I WAS AT a planning meeting this month with a group of excellent music teachers selected specifically because of their excellence. After hours of serious talk about how schools work--and don't--and our hopes and ambitions for change, someone jokingly mentioned it would soon be time to gear up for the annual Christmas concert. sure you mean winter someone said. To which one teacher replied angrily, No, I do not. I don't care what the government says, Jesus is the reason for the season and in my school, we have a Christmas concert complete with the Nativity. No activist judge is going to tell her what to do. She knows what is best for her children and her community. Yikes, I thought. And not only yikes about the anger, but also yikes that in her school, a suburban district near a large metropolitan area, she can make such a proclamation ... and it sticks. I know many teachers who would love to do the same with standardized testing. One such teacher in North Carolina was recently fired for failing to administer standardized tests. Another teacher reported that when he circulated an e-mail announcing an upcoming winter concert, he received an angry response from a central office administrator. young teachers, it said, need to learn that we don't do that here. We have Christmas concerts. The discussion of whether it was appropriate to have a Christmas concert continued far too long for my comfort. There is no way, it seems to me, to have a reasoned discussion on the topic. It is like trying to reasonably discuss whether God planted dinosaur bones to test our faith. If you think He did, then an argument based on such scientific methods as carbon dating are not going to convince you otherwise. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say I'm a pretty staunch separation-of-church-and-state kind of gal. My commitment goes back a long way. When I was in 2nd grade, my teacher lined up all of us kids on Wednesday afternoons and marched with us across the street and down the block to the local Baptist church. There we sat rigidly in the pews for instruction. I already knew about hellfire and damnation, but had I not, I'm sure I would have learned it there. Like any child, I suppose, I enjoyed the break from the mind-numbing Dick and Jane readers and color-by-numbers math. Still, I wondered why church was intruding on my school day. It made no sense to me really. But my life was filled with things that made no sense--like our regular practice of duck-and-cover A-bomb drills. But my concern at eight years old was not that I was being bored almost to tears one afternoon a week--I was pretty used to boredom, after all. But the conflict that grew between school and home caused me to sweat. You see, my father was a very man--at least from time to time. And this was one of those times. And he was Baptist. Only not this Baptist. His was the true faith Baptist. All of those other Baptists were heretics, one step away from eternal damnation. So when my father heard about our church visits, he took matters into his own hands--he re-churched me. And suddenly, my religious education more than doubled. After some time, and for reasons never explained to me, our class stopped going to the church. I was quick to inform my father, and in time he stopped his lessons as well. I've often wondered what those school administrators were thinking when they came up with that idea. But looking back now and considering the context of the times, their once-a-week church visit makes some sense. We were scared. People were building fallout shelters to protect them from the godless menace of communism. …