Mommy I got an A on my suicide note!

Theodore R. Connors, whose daughter was a seventh-grader at West Middle School this spring, said an English class assignment requiring pupils to write a suicide note was highly inappropriate.

“It’s a very dark, dark assignment,” he said.

Connors, who recently ran unsuccessfully for the Auburn school board, wants the assignment dropped next year and said the school district should advise parents of pupils who completed the assignment to talk with the children about suicide.

Auburn School Superintendent John Plume said Wednesday he didn’t think the assignment, as described by the school’s principal, was inappropriate.

Plume said he’s talked to the principal three times about the issue since it first came to light and that Connors has reached a conclusion that “is not based on fact.”

“I’m not a teacher, but I know that’s not an appropriate assignment,” Connors said late last week. “So how is it a teacher would not think that that’s not an appropriate assignment?”
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I think I would go farther then calling this “highly inappropriate”, this is just plain wrong and evil. Requiring seventh graders to think up reasons why they should kill themselves and to put this to paper is total lunacy. What I can’t believe is that they need to stop it from happening next year also. I wonder what they do for a science project – build a Kevorkian death chamber?

And while we are on topic of “Pubwick Educkatshun” here is another story:

NEW ORLEANS (AP) – Apparently the truths in the Declaration of Independence aren’t so self-evident. When Rep. Roger Wicker asked high school seniors in his Mississippi district to name some unalienable rights, he got silence. So the Republican congressman gave the advanced-placement history students some help.

“Among these are life,” Wicker said, “and….”

“Death?” one student said. So much for liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

“It’s not so much that they don’t know the rote phrases and facts,” said Wicker, the sponsor of a House bill to improve civics instruction. “It just demonstrates a real gap in the education of young Americans.”
[Full Story]

This was bad enough, but an “advanced-placement history” class, the cream of the crop of students studying history.