In Alabama, class learns how to shoot a president
Posted at 11:16 AM on May 18, 2010
by Bob Collins
(11 Comments)
Filed under: Crime and Justice
The lesson plan for an Alabama classroom: A teacher, lecturing his class on parallel lines and geometry, taught his charges how to calculate where to stand to shoot the president.
"He was talking about angles and said, 'If you're in this building, you would need to take this angle to shoot the president,'" Joseph Brown, a senior in the geometry class, told The Birmingham News.
The Secret Service checked the teacher out and found he wasn't a threat. The school superintendent checked it out and determined there's no reason to fire the teacher.
Comments (11)
It isn't hard I suppose, but you're wanting to say something, but there just isn't anything to say.
I would say only in the south, but I'd be wrong...
With all the benign analogies that he could have used to demonstrate geometry concepts (billiards, minigolf, etc), he chooses that?
He may not be a threat to today's president, but he's certainly encouraging certain despicable ways of thinking in tomorrow's generation.
Only in (sweet home) Alabama. This man is setting a very poor example for his students and should be fired.
Its not even a good example for geometry. For one thing, bullets don't travel in straight lines, they travel in arcs.
In Alabama there are many more benign shooting examples to use than aiming a gun at any human being, much less our President! Kids there would certainly relate to a hunting analogy and I understand the teacher's attempt to engage them where their interests lie. (Now I would never shoot a deer, but that's a better analogy than shooting a human being and one to which the kids could relate.)
For pity's sake, does no one recognize the danger of using violence in words and thoughts? Not that I advocate thought-police, but, as a matter of eithics, I would urge any adult to consider carefully whether they are stating something in language of violence and to reframe that in peaceful language instead.
Surely intelligent people can make good points without resorting to either gutter language or language that implies violence! What is happening to us? That Superintendent needs to have a serious talk with that teacher.
It's clear that we need to take any and all steps to end this geometry-based threat on our nation's president. Such powerful knowledge should not be handed out in schools so idly.
Imagine what power the terrorists could wield if they got ahold of this information. Imagine what other advanced mathematics pose a threat!
"Extremely poor judgment and poor choice of words," as stated in the article, doesn't even begin to describe this situation. Even hypotheticals about fictional characters (if you were shooting Capone in "The Untouchables") would be questionable, but to insinuate an assassination attempt on any living figure is incomprehensible. If the high school senior quoted were my child, I would pull him from that geometry class faster than you can say "Euclid," but I would hope I had raised him well enough that he'd want out himself.
One would hope that, as tacky as it is, the smugly-outraged-'mongst-us would be rushing in to say such things if
1) the angles were being plotted to assassinate Adolph Hitler, or
2) Our children were raised well enough to understand the lesson, but not want to miss the lesson by checking out.
My kid would no longer be going to that school. Plain and simple.
Probably racist and definitely dangerous. That teacher is a terrorist. I am appalled.
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