Fun Science Tidbits from My Elementary School

I took these photos (really badly) a few years ago when my sister was getting rid of some of their old textbooks and found this book we both used for our science class in... I think it was 4th grade.

This blog could be a lot more interesting I bet if I gave it a more specific theme like, "Surviving (name of my school)" and then all the posts would be about the weird quirks of having all your education up until age 18 take place within the same conservative Christian bubble. I could get a lot of posts just out of the textbooks we had. And then there would be all the material on the weird incorporation of politics into our classes and the swapping of stories about having seen demons and the awkward uncertainty about whether most holidays were really okay given their pagan elements and the banning of Harry Potter and Pokemon and the mixed messages about how you should try to go to a really good college but at the same time maybe you should just go to the college of worship our church runs because non-Christian universities are such hotbeds of secularism and even so-called Christian schools have compromised on so many things these days. I already wrote the one about being coached to choose martyrdom over apostasy in elementary school, so check that one off the list. Maybe I could gather new material too: I got that inspiration when I showed my husband around my old campus and as we looked at the window displays of student artwork an idea started to form in my mind that somewhere in a teacher handbook distributed by the administration there was a passage stating, "All window displays must make explicit reference to Jesus Christ." The student artwork from the preschool classrooms to the older elementary grades was mostly seasonal with various nature themes, but the construction paper cutout letters on every single window fought valiantly to bring it all back to Jesus. My favorites were a window showing off coloring pages of people flying Mary-Poppins-like from umbrellas accompanied by the text "Flying High With Jesus!" and one with painted pictures of lemons and the text, "When life gives you lemons, just pray to Jesus!" 

Anyway, if you can look up A Beka, you can find all kinds of great textbook material. I don't remember the textbooks being subpar in any way, and I always did well on things like SATs, so they must have been covering the standard stuff fine, but they certainly have a way about them. The most intensely my church thing pictured above is the paragraph about how you can't grow corn from apple seeds. That's the primer on creationism presumably for a later grade when they get around to telling you most biologists are liars. I'm not sure about that since I don't remember the topic of evolution or creationism coming up before junior high, and I don't think we used specifically Christian science textbooks anymore at those grade levels. It was up to the teachers to supplement the lessons with creationist material, which they did an outstanding job at. 

Private schools can be weird. I feel like I should have some bigger point here about whether they're a good idea or not, but I don't know enough to say one way or the other. I just can't get over the fact that my school education included the tenet that only people who shared our highly specific religious views could really do science correctly. And this was in California for Foucault's sake!

I'm actually all conflicted now asking myself if it's more un-American to say you can't just found a school around whatever weird belief you want or to found a school around the intention of making sure children are completely indoctrinated in a given belief and taught to mistrust most of their fellow citizens for not sharing it.