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Saying G0D is real may get you an F.
Jordan Wooley, a 7th grader in Houston, Texas, said this week that her teacher at West Memorial Junior High School recently gave a class assignment that asked students to say that G0D didn’t exist, according to KHOU.
The assignment, which you can see below, asked students to label statements as either facts, opinions or commonplace assertions. Wooley wrote that the statement "There is a G0D" was both a fact and opinion for some, but her teacher didn’t agree — telling Wooley that both her answers were wrong and that she had to admit that G0D wasn’t real.
"I said it was fact or opinion," Wooley said. "Based on my religion and based on what I think and believe, I do not think it was a commonplace assertion."
Wooley’s mother, Chantel, couldn’t believe this happened in her daughter's class.
“That a kid was literally graded against her faith in G0D in a classroom, so who would want to be known," Chantel said, according to KHOU. "So the kids were caught in a Catch-22. If they argued their faith, they were being told they were arguing against their faith, and that happened in the classroom."
Jordan Wooley wouldn’t let her frustration go unheard. She spoke at a recent Katy Independent School District board meeting about the scenario, explaining that she wasn’t the only student offended by the assignment.
“My friend, she went home and she started crying. And she was actually supposed to come with me, but she didn’t think she could,” Jordan said at the meeting. “So my friend, she turned in her paper and she had still put that G0D was a fact and to be true. And my teacher crossed the answer out several times, telling her that it was completely wrong.”
But the West Memorial Junior High faculty released a statement — which has been deleted from the Katy Independent School District's website — that said this assignment wasn’t meant to create conflict over religious beliefs. In fact, the worksheet was meant to encourage critical thinking among students, according to the statement.
“The activity, which was intended to encourage critical thinking skills and dialogue by engaging students in an exercise wherein they identified statements as fact, opinion, or common assertion was not intended to question or challenge any student’s religious beliefs as reported by some media outlets,” the statement read.
The school also said the assignment “will no longer be used by the school.”
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