Puzzles are good teaching tools — which is why a teacher in North Carolina has resigned, reports WRAL:
SMITHFIELD, N.C. — A Spanish teacher at Smithfield-Selma Senior High School resigned this week after handing out an assignment that some students and parents said teaches hate.
Khalid Chahhou, who was in his first year of teaching in Johnston County, gave students a worksheet in which they were to translate words and find them within a word-search puzzle.
Some students started uncovering strange words in the process.
“There were words like ‘kill,’ then I saw it said ‘destroy America,'” Eric Herrera said.
Those words are unusual for a school Spanish assignment. They sound like words taken from Vice President Dick Cheney’s speeches about what would happen if the Democrats won the mid-terms elections. AND:
As they read on, students found the puzzle contained a paragraph that contained the following phrases:
–“Sharon killed a lot of innocent people,” a possible reference to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
–“Palestine is not a terrorist group.”
–“Allah help destroy this body of evil making humanity miserable.”
Well, what could be possibly political about that?
But apparently some people disagreed:
“It was kind of scary at first to think about, you know, your own teacher in your own school that is teaching you,” Herrera said.
And, yes, it does qualify as teaching. So school authorities met with Chandra with what the story says is “an unidentified concern” and he resigned. The Sheriff’s office didn’t see anything criminal in all this, or any reason to contact any other authorities.
And the teacher’s response?
Chahhou, who also teaches Arabic at a religious school affiliated with the Islamic Association of Cary, told WRAL in a telephone interview that students got the wrong message from the assignment.
“When I made the assignment, I was upset and angry about a story I recently saw on the news. If any message appears, it is more of a message to myself, not to my students. I never meant to hurt or upset any students or parents,” he said.
And that wins our Silly Excuse Of The Century award.
Generally speaking, teachers don’t use their school assignment as stream of consciousness therapy to work out their problems. If this was not the real reason the assignment contained these phrases, this teacher needed to go. And if this was, he needed to deal with his issues with his friends or in therapy. What makes this story more damning: it all took place in Spanish class, usually one of the most politically neutral subjects in school.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.