Banned Books Week: September 30 – October 6, 2012
I posted this a month or so ago in anticipation of Banned Books Week, and now that Banned Books Week is officially here, well, here’s that post again. We can’t speak up against censorship enough. As long as we put up with such horrendous nonsense, it will just get worse. It is the personal responsibility of each citizen to educate themselves to the point that he/she is able to interpret bullshit from fertilizer. There will always be people who prefer to allow others to dictate their beliefs, but I do not consider such people to be sentient. Am I mean? No, I’m honest. Censorship is for the weak-minded who don’t have the brains to interpret correctly, or the balls to change their parasitic ways, and for people who are afraid. Afraid of new ideas, afraid of questions, and afraid of the universe in general. This is a sick, sad, pathetic way to live, and even sicker, sadder, and more pathetic to insist that our children live this way. If your belief system can’t stand up to questions and thinking, you need to step back and re-evaluate your belief system, because there is something majorly wrong with it.
Mamacita says: Banned Books Week is this week: Sept. 30 – Oct. 6, 2012. It always saddens me to be reminded that there are such huge hordes of ignorant masses in the United States, and yet, sigh, there they are, forbidding this and banning that lest their children learn something their parents hadn’t already run through the personal values laundromat since, heaven forbid, the kids might come home asking questions and – we can’t have it, we just can’t HAVE IT – thinking. Maybe even. . . ASKING QUESTIONS! (shudder)
First of all, I despise censorship. Banning books is akin to banning people; both are abhorrent to the collective intelligence, and both bring us down as a culture. It’s one thing for someone to decide that a certain book will not be allowed in his/her house – every parent has that right – but it’s quite another thing for this person to decide that a certain book will not be allowed in my house, or yours. Or in a library, or school; for one person, or a handful, to be allowed to dictate what the masses might be exposed to is ridiculous, cowardly, stupid, and evil. Someone is offended? There are choices. Such people can remove themselves and their children from the nasty thought-provoking sources. They could also grow a pair and encourage thinking and questions, but that’s too hard and scary for such people, I suppose. God forbid their children might come home from school with. . . . ideas. Brrrrrr, can’t have it. Besides, people who advocate censorship and book burning banning don’t usually know the answers; their thoughts are scripted by others. It’s a lot easier to live that way; thinking for oneself can be so hard, you know.
Many book censors are too insecure in their own backgrounds and beliefs to risk questions from others, and a huge lot of them are just plain too ignorant to deal with anything that isn’t very, very simple. Learning is hard. Stick with what we already know. Go that extra mile to make bloody sure our kids aren’t exposed to anything that might threaten what these adults consider “safe.” Again, every parent has this right – in his/her own home. Outside of that home, guess what? Other people have rights, too. Imagine.
This post is a rerun, but before Banned Books Week actually begins, I want to share with you again this memo from a college-educated man who was in charge of a building full of impressionable middle school students.
I firmly believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator, should contain no idiocy or errors.
I also believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator that DOES contain idiocy or errors should be posted publicly and that the general public should be allowed to mock it.
I suppose that my belief that administrators should be required to be intelligent and able to proofread would be thrown out by the PC police.
This is the letter a principal gave me several years ago, demanding requesting that I take down my bulletin board about Banned Books Week. I had used that same bulletin board for over ten years, and in those earlier years, he had actually praised it for being timely and creative. That was, of course, before he saw Waldo on there.
This is the same school system that had a virtual meltdown because I was bringing in speakers; the curriculum director didn’t want me to bring in people from the outside to talk about careers because, and I quote, “it might give the students ‘ideas.'” These people volunteered their time, and would have continued to volunteer their time, and it would have been of enormous benefit to the students, but no. Ideas are scary, and, to the ignorant, dangerous.
A few years later, the same man who denied permission for me to bring in speakers for free, spent nearly a million dollars of taxpayer money to take all the middle school students to town and have paid speakers talk to them about the same thing I could have done for free. By this time, you see, the Trend Wheel had spun back around, and it was now permissible to give the students ‘ideas.’
One of those speakers represented General Motors, and her speech was 
excellent, although it didn’t sit well with administration. She spoke about high school ‘graduates’ for whom a diploma was nothing but a piece of paper that connoted untruths. She spoke about how an employer should have the right to assume that a diploma pretty much guaranteed literacy and general competence. She spoke about all the money big corporations were having to shell into remedial programs for employees who had diplomas, pieces of paper that represented four years of showing up and not much else. She spoke about how businesses would really appreciate a diploma that told the truth: that if a student had been graduated out of respect for really trying, the diploma should say so, discretely of course, but in terms that the business world would be able to interpret. If the student was just going through the motions of graduation for self-esteem’s sake, the diploma should say so. And if the diploma was rightfully earned because the student had become fully literate and generally competent and had genuinely and individually and truthfully learned how to care for himself/herself in the world in general, the business world should be able to see that kind of diploma and interpret it for what it was: a real diploma.
Oohh, the remarks that were scattered throughout the auditorium. And when we returned to the individual buildings, there was much talk of blueberries and self-esteem.
My friends are mostly lawyers, musicians, writers, speakers, businesspeople, and other educators. Before the edict went out, I often had one of them come to my classroom and talk about what they did all day, and then the students would ask questions. Silly me, I really thought it was helpful.
Sure, they asked my lawyer friends about their individual rights and stuff, but. . . . .
Oh. I get it.
We certainly can’t have our students understanding their basic civil rights and those of their fellow citizens of any age, now can we.
What a narrow escape.
P.S. A few years later, I dared to submit a speaker proposal for my classroom again, and it was again turned down, but this time the reason was different. 
Apparently, it was unfair to other students if one group got to have a speaker and others didn’t. I suggested that other teachers could just as easily invite a speaker into their classroom, too, but nobody else cared to go to the trouble, so I couldn’t, either.
Are our schools in trouble? Darn right they are, and most of it isn’t coming from the students.
Censorship and book banning, indeed. If our society gets any more politically correct, it will be so boring and insipid and cowardly, it will be indistinguishable 
from an ant colony.
Except, of course, that ants are not cowardly.
Book banners are, though.
Censors. The lowest common denominator of humanity. Can there be anything lower than those who strive to keep the rest of us in the dark? Those who fear creativity, ideas, questions, and knowledge are somewhat less than human, by my way of thinking. The human being was created to soar, not bury its head in the sand of fear.
Do I read banned books? I do. And so should you.
*Heine
How am I doing in here? What’s my grade?
Mamacita says: There will always be students who have no idea of their standing in a class; honestly, when a student says to me, “How am I doing in this class? What’s my average?” I want to scream. Even if he is computer-illiterate (and if so, he won’t make it at the college level, sowwy) all he has to do is check his folder. All graded work is supposed to be kept in there, and if he’s that anxious to know his standing, he can add up his scores and average them on paper. Sheesh. Of course, if there are no graded papers in his/her folder, I’m going to guess that he/she isn’t doing all that well. In my class, you have to show up and do the work and TURN IT IN if you want to pass. I’m unreasonable like that.
But, but, it’s so easy these days to know one’s exact class standing!
The students who are going to succeed just go online, type in their login and password, and check their grades themselves.
Besides, any good student at almost any level knows how he’s doing in any class at any given point in time. If they show up and take their quizzes and tests and turn in their homework and participate and laugh at my jokes they’re probably doing quite well. If they don’t do these things, probably not. It ain’t rocket science, except that, on some days, it is.
Dear Parents, please don’t call your child’s teacher daily and ask for an average, at least, not very often. Chances are pretty good that if you can’t find any graded papers in your kid’s backpack or notebook, he’s not doing very well. Please don’t expect that your kid will be allowed to make up all that missing or poor work. Organization and work ethic are every bit as important as an actual score. In fact, without the former, the latter will be pretty bad.
Your child’s teacher has an entire classroom of students, and if each parent asked the teacher to send home a daily report, the poor teacher might as well put up a cot and start paying rent because there isn’t going to be much of a home life. And yes, parents ask us to do that all the time. At the secondary level, one teacher might have over 200 students. Even with email, it takes a long time.
At midterm, most schools send out half-way-point standings. Check your child’s grades. If he’s doing poorly, call the school and make an appointment with the teacher. NEVER just walk in off the street and ask the teacher to give up her lunch or prep or those valuable few minutes before class starts in the morning or those hectic few minutes after the last class leaves in the late afternoon without prior notice. (Would you walk into your dentist’s office, or your doctor, or your lawyer, or your accountant’s offices without an appointment? Or at least, an emergency involving blood and bone fragments?)
Please don’t march in like a Teutonic Reichmaiden and assume that the teacher is a psychotic who hates all children and yours in particular, and that your child is innocent, totally innocent, and his straight-A work has been shredded by the teacher so the world will never see it. I hate to burst your bubble, but it’s probably more your child’s fault than anyone else’s.
Every single night, require your child to SHOW YOU the contents of his backpack. If the papers are wadded up, give your child some incentive to not ever do that again. Require your child to file papers immediately in a pocket folder because you’re going to be looking them over every night. If this interferes with television for either of you, cry me a river.
Do not even turn on that television until this has been done. If there is homework, make sure your child has it finished before the tv is touched. Ditto computer, telephone, and any other electronic gadgetry your child has been playing with instead of doing his academics. Don’t, however, deny your children who ARE doing it right just because one of them isn’t. Sometimes, the sound of a sibling enjoying tv or a computer game or a friend can light a fire under a slacker kid. If it makes him vicious, you’ve got problems that aren’t school-related. Call a shrink.
If your kid is an athlete and brings home a bad mid-term report, ask the coach to bench him. Usually, schools do that anyway; sports are games, and games are only for kids who have done the actual SCHOOL part of their kid-duties. A good coach will do that anyway.
Is your kid one of those students for whom sports are all he has going for him? Is playing ball his life’s priority? Help him change those priorities, because his are all wrong. Don’t EVER argue with a coach for benching your kid for low grades. Even the kid knows he deserves it.
I really don’t have to deal with these issues much any more, because at the college level, I don’t have many parents demanding that I change Junior’s grade, etc. I do have a few, though. It’s incredible and really quite sad that so many parents seem to be living their own lives over again vicariously, through their children. If you are the parent of a college student, you should probably also know that I am forbidden by law to discuss your child’s grades with you. In fact, I’m not even allowed to admit that I’ve ever heard of your child. All I can do is say, politely and professionally, “Thank you for calling.”
I’m not a mean teacher, in spite of what you might think. I am, however, a teacher (and a parent) who required all of my students to work, to obey, and to behave. I still can’t think of a single viable excuse for slacking off on any of those three things. Once those three things were mastered, the creativity could flow and we could use our wings. Once students learned that I would not put up with anyone who did not understand the big three, we could have fun. It did not take most of them very long to learn that it was better for all to behave in ol’ Mrs. G’s classroom, because for those who did, the rewards were many and awesome, and for those who didn’t, well, o—KAY then. . . I poisoned them and buried them on the playground, under the wood chips. Nobody missed them.
That might be an exaggeration, but will you hate me if I tell you that I thought about it on occasion? Oh, so do you. Don’t lie to me.
Where was I? Oh, yes. Some people think I’m strict when in fact I’m a pussycat for students who behave well and take education seriously. The other kind of students don’t appreciate what they’ve got while they’ve got it.
And I say things like, “Shame on you!”
Because, you see, I really do believe that people are encouraged from a very early age to believe that they have a perfect right to please themselves in all ways, whenever and wherever they are, and that their parents are the main ones who encourage it.
Perhaps if we help our children learn that some actions and words ARE shameful, our children will treat each other better, and everyone’s self-esteem (you really don’t want to get me started on that topic) will rise naturally, instead of being inflated with bullshit so it rises regardless of what the child says and does.
Also, I use a red pen. I like to think of the ink in there as BLOOOOOOD. 
I want my students’ self esteem to soar, but I want it to be genuine, which means they’ll have to work for it. That way, they’ve got a right to be proud.
Also, I like to eat Twinkies when I grade papers.
How Anne Frank Helped Me Score Free Classroom Novels
Mamacita says: Every year, for over twenty years, I taught a unit based on The Diary of Anne Frank. This title refers to the stage play; Anne’s actual diary is titled Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. Please don’t confuse the two; it makes me sad.
Our script was part of our literature textbook, and was the main reason I chose Prentice-Hall every four years; I loved the unedited, uncensored selections they chose.
Then, one year, the Political Correctness Police apparently took charge at Prentice-Hall. I unpacked my boxes of brand-new shiny wonderful-smelling books full, I assumed, of the usual wonders that would help my students learn to make connections, groove on the universe, and soar. That year, however, I made quite a different discovery.
Everything in the new edition had been polished and censored, and most of the really good stuff was either gone or sanitized into boring obscurity. The Diary of Anne Frank was one of the censored selections.
All references to underpants and neutered cats had disappeared. The spats between Anne and her mother were gone. Mr. Van Daan was still allowed to refer to his son’s “damn cat,” but any reference to the cat’s missing testicles was gone. The famous passage about the glories of menstruation was gone. Her descriptive longing to be a woman, and her confusion about boys, had been censored. A good deal of the references to the horrors going on “outside” had been removed. What was left was a cute play about emotionless people living in an attic.
I was so upset, I placed a call to Prentice-Hall and made my displeasure known.
The woman who took my call assured me that Prentice-Hall had asked and received permission from the authors of all the selections that had been dismembered. Now, the play The Diary of Anne Frank was written by Goodrich and Hackett, and is BASED on Anne’s diary, but this woman was condescending to me so I stopped caring about her feelings.
“So, are you telling me that you had permission from Anne Frank to change the words of this play?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, our editors had a lovely phone conversation with her, and later received a letter with her full permission.” she told me. I kid you not.
I hoped my straight face showed over the phone. “Are you sure?” I asked her. “Anne Frank herself spoke to your editors and gave permission for these changes?”
“Yes indeed, ma’am. We would never change an author’s words without permission from that author, directly. I assure you that Anne Frank gave us her permission.” I am still not kidding.
“You are aware that Anne Frank died in 1944.” I was still being nice.
Silence.
“We here at Prentice-Hall would like to send you some class sets of books. What would you like?”
And so I added 5 class sets of lovely, UNABRIDGED novels to my classroom. We didn’t use the new textbook that year because abridgements are the devil, and yes, I mean THAT devil.
For the record, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is perfect for 6th grade boys who are reluctant readers. Also? The chapter about Kaa is seriously scary.
Aaaand, I found enough copies of an old book with The Diary of Anne Frank in it to go around. We just used that.
All those boxes of brand-new shiny books are, as far as I know, still stacked in the back of that classroom. They were useless. When I was there, I threw a cloth over them and used them as a table.
In that way, they became useful again.
