Texas student attacked for her anti-illegal immigration homework
I don’t know why the hell a teacher is assigning “political protest signs” as homework, but that aside, the open-borders mob reaction to one girl’s project is absolutely unacceptable. Take a look, via KLTV:
Melanie Bowers, 13, and her parents walked into Athens High School Monday afternoon to talk to campus police. They were hoping to get some answers.
“It never should have happened in the first place. The whole assignment was a silly assignment and they should have contacted us immediately after it happened,” said J.R. Bowers, Melanie’s father.
It was an assignment for history class–to make a protest sign for or against an issue, and Melanie said she chose illegal immigration. Her sign read, “If you love our nation, stop illegal immigration.” Somehow, Melanie said the sign got passed around lunch and angered a group of Latino students.
“I didn’t know any of these people,” she said. One young [student], she claimed, jumped on her back and he put her in a choke hold. “We have brick walls in the middle school and he slammed my face on the bricks.”
Melanie said a group of boys also threatened to rape and kill her. Eventually, the boys let her go and when she went for help, she was ordered back to class, and told she could not call her parents, she said.
“They handled this wrong, you know, they put a child back in danger,” said J.R. Bowers. “It was a very racially motivated crime.”
Apparently, there is video of the attack:
Athens ISD gave KLTV 7 a statement, confirming there was a disturbance in the hallway, Friday between two to three students. “We have a camera system in the building,” said Louis DeRosa. “We are collecting other information and statements from witnesses and this is all the information we have at this time,” he said.
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Yeah-
The inmates are running the insane asylum with “nurse ratchett” the head looney.
GSP
I’m so glad I dont have children in school today. I have a feeling I’d be in trouble with a school administrator if he pulled this on my daughter.
I’d be calling the INS on each and every one of them so fast that they’d be paying for dinner in Pesos by the end of the week.
There is a lot of talk about the assignment and mention of the Texas standards or TEKS. After teaching in the Texas schools for a few years I can tell you that teachers in Texas live and die by the TEKS. You can’t assign anything without referencing it back to the TEKS. The teacher in question probably thought it was a creative way to address the TEKS without a boring paper and pencil assignment.
Although I have real problems with public schools and the indoctrination of our kids in them, I think the majority of teachers are good people who enjoy their work. In all the schools I taught, most of the teachers really loved teaching. But the constraints and demands of the administration and society on what can be achieved in the classroom were huge.
Teachers are just as indoctrinated as the kids sometimes. You’re fed this BS about the standards and the testings that will prove your worth as a teacher to the point that you start believing it. You have to be politically correct and watch what you say. I can see how teachers start to believe in the BS they are pushing because it is being pushed onto them by admin.
Those that don’t will likely not be teaching long. They’ll either leave teaching all together or be forced out.
I could not stand the obvious indoctrination of students while I was teaching middle school. The assignments given were ridiculous – way too pc and seeping with socialist ideas. But it was part of the curriculum that we had to teach. I could not walk into our team meeting and protest a reading assignment on this basis and state that my 6 classes of 7th grade language art students would not be doing it. Ok, I could if I was ready to lose my job.
Now you know why I left teaching. And why my kids don’t go to a public school. We lasted 1 semester in a small town public school in a suburb of OKC before we pulled them out because of issues with the curriculum.
I fully agree with most of the comments here. This needs to be fully investigated and legal action taken. Moreover, this young lady needs to copy protect the phrase. I can alreay see this phrase in t-shirts / bumper stickers, etc. The fact is Mexico is a violent place. I am from south texas, just across the border from Mexico, and people in the mexican side are not friendly.
I’m sorry, but I fail to see the educational merit of having students sit around designing posters – even if they do label them with sentences that amount to little more than parroted political sound bites.
Two quick questions for the Texas Dept of Ed:
1.) Just how does this irrelevant exercise in “arts and crafts” enhance the Texas core content’s prescribed curricula for social studies education in a manner that increases student understanding and interpretation of their roles in U.S. society while remaining both measurable and standards based?
2.) Precisely how is this activity to be measured on the state’s testing system for History Content, when there are no apparent measurable skills taught?
I have no patience for teachers who, rather than actually teach a subject, choose to lead their students in an unconventional art “experiment” and call it education!
As someone who once taught Social Studies/History to middle school students (mostly unappreciative and unimaginative 8th graders), I really would not have used “protest signs.” There are better and more creative ways to give kids the opportunity to take a pro or con position on any topic and then defend said position. While “protest signs” may seem like they’re fulfilling some curricular purpose, I don’t like the fact that some teachers want to use such a lesson to encourage kids to be “activists.”
As a Social Studies/History educator, I wanted kids to learn about American history, how to become responsible and engaged citizens (unlike many liberal teachers I once knew who looked down on me for not only being a military spouse but a, gasp, conservative). I wanted them to know how to think and communicate effectively and I’m not sure a “protest sign” assignment is quite what I would have in mind as an educator. Sometimes such an assignment can be productive for the less engaged learners in the class but, if it becomes “off-topic,” I won’t use it.
I’m surprised you would defend something like this as a Social Studies teacher yourself. I’ve taught in NY, AL, and CO and always felt time-constrained to take little “jaunts” into areas unrelated to a topic. This assignment may have covered curricular goals, but did it really cover what the children were studying? That’s what I want to know.
If this exercise was part of a larger study of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, that’s one thing, but if this was an assignment that took kids on a different tangent, that’s another story. I’ve known many teachers who’ve done this to get through to kids or engage them, but if this is the kind of reaction that a mere “protest sign” will engender, I’ll stick to persuasive essays, speeches, historical character assignments, or cooperative group work instead.
CJ and Terrig,
God bless you both. Children are hard enough to raise in this day and age without anything else to complicate it. I wish you both the best.
I experienced this as well. Try New York State curriculum standards and their lovely standardized exams called the Regents. In the name of “quality education,” many states, including Texas, give a half-a$$ed, multicultural, revisionist, apologist, pc recounting of both US history and Social Studies. There were some ways that I combated this tendency. I encouraged kids to ask questions. When I taught in NY, we were using texts over 10 YEARS OLD (which is pretty typical of “cash-strapped” school districts), very inaccurate, and very liberally peppered with pcisms. While I had students point out things like inaccuracies, misprints, factual errors, I also got the typical, middle school question,”why do we have to learn this?”
Most of the time I deflected because I just plain felt uncomfortable. Then, one day (as a student teacher) I just spoke the truth, “all this information is test-driven.” I then got a follow-up question: “do you agree with that?” I said no.
Public schools have become so test-driven. I blame a lot of this on the state and federal departments of education. I also blame teachers for not raising enough of a stink about this and instead going with the flow. Some teachers claim they support individual learning styles but what I’ve often seen, in my years of teaching, is an acceptance of uniformity of thought.
I spent many years as a sub and I wonder if sunshinerbray fully understands what teaching is becoming. Many qualified teachers start as subs and while they wait for positions to open up, they get their masters degrees. Many schools claim they need teachers but are reluctant to hire from their substitute teacher pool. I experienced this first-hand, along with a lot of other subs with not just bachelor’s but master’s degree backgrounds in education.
What I, and other subs noticed was the following: a) schools would hire mostly bachelor’s recipients that were outsiders or not already subbing for the school system b) schools use a lot of long-term subs to fill teaching positions they say they can’t fill, and c) they won’t hire master’s recipients. For schools who are looking for the best qualified candidates, it looks an awful lot like cost-cutting so that administrators can earn their cushy incomes. Substitute teachers are also the first to blame when educational quality seems to fall when it’s the staffing choices/decisions of a school district that need to be looked at.
When a system becomes so bloated and ineffective that it stops producing a quality product (education) that is competitive with other countries, and breeds chaos, then that system needs to be changed.
Where is the ACLU equivalent to sue the teachers out of their profession for what they are doing to our young citizens?
Remember, most school administrators/officials were teachers first. So the old, I’m just a teacher don’t cut it bubba.
Tell me how much of the union dues collected by NEA/teachers, salary actually go into protecting our children from the crap they are indoctrinating into their little minds?
It’s amazing that if you don’t immediately follow the party line around here, you’re automatically a liberal who’s a part of the problem…
To give you some insight into my opinions of things, I’m currently writing a master’s thesis on illegal immigration and its economic effects in the 20th century. Without going into the details, I’d say it’s in-line with the conservative platform. I wrote a paper this semester on McCarthyism, and I defended much of McCarthy’s stances. I’m as conservative as they come.
#100:
I’m not “defending” the assignment. I was just trying to look at things from her POV. I personally think is was pretty weak. I might do something like that, MAYBE, for example, as a warm-up exercise during a class on the Boston Tea Party or the Dred Scott trial. However, it’s not meaty enough to be a good assessment. My only point was that it’s not completely out in left field, either.
For those of you are curious about testing for Texas social studies classes (or other core classes, for that matter) you can review the 2006 TAKS 11th grade test:
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/resources/release/taks/2006/grxltaksapril.pdf
Here is the answer key:
http://www.tea.state.tx.us/student.assessment/resources/release/taks/2006/gr11takskey.pdf
There’s no “teaching to a test” in my school. My kids do groupwork, document analysis, round-table debates, etc. If you cover the TEKS, which are definitely meaty, your kids will be fine.
The test is not hard. Not at all. A “passing” score on the social studies test is a little more than a 50.
Word is that the school district is holding a press conference at 2:45 Local time (in about 30 min.) and will announce that one student will be charged with “making a false claim”
Is this in fact true that Ms. Bowers has made a false claim? or is it that the school district is trying to make it all better by claiming it never happened?
http://tylerpaper.com/article/20080409/NEWS01/731498537
This is disgusting. No one should physically attack another person because of their beliefs or thoughts.
False Report Charge For Girl In Athens School Attack
Michelle, can you update the headline for this topic to reflect that this was an incidence of fraud on the purported victim’s part?
Thanks.
Michelle, seriously, this is a pretty isolated incident of this type of fraud, but we have to really be careful not to become like the liberals and be honest about what happens. If this student made it up, she is just a teenage drama queen acting out some odd Nativist facade for attention
We can’t let her detract from solid arguments for the rule of law and stemming the tide of culture dilution. This story was, after all, a story about left-wing hypocrisy and government indoctrination.