise as a teacher, but his practice and deportment need growth and refinement.” [3]

Bennish’s lawyer said that the teacher would alter his style, “giving both sides more contemporaneously. When he gives the yin, [he'll] give the yang right then and there — don’t wait a day, don’t wait an hour, don’t wait a week. Put it all out at the same time.” [4]

Perhaps this was the right thing to do. There were inaccuracies in his lecture, it could possibly even be described as a diatribe. But to my liberal ears, it now sounds as though his revised classroom style will be as sterilely balanced as those newscasts that give us a pundit from one side and a pundit from the other and never bother to find a fact.

Now, though, we have reports that New Jersey history teacher David Paszkiewicz has been recorded by a student for prosyletyizing in class:

Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose family is now considering a lawsuit claiming Mr. Paszkiewicz broke the church-state boundary.

“If you reject his gift of salvation, then you know where you belong,” Mr. Paszkiewicz was recorded saying of Jesus. “He did everything in his power to make sure that you could go to heaven, so much so that he took your sins on his own body, suffered your pains for you, and he’s saying, ‘Please, accept me, believe.’ If you reject that, you belong in hell.”

This appears to have been a class on the U.S. Constitution, by the way.

Again a teacher has been disciplined, though the schoolboard won’t say how, and again there have been death threats. But this time the death threats have been made against the student who made the recordings.

I’m not going to pretend to be neutral here. My first reaction to this latter incident was “Aha! The shoe is on the other foot now.” I tend to think it’s more appropriate in a history class to ask students to consider the negative side of American foreign policy than to tell them there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. And as for consigning students to hell, well, that does seem a bit of a threat.

But it also makes me sad to think we live in an era when students on either side of the right/left divide feel they have to be vigilant against their teachers. In both cases, if my memory serves me well, there were accusations that the student baited the teacher, asked leading questions to elicit a damning response.

Most of all, though, I wonder why it is that the right always resorts to death threats.

Possibly related posts:

Some thoughts inspired by the Divinity School Address

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2007 Kentucky Poetry Out Loud Finals

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