The Allen Almanac

I’m a day late with this story, but it reminded me of something that happened when I was a student. A History teacher named David Paszkiewicz in New Jersey (who is also a Baptist minister) got caught proselytizing Christian fundamentalism to his students in class.

Instead of teaching them History, he was teaching them, “that a being must have created the universe, that the Christian Bible is the word of God, and that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark. If you do not accept Jesus, he flatly proclaimed to his class, “you belong in hell.[...]he also dismissed evolution and the Big Bang as non-scientific, arguing by contrast that the Bible is supported by what he calls confirmed biblical prophecies.” He also singled out a Muslim student and “lamented what he saw as her inevitable fate should she not convert.”

The best part is how they caught him though. One student, Matthew LaClair, complained about the event to the school principal and requested a meeting with Mr. Paszkiewicz and the principal. But in the meeting Mr. Paszkiewicz denied it and said that the student had taken something he had said out of context. And now, for the big pwning: “At the end of the meeting, LaClair revealed that he had recorded the remarks, and presented the principal with two compact discs. The teacher then declined to comment further without his union representative. However, he fired one last shot at the student, saying, ‘You got the big fish … you got the big Christian guy who is a teacher…!’” Self-important deceitful ass. UPDATE: There has been a response from some of the other students who attend the school at the original blog that posted this, The Lippard Blog.

My High School (Flippin High School - Go Bobcats!) probably had one of the highest minister to non-minister faculty ratios of any public school anywhere. Our Civics/History, Math, Biology, and Band teachers were all ministers of some sort. That’s in addition to our men’s Basketball coach (who also taught Health) and High School Principal. And that’s out of about a dozen to fifteen teachers total. Mostly, they were Church of Christ or Southern Baptist, so they weren’t exactly liberal in their beliefs either. But I will say one thing for my school, everybody there believed in the separation of Church and State. If they didn’t believe in it, at least they followed it.

We had only one incident of anything like this that I can remember. It was actually not even a regular teacher or minister that did it either. It was some wack-job they brought in as a substitute for our Physics teacher. He was real brilliant too. Instead of just trying to convert us to his religious beliefs by talking to us, he actually handed out those little Jack Chick tracts. One of the students in class that was arguing with him was a Mormon and he gave her a Jack Chick all about how Mormons are going to burn in Hell for worshiping a false god. Unfortunately for him, she wasn’t one to be bullied around and went straight to the principal’s office after class with his tract. I don’t know exactly what happened from there, but he wasn’t teaching class next period and we never saw him again.

Ed Brayton speculated that this goes on, unreported, all the time. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I do know that at least at my school, they have it right. This was at a small school in deep backwoods Arkansas. If they can get it right, hopefully a lot of schools are.

(By the way, if you actually go to my high school’s web page and look at some of the pictures, they aren’t crazy militia people (well, most aren’t). For some reason they always take group pictures during Spirit Week. Those appear to have been taken on Camo Day.)