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| AI-generated photograph of the Library of our fictitious Antonin Scalia High School |
happy final days of summer. as you can imagine, central office
has been inundated with queries on how you—our intrepid educators—
will meet superintendent Walter’s mandate to immediately “incorporate
the Bible…as an instructional support.” while the Bible has important
cultural, literary, political, and spiritual significance, most educators
outside the English and social studies departments are unsure how
to accomplish this without running afoul of parents, the school board,
the dept of education, state senators, the ACLU, and the myriad
acronymed mother groups multiplying in our midst. the admin team,
with help from your dept heads, composed the suggestions below.
divided by content area, the following should be read as inspiration,
not limitations to your academic freedom. the endnotes are provided
only as a resource, should you choose to familiarize yourselves with the texts.
Drama/Performance Arts: students can compose monologues
on the benefits of feigning mental illness,1 stage a morality play
focusing on the perils of drunken fathers being sexually assaulted
by their children,2 or send up a musical about a king singing
and dancing before his subjects, his penis flapping in the wind.3
Foreign Languages: compose conversational scenarios imparting
the importance of language as a means of bridging cultural gaps,4
communing with spiritual beings,5 and mitigating the slaughter
of 42,000 people for mispronouncing a Hebrew word.6
Government/Economics: stage a mock trial for a woman who
grabbed the penis of the naked man dominating her husband
in a physical altercation—should her hand be cut off without pity?7
host a debate on the fairness of a prophet being mauled by a lion
for not disfiguring another prophet.8 present case studies of God
smearing fecal matter on the faces of corrupt politicians9 and
how acts of personal violence are Jesus’ preferred method
of addressing the harms of unfettered, exploitative capitalism.10
Health/Sex Education: have students build interactive websites
or slide decks on donkey-sized dicks with horse-volume emissions,11
the nature of wet dreams,12 reasons for avoiding menstruating women,13
the risks of ‘pulling out’ as a birth control method,14 and how to craft
sex toys from precious metals.15
Home Economics: experiment with recipes for barley bread baked
with pellets of human waste,16 mixed drinks appropriate for political
assassinations,17 and patterns for sewing sackcloth coverings
for repentant cows.18
Mathematics: construct word problems to calculate the number of nights
one could survive in a big fish,19 how many horsemen are needed
for apocalyptic destruction,20 how large a skin-scarf one could quilt
from 200 Philistines foreskins,21 and the means of equally distributing—
around a set geographic region—the remains of a woman gang-r*ped
to death and then hacked to pieces by her husband.22
Physical Education: teach the importance of conditioning by placing
students in the athletic shoes of the murdered prophets of Baal23
or the young men unable to escape bears sent to avenge the bald prophet
they mocked.24 dodge ball can be supplemented with a mini-lesson
on throwing the infants of one’s enemies against jagged rocks.25
Science Classes: students can calculate the impact of a boy falling
from a window after dozing off during a sermon that ran too long,26
and the amount of refracted light needed to prevent another watery geocide.27
they can also determine the physical and chemical changes needed
to liquify a golden statue enough for forced human consumption,28
and the active ingredients in a potion to impel hysterectomies.29
Speech/Rhetoric Class: suggest the usefulness of ad homien attacks,
such as referring to your enemies as aborted fetuses30 and openly praying
they fall victim to botched circumcisions.31
once again, these are only suggestions. if you have any further questions,
please bring them to the attention of your dept head, building admin, and
the four new “biblical coaches” the district has hired to support you.
unrelated, recent budgetary concerns leave us unable to maintain
funding for professional development, academic conferences, and
continuing education efforts of faculty for the foreseeable future.
here’s to a wonderful beginning of the school year: GO CRUSADERS!
11 Samuel 21:10-14 | 2 Genesis 9:20-27 and Genesis 19:31-38 | 3 2 Samuel 6:14-20 | 4 Genesis 11:1-9 | 5 1 Corinthians chapter 14 | 6 Judges 12:5-6 | 7 Deuteronomy 25:11-12 | 8 1 Kings 20:35-36 | 9 Malachi 2:1-3 | 10 John 2:13-17 | 11 Ezekiel 23:20 | 12 Deuteronomy 23:10 | 13 Leviticus15:19-30 | 14 Genesis 38:8-10 | 15 Ezekiel 16:17 | 16 Ezekiel 4:12 | 17 Judges 5:24-27 | 18 Jonah 3:7-10 | 19 Jonah chapter 2 | 20 Revelation 6:1-8 | 21 1 Samuel 18:27 | 22 Judges chapter 19 | 23 1 Kings 18:16-40 | 24 2 Kings 2:23-24 | 25 Psalm 137:8-9 | 26 Acts 20:7-9 | 27 Genesis 9:13-17| 28Exodus 32:20 | 29 Numbers 5:11-31 | 30 Psalms 58:8 | 31 Galatians 5:11-12.
Matthew E. Henry (MEH) is the author of six poetry collections, most recently said the Frog to the scorpion. He is an educator and editor who received his MFA yet continued to spend money he didn’t have completing an MA in theology and a PhD in education. He writes about education, race, religion, and burning oppressive systems to the ground at www.MEHPoeting.com .