According to this article, a high school art teacher is facing sanctions from his school district for “recommending that some of his advanced students consider taking figure drawing courses that included nude figure drawings.” The article lists some other circumstances that may have played a role in the district’s decision to pursue this course of action against the teacher.
This reminds me of an incident that happened when I was in high school. One of the women’s coaches, Coach Mac, was my health teacher. I thought she was an awesome teacher. About halfway through the year, she was charged with having used inappropriate language in class. Turns out, the charges were based on a lesson she taught my class. I don’t remember the point of the lesson, but it was some lesson in development that involved Little Johnny ‘learning the word Firetruck without the middle,’ meaning the word ‘Fuck’. She never actually said the F word in class.
But Coach Mac was brought before the school board for this alleged infraction. I attended the board meeting as a show of support for her. Soon afterwards, she left the district, and I frankly no longer recall whether she was fired or just gave up and left of her own accord. The result was the same for me: the loss of a teacher from whom I learned a lot.
Only later did I discover that Coach Mac’s supposed language in class was just a front for the real issue: she was a lesbian and a girls’ coach. But this issue was never uttered at the school board meeting. To this day, I have no idea if sexual impropriety was suspected or accused, or whether it just rubbed some parents the wrong way to think that a lesbian had access to the the girls’ dressing room. Either way, the whole process was a sham undertaken by a community that must have known enough that its bigotry was inappropriate to pick a cover issue for their witch hunt.
In reading this story, you have to take the time and place into consideration. This was a mostly rural school in the 1980s. Personally, I did not know any homosexuals (that I knew of), I thought the Village People were just a gimmicky group, and non-heterosexual lifestyles were not an issue that I’d even given much thought to. The only reason I know that the lesbian charges were real was that sometime after she left, Coach Mac dropped back by the school with her girlfriend. That visit must have been her parting ‘fuck you’ to the community, so to speak.
Reading the linked article, however, it looks like things haven’t changed a whole lot.

A small cool front moved through last night, bringing with it a thunderstorm and a little fresh, clear air. It made for glorious running weather this morning. I ran about eleven miles around Town Lake and up through west Austin (through Tarrytown to 35th, across MoPac and back down Shoal Creek).
At Auditorium Shores, I noticed on the side of the path a parked bike and an empty guitar case. A few yards later, Woode Wood was serenadiing the sunrise over Town Lake and downtown. I didn’t stop to listen to him, but just his presence there made my morning brighter.

I read yesterday that Bart D. Ehrman’s book Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why is selling briskly. In the book, Dr. Ehrman presents some reasons why we can’t just take the Bible at face value: a plethora of conflicting source documents, errors in translation, the politics of canonization, etc. Or, as the Washington Post article says, his book “casts doubt on any number of New Testament episodes that most Christians take as, well, gospel.”
I haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds like New Testament 101 type stuff to me. I’m really happy that Ehrman’s book is presenting these ideas to people who are not familiar with the complex processes which have resulted in the book we call the Bible. Maybe I should keep a copy or two on hand to give out.

I just finished listening to the public domain Librivox recording of Jules Verne’s A Journey to the Interior of the Earth. By modern sci-fi standards, this was a terrible novel, but considering that it was written in 1864, it was quite remarkable.

As usual, Gordon Atkinson expresses a matter of faith that I share much more eloquently than I ever could. Go read This is how it happened.

For the love of God (so to speak), please refrain from creating choral arrangements of simple, familiar hymns. In order to justify the effort, it seems that you cannot resist the urge to fill these arrangements with musical cliches: key changes, time signature changes, bizarre harmonies, cliched accompaniment, etc.
The people who know and love these hymns will scratch their heads at the arrangements, and such arrangements will not increase the appreciation of those who may be unfamiliar these hymns, or of those who do not like these hymns.
Upon reflection, I guess I could take a market approach: church choir directors, for the love of God (so to speak), please refrain from buying these arrangements for your choirs. We’ll all be happier in the long run.

I haven’t followed the news too closely about the uproar regarding the sale of B&O to a Dubai-based company, but I think this Salon commentary is right on: this is a non-issue and it’s embarrassing that the Democrats are trying to gain political mileage from it.

I just completed the Librivox audio edition of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. I loved it; it’s just over the top.
On a side note, this was the first Librivox audiobook that I’ve tried. I certainly like the principle of making free audiobooks of works that are in the public domain, but there were some problems with this recording. Each chapter was read by a different person. This wasn’t a problem, but the quality and volume of the recordings varied widely.

Garret Vreeland was contracted to photograph a speech and book signing by Paul Bremer. In his blog, Garret offers some thoughts about the experience: on politics, Mr. Bremer’s public demeanor, etc. Nothing earth-shattering. Just a nice smattering of musings.

This afternoon, I spent some time browsing through Crap Cars at Barnes & Noble. This little not-terribly-witty book profiles about 50 of the worst cars sold in the U.S. during the driving lifetime of your average B&N customer–the last 40 years or so. I was dismayed, though not surprised, to find in this book two cars that I’ve owned:
1980 Chevrolet Citation

1975 Ford Mustang II