1 plus 1 equals...

This is not a rant about what our school district is doing wrong. As a matter of fact, it is quite the opposite. As much as I have been beating up on them lately, I figured I was due...

The Junior Logician brought home an interesting math assignment today. His math teacher has a brother in law who is in the 2nd PLT, D Co, 2-2 SCR. As a result, all of this teachers math classes are adopting the platoon. They are collecting items for care packages and each student was "assigned" a soldier in the platoon to send letters and birthday cards etc to.The assignment consisted of two pages. The first page was a list of items that they are collecting to send over to the soldiers (and a short list of items that are not acceptable to send). The second page consisted of instructions on the letter writing project, including the soldiers name, rank, birth date and MOS (military occupation specialty). After all of the grammatical reminders of how to write a proper letter came the following instructions.

Topics you can talk about:
Ask them about themselves, family, where they are from, how/why the came to
serve our country.
Ask how long they have been in Iraq, what the weather is like, what the
kids and schools are like, what their job duties are, what they do for fun, when
they get to come home, how often they get to talk to family, how much do they
see the country improving.Ask how they are doing. Ask them questions that are
caring.

Topics you CANNOT talk about:
Negative personal feelings on the war, your political views and/or your
parents views (we are not here to protest the war)
Only school appropriate questions will be allowed (nothing about killing
people, negative things about the war, drugs/alcohol etc.)

The capitalization emphasis is the teachers, the bold mine.

The teacher also emphasized (a couple of times) that she will be proof reading all letters prior to them being sent.

As often as we complain about teachers and the "liberal" indoctrination that seems to be coming from the schools, it was so refreshing to see this come home tonight. The Junior Logician is very excited about the project. He couldn't wait to get home to tell me all about the project and his soldier and to plan what we were going to get for the care packages. It is one of the few projects in school that I have seen him this excited about.

This is a good reminder to those of us on the right that teachers are not a single monolithic entity. There are some very good individuals out there and they are out there doing the right thing.