Posted on 11/22/2006 7:16:41 AM PST by Indy Pendance
LONG BEACH, Calif. — Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he "discovered" them.
The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.
Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.
He has replaced it with a more realistic look at the complex relationship between Indians and white settlers.
Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But "what I am trying to portray is a different point of view."
Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme.
"I think that is very sad," said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. "He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving."
Even American Indians are divided on how to approach a holiday that some believe symbolizes the start of a hostile takeover of their lands.
Chuck Narcho, a member of the Maricopa and Tohono O'odham tribes who works as a substitute teacher in Los Angeles, said younger children should not be burdened with all the gory details of American history.
"If you are going to teach, you need to keep it positive," he said. "They can learn about the truths when they grow up. Caring, sharing and giving — that is what was originally intended."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Imagine what it must be like to wake up every morning and be Bill Morgan.
Liberals always treat Indians like they are some kind of peace-loving, tree-worshipping, combine-dwelling hippies. Shoot, they took each other's land all the time and then skinned the owners alive. The whole east coast was just one massacre after another until Smallpox came along.
I'm sure he sees no problem with himself. I wouldn't want him teaching my children.
would like to be there when he discovers retribution
Yep, this is just more political correctness in the classroom.
Yep, we stole the land from the peace loving native peoples.
As a side note, I'm surprised we're allowed to still call it Thanksgiving, because that has a strong element of thanking God for what we have.
I've been expecting that the name Thanksgiving would be de-emphasized, just as the name Christmas has been de-emphasized, and rolled up into the "holiday season" where there are lots of holidays.
Good post.
The writer should have put "realistic" in quotes, otherwise it looks like the story agrees with the idiots point of view.
This lesson is appropriate for high school students, in my opinion, but not for younger students. I am not advocating returning the country to the Indians and I am happy that Anglo culture prevailed in North America. However, it is always good for us to be presented with both sides of any argument, and I believe it is appropriate for high school students to ponder the feelings of the Indians. After all, I believe that we are now experiencing the same invasion of our culture as the Indians did at that time.....different circumstances, but certainly the same feelings as we watch everything we love and value fade away.
Is Bill Morgan of European ancestry? If so, then he needs to practice what he preaches, and set an example and leave this country so the native peoples can have it back. If he feels that strongly about this, he's hypocritical if he stays and enjoys all that this country has to offer. On the other hand, maybe he lives on an Indian reservation and enjoys Indian casinos.
Of course, to be truly accurate, the students would all have to steal the items from each other before the teacher enters the room.
Where did they find this moron?
Probably fresh out of college with a degree in education.
If you're too dumb to make it in journalism school, education is the way to go!
Owl_Eagle
If what I just wrote made you sad or angry,
it was probably just a joke.
I am watching a show on the History channel right now about the Cherokee...even the existing Cherokee say they were fighters....and they killed for fun...they were very violent....NOT the peace loving peoples the lefties have made them to be....
The Pilgrims got on well with the Indians, it was the later settlers that got snatchy.
This guy needs a brush up on history and stop with the self hatred and actually TEACH the truth.
I don't get this. He says he wants to portray a more "realistic" version of history. But he's really making his own value judgements about what that history should be. He's taking the position that the English settlers were wrong to come to America and settle this land. He's taking the position that the Indians were just peace loving people, living in harmony with nature. He's injecting a certain point of view into the story of Thanksgiving and the overall settlement of America by Europeans. He's not being "realistic" as such. He's taking sides and presenting a viewpoint that he agrees with.
>>>After all, I believe that we are now experiencing the same invasion of our culture as the Indians did at that time.....different circumstances, but certainly the same feelings as we watch everything we love and value fade away.>>>
Yes, and an absolute feeling of helplessness about it.
Good point.
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