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.”
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.
Never said it is, except in particular context - when it is outside curriculum.
I never said it should not be taught “because of the topic of race”. In fact, I said it should be thought but in social studies class.
And this is how intelligent design will be in the school.
We are democracy and democracy is build on rules. Following the rules is essential to the democracy, otherwise it becomes anarchy. You can’t have “let’s break the rules, but only when I like it” and have flourishing country.
A social studies teacher is not the right person to be analyzing and teaching modern persuasive writing styles. That material belongs in an English class and if you teach it in social studies you have philological fucked up.
And if the teacher said “This book is about persuasive writing style” we would not have this conversation. She specifically gave the book because it describes racism, she did not even mentioned the style (at least per article).
I want my child to learn about racism from the teacher who is trained to talk about this topic, who has specific class for that, and bring it as a part of complex social problems that exist, not from activist in literature class, who suppose to teach literature.
You’re just wrong about what kinds of works a good AP Lang class should be teaching. You’re wrong about what the class is, how it works, and what it intends. You’re wrong about the science of education going into this. You’re wrong about the cross-disciplinary nature of the lessons. You’re wrong about the purpose of this book being assigned. And in that wrongness you are advocating for a world where education does a worse job teaching kinds how to navigate and be resilient in a world full of people that are going to constantly be trying to convince them to believe certain things and act certain ways.
OK, I admit, this changes my view. I read only what was posted - did not read the whole article. Well, it teaches me.
I’m shocked and impressed with your change of tone. As someone who took AP English all through highschool, I’m glad to hear you can have an open mind
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Is CRT in the room with us right now??
I do not understand your question. Are you still talking about Critical Race Theory, or switched to Cathode Ray Tube?
Well that’s good, because it’s usually only studied in a graduate-level law school course. Good job buying into that Republican rhetoric.
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.