An excellent article! Teaching evolution to young Christian skeptics

[hyphenate]

This is an excellent article--this teacher had me hooked, and I have long believed in evolution!
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David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote "Evolution" in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as truth. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.

"If I do this wrong," Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, "I'll lose him."

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state's public schools to teach evolution, calling it "the organizing principle of life science." Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other Christian traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God's individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/30/MNSK12HD6J.DTL

[elfin]

1. Earlier in the New York Times as well

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/education/24evolution.html?scp=3&sq=education%20evolution%20florida&st=cse

Thanks for reminding me - meant to copy this out for my daughter-in-law who is very concerned about this for her Fundie sister's kids who are smart and privately Fundie schooled.

As a docent in a Natural and Human History museum, I appreciated this teacher's tips when I am confronted with a gaggle of Home Schoolers (and their hostile parents) going through our Earth History dioramas.

[pscot]

2. Life on the front lines

Interesting article, and rather hopeful.

[ladjf]

3. It will never happen. But, the President and Vice President candidates

should be required to take 6 hrs. of collegiate geology and 3 hrs. of meteorology. If after taking a full year of geology they still believe that the Earth is 5,000 years old, we've just got to hope that the electorate has enough sense to not vote for ignorance.