Rialto Unified's Bad Idea

I can't stop thinking about Rialto Unified School District, and their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad writing assignment. Teachers designed an assignment in which they asked students to state whether they believed the Holocaust had actually happened, or was made up.

The thing I just really can't wrap my brain around is the district's defense. The interim superintendent said that the objective was to teach "critical thinking."

First, assignments don't teach critical thinking.

Second, as teachers, we are responsible for the ideas we present to our students, and we must think about the implications.

Third, we have to stop giving more weight to "critical thinking" than to the ideas we ask students to critically think about.