David McElroy

Most of us had lousy teachers at some point. I had a physics teacher who absolutely didn’t understand the subject she was teaching, but she was politically active, so she ended up as president of the state teacher union. I had a chemistry teacher who couldn’t speak louder than a mouse and couldn’t control his class, so I learned nothing. But none of them compare to the basketball coach I had for math in the seventh grade.

I lived on the beach in Pensacola, Fla., that year. (It sounds nicer than it is. All the sand gets really tiresome.) The beach is in the Pensacola city limits, so the beach kids were bused into the city. Every day, our bus drove us through a suburb with good schools and deposited us at terrible schools — filled with bad teachers and unmotivated students from poor homes. It was my only experience in a majority-black inner-city school. It felt strange being one of only two white boys in the seventh grade.

My math teacher was a really likable guy, but he was a basketball coach — and he didn’t care that much about math. Even though we were in the seventh grade, they were just starting long division. Since I’d been in pretty good schools until them — and had already been taught basic algebra at home — the class seemed like a joke. I was bored.

When the coach found out that I knew more about math than he did — and I admitted how bored I was — we made a deal. For a six-week grading period, he turned the class over to me. It was at the beginning of basketball season, so he used the time to prepare for basketball and he handed me the teacher edition of the textbook. For six weeks, I taught the class. I was much tougher than he was, but grades went up. Since we didn’t get caught, it was actually a very fun experience.

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What would happen if a government-run high school put on a program featuring a song with the words, “There is no other truth except Jesus Christ”?

I’m betting that half a dozen civil liberties groups such as the ACLU would be threatening to file lawsuits to protect against this “establishment of religion” in schools. Why does it never seem to happen when it’s not a Christian message being presented?

In Grand Junction, Colo., a high school choir is preparing for a program that will include an Islamic worship song called “Zikr.” I hope you’ll listen to it. I like the music and think it would probably be beautiful as a live performance when sung properly by a choral group. It has value as a way to learn another culture.

But the song contains lines — in the Urdu language — that say “There is no truth except Allah” and “Allah is the only eternal and immortal.” When the choir teacher gave the students the translation of what they were to sing, one senior boy said he couldn’t sing those words. When the school refused to remove the song from the program, he quit the choir.

“In the Bible, [it says] that you don’t worship any other god — and this is worshipping another god and even another prophet,” said James Harper, who’s a Christian and is active in his church. “I think there would be a lot of outrage if we made a Muslim choir say ‘Jesus Christ is the only truth.'”

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