Mommy, Can I Kill This?

Opening Scene Imagine you are doing the dishes in your kitchen sink, up to your elbows in soap suds and water. Up behind you comes your five year old son. He asks, "Mommy, can I kill this?" Immediately, before you even have a chance to turn around, the first thought that flashes through your head is, "What the heck is it?!"

If it is an ugly, icky Black Window spider, you will quickly knock it out of your son's hands and kill it yourself. It is the neighbor boy's puppy, the answer is an immediate, "No! And just what were you thinking, even wondering if you can kill a puppy?"

We all know that, essentially, whether or not you are permitted to kill something depends upon just what it is you are killing. Or do we?

On the issue of abortion, I used to be adamantly and passionately pro-choice. It was none of my business to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her own body. And it sure as heck wasn't the government's business to get into our private lives and tell us what to do either.

That was my passionately held view, hence I was pro-choice.

That was, until I began to consider just what it was that was being killed.

You see, both those who are pro-choice and those who are pro-life essentially agree on morality. They both passionately agree that it is evil to kill children.

However, where they differ is on matters of fact, i.e., whether or not the unborn is actually a child/human being (or at what point the unborn becomes a child/human being).

I finally moved from being pro-choice to pro-life when I realized that the issue was not primarily women's rights, or government intervention, or opposition to fundamentalist, right-wing religious zealotry, or even a difficult moral issue.

I realized the fundamental issue is, just what is it? Once you resolve what it (i.e., the unborn) is, all the rest of the moral and legal questions resolve themselves.

If the unborn is not a human being, then no justification for abortion is needed.

If the unborn is a human being, then no justification for abortion is possible.

I have moved from being passionately pro-choice to now being adamantly pro-life and believe abortion should be outlawed in all instances, save when the life of the mother truly is in jeopardy.

My reasoning boils down to the following syllogism:

1. Major Premise: It is immoral to intentionally kill an innocent human being.
2. Minor Premise: The unborn is an innocent human being.
3. Conclusion: Therefor, it is immoral to intentionally kill the unborn.

Certainly both pro-choice and pro-life people agree with the major premise, i.e., it is immoral to intentionally kill and innocent human being. (And, certainly someone who believes it is not wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being can hardly complain about someone else forcing morality down their throat in making abortion illegal.)

The primary issue comes down to the minor premise, i.e., whether or not the unborn is an innocent human being.

I will address the minor premise in the next installment of Mommy Can I Kill This?


The tiny hand of 21-week-old fetus Samuel Alexander Armas emerges from the mother's uterus to grasp the finger of Dr. Joseph Bruner as if thanking the doctor for the gift of life.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/thehand.asp

Reflections on the CA Proposition Results

Obviously, good men can differ on how they felt about the propositons put forward by the governor. One such excellent blooger is Matt Heidt at Froggy Ruminations (http://haloscan.com/tb/cabana11/113152525096492201).

I support proposition 73, the prior parental notification if a minor (daughter) is going to get an abortion. I will be blogging about this later, as well as writing an article on my relatively newfound oppositon to abortion. (I used to be pro-choice, but have now moved to being pro-life).

If you read my posts below, CA Propositons 74 and 75 were both unnecessary and actually hurtful, especially propositon 74. That is based on the premise that what is going wrong in public education today is somehow the fault of the educators.

Folks, I don't get to pick my students, nor do I get to dismiss them. Nor can I force them to do their homework and their parents rarely watch over their kids and make them do their homework. If you want to blame a team's poor performance on the coach, you at least give the coach the right to pick his team and get ride of those players who either aren't up to it, or don't give 100%.

Teacher's are not afforded that luxury and until that time, it is rarely the fault of the educator.

CA Special Election Results

The results are in and finalized. All the propositons went down. Here are the results from the CA Secretary of State website, http://vote2005.ss.ca.gov/Returns/prop/00.htm

Why Teaching?

Successful teaching can be defined in different ways. I consider positively impacting the lives of students as aspect of successful teaching to be at least as important as expertly imparting content to students.

When asked, What do you teach? my response invariably is students. In other words, I emphasize the fact that I am teaching people, as well as content. In that vein, my best teaching experience was the same experience that proved the tipping point for my going into teaching rather than professional engineering.

This experience occurred when I was a Teaching Assistant in Physical Chemistry at UCLA. About four weeks before the end of the quarter, one of my students met me at my office hours. He explained to me that he had failed to two mid-quarter examinations, and likely would not pass the course, and not graduate from UCLA on schedule. His only hope was his performance on the quarter final exam. He was quite depressed and obviously felt hopeless.

I was able to diagnose his situation in terms of his standing in the class. But more importantly, I was able to re-motivate him by helping him develop his study schedule and meet with him on a regular basis to get him prepared for the quarter final exam.

I did not know how he did on the final until he called my home. He explained to me how he had done so well on the final exam that the professor gave him a B in the Physical Chemistry course. Hence, he would graduate on schedule, and with good enough grades to move on to dental school.

Moreover, it was his verbalized thanks and the sound of heartfelt gratitude in his voice that made me realize the positive impact I had had in his life. This was not just a grade in a course, not was it graduating and moving on to a professional program, but he had undergone a sea change in his thinking about himself.

So did I.

I realized at that point that I wanted to be a professional educator because of this sort of impact I could have.

Since that time, I taught Physical Chemistry and Chemical Engineering courses as a TA at UCLA, taught Physical Chemistry at a small private Southern California University, taught basic Earth Science to high school English Language Learners, and have even taught arithmetic to learning disabled 1st and 2nd graders. It is not the content that matters to be, but the students.

I have had many other experiences in which my students have done very well academically, and have gone on to live successful lives. However, the teaching experience I described above was my most successful in that I then realized the impact I could have, and what my in life calling was.