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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8870520" data-attributes="member: 7035894">I didn't deal with it at all. I grew up in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, and the Satanic Panic thing was a very amusing American oddity to us. We couldn't believe that people were being so silly about the game.Now, I'm a teacher, and reading the OP's story made me really pissed off at his art "teacher." From the description, he should have been fired for cause:1. Being a terrible teacher with little apparent engagement with or strategy for teaching his chosen subject. If you're an art teacher, teach some freaking art, don't waste everyone's time with your personal interest in the leisure activities of your students.2. Injecting his personal religious agenda into a public school classroom. This should be obvious.3. Being totally immature and setting a horrible example of how to behave as a human being.4. Did I mention turning the class into a giant waste of everyone's time? Yeah, well I'm mentioning it again.Jerks like this make teachers look terrible. I'm sorry the OP and others had to endure asshats like this guy.The good news is, attitudes have really changed around the game. Although there was no Satanic Panic around D&D where I grew up, it was still seen by most as a weird little hobby and a general waste of time. Now, my D&D Club is not just supported by my school (GNS, go Gryphons!), but they advertise it, helped me put on a summer camp for neuro-diverse students, and even asked me to run a professional development session teaching it to teachers last year. My administration sees D&D as a fantastic club for encouraging creativity, problem solving, and socialization that tends to serve a segment of the student population that has been underserved by traditional clubs and sports. I use it and other RPGs and Strategy games all the time in my teaching, too. I just ran a game of Dread in my Creative Writing class to focus on how to build narrative tension. We used a re-themed version of Werewolf in our Language and Literature class's study of Persepolis to explore the effect of paranoia and group think on a population. A colleague and I even once included the entire 11th and 12th grade in a live action zombie apocalypse scenario to explore both exponential disease spread (she's an Econ and Human Geography teacher) and real world ethical decision making (for my Theory of Knowledge students). In modern education, games are seen as an extremely valuable teaching and learning tool, and there are now schools where you can earn graduation credit taking a class on D&D!</blockquote>

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