Teacher teaches AP history, comes off criticial of religion.

Go figure. Teaching AP European history involves being critical of religion. Sure European history heavily involves the church in so far as they ran the place since the fall of the Roman Empire, but do you have to teach them so well? What next are US history teachers going to say that the US *wasn't* founded as a Christian nation.

"How do you get the peasants to oppose something that is in their best interest? Religion."

How little things change. The point to learning history is to avoid repeating it. Perhaps in the larger sense as well as in the narrower sense. I do enjoy some of the student's comments. Mostly because they are AP students and off in college now for the former ones. One Good Move has a copy of BillO's show interviewing the kid who apparently jumped straight to lawyers as step one, even though the LA Times article quotes Chad's (the kid) sister as saying they exhausted their options. The lawyer makes a comment about a former student who is now a "intolerant Christian-Hating know-it-all" due to Corbett's (teacher) teaching. He must be good.

British Teacher Pardoned for Teddy Bear.

A teacher in Sudan was sentenced to 15 days in prison (a slap on the wrist compared to the typical sentence) for having her class name a teddy bear and accepting the name Muhammad (the students favorite name). Well she was thankfully pardoned and deported back home. Though, in the yahoo rundown of the story taken from AP I kind of missed a point. See if you catch it:

A British teacher jailed for letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad as part of writing project headed home Monday after being pardoned — ending a case that set off an international outcry and angered many moderate Muslims.

Hard-line Muslim clerics here denounced Gibbons, saying she intentionally aimed to insult Islam. A day after her Thursday trial, several thousand Sudanese massed in central Khartoum to demand that Gibbons be executed. Many of the demonstrators carried swords and clubs.

There was apparently an angered "moderate Muslim group" but the angry folks seem to be those out protesting demanding she be murdered for allowing a teddy bear be name Muhammad. Is that what qualifies for moderate? Is the scale somehow weighted so that where moderate would be between 'let her go it shouldn't even be a crime', 'let her go it was an honest mistake', and 'fifteen days is a slap on the wrist' in what we typically think of moderate. Whereas in a different group moderate counts as: 'Fifteen days! She insulted Islam!', 'She should be put to death!', and 'She should be beheaded!' -- So the protesters demanding she be killed are actually moderates?