I'm a little late venting this, as it happened some time ago.
As part of a field trip for our geography class, we went to 3 different religious centers in Lewiston. It would happen that there is a lot of Somali immigrants in Lewiston (which is kind of strange since Muslims are pretty rare in the rest of Maine), so we did some activities with a few of them.
For a second, I thought the teachers at this school had done something which wasn't stupid. It was informative, and I enjoyed talking with these Islamic kids, they all seemed so nice. Then the teachers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it was an amazing idea to explore stereotypes about each of the religions we had learned about that day. The kids from the Islamic center would take part in this activity.
Cards would be handed around, and each one would have a "stereotype" (aka an extremely rude phrase or slur) which you would explain when your turn came. It might have just been me, but the stereotypes about Islam seemed waaay worse than the ones involving Judaism or Christianity. Evidently, our guests thought so as well, based on some of the reactions I saw. Some of them took it really well, laughing at the stereotype and explaining how ridiculous and untrue it was. Others were extremely offended, or even looked like they were going to cry.
In yet another stroke of amazing luck, I had one of the (in my opinion) worst ones their, which I had to read off while sitting directly adjacent to one of the guests, which proved to be a rather unpleasant experience. I have no idea what the teachers were trying to do with this, or how they thought it would help anyone learn anything. It has, however, given me some time to practice writing firm and formally written emails.
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