Recruiting "Young Scientists for Jesus" in the classroom

If you use your curriculum as catechism, as a "doctrinal manual" passed from on high used to dictate the content of science to be tested using predictable questions with memorized answers, well, you may as well be proselytizing for the Catholic Church.

Neither will hone your knowledge of science, but at least the latter gets you a lottery ticket's chances of getting into Heaven.

If you expect a freshman high school student to grasp the structure of DNA before she knows the nature of chemical bonds, you are asking her to worship the canonical double helix like a Crucifix, the heart of the Mystery.

But that is what most of us do, with predictable results--some adolescents grab the DNA molecule for dear life, reverently chanting the prayers to St. Erwin, "A goes with T, G goes with C," carefully studying the Scriptures interpreting the mysteries of transcription and translation.

Others go through the motions just enough to get to Purgatory--recite the right words, kneel down before the Microscope, and slide out when the bell rings, every day seems an eternity in Hell.

The saddest, though, are the damned, the ones who reject the Gospels of Charles, James, Francis, and Rosalind,the free thinkers who dare question our catechism and abandon "science."

Have a come to Jesus moment, throw away your catechism book. Proselytizing has no place, none, in a science classroom.

No matter what Pope Arne and his archbishops say....

Bless me Father for I have sinned....

I need to change a good chunk of my classroom practice.


The archbishop picture modified from The Daily Beast.