Wow. I have actually met someone who is dumber than my coffee table. She's my student teacher. Yep. This woman will have a college degree next month and will enter the teaching world in the fall. I plan to do everything in my power to stop such a travesty from occurring. Here's what happened today:

She's preparing a lesson on the crusades to give to my class tomorrow. She showed me her powerpoint today and it was terrible! She got so much stuff wrong, out of order and each slide was a huge block paragraph of info I later discovered she just cut and pasted off the internet. But, since she's new at this I was willing to be patient and talk her through a proper presentation style (even though she should have known better). Things were going along okay when the train wreck occurred. She had a sentence in her ppt she didn't understand - something about the Muslims holding Jerusalem after the crusades until the 20th century. She asked if the Christians finally got the city back and I replied that no, the Jews held Jerusalem now. She then said, "well Jews are Christians, right?" After very nearly swallowing my tongue, I calmly (yet twitchingly) replied, no, Jews are Jews and Jerusalem is a city in Israel - a Jewish nation since 1948. She took all this in as though she'd never heard it before. When I mentioned that the fact that the Jews coming in in 1948 upset the Muslims so much that it has led to intense violence in the Middle East, she stared at me with astonishment as though I just told her I'd cured cancer! I almost throttled her on the spot. I don't allow my FRESHMEN to walk out of my room without knowing this stuff. How does someone get to near-college graduation (with a history degree, no less) without knowing this stuff? And she's not some bimbo coed. She's in her mid 40s and served in the army for 15 years. No friggin' excuse.

Oh - and her idea of doing historical research for the crusades was to watch the movie, Kingdom of Heaven. An entertaining movie, I'll give you, but it's completely unacceptable as historical research at an adult level. She needs to read a stinkin' book! Her advisor is coming to observe her and we've already spoken about what a wreck this woman is. I warned her advisor she doesn't know her content at all and she's got no sense of the world around her. The advisor wasn't the least bit surprised and has been having tons of trouble with her all semester. Tomorrow should be interesting.

On the upside, it was a beautiful day today. I love spring! :)