Comments

We got an email in response to a May 6th by Joslyn Jane congratulating Claremont High School teacher John Lawrence for being named Advanced Placement (AP) Teacher of the Year by the Siemens Foundation.

It occurred to us that this email might be more appropriately posted as a comment, but we currently have the comment feature disabled. We've done this for a number of reasons, partly out of the lack of editorial time to manage the comments for things like comment spam. Despite former Claremont Mayor Diann Ring's comments two days ago that we don't have anything better to do, all of us, like our readers, have many commitments and limited free time.

We did find a post on a site called DennisKennedy.com. The author is an attorney specializing in technology law. In answer to a reader's question, "Who do you think you are, God?" Kennedy makes some good points about his choice to not to allow comments. And, no, we have no deity ambitions here.

If you have thoughts on this, feel free to email us at claremontbuzz@yahoo.com.

In the meantime, here in it's entirety is the note received on Joslyn Jane's bit about teacher John Lawrence. We rather like Mr. Lawrence, but since one of our criticisms of Diann Ring and her Claremont 400 compadres is that they refuse to allow alternate views, we felt compelled to post the reader's email, even though we do not endorse those views.

We should also note that a similar letter about the same teacher ran in the Claremont Courier some time ago. Claremont Insider makes not representations as to the writer's accuracy, and the thoughts expressed are entirely the writer's:


From: NAME REDACTED
To: claremontbuzz@yahoo.com
Subject: please post this to the blog as a postscript to Lawrence post
Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 01:50:23 -0700

To Whom it may Concern,

Re: Claremont Insider blog Sunday, May 6.Mr. Lawrence of CHS awarded “Advance Placement State teacher of the Year”

UNBELIEVABLE

In the spring of 2005, students (at CHS), were put in (what this writer considers) an extremely inappropriate situation when their teacher, Mr. John Lawrence, requested they participate in an experiment as part of the Advance Placement Environmental Science class, which had nothing to do with AP Environmental Science. This “experiment” was using dimmed lights and mood music, and the students were instructed to ask, “Will you have sex with me?”, while exchanging chemical solutions of what they termed “bodily fluids” in their test tubes. Asking “sex questions” without parental permission is against the CA Education Code. There is nothing in the College Board’s AP Biology test that asked for this nonsense. At the least it should have been reported to the College Board since Advance Placement is copyrighted by the College Board.

And now I find out Mr. Lawrence has been given this award of “Advance Placement State teacher of the Year.” UNBELIEVABLE!

(the other class was Robert Hoyle's March 31 Freshman science biology lab)

Signed,

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