Teachers have a right to free speech, too (with a poll)

You may have noticed one thing about our so-called free society: there is one group of professional, well-educated, articulate people who have been de facto forbidden to speak aloud about their views. Those people are our teachers. In particular, if they dare to express liberal, socially conscious views in ways that risk a difference of opinion getting back to parents or, jebus forbid, donors and community activists, we all know what will happen: they will be fired. The teachers know this, too — almost all of them willingly self-muzzle, because it has been repeated over and over to them that actually having a social conscience will damage their relationship to their students.

It’s all a big lie.

It’s really an attempt — and so far, a very effective attempt — to silence a whole class of people who might say something enlightened about society and teaching. It’s disgusting to see how often it works.

Here’s a perfect example: Elizabeth Collins was a liberal, concerned teacher who created a blog to express her views about stuff she cared very much about, such as writing, teaching, and activism. Read it, it’s good stuff, and it’s obvious she cares passionately about those subjects. She also wrote about her experiences as a teacher, taking care to avoid naming the school or any individuals by name, but still being free about criticism and praise while protecting people’s privacy.

I know, most of you are already going “uh-oh”, and you already know where this is going. I also know that a lot of you have absorbed the recieved wisdom and are thinking that she deserves anything that happens to her, that she should know better than to talk about her teaching. You in the last group…you’re a bunch of assholes, and you’re part of the problem. Go away. I want teachers to write openly and frankly and honestly about teaching, and you don’t.

Yes, Elizabeth Collins was fired.

Her story is getting the expected responses, like this:

Enjoy unemployment you liberal, Dem, socialist, borderline commie hack that can’t tolerate an opionion that differs from your own. You got exactly what you deserved. Keep blindly following Obumbler. How’s that working out for you?

I don’t see that Collins demonstrated intolerance; she’s the one fired, not anyone else. If you want to see intolerance, look to the rich dogmatic conservatives who flexed a little muscle and expelled a thoughtful person from the school.

In a Feb. 24 posting, Collins wrote about unfounded accusations that teachers can face. Referring to the Whites’ e-mail – without naming names or spelling out the context – she added, “I realized I was dealing with some hard-core provincialism – not to mention intolerance of anything but ultraconservative views.”

Collins was crossing swords with prominent members of the local Catholic community. In 2009, James White received the Sourin Award from the Catholic Philopatrian Literary Institute for exemplifying Catholic ideals. (Cardinal Justin Rigali was given the award the year before.) He is also a trustee on several Catholic school boards, and James and Megan White and his construction company, J.J. White Inc., are donors to several Catholic schools, including Notre Dame de Namur.

…

The school showed the document to Collins and she wrote a reply in which she said that at the March 3 meeting, the Whites had “proceeded to harangue me, raising their voices, pointing at me, slapping the table.” She added that James White had demanded her resignation and threatened to sue the school.

He certainly does represent Catholic ideals in his little crusade to get anyone with different political views fired! And is anyone else surprised that it is conservative Christianity behind the firing? The Whites and their smug arrogance and tiny little minds are the problem here, not Elizabeth Collins. It’s too bad there isn’t an easy way to dethrone such vile thugs from their undeserved positions of respect in these communities.

We need to do more to protect teachers from this kind of bullying, this policy of silencing their contributions to society; actually, though, it’s an asymmetric silencing, because teachers who express conservative views, who echo the dogmatic stupidity of their communities, do not experience this kind of oppression (unless they cross the line into physically injuring students, and even then the community tends to rally around them). You can be an openly Republican gay-hating commie-bashing environment-trashing teacher, but if you’re a lesbian socialist civil rights activist in most parts of the country, you know what you have to do: you have to be very quiet and not raise a fuss if you want to keep your job.

And please note, I’m not talking about what you do in the classroom — there are reasonable restrictions on what you can do there, and there is also a specific set of tasks that you are expected to complete in order to do your job — but entirely outside the class, in your private life. There aren’t many jobs with those kinds of repressive restrictions. You can be a plumber or a carpenter or a taxi driver or a farmer or a Republican politician, and you can get off work and drink or gamble or vote for Ron Paul or Barney Frank, and be open about your views, and it won’t usually trickle back to your boss as a sign that you aren’t fit to unclog drains or plant asparagus. But write on a blog about social justice, civil rights for gays, or your support for public health care, and watch out — there are people who will decide that you are a bad influence on children.

Never mind that there are better reasons to keep devout Catholics away from kids than to so restrain liberal Democrats.

Again, this is not about a teacher keeping a Bible or Chairman Mao’s little red book on their desk, and flogging it to the students (either of which are reprehensible). It’s about what a teacher does on their own time, outside the school, and somehow we’ve got this attitude that teachers must be social ciphers in all circumstances. Teachers should have a right to be Christians or Communists (not that Collins is the latter, and I have no clue about her opinions on the former), but so far, the only privilege they’re usually granted is to be ideologically mainstream.

There is a poll associated with this story. The wording is good: does she deserve to be fired, which makes it easy for me; no, I don’t think she does, because no employer has the right to police the thoughts of its employees, and thoughtcrime should not be punishable. There’s a different question that isn’t relevant here: Does a private school have the right to fire someone for causes like this, and then I’d have to say that yes, they do. Because private schools can be pocket tyrannies. It just means that you shouldn’t work for such wretched institutions.

Did the teacher deserve to be fired for the blog post?

Yes 42.9%
No 50.5%
Not sure 6.6%

One other aspect of this story that really bugs me is that some parents have the idea that their kids should not be criticized: a teacher is supposed to somehow teach without ever giving any kind of discouraging word when a student is wrong. I hate that attitude. Sorry, students get to be told when they’re being little jerks, or being obtuse and failing to follow simple instructions, or even when they’re being narrow-minded little bigots. Teachers are smart in being able to get those messages across without being demeaning, as comes across clearly in Collins’ blog, but no, you can’t require that teachers be supportive of bigotry and stupidity. It’s kind of a violation of the job description.

Bat sex is not protected by academic freedom

Whoa, dudes. Did you hear about the bats who have oral sex?

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate’s penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.

Read that carefully. If it’s a bit difficult to imagine, here’s a video:

Not only do female bats give male bats oral sex, but they do it while they’re having intercourse. The male enters the female from the rear, and the female bends over to lick the shaft of the penis while he’s thrusting in and out. I have never seen that in a porn film. Maybe there is such a thing out there — I can’t claim much knowledge of porn — but this means that animals not only carry out sexually activities condemned by the religious as unnatural, but they do it better than we do.

I have just done something very wicked. I have compared human sexual behavior with that of another animal, describing work published in a serious scientific journal. I could get fired for that! If you were to show this story to co-workers and discuss the implications, you also could get condemned and sanctioned. We’re in trouble now!

You may find that hard to believe, but it’s true in at least one case: Dylan Evans, at University College Cork, in an argument about the uniqueness of human behavior, brought this article up, and his opponent shut him down by crying harassment, triggering an investigation. He was exonerated, but the university president has decided he needs to be sanctioned anyway.

Here’s the story straight from the target.

Dear Colleagues,

The President of University College Cork, Professor Michael Murphy, has imposed harsh sanctions on me for doing nothing more than showing an article from a peer-reviewed scientific article to a colleague.

The article was about fellatio in fruit bats. You can read it online at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007595

It was covered extensively in the media, including the Guardian – see http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/nov/10/oral-sex-bats-improbable-research

The colleague to whom I showed the article complained to HR that the article was upsetting. I had been engaged in an ongoing debate with the colleague in question about the relevance of evolutionary biology to human behaviour, and in particular about the dubiousness of many claims for human uniqueness. I showed it the colleague in the context of this discussion, and in the presence of a third person. I also showed the article to over a dozen other colleagues on the same day, none of whom objected.

HR launched a formal investigation. Despite the fact that external investigators concluded that I was not guilty of harassment, Professor Murphy has imposed a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling on me, and as a result my application for tenure is likely to be denied.

I am now campaigning to have the sanctions lifted. I would be grateful for your support on this matter. I have created an online petition at:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/freedebate/

I’d be grateful if you sign the petition and ask your colleagues to do so. If you also felt like writing directly to the President of UCC, his address is:

Professor Michael Murphy
The President’s Office
University College Cork
Cork
Republic of Ireland.

Your support would be greatly appreciated.

Dylan Evans

Oh, well, the article was upsetting. Can’t have that; science articles are supposed to be affirming and soothing, I guess.

If you find the president’s actions unwarranted and ridiculous, sign the petition and write to him. And please, do feel free to discuss bat porn all you want.

Several of the documents in case are now available online.

I’m glad I’m not at risk of ever getting a job offer from a Catholic university

Not that I’d ever apply; I wouldn’t ever want to work in an instition with an irrational commitment to a weird medieval superstition. It leads them to make all kinds of strange decisions.

Marquette University has just done that. They’ve been searching for a new dean for the college of arts and sciences, and had made an offer to a Dr Jodi O’Brien, a professor of sociology at Seattle University. They have now abruptly yanked the offer off the table and announced that the search has failed.

The reason? Partly, it’s because she’s a lesbian. Marquette does have other gay faculty, though, so that’s not the whole story — the other part of the story is that she actively studies the sociology of homosexuality, and has written papers that favor gay marriage.

“I guess if she was a lesbian abut her research was on microorganisms, she might have been acceptable,” Franzoi said. But he said scholars study issues that are important to them and O’Brien’s sexual orientation makes her scholarship related to gays and lesbians important to her.

“This issue has always been a problem with Marquette officials. This is just the latest and probably most publicly embarrassing of its kind.”

Apparently, you can be a lesbian at Marquette as long as you aren’t too lesbian. People outside the university seem to have applied pressure — donors, possibly, who don’t want to hire administrators who are insufficiently conservative.

And that’s why I’m happy to stay clear of private universities with peculiar affiliations. They have a rather limited definition of academic freedom.

Et tu, Canada? It must be dangerous to teach while lesbian.

A pipe dream of proper priorities

This is an education plan I could get behind.

One additional requirement, besides diverting reasonable amounts of money into education: demand improvements in quality. Not this misbegotten accountability of No Child Left Behind, but shakeups in how school boards manage budgets; remove the elected officials from the business of dictating pedagogy and content, and let the qualified professionals design curricula that actually works. I listened to the video and just felt a sense of dread at the thought of the Texas Board of Education suddenly flush with new money and deciding to buy Bibles for every child, or something similarly absurd.

Liberty University: setting the bar high

Last year, Liberty University picked an appropriate commencement speaker: Ben Stein. And the laughter did peal across the nation.

What could they do to top that this year? Who could they possibly get as a commencement speaker for the class of 2010 to signify exactly how deeply into Wingnuttia they are? Who could possibly stand up and show them their future?

It’s Glenn Beck. Perfection!

They may have peaked. I don’t know who they could possibly get to be as representative in 2011.

Post-docs deserve a little help

Post-docs are the weird, easily forgotten positions in academia, neither fish nor fowl. They’re something more than a student — they’ve got Ph.D.s! — but definitely far less than faculty. On the plus side, it’s often the one position where you get to do nothing but research, research, research…but on the negative side, you’ve got minimal official status within your institution, have no say in governance or administration, and are at the mercy of your academic overlords. It’s also a low-paying position (although it has gotten somewhat better and more realistic since my post-doctoral days, when it was a poverty-level salary), with budgets basically frozen for the last few years. Remember, post-docs are highly trained professionals with degrees and publications and skills, and they are still treated like apprentices as far as the administration goes.

The good news is that Obama has proposed a small, 6% increase in the standard NIH post-doctoral stipend — not everyone is paid by NIH, of course, but it does provide a benchmark for what the typical post-doc salary should be.

Don’t start celebrating just yet, though. This is only the proposal, and it needs to be approved by congress, which generally treats that book-learnin’ infrastructure of the country as something expendable, and much less important than subsidizing corn, which has the virtue of being non-uppity and usually voting Republican. What you need to do right now is write to your representative and tell them that it sure would be nice if scientists could be paid a living wage commensurate with the investment in their education. Support your local post-docs, and especially if you are your local post-doc, write in!

Jerry Coyne gets email

Coyne was quoted in this article on homeschooling, which brought in an unexpected surge of email, including some rather nasty words from the Christians. This doesn’t surprise me at all; criticizing religion, especially the more far-out beliefs that are clearly unsupportable and in contradiction to all of the evidence, is always a reliable trigger to start some kooks spewing.

Homeschooling is another trigger. People care very much about their kids, and so telling them that they’re wrecking their children’s future by giving them a substandard education poisoned with a falsified ideology is not the kind of thing that will get you pleasant nods of approval…even if it is true. I’m one of those people who thinks we ought to be consistent and require everyone to attend an accredited school, public or private, and that private schools ought also to be required to meet certain secular standards, such as that their science education ought to address the evidence reasonably. You want to send your kids to a school that teaches them all about Jesus? Fine. But it doesn’t count as a legitimate education unless it also teaches the basics of science, math, history, English, etc. in a way that meets state education standards.

It’s the same principle that warrants requiring vaccinations for all children: for the defense of our society.

Virginia does something stupid, again

I’ve been on a few job search committees, and I’ve been on a few job searches myself, and there’s a standard piece of boilerplate we put on all of our job ads.

The University of Minnesota is committed to the policy that all persons shall have equal access to its programs, facilities, and employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, disability, public assistance status, veteran status, or sexual orientation.

Whenever we start a job search, too, human resources reviews whatever we do, and we also get to attend a meeting where we’re informed in very strong terms that that paragraph isn’t just for show, but they really mean it, and if we violate those principles in any way, we can be in big, big trouble — and then they show us the burly lawyers with bullwhips and the guillotine. It’s important stuff.

It’s not just Minnesota, either. When I was on the job market, there was always some equal opportunity paperwork that went with every application. It’s common to every civilized state in the union that they will make an effort to avoid discrimination.

Except Virginia.

Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli says Virginia’s colleges and universities cannot prohibit discrimination against gays because the General Assembly has not authorized them to do so.

In a letter Thursday to the presidents, rectors and boards of visitors of Virginia public colleges, Cuccinelli said: the law and public policy of Virginia “prohibit a college or university from including ‘sexual orientation’, ‘gender identity’, ‘gender expression’ or like classification, as a protected class within its non-discrimination policy, absent specific authorization from the General Assembly.”

That’s remarkable. They aren’t just saying, “Well, we don’t have a state legal requirement that you can’t discriminate against gays, but if the universities want to be a little more egalitarian than the rest of us, it’s their own decision.” They are saying there is a strong prohibition against not discriminating against gays: “Universities may not be more egalitarian and prohibit discrimination. Unless we say they can.” Virginians have a right to be prejudiced assclowns and fire faggots freely.

I’m sure Patrick Henry University and Liberty University find this decision cause to celebrate, but you’d think the state would have learned something from Loving v. Virginia.

Peptides publishes a clunker

I’ve got my hands on a strange paper by D Kanduc: “Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments”. Here’s the abstract.

Discovering the informational rule(s) underlying structure-function relationships in the protein language is at the core of biology. Current theories have proven inadequate to explain the origins of biological information such as that found in nucleotide and amino acid sequences; an ‘intelligent design’ is now a popular way to explain the information produced in biological systems. Here, we demonstrate that the information content of an amino acid motif correlates with the motif rarity. A structured analysis of the scientific literature supports the theory that rare pentapeptide words have higher significance than more common pentapeptides in biological cell ‘talk’. This study expands on our previous research showing that the immunological information contained in an amino acid sequence is inversely related to the sequence frequency in the host proteome.

What? This is an intelligent design paper? How interesting. Unfortunately, the abstract is wrong, and ‘intelligent design’ is not a popular way to explain information in biological systems, and I read through the whole thing, and missed the part where it actually supports ID.

Here’s what the paper actually does: it dissects a sample protein and asks about the frequency of its components in the proteome. It looks specifically at calmodulin (CaM), an important and highly conserved protein that is involved in all kinds of developmental and physiological interactions. The rather arbitrary unit the protein is broken down into is 5 amino acid chunks, or pentapeptides, and each pentapeptide sequence is searched for in genes other than CaM. If this is the initial sequence of CaM,

MADQLTEE…

Then what Kanduc does is search the proteome for MADQL, ADQLT, DQLTE, etc., and count the number of times each appears. Rare pentapeptides are equated with high information content, and common ones are assigned low information content. Some pentapeptides, in his analysis, are found only in CaM, while others are found multiple times, with an average of 12 occurrences. This is supposed to be significant.

It’s also where he loses me. If you search a completely random string of amino acids for an arbitrary pentapeptide, it should turn up, on average, once in every 3,200,000 amino acids. If you search a long enough chunk of amino acid sequence, one that’s long enough to generate on average 12 hits, what you’d expect to see is a bell-shaped distribution — some pentapeptides may appear only once, while others appear dozens of times, just by chance. And that is what Kanduc sees. That some pentapeptides are unique to CaM is perhaps not too surprising, especially when you consider that the proteome is not a random sequence at all, but the product of frequent gene duplications and is also refined by selection.

So far, this idea that some pentapeptides will be rare and others common, is utterly uninteresting and unsurprising. I would have liked to have seen some consideration of the null hypothesis, that the distribution is due to chance alone, but that seems to be totally lacking. If I’d been reviewing the paper, I would have sent it back with a request for revisions to consider that possibility.

However, Kanduc does propose something that actually is interesting: that the rare pentapeptide sequences in specific genes also correlate with regions that have important functional roles.

Using the CaM features, attributes and annotations reported at www.uniprot.org/uniprot/P62158, we find that modification sites, structural beta strand motifs, functional domains, and epitopic determinants are confined primarily to areas of low similarity with the human proteome.

Now that’s kind of cool, if true. It’s also a bit unsurprising. He does examine the length of the CaM protein and show that rare pentapeptide regions are also sites for for acetylation, ubiquitylation, and phosphorylation, and also at the calcium binding site, for instance; but these are functional regions of the protein where one would expect some selection for specific properties. We get a different analysis, in which naturally occurring pentapeptide fragments that are known to have significant biological activity are searched for in the human proteome, and found to be fairly rare. Again, this might be an expected result explained by selection — after all, a sequence that can trigger apoptosis might be expected to be confined by selection to a limited range of sites — and don’t seem to me to require postulating an intelligent designer.

As a paper that hints at some possible functional correlations in the proteome, it’s mildly diverting. It’s weak in that it doesn’t address the null hypothesis very well — I get the impression the author is more interested in fishing for correlations than in actually testing his hypothesis. Where it starts triggering alarm bells, though, is the shoutout to creationists. Kanduc says this about CaM:

…the CaM sequence is characterised by both specificity and complexity (what information theorists call ‘specified complexity’); in other words, it has ‘information content’.

Uh-oh. “Specified complexity” is a meaningless phrase; the creationists have not defined how to measure “specification”. In this case, Kanduc hasn’t either, and his criterion for calling it “specified complexity” is that CaM has various functional domains, which is kind of expected for a protein that has functions. I find it interesting, too, that he doesn’t provide a citation for his claim — Dembski doesn’t get an acknowledgment. Probably because it would be a too-obvious hint about where in looney-land this idea is coming from, and because Dembski doesn’t bother to explain how to calculate “specified complexity” either.

Also, there’s something suspicious about the phrasing there — it seems to be straight out of Meyer 2000:

Systems that are characterized by both specificity and complexity
(what information theorists call “specified complexity”) have
“information content”.

Hmmmmm. (Thanks to Blake Stacey for picking up on that identity.)

Another problem with the paper is the conclusion, which is some unholy amalgam of a dog’s breakfast and a word salad, and either way is grossly unappetizing.

Researchers in the fields of biology and immunology need to define objective informational entities and reductionist basic laws that are valid everywhere and for everything. As new objects and scientific laws are absorbed into experimental protocols and reports, abstract terms such as “sense”, “edit”, and “attack” as well as old dogmas such as the self/non-self dichotomy will become obsolete in favour of more intelligible and concrete theories and biological activities. This process will enable the effective translational application of science to medicine.

What the heck does that mean? What does it have to do with the rest of the paper? Again, if I’d been reviewing it, that would have gone back with a recommendation to delete the gobbledygook and write a conclusion that actually makes sense in the light of the rest of the paper.

What we have here is yet another case of poor reviewing and editing. There is a germ of an interesting observation in the work that the author fails to examine critically and convincingly, but the main intent seems to be to inject the words “intelligent design” into a reviewed scientific paper (while failing to justify why that is a useful hypothesis) and for the author to ride some obscure immunological hobbyhorse which is also not addressed by any of the data. It’s remarkably sloppy work that should have been sent back for extensive revision, rather than being published as is.

I do notice that it was received at Peptides on 20 January, and then bounced back and accepted after what must have been only minor revisions only two weeks later. The journal is commendably fast in its turnaround, but this looks like a case where haste just churned up the garbage a bit more.

Kanduc D. Protein information content resides in rare peptide segments, Peptides (2008), doi:10.1016/j.peptides.2010.02.003

Melissa Hussain committed Thought Crime!

And she may be fired for it.

Hussain is an eighth grade science teacher in North Carolina who was getting harrassed by bible-thumping students in her classroom — harrassment that was apparently encouraged by their red-necked ignorant parents. The kids were giving her Bibles and Jesus postcards and reading Bibles instead of doing their classwork, and seemed to have enjoyed flaunting their dumb-ass religiosity at her. So she vented on Facebook. The parents got indignant that she would dare to express her unhappiness with their darling little children, and are pressing to have her fired — but the curious thing is that the only comments they quote all seem reasonable and moderate.

Hussain wrote on the social-networking site that it was a “hate crime” that students anonymously left a Bible on her desk, and she told how she “was able to shame” her students over the incident. Her Facebook page included comments from friends about “ignorant Southern rednecks,” and one commenter suggested Hussain retaliate by bringing a Dale Earnhardt Jr. poster to class with a swastika drawn on the NASCAR driver’s forehead.

Notice that other people are making rude comments about the Bible-thumpers (and I feel the same way), not the teacher. That was the worst they could find? That she rejects religious harrassment and shamed her students to get them to stop doing it?

Here are some more atrocities from her Facebook page.

Parents said the situation escalated after a student put a postcard of Jesus on Hussain’s desk that the teacher threw in the trash. Parents also said Hussain sent to the office students who, during a lesson about evolution, asked about the role of God in creation.

On her Facebook page, Hussain wrote about students spreading rumors that she was a Jesus hater. She complained about her students wearing Jesus T-shirts and singing “Jesus Loves Me.” She objected to students reading the Bible instead of doing class work.

But Annette Balint, whose daughter is in Hussain’s class, said the students have the right to wear those shirts and sing “Jesus Loves Me,” a long-time Sunday School staple. She said the students were reading the Bible during free time in class.

“She doesn’t have to be a professing Christian to be in the classroom,” Balint said. “But she can’t go the other way and not allow God to be mentioned.”

I think teachers have a right to complain when their students and their students’ parents spread rumors and are disruptive in class. And yes, singing “Jesus Loves Me” during science class is inappropriate, a waste of time, and a transparent attempt to taunt the teacher. I also doubt that there is such a thing as “free time” in a science class: more likely, they’re given time to work as individuals or groups on classwork, and reading their Bible is not getting their work done. Eighth grade science class is not Sunday School, although I guess some retrograde retard might understandably confuse the two.

And of course Hussain is getting no support.

Thomas and Jennifer Lanane, president of the Wake County chapter of the North Carolina Association of Educators, said she wasn’t aware of the details of the Hussain case, but said that teachers need to be careful about information they put online.

“We are public figures,” Lanane said. “We are held to a higher standard.”

Quit your jobs, Lananes. You should be ashamed. Stand up for the educators you supposedly represent; I do hold teachers to a higher standard, a standard that involves honesty and integrity and service to their discipline. The Lananes know nothing about this case, but are willing to throw a teacher who struggled with a classroom of militant morons to the wolves. Idiots who confuse “held to a higher standard” with refusing to challenge their students or bowing to community pressure, instead of to being forthright and outspoken, are the peril here.

I support Melissa Hussain. She sounds like a fine teacher who made entirely appropriate responses in a difficult situation, and I want more teachers who are willing to oppose the willful stupidity of communities full of science-hating throwbacks who want to impose Sunday School ‘rigor’ on science education.