There are a few reasons I can imagine for a limit on Pokemon.
First, you may not realize it, but there is a raft of Pokemon books out there whose quality is about on par with the cartoon show’s quality–that is, they suck shit. And a lot of kids love them just as much. A teacher may be wanting kids to expose themselves to quality children’s literature (and we’re kind of in a golden age of children’s literature right now), and so may exclude Pokemon in order to get kids to read the good stuff.
Second, students given the opportunity to write fiction often want to write retellings of the Pokemon cartoon they just watched (or the Spiderman movie they just watched or whatever). When students use someone else’s characters, they’re missing out on one of the joys and trials of writing fiction: inventing one’s own characters.
As a second-grade teacher, I absolutely allow students to read Pokemon books. My first year of teaching I thought I was going to have to fail one student, because her reading was so poor. She strongly resisted practicing reading with the “just right” books I provided. Then she started bringing in one of those shit-sucking Pokemon books and reading it every chance she got. It was far more difficult than the books I’d been giving her, and she really struggled with it. Key word: struggled. She didn’t resist it at all, but rather she worried at it like a tiny dog with a giant bone, desperately trying to get her mental jaws around it. I credit her passing of second grade to Pokemon. She loved Pokemon, and only Pokemon, enough to work at it; and it working at it, she developed her reading skills to grade-level.
Now, I have rules. We just started a unit on nonfiction, and today in the library I required every child to check out at least one nonfiction book on a topic of their choice. When a kid brought me a Pokemon handbook from the 745 section (I think), I nixed it, just as I nixed the I Spy books (and would have nixed fairy tales from the 398 section): books like that blur the line between fiction and nonfiction, and it’s a fairly hard concept for most kids anyway.
And I also forbid Pokemon in fiction writing (not reading), as part of a broader rule. I explain that any characters someone else created belong to that author, and students need to create their own characters. I’ll help them create their own ninjas or dragons or superheroes or whatever, but they can’t use someone else’s characters.
I discourage use of Pokemon in nonfiction: as I tell them, if I want to find out the plot of Saturday’s Pokemon cartoon, I’ll watch the fuckin cartoon myself, I don’t want to read their blow-by-blow of it. But I’ll allow it in some cases, such as the kid who described how he and his brother worked together to hook up the Xbox, sat down on the couch, and played, and how he let his brother win because the brother was younger. That’s good stuff there, even if Pokemon is involved.
So I’d be thrilled if a kid brought me that document. As a parent, I think I’d encourage the kid to do it anyway: even if the teacher’s a pill, I think it’s a valuable experience in speaking up to unreasonable authority, and it’s quite possible the teacher’s not a pill and will get a kick out of it.
He would have turned the corner and started to read eventually, but man, Pokemon sure worked wonders.