Pursuing Justice

In today’s lecture, Rich talked about controversies in public school.  I thought I’d share something that happened to me.  While teaching the American Revolution unit, the more veteran teachers gave me the movie The Patriot to show to my class.  They said to only  show the first ten minutes because it’s R-rated and gets very violent.  The first ten minutes chronicled Mel Gibson (the father) having a heated debate with his son (Heath Ledger, RIP) about entering the war.  Mel had already fought in the French and Indian War and didn’t want his son going to war having faced the hardships of war firsthand himself and risk losing his son forever. We basically watched the argument and then shut it off.  Watching this segment lead to a great discussion about how families must have felt when the war was eminent.  This then lead to the current war and how many families are anguished because they have loved ones away at war, really not knowing when they’ll be back.  Well, one of my students apparently went home and told her parents she had seen an R-rated movie in school, completely leaving out it was only ten minutes.  Needless to say, I got an email the next day of such complaint from the parents .  I asked my principal to handle this because I didn’t want to get into a battle with parents.  The ruling came the following day:  From that day forward, no one was to show The Patriot’s first ten minutes.  Basically, this is another case of one apple spoiling the bunch.