I usually ignore responses that start with “Je*** fu***** C*****”. Or other personal insults. Wouldn’t you?
Now the above responses from people like MandaJo are great.
Absolutely not. I’m not bothered by intensifiers, and am scornful of people whose outsized reaction to intensifiers causes them to run screaming away from the actual content being intensified.
ETA: Also, “Jesus Fucking Christ” is not a personal insult. Not even if you’re Jesus Christ!
It doesn’t sound like your 10th grade son is taking 11th grade AP English if most of the kids in his English class have an issue like that. In other words, your son is not the target audience for this class of college bound 11th graders at a high school that has some of the highest SAT scores for a public school in the country.
So why not respond to the thoughtful ones?
Maybe I’m just getting old, maybe I’m not up with the latest trends. Just see if you follow me:
I remember when conservatives were adults. I remember when they could talk about ideas, strong ideas, and use the language appropriate to strong ideas. I remember when they didn’t shy away from ideas, or from language, and could use words, all of the words, to express those important ideas.
Maybe you don’t remember. Maybe you never experienced it. I suppose this is all going right over your head.
Maybe, for you, the conservative movement has always been whining and self-inflicted misery, claiming to be insulted as a debate tactic, and using words as an excuse to ignore ideas instead of as a tool to express them.
I certainly hope I haven’t offended your delicate sensibilities with my politically incorrect post.
Just wanted to mention that when Patience the black Lab was a pup, we took her to a Social Justice Factory puppy school at the University, where they emphasized playful interaction over training.
She wound up with behavioral issues which we later had to get straightened out at Adolescent Boot Camp.
We should’ve enrolled her in a charter school to begin with.
Sure she wasn’t ready for Conversion therapy? I’ve heard horror stories about Black Lab owners who are stunned when their dogs come out and say “Mom, while on the outside I look like a Black Lab, inside I’m really a Golden Lab and I want to date other Golden Labs.”
That shit needs to stop.
I don’t know, they are just books, and there are lots and lots of books.
There are some benefits to the idea that pretty much everyone who has received an American education has read the same books. Everyone I know is familiar with Huck Finn and 'Mockingbird, even if they couldn’t tell me a single line from either book, they know the basic concepts, and there could be something to cultural cohesion in that. I am not sure the value in that, but I will not say it is without value.
I could see them replaced on the merits of no longer being as relevant to our people and culture. There is no part of Huck’s life that is comparable to my own. There are some messages in 'Mockingbird that are relevant and useful, but it is still dated. The famous speech at the end, “And now imagine that girl is white.” isn’t as shocking and revelatoray as it was in 1960. Now there have been almost 2 whole generations since the civil rights movement. We still have a long ways to go, but I think we are beyond the prejudices found in that book, and it is more revelatory to read works of fiction that focus on the subtler side of racism.
Now, if they are replacing them with Twilight and Harry Potter, I think I would find that a poor choice. Honestly, I am not as up on literature as maybe I should be, so I can’t think of any good examples of books that would be more relevant replacements to those, but I am quite sure there are some.
I would replace Huck Finn with a story of a minority child growing up in the inner city; the adventures, challenges, and adversaries one finds there. I don’t think that is a perspective that is taught enough to us entitled white people. It is easy to dismiss some of the social inequalities found in Finn, we are removed by well over a century from that time. If the setting is more contemporary, and it is not a look back, but a look just over there, then here is more chance for empathy and understanding. Of course, sucha book, were it to be in any way a realistic portrayal, would probably have more instances of the problematic words that have gotten Huck Finn in trouble over the years.
And as long as people continue to say with a straight face that the philosophy of “all men are created equal” was implemented in a meaningful way in early America, then we need more “social justice” in our education.
At what point, and for what reason, did you have the opportunity to review the progress of the students in your son’s classroom?
I am so confused. I’m not trying to be stupid. You seem to be saying things that contradict each other.
On one hand, you want schools to teach “real issues” and you disagree with taking Huck Finn off of the curriculum.
On the other hand, you object to teachers discussing issues such as race, class and gender. If you are discussing the impact of a character’s social class in a story, that’s a Marxist reading. If you are discussing how gender impacts a story, that’s a feminist reading (honestly, even if I’m talking about how Pa’s ideas of manhood are a satire of the society’s idea of manhood, that’s still a feminist reading, because that’s the name we give to analysis of the impact of gender roles in a text).
Part of me thinks you just don’t believe me that the names “Marxist” and “Feminist” mean what I say they mean and that anyone who would put the name “Marxist” on their syllabus has to be a Red Communist looking to indoctrinate. All I can tell you is that you’re wrong on this one. It’s like finding a syllabus for “Modern Literature” and being upset that everything is from the 20s and 30s, nothing modern day. I’ve seen that, because people think Modern means “contemporary” when it doesn’t, or claiming that Poe isn’t always Romantic because no one falls in love. These are terms of art.
The other part of me thinks you think I should be required to teach Huck Finn, but I ought to be stopped from talking about Race or Class or Gender, I should just be helping kids understand the story as told. I disagree with that pretty vociferously, but if you want to have that conversation, we can.
So which is it?
P.S. to everyone else, for what it’s worth, I hate TKMB with a deep and abiding passion, and I will do almost anything to avoid teaching it. It’s an appalling Mary Sue: it promotes this idea that there were these incredible moral heros in the south able to see past the horrid structures of racism and not afraid to do the right thing. It lets us pretend that if we’d been there, we might have been Atticus. And that’s a lie. NO ONE stepped up in the South to defend the Scottsboro Boys. The only group in the whole country willing to pay to defend them was the American Communist Party, and they hired a Jewish lawyer from New Yorkcity to do it.
ETA: Also, I’m bitter about Tom Robbin’s death. It ties everything up, when the reality was that the court cases and challenges went on for years. Being a hero means commitment, it means slogging through the aftermath. Having Tom Robbins die–and making it his own fault, for trying to run–is just insulting both to the real victims in the case and to the people who fought for them.
Yes, it’s a pretty stinging indictment that it took Communists to stand up for justice in the US.
By the way, this is the course description for 11th grade non-AP English at Duluth East High School copied from their 2017 course catalog available on the web (bolding mine):
Looking at that list, I’m noticing a couple of things:
-Every book on that list of “foundational works of American Literature that are inclusive of multiple cultural perspectives” was written by a man, and all but one were written by a white man.
-None of them were written after World War II, despite the course’s coverage “from the pre-colonial period to . . . the present.”
I think back to the early nineties, when I took 11th grade English; in addition to Huck Finn and Scarlet Letter, we read Beloved and Invisible Man and Native Son. When I look at this course, my problem isn’t how SJW it is; my problem is that it’s not nearly SJW enough.
Slight off topic, but still on topic…
Does copyright have any effect on what books are in schools? Anything from long enough ago is no longer under copyright, so is much easier to use in excerpts or in whole. Things that are more current and still under copyright would be harder to secure the rights to use.
Could that be a reason why there isn’t anything on the syllabus from a more recent time?
Thank you for pointing that out.
I find it deeply satisfying that you’re using this quote when trying to make a point about the moral bedrock upon which our country was founded.
It’s not a matter of “getting the rights”, but rather of purchasing the text. You can often find really cheap paperbacks of works that are out of copyright. You can also find them on-line and photocopy them. More recent works (or works old enough that you need a recent translation and/or good linear notes) are vastly more expensive. In many cases, the only way to teach more modern works is to require kids to buy them. I won’t do it because I’m in a poor school and that’s a ridiculous barrier to entry. But I know people who do. Sometimes schools will buy “real” books, but it’d be a rare district that would fund more than a couple for a year-long course.
Because of this, I tend to teach fewer works by people of color and/or women than I would like. We read a little Wollstonecraft and a little Stanton, Sojorner Truth, MLK, Harriet Jacobs. It’s honestly easier in a non-fiction course in many ways. When I taught AP Lit my book list veered very Dead White Men, largely because of this issue.
It’s not correct, period. Or did the Constitution not need the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments after all? I mean, yeah, those words are in the Declaration of Independence (not the actual Constitution) but just WHO they applied to has changed over the years. A lot.
I’m being pedantic, but the quote is actually from the Gettysburg Address. Which carries even less authority than the DoI, but whatever.