[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'165212\' date=\'Oct 1 2007, 08:44 AM\'][quote name=\'DrBear\' post=\'165201\' date=\'Oct 1 2007, 06:43 AM\']Your teacher was both right (you did have to write about a black person) and wrong (your hero is YOUR hero). Sadly, most of education today is "do what I tell you to do," not "do this to LEARN."[/quote]There's been a lot of unnecessary bashing of education in general in this thread. [/quote] Except Ray has a great point, one I can back up. If you were to mentally replace the phrase "public school" with the phrase "government run school" every time you heard the former, opinions might be different. For nine of my twelve years of grade school, I marked time by doing things because I was told, and because a grade depended on them. I learned more between my seventh and ninth years than in the remaining nine.
(During one of those nine years, I was also assigned a "black person of note" paper, randomly drew Arthur Ashe from the bowl, and remember that he was a good tennis player and died from AIDS. And that's roughly it.)
If the assignment was to profile a black person, and you turn in a report about Merv Grifiin, then the teacher was right to fail you, especially since you were warned in advance. That's just comically, blatantly defiant.
That's true, there's no dispute on that account. But there's also a lesson there. People have choices to make, and for good or bad, those choices bring about consequences. Those consequences have to be dealt with.
Mostly, though, I imagine it was the whole "not black" thing.
Personally, I'm not crazy about Black History Month as something to recognize, any more than I would be to celebrate "Native American Month," or "White Guy Month." People should be celebrated and studied for their contribution to history, and not for the color of their skin. Going back to that bashing of schools thing, I stopped counting a while ago, but the Seattle School District has a pathological mania when dealing with race. Or rather, when trying to brainwash their students into thinking that equality is great, but being white is an unfair advantage. Or that a white person cannot
by definition be a victim of racism.
The assignment would have been exponentially more valuable (and I imagine personally satisfying) if there was no limitation on the skin color of the honoree.
///But I wouldn't have picked Bill Cullen.
It's too bad that the internet didn't exist in this form when I was going to school, because as a youngster, all I knew about Bill was that he had a physical impairment, and that he hosted a game show or three that I liked. Given the chance, I would have loved the opportunity to craft a "hero worship" essay about him. Throughout much of my childhood, I thought of how Bill dealt with his challenge, and it helped me with mine.
/And yeah, there's that whole thing about how he was such a good host, too.