Feel a fatwa coming on (alcohol in the classroom?)

Basically, yes.

Heck, in the states if you did anything involving food, drink or fun you’d have to let the boss know. Our French/Spanish club generated an angry letter from the food university service company because we had the nerve to make fondue, paellas and other snacks in the classroom after school without permission. How did they even find out? That’s the thing I didn’t miss about the states. Stupid rules and litigiouse thinking.

only TWO countries? That doesn’t sound very inclusive…
Considering the current year status quo, you should be glad you were not sent to re-education camps!

Yea and that’s why I came back to Taiwan. That and this whole PC culture means you have to be very careful what you say. One off the cuff remark and you lose everything, possibly your freedom too

Eh no. There’s a dribble more of foreign students on scholarships , and loads of Asian tourists. That’s about it.

I’m not Muslim but I can’t tell single malt from blend in smell or taste and…I don’t care.

Well, past classes have consistently and overwhelmingly guessed wrong, which suggest there is a detectable difference with the particular ones I’ve used.

I’d speculate that the blend (Famous Grouse IIRC) is tailored for mass acceptability and is smoother. Students expect the SM to taste “better” so they assume the blend is the SM.

so, have you gone into hiding yet?

Decided against the whisky theme for this class, not so much because of the haram thing (I asked an Algerian student in another class who thought smelling alcohol was OK) but because I think it might make for difficulties with the writing task.

The trickiest part of writing a Compare and Contrast paragraph for students is forming a conclusion that makes sense.

Easiest is usually to make and justify a choice, and that’s going to be rather abstract for whisky if you are a strict muslim.

They could decline to choose on that basis, and I could probably accept such a non-conclusion conclusion, but better to avoid the technical difficulty in the first place.

I’ll still use it for another class of predominantly Taiwanese students.

Since a rumor had apparently leaked, at the beginning of the test class I announced that I would not be running the whisky topic, since some expert opinion was that it was Absolutely Haram, with potential for fatwa, jihad, a spike in Toyota Pickup truck sales and the black flag of the Worldwide Caliphate flying over the campus by the end of the decade.

While this would admittedly have the attraction of irritating both the USA and the PRC I didn’t feel it was worth the risk for what they were paying me.

Muslim students disagreed. There were mutterings of religious descrimination.

You just can’t win these Holy Wars.

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I don’t get the reason why would those muslim students disagreed over “not be running the whisky topic” ?

Seems they felt they were discriminated against by being denied the chance to sample Ducked’s fine tipple. Totally understandable

I dunno. It sounds like he’s told the class something along the lines of “We can’t have whisky tasting because of the Muslims.”

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Man, that’s Ducked.

if the non muslims complained i can understand it, but for the muslims themselves? i don’t get the objection

Who cares, just ignore them. Say its an optional activity you always did.

It sounds like they (or some of them) don’t interpret their religion the same way you do.

If you canceled a Christmas activity on the same grounds, you might get a similar reaction… or not, depending on how fun Christmas activities are reputed to be. :2cents:

No way would I bring booze into a classroom. You’d be risking your job and more just to seem a little cooler to a few students.
And your two drinks may seem worlds apart to you, but to the average Taiwanese (mostly non-drinkers), it would be like writing about the difference in 1% and 2% milk, or writing about 95 vs. 92 at the pump.

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Well, in risking my job I’m really risking very little, so its an acceptable risk.

Not sure what “and more” might comprise. Wouldn’t have thought this was a criminal action, so we can’t be talking jail time.

Excommunication?

Re the fine distinction, you have a valid (if somewhat picky) point. However , for the Taiwanese class there was a .PPT presentation which explained the difference, (along with pretty pictures of castles and Highland cows called Hamish) and from which they were expected to take notes, which was part of the assessed activity process, so I think its legit.

This course is billed as prep for exchange students, so I’m assuming they might have formal lectures in English in the destination institution. I use material from the Lecture Ready series (suggested, IIRC, by Buttercup on here a few years ago) for part of the prep.

There is actually A LOT you could write about 95 vs 92 at the pump. I had a Technical English course last year where that might have worked, since I featured the IC engine quite a bit.

Predictably, going by the god-awful specified text book, which I didn’t use, the institution wanted rote-learning of IT buzzwords. I was buggered if I was going to do that, and they didn’t ask me to run the course again.

Yeh, I try and tell the truth.

When I was in IT it was pretty much a USP.