Banned Book Week...a teachers' perspective

Over the summer one of my former students posted a newspaper article on my facebook page. It detailed three books that were being banned in a high school near by and she asked if I would write about it. I couldn't and still can't as I have not read the three books (Speak, Twenty Boy Summer and Slaughter-house Five), but I can write about what I feel banning a book at the high school level can mean and I can do that on a personal level.

Every year I give a choice fiction assignment in my honors class, with this assignment I give a list, but I also give a warning, please see below:

Last year I had two parents complain about the assignment because I gave a list of books that they felt were OK for their children to read as their teacher had approved the book in a list. After looking over the books, they didn't understand how I could let their kids read such filth. Now, both of these complaints happened at the end of the unit, after all projects had been assessed and it was May...in essence, shy of exempting the students from the work, there was nothing I could do.

My principal asked me: Would you allow your child to read [he read a part from the book that I'm leaving out only because I don't want people who I know telling the parent that I'm talking about the book]?

My answer: I read that book in high school, I'm not sure now that my mother knows I read it and I'm not sure that she cares I've always been allowed to make my own choices, which is amazing considering how devout my mother is, but there you go.

I didn't want to get rid of the project, the students grades or the ability to let the kids choose what they wanted to read. My principal wanted to make sure that parents understood that books might be questionable. I wanted to make sure that parents could be held accountable for guidelines and papers I give their children to take home.

After another debacle, which occurred during the summer (because it wasn't me, I won't go into detail), we've created the following for the whole department to use:

We'll see if it works...

I'm all for letting my students' parents determine what they read. However, I definitely don't want to be that person...ever...reading creates free thought and I mean all kind of reading, especially the unbridled kind. I remember when I was in high school one of my friends only read romance novels, I mean dirty, making me blush just thinking about it, romance novels and we would tease her about this fact. One day my teacher (and, this was in the world's smallest town in the early 90s) said, "Don't knock what she reads, they're dense, complex, historical and she's reading!"

Over the years, we've had to have alternate assignments for The Crucible (John Proctor says, "God is dead!", of course people don't read the whole play to see why he's saying it or to think about how it's actually promoting the idea of the true Christian, not the hypcritical Christians of Salem), Of Mice and Men (too much cussing, and new for this year, because it is derogatory towards those who are mentally-challenged) and many others. I don't mind having alternate assignments, what you do in your home and how you want to raise your kids is truly not any of my business and, I can find an alternate for pretty much all of the books, short stories et cetera that we read in class. I do mind removing a book from the curriculum or the shelf just because of the mores of a few.

Once we start banning books and censoring their product where does it stop? Whose voice gets to be the loudest? What ideals get to be the strongest?

A List (25 Banned book that I love)
I'm not going to tell you why they're banned...read them just because they're good, not because they're salacious.

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
2. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
3. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
4. Forever by Judy Blume
5. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
7. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
8. Beloved by Toni Morrison
9. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
10. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
11. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
12. The Giver by Lois Lowry
13. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
14. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
15. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
16.  Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
17. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
18. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
19. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
20. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
21. The Drowning of Stephan Jones by Bette Greene
22. Maurice by E. M. Forster
23. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
24. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
25. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

Some great blogpost
Lesson 24: Books Are Made for Reading & Hiding Girlie Mags in Class
Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read
I Read Banned Books
Why Banned Books Week Matters
Banned Books in the United States
Still Beating That Old Dead Horse About Censorship

The Most Dangerous Word

"There is more than one way to burn a book.
And the world is full of people running about with lit matches."

~Ray Bradbury

                 Race is a sensitive issue. When questions about the African-American/Black/Colored race arise I either a) ignore them, I dislike when people assume I am a spokesperson for something just because I happen to resemble that something (this includes

matters of race, social class, religion, occupation et cetera) or b) try to answer as honestly as possible and can only do so from personal experience.
            I also try not to give words power by treating certain words like they make or break my life, conversation and my view of people and situations. I know that every word has its time and place. This, of course, excludes the use of the f-word around my daughter (she's at that stage where she repeats everything she hears...just ask her father, who is no longer allowed to play GTA IV while she is awake!) and the n-word.
            Sad to say, the f-word has stuntedly and awkwardly come out of my mouth before, followed by profuse apologies, but I can't even say the n-word. I dislike when people use it even in fun with friends. I visibly cringe when I hear it and I don't like reading it. Like any other person who's part of a minority, I have had my own experiences with ignorance and derogatory words, especially this one.
            The book that helped me to understand this word and its power, is Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. I suggest reading it. In it I learned what I suppose I always knew, the n-word, like any other powerful word, has good connotations (I have even experienced some of these), multiple definitions, a troublesome past and a permanence in the lexicon of the history of the human race.
            While there are words I hate and games I say my husband shouldn't play in front of my kiddo, I do not believe in censorship of any kind and I'm not sure that replacing the 'n-word' with 'slave' in the seminal South/Southwest regionalist novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, so those offended (especially schools who ban it) will read/buy it, isn't some form of it.
             I am positive this does not contradict my feelings. Not liking something and removing it from existence are two very different concepts.
             The town in which I teach has a population of 12, 155 (2000 census); 95.99% of which is white (according to the same census) and yet, this book (in its non-altered state) is part of the Freshman English curriculum. We believe that when that book is taught, not just read, taught...it is life changing. I didn't realize we were so progressive.
             If we take the n-word out of the novel Huck Finn, if we allow those schools who censor the novel to win...we allow a form of laziness that only exist in 'Stoner Movies'. Instead of fixing something to where it's "appropriate" (and, what is appropriate? who decides?) enough for the sensitive and inane, why don't we just teach the reasons why the word is there in the first place? Why don't we just have conversations and dialogue? We can assume the public understands that when we take any word out of any book we create negative history revisionism, we start something that, in 100 years, we won't be able to stop, (read Fahrenheit 451 or at least Bradbury's Coda if you don't understand what I'm talking about) and we give that word more power than it deserves.
             It is, after all, about time and place, right?