Tuesday, July 16, 2024

MEMO FROM THE PRINCIPAL OF ANTONIN SCALIA HIGH SCHOOL, CHARITY OK

RE: AMENDED COURSE OF STUDY FOR THE 2024-25 ACADEMIC YEAR

by Matthew E. Henry


AI-generated photograph of the Library of our fictitious Antonin Scalia High School


Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Requires Public Schools to Teach the Bible. —The New York Times, June 27, 2024


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 | 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 scorpionHe 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 .