South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.
Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.
Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.
“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.
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Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.
“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”
I will be in minority here, but she is a teacher of English, and this topic should be taught in social studies. It is unprofessional to do what she is doing.
You cannot hope to teach any kind of literature without teaching important context around it. You are wrong.
Unless the book is literally recognized achievement, it should not be in the class. I say this without arguing with your statement that context is important.
It is, though. You just don’t know it – probably because your dumbass teachers avoided non-white authors in your classes.
Did you read the article? The teacher gave pretty good reasons why:
Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.
“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”
A large part of English classes are about influential literature, not learning how to read. The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, etc. They all have a message, and that’s part of English literature classes. If a book doesn’t have anything to say it isn’t worth reading. What books should be allowed to assign, in your enlightened opinion?
Is this book influential? I doubt so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me#Reception
On November 18, 2015, it was announced that Coates had won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me.[20] NPR’s Colin Dwyer had considered it the favorite to win the prize, given the book’s reception.[6] It also won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.[21]
The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list for nonfiction on August 2, 2015, and remained number 1 for three weeks. It topped the same list again during the week of January 24, 2016.[22]
The book was selected by Washington University in St. Louis and Augustana College[23] in 2016, as the book for all first-year students to read and discuss in the fall 2016 semester.[24] In the same year, the book was ranked 7th on The Guardian’s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.[25]
Yeah, it was only a finalist for a pulitzer prize. It’s probably not worth considering.
However, your comment wasn’t about it being influential. It was about whether topics, such as this, should be examined in an english course. Again, what books do you deem appropriate for such a course?
I feel like a solid half of the books I was assigned in k-12 had to do with the holocaust, slavery, or the cold war. To kill a mockingbird, number the stars, boy in striped pajamas, Anne Frank, number the stars, night, the hiding place, animal farm, the giver etc. This definitely doesn’t seem out of the ordinary or inappropriate to me. I’m more skeptical of teaching books like Lolita (though I personally feel even young kids can read reasonably critically, especially with the guidance of a teacher).
Teacher here. IMHO the job of any pre-university teacher goes beyond the strict subject matter of their class. Nothing wrong with a math teacher doing a bit of computer science, or a language teacher talking about history, or a history teacher doing ethics. Helps students develop their critical thinking skills, judging by themselves the worth of someone else’s opinions. Some people think that teachers must be controlled so that they don’t indoctrinate kids or whatever but this completely ignores the fact that kids are smarter than what most adults think. School is the place where they can exposed to a diversity of opinions, new ways to think about stuff, learn to live in a society. If you think of school as a service and education as just another product, you’re wrong.
I couldn’t even imagine an English teacher refusing to teach any books that involve history. I would get my daughter transferred to a different class because that is not a good learning environment.
My daughter is in middle school. They were given three book options to study. One of them is an award-winning autobiographical graphic novel about two child refugees in Africa. I suppose the person we’re talking to would say that would only belong in social studies too. I mean it involves Africa and war and it’s a true story. Does any of that belong in English? (Yes.)
Teachers absolutely have to be controlled. The shit people believe nowadays should stay away from educational system. I do not want intelligent design to be part of biology class only because a teacher decided “to expand views of the students”. But it works in both ways. Progressives topics should be avoided too if they are not part of the program. I do not want CRT, for example, to be thought to 8 graders either, especially in literature classes, unless it is part of the curriculum. There is acceptable program, and teachers should go alone with it.
Are you getting dizzy? You’re changing your arguments so frequently I figure you must, maybe you should sit down. Being progressive is not equivalent to denying science. Teaching an award nominated book should not be banned simply because it broaches the topic of race. And no, teachers should not go along with what’s always been taught, because the world hasn’t stopped evolving in the 1960s.
If my kid comes back from biology telling me about intelligent design because his teacher mentioned it in class I admit I’d be pissed off, but I don’t think I’d call for the teacher to be fired or try to censor them. Instead I might tell them about the scientific explanation and why I think what the teacher says is bullshit. As a parent I try to participate in my kids education. Problem is, some parents don’t, and then they go crazy when teachers different ideas than theirs.
You know, sometimes literature exposes us to the perspectives and life experiences of other people who are not like ourselves. And thus, through literature, we broaden our perspectives and better empathize with others instead of being ignorant hateful shitbags.
And by sometimes I mean most of the time.
Between the World and Me is a book-long letter to Coates’ son about his own experiences with racism. Why would that be taught in social studies? I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in English class. It dealt with racism just as much as Between the World and Me. It wasn’t taught in social studies because it’s literature. So is Between the World and Me. You don’t read literature in social studies, you read it in English. In fact, I don’t remember ever reading a book in high school social studies that wasn’t the textbook. What did you read?
They’re two pretty different subjects. One teaches about grammar, rhetoric, vocabulary, how to express ideas in words and how to understand others’ expressions. The other is about our interactions with the humans around us, whether in written form or not, whether in English or not. A big part of my social studies courses was about people who didn’t even know English.
