I love this job. I hate this job.
One of the things English teachers face almost more than any other academic discipline is the content challenge. Students challenge the content we teach all the time. That's part of their jobs as teenagers and it goes with the territory. I always listen to their complaints and concerns. Sometimes it comes down to fatigue or sheer laziness, but not as often as people think. More often, their issues lead me to deeper issues which can lead me to better texts or better approaches to teaching those texts.
Parents challenge content too, but unlike the students they not only challenge the curriculum, they also challenge material in classroom libraries and media centers. This is also natural. It's a parent's job to be concerned about the material and values that their children are exposed to. It's entirely natural to want to protect one's child but it puts educators in a sticky place sometime.
As educators we have a responsibility to the student and we have a responsibility to their understanding of the world. Flawed as we are, we try to present the world in a fair and unbiased manner so that the student can make their own decisions armed with the relevant information. As a person and as an educator, I am deeply opposed to censorship. I believe all knowledge has value and all ideas are worth consideration (even if in the end I discard them, the process of evaluation has value.) I believe that censoring material only elevates its power. In my ideal world, the only censored material would be deliberate lies and misrepresentations.
Even so, there are lines. I don't think middle schoolers should be reading Confessions of an Opium Eater or Shades of Grey, for example. Candide's more than a bit dicey and I've personally called home when I caught one of my freshmen reading Lady Chatterley's Lover (impressed though I was.) The trick is, when a parent makes a decision to disallow content, it's a parental decision. When I remove things from the libraries or tell students they can't read it, it's censorship.
Nevertheless, it's part of my job and, as one of the most prolific readers I've ever met, it always has been one of my functions at the school.
I love getting to read the books first, and I love the mental exercise of building a case either for or against a book. I hate holding a wonderful, beautiful book in my hand and struggling to find to find a way to make it available for the students who are ready for it.
I read Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam today. It is an extraordinary book and a revelation that touches not only on the inherent bias of the legal system, but also the transformative power of art. It is also full of foul language and violence. It's not gratuitous at all. It's completely appropriate to the events of the story. It will still be difficult to keep in the student library.
I wish people would stop being so afraid of words. Words aren't a threat, the ideas are. . . and you can't stop ideas, you just have to face them and deal.
