Sam Amico
A Utah teacher wanted to teach middle schoolers that insects could help save the environment from cows, which are supposedly “killing the world.”
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So Kim Cutler, the teacher in question, had Spring Canyon Middle School students write a paper on eating bugs and gave them extra credit if they actually ate them.
Cutler assigned an essay, with its title simply being, “Why America Should be Eating Bugs.” (Apparently, this is limited to America, and why, we have no idea, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Cutler instructed students that this was the only point of view allowed — that cows needed to be replaced with insects as humans’ main protein source because cows give off methane, which strikes the ozone layer.
Write it, and show that you understand that it’s the only way, which seemed to be the rallying cry for the assignment.
But one student challenged this thinking and recorded her interaction with Cutler. The student, Saige Wright, asked Cutler if she could take another approach, and Cutler told her no. Saige’s mother, Amanda Wright, revealed as much on Fox News Digital.
Kim Cutler
Amanda Wright told Fox she believed her child was being subject to “‘indoctrination” after Cutler said there was “only one right answer” on the insect-eating assignment.
The exchange went like this:
Amanda to Cutler: “How come we can’t state our opinion on why Americans shouldn’t be eating bugs?”
Cutler: “Because we don’t have any evidence to support it.”
Saige: “We don’t?”
Cutler: “It’s kind of weird that I gave you a topic where there is only one right answer. We don’t want to eat bugs and it’s gross. But should we be eating bugs? Yeah, because we’re killing the world by raising cows and animals. So we need to, not get rid of cows, but like, try to balance our diet so that not so much of our land is being used to raise cows, cause it’s killing the Ozone layer.”
This did not go over well — either in the community and on social media.
But the school district supported Cutler, saying that she was only doing her job — and may not have even been supporting her personal beliefs. She may not really even think you need to eat only bugs and not cows. That was just the assignment — to take only that point of view.
“It is our understanding that this assignment is part of many essays where students will explore different sides of issues, find and sort through the evidence, and cite it in their own essays, which is a significant part of the writing core in the Utah State Standards,” a representative for the school district told the Daily Mail.
“Students explore the differences between opinions and facts while they both read examples of and write their own persuasive/argumentative essays — such as ‘Why America Should Be Eating Bugs.'”
Cutler has not been disciplined, nor will she face any, the school district said. Her picture was removed from the school website “for safety reasons,” the Daily Mail reported.
