[Impala64ssa]

is the superintendent sorry for this incompetent teacher's thoughtlessness, OR is she sorry that they got caught? Rhetorical question of the day: If this teacher gave her Black students an assignment arguing in favor of cross burnings and Jim Crow laws....well we all get the idea.

[muawiyah]

To debate issues it's worth learning how those on the other side think about them. I can think of a thousand ways other than the one this particular teacher selected to use. But isn't this in New York where every teacher is a member of a militant union given over to totalitarian thought?

There are no surprises in this.

[Chode]

paid leave = paid vacation

[kenavi]

It's clear from the context that the teacher was not taking the Nazis' side: "your very life in the Third Reich is at stake in your answer".

She (or he) was showing how even classic forms of argument: ethos, pathos, or logos, could be misused for intellectually unscrupulous ends.

It is not a lesson that all high schoolers are intellectually or emotionally prepared to handle, and the teacher needed to get the students' informed buy-in on the value for them in life as an educated citizen of this republic.

[Jack Hydrazine]

Another Leftist testing the system with a trial balloon.

[Gumdrop]

She ought to be fired!

[gmartinz]

It isn’t so much the teacher’s use of the assignment (although what person wouldn’t look at that assignment and think, ‘This just isn’t right’) the BIG problem is whoever created and approved it. Would it have gotten past the editors if the pursuasive argument to Nazi leadership was “Homosexuals are evil?” Not a chance. Or, a pursuasive argument to the government of then-Taliban ruled Afghanistan that “Atheists are evil?”