The Parenting Bunny On Tour

I’m pleased and proud to say that I am Guest Blogger of the Day at Tanya Kovarsky’s Rattle And Mum blog today. Let’s hope that this endeavour goes better than last time I guest blogged, which ended up with me collecting an amazing range of personal insults and several (or more) threats to my life.

However, today’s subject is no less edgy [really? – Ed.], catchily-entitled Slaying The Stereotype Of The One-Parent, Two-Parent Family, and wherein I comprehensively fail to change anyone’s mind about how little paternal effort and thought typically goes into bringing up children.

That failure aside though, please do go and support my efforts anyway, but keep the insults to yourselves this time.

Thanks.

ARGH!

In today’s news:

Religion forces science teacher to quit

A science teacher at an upmarket Cape Town school has found herself at odds with senior staff over her desire to teach evolution in science lessons. She said that the teachers in the school’s science department were mainly Christian and that she was reprimanded over teaching the scientific concept.

“We’re talking about the head of biology, we’re talking about the longest standing member [of staff] who’s been there for more than 25 years and we’re talking about the most recent member who was trained in a Biology area.”
“What he actively does in class is he poo poos the idea [of evolution], he makes kids laugh at the idea of the age of the Earth as proposed by scientists currently. He poo poos the fossil record, he gives what he believes is counter evidence to carbon dating,” she said.

For starters, I’ve noted that there’s an awful lot of poo pooing going on at this school. And that should immediately raise some red flags.
But, that aside, I have no issue with people choosing to send their kids to a school which teaches along the lines of certain beliefs. That, as the expression goes, is their indaba. You want your kids to learn nonsense, send them to a school that teaches nonsense. Give them what you consider to be a good start in life and then let’s all sit back and see how they get on with their tertiary education and future career in the real world.
But this situation is slightly different, as this school has a Science Department. And if you have a Science Department in your school, surely it should really follow that they teach… er… “scientific concepts” like evolution and carbon dating.

No?

Religion is all well and good (well, actually not in my opinion, but there are apparently some people who like it), but then this ex-teacher continues to tell us about the Muslim Biology teacher who refused to teach evolution. And the most laughable of all:

I met a Christian Geography teacher who refused to teach plate tectonics.

If you choose to believe that plate tectonics is not real or if you choose to believe that Creationism is where we all came from, then – simply – don’t take a job like a Geography teacher or Science teacher, that involves you having to fight those concepts each and every day. Want to tell the kids about Adam and Eve or how God creates earthquakes and tsunamis? Well then, rather express your views by teaching Religious Education and leave the Science and the Geography to those who understand Science and Geography.

Equally, it seems to me that the teacher who quit should maybe choose her place of employment more carefully, as she seems to have crashed and indeed burned, again:

“I’m constantly on the defensive. In fact, my life has got even more interesting now because I’ve joined a school that’s a cult. They believe that their leader has insight and he believes that the entire solar system was created for human beings, and that animals and plants are the rejected parts of what would’ve been the human body that don’t belong, and the last thing to be rejected was bacteria.
And don’t bother that the fossil record goes the other way round because he had these insights through his spiritual and meditative journeys. So now I find myself out of the frying pan into the fire.”

Good plan. Well done.

Anyway, this should also serve as a wake up call to those of us who have kids at schools with a religious foundation. Do you know what your child is being taught in their “Science” lessons?

UPDATE: As per Jacques’ comment below, it looks like Emperor of the Western Cape, Helen Zille is onto this after being alerted by a very rude man on twitter.

Weekend summed up

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words and so in an effort to save time and to get to bed sooner than I might otherwise have done, please enjoy the thousand words on our weekend away as depicted by this scene from Struisbaai beach yesterday morning:

That’s my girl on the beach, my boy in the waves, an invisible kite-surfer and blue skies forever.

Yes, it might be ever so slightly out of focus, but that was almost certainly down to sea spray on the lens, an over-abundance of sunlight and quite fitting given the two bottles of decent merlot I polished off the previous evening.

Long weekend

Because the kids are off school on Monday (it’s half term) (for a day), we’re taking the opportunity to enjoy a long weekend at the cottage.
Hopefully the weather will be better than the day I took this photo.

Amazingly, the day in question was 24 short hours after Midsummer’s day and everyone was wondering whether we’d actually get a summer at all.

You can view the photo on black here.

Beacon

The Inukshuk is a rudimentary communication system used by the Inuit people in North America to mark routes and as a symbol of reassurance for travellers:

They are monuments made of unworked stones that are used by the Inuit people for communication and survival. The traditional meaning of the Inukshuk is “Someone was here” or “You are on the right path.”

An Inukshuk is a welcome sight to a traveller on a featureless and forbidding landscape.

But the towers made by Alex and me on the beach have a far more fundamental message. They tell the South Atlantic Ocean who’s boss.

Briefly, anyway.

Remember King Cnut (“The Great”)? Allegedly, he:

…set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet “continuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: “Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.” He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again “to the honour of God the almighty King”. This incident is usually misrepresented by popular commentators and politicians as an example of Cnut’s arrogance.

Cnut’s parents were called Sweyn Forkbeard and Sigrid the Haughty. No wonder he had issues.

Of course, nowadays, we know that the tides are influenced not by some mythical sky goblin, but by the magnetic pull of the sun and the moon and the rotation of the earth. They’re no less powerful than they were back in the 11th Century though and our stone towers’ arrogance is usually hastily dismissed, to Alex’s repeated disappointment.

Next time, I’m going to even up the odds a little by taking some cement along…