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 | 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 .

AN OPEN LETTER EXPLAINING ELEMENTS OF OUR NEW, IMPROVED, AND DECIDEDLY UNWOKE CURRICULUM

by Dick Westheimer

Dear Parent,

 

We believe in children. We believe 

in padded playgrounds and unscuffed knees 

and helmets and a bubble wrapped curriculum 

lined with velvet and free from troubled ideas.

 

We believe our teachers should teach

that enslaved Africans got vocational skills

like painting and planting for their personal benefit,

that residents of Auschwitz knew the trick of how 

to lose weight and look so fit, that members 

of the Five Tribes, removed for their own good, 

got to “pursue happiness in their own way.”

 

We believe those seeking refuge (whose boats 

overturn) might learn to swim, that those 

with black-lung get to sit in front of their TVs

in their BarcaLoungers with their very own 

government issued oxygen tanks, that Catholic 

boys get personal tutoring in anatomy from 

respected men in their white collared shirts, 

that trafficked girls get to travel the world 

and meet new friends.

 

We believe children should learn nothing

about those pre-teens head-bent in sweatshops

sewing their shoes, or two-year-olds toddling 

in electronics junk yards recycling their PCs

or tweens armed and taught to harm their kin. 

 

We do this for you, dear parent 

because, we are committed to protect 

you from Judgement Day when 

Johnny or Susie asks what 

you could have done and why, 

dear parent, you didn’t. 

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio. He is a Rattle Poetry Prize finalist. His poems have recently appeared in Whale Road Review, Innisfree Journal, Gyroscope Review, Banyan Review, Rattle, Ritual Well, One Art, and Cutthroat. His chapbook A Sword in Both Hands: Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine is published by SheilaNaGig.

OLD POISONS

by Jack Romig

The Texas Freedom Caucus—a group of Republican lawmakers—sent a letter to the State Board of Education ahead of its Tuesday meeting, noting that they were watching the changes to history lessons closely. Legislators “will not hesitate to intervene during the next legislative session, should the need arise, to protect Texas children from being further indoctrinated and taken advantage of,” they wrote. The caucus celebrated on Twitter Tuesday night, saying: “The board voted to scrap the wokeified proposed changes to the TEKS.” —The Dallas Morning News, August 30, 2022

If we must stand nostalgic by the crusted rivers of our past,

forgetting how we took the land from other folk,

made belles and cavaliers of those who drove the slaves,

erased a second time those killed for human difference;

 

if we have only mists of vaguest sentiment  

to hide from us the questions that our history asserts,

then let us also keep alive our feelings for old poisons,

 

mercurochrome our mothers painted on our cuts

and used its toxic salt to draw hearts on our knees,

insecticides that fogged the wake of tanker trucks

as we, unknowing, trotted in the spray.

 

Jack Romig was a longtime manuscript editor with Book-of-the-Month Club in New York City. His poems have appeared in Common Sense 2, The Fourth River, and Philadelphia Stories. He lives in Huff’s Church, Pennsylvania.

THE NEW CURRICULUM

by William Aarnes

                        America First

At dinner tonight
our eighth-grader repeated

how all the kids just love
their Patriotism teacher.

She asked if we knew
that for centuries

people have misjudged
that Samaritan as good.

Each evening she seems
more and more suspicious

of our baffled looks,  
of our needing to have explained

something so self-evident
as the moral that only someone

alien to our way of life
would help a victim

who probably deserved
a worse beating than he got.


William Aarnes lives in South Carolina.

ERASING HISTORY

by Janet Leahy

Image source: 7NewsDenver

"A newly conservative board for the Jefferson County School District, which is Colorado’s second-largest, raised the possibility of pruning the curriculum of books and material that could be seen to exalt civil disobedience and promote unpatriotic thoughts. Where does that leave the civil rights movement? Vietnam?" --Frank Bruni, “The Wilds of Education, NY Times, September 27, 2014

"The organization that oversees the Advanced Placement curriculum, whose history course is being defended by massive, ongoing student protests in a Denver suburb, has now said that it backs those protests. The College Board’s Advanced Placement Program supports the actions taken by students in Jefferson County, Colorado to protest a school board member’s request to censor aspects of the AP U.S. History course," said a statement from the College Board released on Friday. --HuffPost, September 27, 2014


In Colorado
students march with teachers protesting
the school board’s agenda to change
the AP history curriculum.
Why teach evolution, climate change,
the civil rights struggle, the exploitation
of Indigenous People?
Why teach critical thinking?
Just erase the chapters of the past that might
cast a negative light—
the bombing of Hiroshima, slavery.
Rip whole chapters from history books.
Red-flag for omission accurate facts
that show Americans
treating others as less than human.
The scholarship of history in question.
Yet these students
keep their eyes on the prize,
demanding an education aligned with truth,
knowing
ignorance is not bliss.


Janet Leahy writes poetry in New Berlin, Wisconsin.  A member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, she has two collections of poetry, The Storm, Poems of War, Iraq and Not My Mother’s Classroom.