The child from last week was back, once again with challenging assignments…
This time she had to talk about “problems in society”, she had written cue-cards about pollution, and how bad it is that we’re polluting the oceans, but the empty cue-card had the headline “Religion” written on it.
“Do you think I know something about that subject” I asked? She nodded “Yes”.
She started out by acknowledging that there are more similarities than differences between Christianity and Islam, and once again the number one issue Muslims have with Christianity surfaced, the fact the Jesus, alav ha-shalom, is claimed to be the “son of God”, well since God or Allah, is “one”, this is blasphemy. My point was once again that we’re all children, and that our relationship with the Creator is much akin to the relationship we have with our parents, and that I believe that that was what Jesus meant (I feel that that is expressed by one of the names of God: Al-Wadud (الودود) The Loving, the Kind One).
We’ll after touching the subject of the prophet Muhammad “Salla Allahu ‘Alaihi Wa Sallam†cartoons, she ended up with two cue-cards, focusing on tolerance and understanding as ways to avoid problems due to religion. The “Nudansk Ordbog” actually lists “Understanding other cultures” as a way to create tolerance.
Part of the assignment was to describe an ideal party – the “happy” party. I should get the 10 misson statements she listed, but here’s some important ones I remember:
- Everybody should have a job
- People shouldn’t annoy each other
- It should not be allowed to beat children
- The Police shouldn’t beat on people
I think the “happy” party will get my vote.
Finally she had a Math problem, and it included triangulation: You know the length of one side, and the three angles, now the job was to determine the middle normal! I believe that it’s quite simple to calculate – even without knowledge of trigonometry, I just couldn’t remember the formula, so after some attempts at analysis, I decided to do a simple calculation of the fractions, by measuring the drawing in the textbook.
One side of the triangle was 12 meters, I measured it to be 2,7 centimetres, so the unit is 4,44 meters/centimetre. I then measured the middle normal and got 5,2 centimetres yielding 23,11 meters.
We do need Internet access in the “classroom”, Wikipedia has the solution, but it seems that you do need knowledge of trigonometry, which she doesn’t have as far as I know. It might be that my approach was the correct one!