Belshazzar palace was close to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar the king of Babylon had a son named Belshazzar. When Belshazzar became King God was angry at Belshazzar for being so selfish that he forgot about God. God sent Daniel to help Belshazzar understand God’s message. By those rivers a wondrous thing was about to happen.
God sent a message to the king. A mysterious hand wrote a cryptic message on a wall. The king called for his super-wise men, but they could not understand the language that it was written in. Belshazzar started shaking head to toe in fear. The queen announced, “I know a man who is very wise and whom your father trusted.” He sent for Daniel who interpreted the writing, “God is angry at you for worshiping false gods.”
That very evening, a king named Darius of the Medes took over the kingdom of Babylon. He captured the city of Babylon while Belshazzar died horrifically.
“I mean, like, with culturally relevant teaching…[?]…” her high-pitched voice droned, lilting upwards at the end of the phrase as if everything said was more of a question than a statement. Was she really that unsure of what she was saying or was it a habit learned from an academy which no longer believed truth to be something definitive? I was sitting through yet another required teacher training seminar wondering if I was the only one in the room more interested in the message than in these interminable lectures on teaching methods. Yet this particular post-modern drill sergeant took the message/method dichotomy a step further than I had ever heard it taken. She delivered a conclusion to her talk that can only make sense to a brain thoroughly washed in ideology and completely abandoned by common sense: “It doesn’t matter what we teach our students…[?] as long as we teach them with the right method.” 
July 4/17, 2015
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