A Texas 7th grade girl says one of her teachers gave an assignment requiring students say God is a myth or receive a failing grade.
Jordan Wooley, who attends West Memorial Junior High School in the Katy Independent School District, told her school board Tuesday night they were given an assignment asking them to identify whether different statements were facts, opinions or myths. On the statement, “There is a God,” the teacher would only allow students to write myth, or else they’d fail, Wooley said.
“Today I was given an assignment in school that questioned my faith and told me that God was not real. Our teacher had started off saying that the assignment had been giving problems all day. We were asked to take a poll to say whether God is fact, opinion or a myth and she told anyone who said fact or opinion was wrong and God was only a myth,” Wooley told the board, KHOU reports.
Wooley said students who argued were threatened with punishment. Wooley said her teacher asked her to prove God was true so she referenced the Bible and people who died and went to Heaven but came back to tell their stories.
“She told me that both were things that people were doing to get attention,” Wooley told the board. “I know that it wasn’t just me that was affected by it. My friend went home and started crying.”
Wooley said her friend put God as “fact” on the assignment, and the teacher crossed it out several times and told her it was “completely wrong.” A different friend got so upset that she threw everything off of her desk.
“Another child in my class had asked the teacher if we could like try to put what we believe in on the paper, and she said you can if you want to get the problem wrong, which you’ll fail the paper if you do,” Wooley said. “I felt like this was really wrong, and I didn’t feel like it was fair for my faith and my religion to have anything to do with what I’m learning about in school.”
Wooley said she and her parents called the principal, who said she would handle the situation.
This was part of graded assignment and #katy middle schooler says she was told she had to say God wasn’t real #khou pic.twitter.com/5EQ5EnSYi7
— Josh Chapin (@JoshChapinKHOU) October 27, 2015
The school responded in a statement that the assignment was “unnecessary” and would not be used again and said the teacher is “distraught” over the attention. The school said the assignment was actually not going to be graded and that the teacher never asked students to call God a myth, contrary to the student’s account before the school board.
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