The worst job: Teaching science in Dover

By MIKE ARGENTO

HARRISBURG — Some time ago, I wrote a column about the guy who had what had to be the worst job in the world — the men’s room attendant at the York Fair.

Here was this guy, stuck in a smelly men’s room all day long, handing out paper towels and mopping up things you really don’t want to have to mop up.

In the worst job in the world sweepstakes, it just beat out by a nose the guy who was responsible for shoveling up the livestock manure at the cattle barns because at least that guy got bathroom breaks. The guy in the men’s room, well, he was already in the men’s room.

We now have a new winner in the worst job in the world sweepstakes: Science teacher in the Dover Area School District.

Think about it.

As a kid, you’re interested in science and read Scientific American like other kids read Highlights. You go to college and study science and education, thinking that there can be no better calling than inspiring kids to share the thrill of discovery that comes with learning about the world and how it works.

You go to graduate school and go through student teaching and finally get a job teaching in Dover.

Then, one day, you’re called to a meeting where a member of the school board, a person charged with overseeing education in your school, tells you that he wants the biology classes to start teaching creationism.

Here you are, dedicating your life to science, and one of the people in charge of the school wants you to balance science with religious beliefs.

Certainly, the school board member is joking, you think. He can’t possibly think that’s a good idea. Science is science. Religion is religion. Two separate things.

But the school board member is serious. He begins sharing his own belief, based on his religious faith, that the earth is only 6,000 years old and dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark.

And, partly because this guy controls your future and partly because you don’t want to be like the kid who tells the other kids that there is no Santa Claus, you’re kind of in a quandary about what to say.

You start questioning your decision to dedicate your life to this school. What’s next? Will the school board ask you to start teaching that gravity is merely a theory and that you have to balance that theory with the belief that gravity is God’s way of saying you’ve had too much tequila? Will the school board start telling history teachers that because some believe the Holocaust didn’t happen, that they’ll have to balance their instruction thusly? Will the school board demand that English teachers begin teaching kids that the plural of “you� is “youse�?

Your fellow science teachers tell him it’s a bad idea, for a variety of reasons. They tell him it’s not science. They tell him he’s inviting a lawsuit.

Which turns out to be prophetic.

On the second day of the Dover Panda Trial, Bryan Rehm told that story.

He was a physics teacher at Dover, and from his demeanor on the stand and his lucid explanations of scientific ideas, it certainly appears he was a good one, the kind of teacher who inspired students to think about science and develop intellectual skills that would help them in any field of study they would choose to pursue.

He testified about meeting with then-school board president Alan Bonsell, a meeting in which Bonsell told teachers that he’s interested in them “balancing� instruction about evolution with creationism.

The teachers balked because it’s not a balance. One — evolution — is science, which is what science teachers teach. The other is not.

Bonsell told the teachers he didn’t want kids going home and telling their parents about learning about evolution because then their parents would have to tell them that their “teachers are lying to them.� He also expressed concern that they were teaching kids that human beings evolved from monkeys, which isn’t, technically speaking, what they were teaching, Rehm said.

Rehm started going to school board meetings, where he heard all kinds of things that made him start rethinking his decision to pursue a teaching career in Dover. School board member Bill Buckingham, for instance, criticized biology textbooks for being “laced with Darwinism.� Considering evolution is a
guiding principal of biology, that makes sense.

He heard Buckingham tell one of Rehm’s former students, a kid studying biology at Penn State, that college was brainwashing him. Penn State? The only brainwashing that occurs at Penn State — and I speak from experience — is the belief in the infallibility of Joe Paterno.

He heard Buckingham’s wife speak at a board meeting against Darwinism and in favor of the Bible.

He heard discussion about creationism and other stuff like that. He heard board member Heather Geesey say that the school board would just have to fire teachers if they disagree with the board.

There was talk about “liberals in black robes taking our freedoms away,� he said. And how the separation of church and state is “a myth,� he said.

He heard Buckingham challenge his former student by saying the kid couldn’t tell him he descended from apes and “which side of your family came from apes?�

School board meetings, in Rehm’s words, “were turning into a zoo.�

Which is kind of weird considering the majority of board members proclaim no kinship to denizens of a zoo.

Anyway, he heard rumors the board was planning to adopt some means of getting some form of creationism into the classroom. He ran into Supt. Richard Nilsen and asked him, point-blank, and the superintendent told him not to worry about it. During testimony on Tuesday, Rehm said Nilsen told him, “There will never be a vote.�

Turns out that wasn’t exactly true. Rehm heard what Nilsen said and, because of the way school board meetings were going, he thought he had something to worry about.

He resigned his job in June 2004 and got a job in another school district — one outside of York County, just for good measure.

-------

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com. Read more Argento columns at ydr.com/mike.