On Tuesday, Katy ISD released a statement saying, in part, that the assignment was supposed to encourage critical thinking and dialogue and not question any students’ religious beliefs. “If they argued their faith, they were being told they were arguing against their faith and that happened in the classroom”.
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But she claims the teacher insisted that the answer was wrong, and that she should have said that the statement is a fact.
“We were asked to take a poll to say whether God was fact, opinion or a myth and [the teacher] told anyone who said God was a fact or an opinion that they were wrong”, she said, the news site reported. Wooley, who is Methodist, took her concern to the Katy ISD school board Monday night as her mother looked on.
She added: “When I tried to argue she told me to prove it and I tried to offer things such as the Bible and stories that I’ve read before from people who have died and went to Heaven, but have come back and told their stories”.
“I think that the teacher crossed a serious line when she led impressionable minds to write there was no God…that God wasn’t real”.
A local middle school student and her parents are upset after being given a controversial classroom assignment. “I felt like this was really wrong, and I didn’t feel like it was fair for my faith and my religion to have anything to do with what I’m learning about in school”.
Another press account of the matter, Covering Katy, described it this way: “It appears the teacher was not following Katy ISD’s curriculum, because Memorial Junior High students who have a different reading teacher said God was never mentioned in their class”.
“The majority of the kids believed in God”, Jordan’s mother told KRIV, “and they’re being told by their teacher that there’s no God”.
To the statement “There is a God”, Wooley told she answered that it was both a “factual claim” and “opinion”.
She and her mom also went to the principal and would like to see this assignment stopped. “But in Houston, Texas, where it’s red, white, and blue, and stars all over, and God bless the United States, and “Don’t Mess With Texas”, you know, Texas is messing with my kid”.
At the conclusion of the investigation today, the principal determined that the classroom activity included an item that was unnecessary for achieving the instructional standard.
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Jordan said her reading teacher was not in class Tuesday, but that friends in the other 7th grade reading class told her their teacher used the same assignment Tuesday. However, it also added that the assignment was ‘ill-conceived and because of that, its intent had been misconstrued’.
