The silly season.

[Icarus]

Well root toot! A teacher in Virginia is fearing for her life because she told her students who were learning calligraphy to pen some Arab quotations. Arabic penmanship is appropriate for such an exercise. That kind of text has a lot of curly cues that work only with calligraphic skills. The shit has also hit the fan in Williamson county Tennessee because a teacher dared to have the students learn some of the basics about Islam. Civics classes, in the pursuit of learning, are likely to examine the way that cultures, other than our own, are likely to think and believe.   Both those episodes have caused colossal cyber attacks on the teachers and the school boards.

It seems that the mere mention of Islam is cause for great alarm for a certain elements of white, Christian, less educated, citizens.  Seems to me that high school students should learn some of the fundamentals about how the other part of the world works and thinks. I claim that knowing the enemy is a useful defensive mechanism, offensive mechanism too if it comes to that.  I mean Really,  it is common practice for high school and college football coaches to film and analyze the behavior of competitive teams and use that information to advantage.  What is so difficult to understand about the advantage for learning the ways of the Muslim belief?

[Sandra Craft]

I understand that this is all a ridiculous over-reaction, but still the quote the teacher assigned seems really tone-deaf.  There's so much poetry that could have been used to practice Islamic calligraphy on, why use the one phrase that's guaranteed to be the most inflammatory?

[Tank]

I understand that this is all a ridiculous over-reaction, but still the quote the teacher assigned seems really tone-deaf.  There's so much poetry that could have been used to practice Islamic calligraphy on, why use the one phrase that's guaranteed to be the most inflammatory?

Ageed. Of all the things she could have chosen!

[Waski_the_Squirrel]

What academic lesson was taught with the calligraphy? Why this particular phrase? It sounds to me like a hastily thought up activity.

Of course, none of that excuses the disproportionate reaction.