Global Issues

During my junior and senior year of high school I attended a class called “Global Issues” As the titles suggest, it was a very loose class with no real lesson plan. Because a majority of the assignments were all opinion based, about 90% of the grading system was purely “class participation”. And damned if I didn’t participate!

You see, my teacher in this class, Ms Haas, was a hard core left wing liberal; while me and my friend Nate on the other hand, were far right wing conservatives. As I said before, Ms Hass didn’t have a solid lesson plan in place, but we sure did. Our entire goal in this class was to make life a living hell for our teacher, conspire to turn the class against her, disprove global warming, and make everyone in the class pro corporations. I’d like to think we succeeded in every aspect.

Often times the teacher would enter the room and say something like, “Alright class, today we are going to learn about child soldiers in Darfur.”  To which I would reply “No, we are going to talk about how the media lies to scare us into believing global warming.” To which point the students in the class would pull out the assignments I gave them behind Haas’ back (Do as much research as you can trying to disprove Global Warming) One student brought in a news article showing how 75% of the temperature measuring tools were put in places like asphalt or near hot springs, deeply flawing the readings. Another showed that in order to become a respected scientist in the study of climate change, you had to admit that you believed in man made global warming, therefore every scientist that studies this field is quoted as saying such. Nate and I brought in evidence from NASA disproving man created climate change. If you don’t know much about NASA, they tend not to fuck around.

NASA:  “We tend not to fuck around.”

 Although Haas had the woman balls to say that NASA wasn’t a reliable resource. Well I guess that’s fair; its not like NASA has ever really proved itself to us before or anything.

            Another one of my favorite moments was when we twisted her words to make her look like a Nazi. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t anti Semitic or anything, just much more passionate about some issues than others. You see, there is something you have to understand about Ms Haas… she thinks that she is black. She isn’t. She’s not even dark skinned; she’s white as snow for Gods sake.

Not pictured: Ms Hass 

She was so sure that she was black, that slavery offended her in such a personal level that Harriet Tubman would have told her to cram it. She came into class one day and started one of her insane yet amusing rants about racism in today’s world and how we should pay compensations to the African American community. To which point I raised my hand and said “Excuse me Ms Haas, but I feel like we have touched this issue more than enough this year, why don’t we talk about compensations for another group of people persecution throughout history, the Jews perhaps.”  She did not like this, not at all. To which point she said and I quote “The holocaust only happened one time, The Jews were not even slaves either. In fact, throughout the majority of history the Jews have been the persecutors.”… ESCUSE ME?!?!?!?! Now I’m about as Jewish as Ms Haas is black (that is to say, not even the slightest bit.) But something about that struck me as very wrong. And by something, I mean everything.

“Naaw, its cool, I mean, there I was, minding my own business when these guys were like, ‘come with us to these death camps’ and im like ‘well, at least I’ve never been a slave, ya know?’”

I’d like to start out with the phrase “the holocaust only happened one time” Sure, Nazis didn’t round up Jews every decade and put them into death camps, THAT only happened one time, but since the beginning of time Jews have been persecution. I’d like you to notice the warm and fuzzy words like “Burned alive”, “Slaughtered”, and “Tortured”. And this doesn’t even get into the B.C. era where the Jews were…. SLAVES! Although, that was just one time. Its not like they were slaves so often that somebody could write an entire article about it… oh wait, what’s that? There IS one? Well who knew, clearly not Ms Haas.

            You see, this class was not like any normal class. Since “Global Issues” could mean anything, it was like we were on a ship in international waters. Anything goes. And when Nate and I came into the class, it was mutiny. Poor ms haas couldn’t take it with us in there, what with our constantly hiding George Bush posters all over her classroom and our all our essays being titled “Why I think Nixon was framed by the liberal devil” or “How Ronald Reagan saved the world” or something to that extent. She constantly complained to the principal that we were “conspiring against [her]” and he thought it was crazy talk. The best part about it, we were. I miss this class, and one day, when I’m a teacher, I’d like to start one up like it, just to see what two students were the smartest dicks around.