For good science teaching, trust a science teacher, not a legislator. Julie Olson, Mitchell, SD.
But science teachers don’t need the protection as long as they’re working with theories based on factual evidence, said Julie Olson, a science teacher in Mitchell. Olson is president of the South Dakota Science Teachers Association.
“Science has got to be fact-based, it has to be evidence-based,” Olson said. “Intelligent design isn’t evidence-based, so it isn’t science” [Patrick Anderson, “Intelligent Design in Science Class?” that Sioux Falls paper, 2016.01.31].
…and for disingenuousness:
Olson wishes Monroe and other lawmakers behind the senate bill would be more direct about their intentions.
“I just hate the fact that they’re trying to sneak in the discussion on intelligent design,” Olson said. “If that’s what they want taught they should at least say it” [Anderson, 2016.01.31].
Instead of being honest—you bet, I want my religion affirmed in science class—Senator Monroe takes his verbal contortions as far as to write into his bill this reality-denying statement:
The provisions of this Act only protect the teaching of scientific information and may not be construed to promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine, nor may these provisions be construed to promote discrimination against any religion, religious belief, nonreligion, or nonbelief [Section 2, Senate Bill 83, 2016.01.25].
Senator Monroe is trying to promote the religious doctrine of creationism, so he writes into his bill this escape clause that prohibits us from saying that he is promoting the religious doctrine of creationism. Just say it over and over, and it becomes true… so goes the thinking of Jeff Monroe and other Republicans who prefer their own fantasies to objective truth.
“Senate Bill 83, introduced in the South Dakota Senate and referred to the Senate Education Committee on January 25, 2016, would, if enacted, allow teachers to teach “the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information” presented in courses aligned with the state education standards.
“No areas of “scientific information” are specifically identified as abounding in weaknesses, but the legislative history of the lead sponsor, Jeff Monroe (R-24), is suggestive. In 2014, he sponsored Senate Bill 112, which would have allowed teachers to teach “intelligent design”; in 2015, he sponsored Senate Bill 114, which identified “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, [and] human cloning” as scientifically controversial.
“Senate Bill 112 was killed in the Senate Education Committee at Monroe’s request. Senate Bill 114 received a hearing in the Senate Education Committee, during which representatives of the state department of education, the South Dakota Education Association, and the Associated School Boards of South Dakota testified in opposition to the bill, and then died in committee when the legislative session ended.
“In sponsoring Senate Bill 83, Monroe is joined by Ried Holien (R-District 5), Phil Jensen (R-District 33), Betty Olson (R-District 28), and Bill Van Gerpen (R-District 19) in the Senate and by seven members of the House of Representatives, although there is no House equivalent of the bill.”
Craig
“Is Julie Olson the wife of former Senator and Representative Mel Olson?”
Yes – and I’m pretty sure their kids are going to do amazing things one day considering their genes. Mel and Julie are both very bright and seem to put more weight upon logic and fairness instead of emotion or tradition. Mel in particular is an amazing speaker and had some of the best speeches on the house floor when he was in Pierre.
If I could pick someone to run for Governor it would be Mel, but I think he is smart enough to know we have a long time to go before a Democrat is considered electable in our state.
Craig, I’ll second your nomination of the gentleman from Mitchell.
El Rayo X
Who know more about science that Scientologists? Let’s bring their origin story to the public schools: Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack. Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.
Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyze them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).
These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralyzed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.
The story doesn’t end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a “thetan” in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).
After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called “implanting”.
When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.
As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xemu is still alive today.
What say you Jeff? Do you want to open the gate?
O
How about teaching the scientific proof that the earth is flat (complete with photographic evidence)?
El Rayo X, I like your story about Scientolog. Its like Blazing Saddles, Star Wars, and the Simpson’s all rolled into one religio.
I also like the word Teegeeack and will find new ways of using it.
The Blindman
Lorri May
El Rayo X, that’d make a good movie in itself! Except now we know the ending, which ruins the whole movie. Shucks.
You know, if we could get rid of the idiotic bills – which at this point always get more attention than the common-sense bills and deal with outlawing abortion. again. *yawn*, investigating school students’ privates to see if they’re male or female (and so Roger Hunt can get off doing it), trying to get creationism taught in schools – just think how much our Legislature could get done!
Jesu Cristo, Republicans, give us a *break* already!
Spencer
It would be an insult to say that Julie is one of the best science teachers in the state since she is likely one of the best in the country. That being said she needs to cut Mel’s strings. The puppet show is getting old.
Julie Olson
Thank you for the nice comments on my teaching. I give credit to my parents, family, and past teachers. I can assure you there never were any strings to cut – nor any ventriloquism. I actually refused to say the word “obey” in our wedding vows, much to Mel’s chagrin!
I hope you have convinced Mel of the evils of smoking, Ms. Olson, and glad to hear that you are one of the great teachers we have here in South Dakota. Science, even. That’s the most fun thing to learn and teach.
Don Coyote
“Science has got to be fact-based, it has to be evidence-based. Intelligent design isn’t evidence-based, so it isn’t science”
And yet Darwinism can’t explain the origins of life and instead speculates about a primordial soup. In fact there are no standard models in the wide open debate of abiogenesis. The Big Bang can only throw spaghetti at the wall in it’s failing to explain the origins of matter, gravity and inertia, competing with various multi-verse and oscillating universe theories.
The great astronomer Fred Hoyle (an atheist no less) rejected Darwinism stating it was mathematically impossible: “… as biochemists discover more and more about the awesome complexity of life, it is apparent that its chances of originating by accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have arisen by chance.”
And
“If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of…”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
larry kurtz
Two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom look like a trinity to me.
Don, Don, Don—I’m not the one smoking. the theory of evolution explains things based on evidence far better than anything Jeff Monroe is offering. The Big Bang Theory explains our universe far better than Jeff Monroe’s fantasies and wishful thinking.
And intelligent design? Please, stop thinking that something as vast as the cosmos is bound by your tiny experience with human artifacts. Design is not a scientific concept. No truly scientific evidence points to a designer. We can have this debate in school; science teachers can say these things already. But good teachers aren’t going to let church kids hijack science class and turn it into an adjunct Sunday school class or proselytizing session any more than I will let kids turn my French class into a calculus symposium every day.
Creationism is a sectarian doctrine. (Do any atheists advocate intelligent design?) SDCL 13-33-9 forbids the teaching of any sectarian doctrine in the schools of our state. Pass Monroe’s SB 83, and Monroe still can’t open the door for teachers to preach creationism to their science classes.
Bill
Three of the co-sponsors are also the same morons who voted for the Astrology bill a few years ago.
Craig
Why do creationists always try to find some random scientist that they can quote to make it appear that there is more debate on these issues than there really is?
If we are going to quote Hoyle, we should also quote him when he said “it is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right”.
Hoyle also believed that there was a correlation of flu epidemics and the sunspot cycle, and that petroleum and natural gas weren’t formed via the decomposition of organic materials but rather were a byproduct of inorganic means. Granted he wasn’t able to prove any of these things but that didn’t stop him from believing them to be true.
In short, just because someone is brilliant in one area does not somehow indicate their are brilliant in all areas. Bill Gates has a brilliant technical mind and was able to do things with computers that had never been thought of, but I wouldn’t want him in charge of removing my tonsils.
How about we let scientists debate science and let those who believe in a creator continue praying to their chosen diety.
Governor Daugaard would veto this crap, right?
Is Julie Olson the wife of former Senator and Representative Mel Olson?
I wonder what Senator Jeff Monroe and his friends would say about teaching evolution in Sunday School?
Ror, I believe that’s a yes: http://www.nextgenscience.org/ngss-writing-team-member-julie-olson
Mark, I’m pretty sure that’s a no.
Larry, I’m hoping that’s a yes, but Governor Daugaard has signed plenty of bad, unconstitutional ideas before.
This has now hit the National Center for Science Education’s radar…
http://ncse.com/news/2016/01/antiscience-bill-south-dakota-0016890
“Senate Bill 83, introduced in the South Dakota Senate and referred to the Senate Education Committee on January 25, 2016, would, if enacted, allow teachers to teach “the strengths and weaknesses of scientific information” presented in courses aligned with the state education standards.
“No areas of “scientific information” are specifically identified as abounding in weaknesses, but the legislative history of the lead sponsor, Jeff Monroe (R-24), is suggestive. In 2014, he sponsored Senate Bill 112, which would have allowed teachers to teach “intelligent design”; in 2015, he sponsored Senate Bill 114, which identified “biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, [and] human cloning” as scientifically controversial.
“Senate Bill 112 was killed in the Senate Education Committee at Monroe’s request. Senate Bill 114 received a hearing in the Senate Education Committee, during which representatives of the state department of education, the South Dakota Education Association, and the Associated School Boards of South Dakota testified in opposition to the bill, and then died in committee when the legislative session ended.
“In sponsoring Senate Bill 83, Monroe is joined by Ried Holien (R-District 5), Phil Jensen (R-District 33), Betty Olson (R-District 28), and Bill Van Gerpen (R-District 19) in the Senate and by seven members of the House of Representatives, although there is no House equivalent of the bill.”
“Is Julie Olson the wife of former Senator and Representative Mel Olson?”
Yes – and I’m pretty sure their kids are going to do amazing things one day considering their genes. Mel and Julie are both very bright and seem to put more weight upon logic and fairness instead of emotion or tradition. Mel in particular is an amazing speaker and had some of the best speeches on the house floor when he was in Pierre.
If I could pick someone to run for Governor it would be Mel, but I think he is smart enough to know we have a long time to go before a Democrat is considered electable in our state.
Craig, I’ll second your nomination of the gentleman from Mitchell.
Who know more about science that Scientologists? Let’s bring their origin story to the public schools: Once upon a time (75 million years ago to be more precise) there was an alien galactic ruler named Xenu. Xenu was in charge of all the planets in this part of the galaxy including our own planet Earth, except in those days it was called Teegeeack. Now Xenu had a problem. All of the 76 planets he controlled were overpopulated. Each planet had on average 178 billion people. He wanted to get rid of all the overpopulation so he had a plan.
Xenu took over complete control with the help of renegades to defeat the good people and the Loyal Officers. Then with the help of psychiatrists he called in billions of people for income tax inspections where they were instead given injections of alcohol and glycol mixed to paralyze them. Then they were put into space planes that looked exactly like DC8s (except they had rocket motors instead of propellers).
These DC8 space planes then flew to planet Earth where the paralyzed people were stacked around the bases of volcanoes in their hundreds of billions. When they had finished stacking them around then H-bombs were lowered into the volcanoes. Xenu then detonated all the H-bombs at the same time and everyone was killed.
The story doesn’t end there though. Since everyone has a soul (called a “thetan” in this story) then you have to trick souls into not coming back again. So while the hundreds of billions of souls were being blown around by the nuclear winds he had special electronic traps that caught all the souls in electronic beams (the electronic beams were sticky like fly-paper).
After he had captured all these souls he had them packed into boxes and taken to a few huge cinemas. There all the souls had to spend days watching special 3D motion pictures that told them what life should be like and many confusing things. In this film they were shown false pictures and told they were God, The Devil and Christ. In the story this process is called “implanting”.
When the films ended and the souls left the cinema these souls started to stick together because since they had all seen the same film they thought they were the same people. They clustered in groups of a few thousand. Now because there were only a few living bodies left they stayed as clusters and inhabited these bodies.
As for Xenu, the Loyal Officers finally overthrew him and they locked him away in a mountain on one of the planets. He is kept in by a force-field powered by an eternal battery and Xemu is still alive today.
What say you Jeff? Do you want to open the gate?
How about teaching the scientific proof that the earth is flat (complete with photographic evidence)?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/26/entertainment/rapper-bob-earth-flat-theory/
El Rayo X, I like your story about Scientolog. Its like Blazing Saddles, Star Wars, and the Simpson’s all rolled into one religio.
I also like the word Teegeeack and will find new ways of using it.
The Blindman
El Rayo X, that’d make a good movie in itself! Except now we know the ending, which ruins the whole movie. Shucks.
You know, if we could get rid of the idiotic bills – which at this point always get more attention than the common-sense bills and deal with outlawing abortion. again. *yawn*, investigating school students’ privates to see if they’re male or female (and so Roger Hunt can get off doing it), trying to get creationism taught in schools – just think how much our Legislature could get done!
Jesu Cristo, Republicans, give us a *break* already!
It would be an insult to say that Julie is one of the best science teachers in the state since she is likely one of the best in the country. That being said she needs to cut Mel’s strings. The puppet show is getting old.
Thank you for the nice comments on my teaching. I give credit to my parents, family, and past teachers. I can assure you there never were any strings to cut – nor any ventriloquism. I actually refused to say the word “obey” in our wedding vows, much to Mel’s chagrin!
(We left out “obey” too! :-) )
I hope you have convinced Mel of the evils of smoking, Ms. Olson, and glad to hear that you are one of the great teachers we have here in South Dakota. Science, even. That’s the most fun thing to learn and teach.
“Science has got to be fact-based, it has to be evidence-based. Intelligent design isn’t evidence-based, so it isn’t science”
And yet Darwinism can’t explain the origins of life and instead speculates about a primordial soup. In fact there are no standard models in the wide open debate of abiogenesis. The Big Bang can only throw spaghetti at the wall in it’s failing to explain the origins of matter, gravity and inertia, competing with various multi-verse and oscillating universe theories.
The great astronomer Fred Hoyle (an atheist no less) rejected Darwinism stating it was mathematically impossible: “… as biochemists discover more and more about the awesome complexity of life, it is apparent that its chances of originating by accident are so minute that they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have arisen by chance.”
And
“If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure of order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of…”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom look like a trinity to me.
Don, Don, Don—I’m not the one smoking. the theory of evolution explains things based on evidence far better than anything Jeff Monroe is offering. The Big Bang Theory explains our universe far better than Jeff Monroe’s fantasies and wishful thinking.
And intelligent design? Please, stop thinking that something as vast as the cosmos is bound by your tiny experience with human artifacts. Design is not a scientific concept. No truly scientific evidence points to a designer. We can have this debate in school; science teachers can say these things already. But good teachers aren’t going to let church kids hijack science class and turn it into an adjunct Sunday school class or proselytizing session any more than I will let kids turn my French class into a calculus symposium every day.
Creationism is a sectarian doctrine. (Do any atheists advocate intelligent design?) SDCL 13-33-9 forbids the teaching of any sectarian doctrine in the schools of our state. Pass Monroe’s SB 83, and Monroe still can’t open the door for teachers to preach creationism to their science classes.
Three of the co-sponsors are also the same morons who voted for the Astrology bill a few years ago.
Why do creationists always try to find some random scientist that they can quote to make it appear that there is more debate on these issues than there really is?
If we are going to quote Hoyle, we should also quote him when he said “it is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right”.
Hoyle also believed that there was a correlation of flu epidemics and the sunspot cycle, and that petroleum and natural gas weren’t formed via the decomposition of organic materials but rather were a byproduct of inorganic means. Granted he wasn’t able to prove any of these things but that didn’t stop him from believing them to be true.
In short, just because someone is brilliant in one area does not somehow indicate their are brilliant in all areas. Bill Gates has a brilliant technical mind and was able to do things with computers that had never been thought of, but I wouldn’t want him in charge of removing my tonsils.
How about we let scientists debate science and let those who believe in a creator continue praying to their chosen diety.