Friday, April 20, 2007

See You're The Kind of Person Who Believes In Makin' Out Once

Yesterday, we did a practice for the vile standardized test the sophs will be taking next week. The passage was a biography of Jocelyn Elders.

It was an innocuous chronological piece with zero pizzaz. Elders was born in 1933 on a cotton farm, got a scholarship to college, was the only African-American person in her medical school class, and later was named Surgeon General by Bill Clinton. She overcame many obstacles in her life.

Isn’t that great and admirable?

I let the kids answer all the multiple choice questions – compelling questions like “What does the word segregated mean in paragraph three?” – before I told them the reasons I remembered Elders from her short, 1993 stint as Surgeon General: her supposed support of masturbation education, and her penchant for saying things that made pro-lifers’ salivary glands spring to life with blood thirst. Things like, “We must end our love affair with the fetus.” Someone so attached to blasphemy was a big topic of conversation at my Catholic high school.

“Don’t you think you would have been more interested in this article if it included that stuff?” I asked them.

“Oh, for sure,” they said, nodding. “Absolutely.”

1 comment:

Martha said...

Been reading. Just haven't been commenting. this entry great fun. The juicy stuff should be part of education. Lot's of talk lately about totally revamping high school. I'd be up for that discussion!