Lessons in wielding authority

Creationist spoof irks Board of Education member

By Roy Wenzl, The Witchita Eagle
April 20, 2006

On Tuesday at Stucky Middle School, science teacher Randy Mousley chewed out a dozen kids, handed out half a dozen disciplinary conduct slips, kicked two disobedient boys out of his class, and suspended a student for disobeying his order to sit in detention. Along the way, Mousley taught science.

He stands 6 foot 4, weighs 250 pounds. He uses his size to intimidate wayward kids in class. He projects his booming voice down long school hallways to freeze hundreds of noisy children into something resembling quiet. He is a big, bald man of authority.

"I don't play around," he says.

He rumbles. Kids listen.

Last week another authority figure, a member of the State Board of Education, objected to something Mousley had done.

He had allowed another teacher to tape a poster of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to Mousley's classroom door.

Mousley, the fierce enforcer, had to decide whether the poster should stay.

On Wednesday, April 12, Stucky Principal Kenneth Jantz told Mousley that members of the State Board of Education were touring the school.

Mousley, by his own account, just shrugged. He teaches nearly 170 seventh-graders. Like most middle-schoolers, his students are emotional bundles of nerves and racing hormones. They talk boisterously; they listen only intermittently to orders and instruction; they talk back. The boys wear their jeans way down south, where belt-lines cling precariously to upper thighs.

Nearly half the 800 Stucky students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, and some show up hungry every day.

Controlling and teaching hundreds of middle-schoolers keeps a teacher on tip-toe all day. So if somebody wants to take a tour, Mousley lets them in the door and keeps on booming out facts and theories and questions about geology or astronomy or Newton's Laws of Motion or whatever is on his classroom agenda that day.

Mousley was teaching hands-on geology when Jantz led the board members through the classroom.

Mousley barely looked at them.

Minutes later, someone on the tour -- Mousley wasn't sure who -- asked if he taught the spaghetti monster in his class.

The question puzzled him.

No, he said.

Later, he heard that someone had said something to Jantz about a problem.

The spaghetti monster had been taped to his classroom door so long that Mousley had forgotten it was there.

He had not even put it there. That was an act of alleged humor committed by his friend, Dave Clark, a sixth-grade science teacher who ran unsuccessfully against the incumbent state Sen. Susan Wagle in 2004. Clark disliked politics so much after he lost that he vowed to never run for office again.

Last fall, the State Board of Education voted 6-4 to encourage criticism of evolution in public school science classes.

Afterward, Mousley noticed on the Internet that some guy from Corvallis, Ore., named Bobby Henderson had created The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to poke fun at the Kansas Board.

Henderson claimed satirically that the universe was created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster (also known as FSM), that it was a religion with a mythology just as believable as any other religion, and that he would sue the State Board of Education unless it gave the Pastafarians (as they call themselves) the same respect and weight as the teaching of Intelligent Design or any other Earth origins teaching.

Mousley mentioned FSM to Clark, who was teaching next door. Clark found a crude drawing of the spaghetti monster on the Internet. Clark thought the monster was funny.

Clark taped copies of the image to his classroom door and to Mousley's door.

Mousley forgot about it. None of his students mentioned it.

He does not believe in the spaghetti monster as a deity. But he is no atheist. "I'm just a guy who believes that beliefs, including my own, should be kept private. They are nobody else's business."

Sometimes when he teaches that the Earth is billions of years old, students will say that their parents teach them that the Earth is only 6,000 years old according to the Bible.

He says he tells these kids that he is glad they have these beliefs, and that religious beliefs should be respected, but that this is a science class where science is taught. Then he moves on.

Connie Morris, one of the conservative majority on the state board that voted for the new science standards, saw the poster on Mousley's door during the tour of the school and was immediately offended.

These Pastafarians, she said Wednesday, have sent her at least a thousand e-mails since last fall.

"They are very serious about claiming to be a religion," she said. "We know it's a satire. I don't mind the ridicule; it comes with the job. But I do personally object to my own religious beliefs being ridiculed, and that's what the Pastafarians delight in doing."

She asked a teacher (she thinks it was Mousley, but she's not sure) whether he taught the Flying Spaghetti Monster in his class. The teacher, she said, appeared puzzled, but said no, and did not seem inclined to talk. So she talked to Jantz, the principal.

She said it is not true, as it was reported in the Eagle last week, that she asked Jantz to remove the poster.

"I would never do that," she said. "That's something for the school and the area parents to decide if they want. But I do have a right to state my own beliefs, and I told him I found the poster offensive. He was very nice about it, very engaging. He listened to me."

After telling Jantz of her personal feelings, she let the matter drop, Morris said.

After the board members went through the Stucky hallways, Mousley went to Jantz and asked what the problem was.

He says Jantz told him that one of the board members had complained about the poster.

Jantz had to keep moving with the tour. He said they would talk later.

Mousley has taught since 1981, except for a seven-year break when he worked in the aircraft industry.

In that time, he turned himself into a vigorous advocate for hands-on education. In his classes, kids are made to do a hands-on project: Go find rocks and identify the type and origin of each.

Other science teachers at Stucky, Dave Clark and Adam Bancroft, say Mousley is a great teacher who mentored and taught them the value of hands-on learning.

For the past five years, Mousley has been one of the few teachers sent by the district to speak to thousands of other teachers at the National Science Teachers Association annual conference.

In a quarter century of teaching, he has become concerned with what he says are the real problems: Disrespect. Lack of support from parents. A decline in the intellectual ability of children.

When he started out, he says, it was common to see a lot of middle-schoolers who could learn algebra. "That was the gold standard for advanced middle school students then," he said. "You could always count on knowing that you could teach algebra to a group of middle-schoolers."

Now, he said, the gold standard is not algebra but pre-algebra. Intellectually, the kids have declined, whether from spending too much time on video games or spending too little time with books. Maybe the parents aren't demanding as much, he said.

These are problems not only for schools but for the future, he said. Educators and legislators are not doing enough to solve these problems; they seem to get caught up in tangents, he said.

Morris shares his concerns. She taught nine years in Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado, six as a first-grade teacher, three as a substitute. She says Mousley is right about the problems he described.

Where people disagree, she said, is not whether there are challenges, but how to fix them. Much of the entrenched education community, she said, is terrified of change.

After the state board members left Stucky, Jantz told Mousley that Morris had found the monster poster offensive.

But after she brought it up, Jantz told him, another board member on the tour, Sue Gamble, told him that Morris had no real authority. Gamble had voted against the new science standards.

Jantz looked worried, Mousley said later.

A principal has a lot on his plate. The last thing a principal needs, while trying to educate 800 often rambunctious children, is something in the school that makes waves.

Mousley felt bad for Jantz; he respects Jantz as a good administrator, "a straight talker" who supports his staff. Jantz's leadership makes people want to work for him, Mousley said.

He noticed that Jantz didn't ask him to take down the poster. He merely reported what had been said. Then Jantz walked away.

Mousley had to decide what to do.

There was more than a little riding on this: Mousley is a teacher of influence. For the past three years, the district has appointed him to serve on committees that tweak the district science curriculum.

He is an authority figure. What he decided now had to be based not only in what was right, but in whether obedience to authority is a respected value. Morris, he knew, represents a certain authority, and the conservative thinking of many Kansans who pay taxes to schools.

It took only moments for him to decide.

Jantz had made no requests. Teachers, though they are often rigidly scripted by the rules of curriculum, are still free to be their own authority figures, up to a point.

Given that authority, there was no doubt in Randy Mousley's mind about what to do with the poster.

He left it on his door.