{"id":3255,"date":"2012-04-19T21:34:33","date_gmt":"2012-04-20T03:34:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/?p=3255"},"modified":"2012-04-19T21:34:33","modified_gmt":"2012-04-20T03:34:33","slug":"beliefs-and-the-essayists-that-have-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/?p=3255","title":{"rendered":"Beliefs And The Essayists That Have Them"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone in my Sikeston writing class believes in creation science. Granted, that is not a lot of people, perse, only 5, but that&#8217;s still enough to make me my jaw drop.<\/p>\n<p>Now, when I told CJ this, his response was &#8220;Well, love, do you remember where we live?&#8221; Maybe that&#8217;s a relevant point. I&#8217;m in the Bible Belt. People believe in things here, and in general, that&#8217;s cool. I&#8217;m down with that. Beliefs are fucking awesome.<\/p>\n<p>But this sort of thing&#8230; and everyone&#8230; and they&#8217;re in college&#8230; I just&#8230; I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p>The thought process required to believe actual science and also believe in your religion is so simple, I really have no idea why people have problems with it. God made everything. Clearly he made these natural systems that work the way we are finding. Done. Science go. But I guess that&#8217;s too hard? That would require saying, I guess, that the Bible is not a history book but instead a story book filled with damn good ideas that are worth following like, you know, don&#8217;t be a dick to people. And people won&#8217;t do that, I guess. That&#8217;s across a line. So they&#8217;d rather ignore what we as a species have learned.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know. Believe what you want. These students aren&#8217;t hurting me by believing all that. In fact, I really like my little class. They&#8217;re all pretty great people and more engaged than a lot of my other classes. I&#8217;ve had a lot of fun teaching them this semester. But it just makes me worry about their future. I mean, the paper that sparked the conversation which caused me to learn this that one of the students wrote was just&#8230; wrong. Even the creation science was not in line with what I know about &#8220;serious&#8221; creation science, and the science he was trying to refute was even MORE wrong. I&#8217;ve got to tell him to fix all that in order to have a good paper, and I did. But if he seriously isn&#8217;t about to look all that stuff up before I prompt him to for the assignment, what hope does he have? Like, how does he actually learn anything? I do wonder. It worries me. He&#8217;s a good guy, and I want him to succeed.<\/p>\n<p>People who believe are awesome. I 100% believe, and have proof, that you can be seriously religious and not fall into these sorts of major learning traps, and it is those sorts of people I really respect. (Well, a sort of people I really respect.) But as an educator, I&#8217;m just filled with fear at learning this about my class. I&#8217;m an English teacher. I don&#8217;t teach science. I can&#8217;t try to tell these people this is wrong. That&#8217;s not my place. I&#8217;m going to help this guy write his creation science paper, and it is going to be the best creation science paper. And I am going to disagree with it fucking completely. And I&#8217;m going to worry about what happens when he takes a science class, or meets someone who doesn&#8217;t understand his beliefs and actually attempts to tear him down, or he has to make some sort of decision based on either science or religion, but probably not both.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s awesome. I know he could handle thinking it all out. Will he, though? That&#8217;s what I don&#8217;t know. And that&#8217;s scary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone in my Sikeston writing class believes in creation science. Granted, that is not a lot of people, perse, only 5, but that&#8217;s still enough to make me my jaw drop. Now, when I told CJ this, his response was &#8220;Well, love, do you remember where we live?&#8221; Maybe that&#8217;s a relevant point. I&#8217;m in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3255"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3255"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3257,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3255\/revisions\/3257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/getmeoutofthis.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}