CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: School's sacking of Christian science teacher divides town in the irrational Bible belt  Thu Feb 11, 2010 4:40 am | |
| Jennifer Dennis studied her 13-year-old son's skin and was uncertain which to be more astonished by: the shape made by the strange dots running the length of his forearm, or how they got there.
"When I looked at it, the shape was definitely a cross, like a Christian cross," said Dennis. "Zach said his teacher did it with an instrument that gave off something like a lightning bolt. It was red, like a sunburn or if you burn your arm on the oven."
The next morning, Dennis was standing in the reception of Mount Vernon middle school demanding to know what had been done to Zachary.
That was three years ago and the small, deeply religious Ohio town is bracing itself for the answer to Dennis's question after the lengthy de facto trial of a man who is either a decorated teacher martyred for his Christian faith, or a religious zealot who spent years undermining the very science he was paid to teach.
Along the way, the dispute has prompted Bible-waving students to march on their school, set teacher against teacher, and forced Jennifer Dennis and her family to leave town.
At the heart of the controversy is John Freshwater, who taught at Mount Vernon middle school for 21 years.
Freshwater said he had done the same science experiment to hundreds of students before Zachary Dennis, using a Tesla coil, which gives off an electric spark.
The teacher said it was painless and harmless – although a doctor would later testify that Dennis had second-degree burns – and that he had made an X, not a cross, on the boy's skin.
That might have been the end of the matter after the school ordered Freshwater to stop using the coil on children.
But Zachary Dennis's parents asked him what else was going on in science class. Out poured accounts of lessons on evolution mingled with creationist theories about "intelligent design", a euphemism for the hand of God, of questions about religious beliefs and of classroom walls pasted with the Ten Commandments.
Other children told of also having crosses burned on their arms.
The school sacked Freshwater in June 2008. He invoked his right to a hearing that is about to reach its conclusion after dragging on and off for more than a year and costing the school board close to $500,000 (£300,000).
Dick Hoppe – a former nuclear missile engineer who later helped design the Apollo spacecraft command module, and who was more recently a visiting professor of biology at a local college – has attended almost every day of the hearings.
"One student, when asked what he had learned about science from Mr Freshwater, testified that what he learned was you can't trust science. That surprised me. I didn't want to believe it was that overt," said the avowed atheist.
"Freshwater was teaching what the text taught – age of the Earth, fossils – and then would add an overlay of creationist material that cast doubt on what the text said. He would use a handout that described all the adaptations of a woodpecker and at the bottom he added: was intelligent design involved? He was teaching against the curriculum."
The hearings heard that Freshwater pinned up a poster of President George Bush and the then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, at prayer, and another advertising an evangelical meeting.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/10/brand-cross-christian-science-teacher |
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