Mississippi School District Pulls "To Kill a Mockingbird" from Shelves

I'd LOVE it if we could teach those.

But, here's the thing, what are we going to give up in order to teach these books? What won't we teach? And what do we do about the kids who simply don't have the vocabulary, language skills, or reading ability to keep up? Do we shuffle them off into a class of their own and hand them something easier? Most schools are moving away from streaming, these days.

Ready Player One! AWESOME book. Completely kid-appropriate, with lots of interesting themes.

I knew you'd have good points! I like 'em, and we agree. It's just perplexing.

I was by no means suggesting their weren't modern great books, but there are SO many books, how do we decide which ones?!

Ready Player One is one I should have thought of. I tend to overlook sci fi because of my extreme personal bias to it. Like I'm overthinking how good sci fi can be, but it can be awesome and that is a shining example.
 
So, I just googled, "Are Iranians white?"

And got this as my top result...

https://ajammc.com/2013/12/03/are-iranians-people-of-color/

The article basically sums up to, "It's complicated."

My BFF is Iranian. He came here (older than me by about 10 years) after the Shah was overthrown. He is often mistaken for Italian, but sounds like he's from New Orleans (where he was raised) and has been a citizen since before I met him in 1999. He is definitely white by appearance and culturally.

ETA: he is secular and his family is eastern orthodox christians if that matters.
 


Even if it's not in the curriculum or the school library students can get it a public library or buy it for their kindle. Not reading it in school doesn't ban it from anyone.

Perhaps not "ban" but definitely "make it much more difficult to access". Many children and young adults don't have access to their public library (parent doesn't take them, too far to walk, parent doesn't want to have to deal with lost items/fines, etc, etc) and many also don't have electronic devices and/or do not use them to access books(whether by choice or due to financial circumstances). A school library provides easy access to a collection of materials that are accessible to all students in that building.


(Stepping down off my soapbox....)

Terri
 
I wish they would state what book they are adding as a replacement. Hope it's not Shakespeare or Ethan Frome. Ugh, I hate Ethan Frome! I'm trying to get our school district to change some of the books our HS students read. Too much Shakespeare (4 plays, all tragedies), too much white guy angst.
 


When I was in high school we read a Shakespeare play every year:
Freshman/Romeo and Juliet
Sophomore/ Julius Caesar
Junior/Hamlet
Senior/MacBeth

This was the basic English curriculum. The Advanced Placement kids and the slower (sorry I can't think of the PC word) kids had different reading lists. This was in the '70s in the Bible Belt.
 
Perhaps not "ban" but definitely "make it much more difficult to access". Many children and young adults don't have access to their public library (parent doesn't take them, too far to walk, parent doesn't want to have to deal with lost items/fines, etc, etc) and many also don't have electronic devices and/or do not use them to access books(whether by choice or due to financial circumstances). A school library provides easy access to a collection of materials that are accessible to all students in that building.


(Stepping down off my soapbox....)

Terri

Kind of a side note, but my kids haven't had "regular" access to the school library since elementary. I'm not really sure what purpose it serves if there's no time in the day to visit it. DD17 hit book #100 (all paper, none electronic) for the year last month and hasn't checked a book out of the school library since 4th grade :(
 
I wish they would state what book they are adding as a replacement. Hope it's not Shakespeare or Ethan Frome. Ugh, I hate Ethan Frome! I'm trying to get our school district to change some of the books our HS students read. Too much Shakespeare (4 plays, all tragedies), too much white guy angst.

Ethan Frome is the worst book I had to read in high school.
 
I'd LOVE it if we could teach those.

But, here's the thing, what are we going to give up in order to teach these books? What won't we teach? And what do we do about the kids who simply don't have the vocabulary, language skills, or reading ability to keep up? Do we shuffle them off into a class of their own and hand them something easier? Most schools are moving away from streaming, these days.

As for modern definitely-ought-to-be-classics (if they're not already)...

A bit of modern history - Persepolis, a graphic novel tackling the author's experiences growing up during the Iranian revolution.

Ready Player One! AWESOME book. Completely kid-appropriate, with lots of interesting themes.

Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey. A strange, hilarious book about a society where people are socially stratified based on what colours they can see.

The Ancillary Trilogy - all about identity and what makes us human, set in a sprawling culturally rich galactic empire. I would LOVE to teach this one to high schoolers!

And that's just off the top of my head. But, just ask any librarian or book seller and they can tell you that there are some brilliant books being written today.

I was reading quickly, and for a moment totally thought you were recommending Fifty Shades of Grey on a middle school reading list.
:rotfl2:
 
I think the replacement book and the rest of the curriculum is really critical to evaluating this. Are they still doing a unit on racism and replacing TKAMB with another age appropriate, perhaps more modern, book that tackles the subject? Then great. Sounds like a non-issue, although one that could have been handled differently.
Or are they replacing TKAMB with something completely different and unrelated and just avoiding hard discussions in general? In that case, no good.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird is an American classic and perhaps the best novel ever written. It was always enjoyable and relatable when we read it in school (and that was more than once). This idea that it is an "older book" is astounding, as kids should be reading much older works than that as well. Yes, the book has some uncomfortable depicitons, but it's not like the author is espousing such as a positive. This should not be controversial for kids who are of an age to understand the ideas presented.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird is an American classic and perhaps the best novel ever written. It was always enjoyable and relatable when we read it in school (and that was more than once). This idea that it is an "older book" is astounding, as kids should be reading much older works than that as well. Yes, the book has some uncomfortable depicitons, but it's not like the author is espousing such as a positive. This should not be controversial for kids who are of an age to understand the ideas presented.
I agree. My teenage son and daughter both read it in 8th grade and really enjoyed it. I can't say the same about some of the other books they had to read. My daughter is now reading Pygmalion and she absolutely hates it.
 
FWIW, my DS1 who graduated high school in June read both The Iliad and Canterbury Tales in high school. Along with Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and The Inferno. (And a few others which escape me at the moment ... lol...)
 
To Kill a Mockingbird is an American classic and perhaps the best novel ever written. It was always enjoyable and relatable when we read it in school (and that was more than once). This idea that it is an "older book" is astounding, as kids should be reading much older works than that as well. Yes, the book has some uncomfortable depicitons, but it's not like the author is espousing such as a positive. This should not be controversial for kids who are of an age to understand the ideas presented.

My daughter hated it, but that's not why I replied. You were required to read this more than once???

I can't imagine with all the books available to us that it would be necessary for any student to be assigned the same book twice for any reason from K-12 (assuming they spent K-12 all in the same district). That's just poor planning, IMO. That lack of planning is why I got stuck studying the Renaissance Period for all of 4th-6th grades.
 
To Kill a Mockingbird is an American classic and perhaps the best novel ever written. It was always enjoyable and relatable when we read it in school (and that was more than once). This idea that it is an "older book" is astounding, as kids should be reading much older works than that as well. Yes, the book has some uncomfortable depicitons, but it's not like the author is espousing such as a positive. This should not be controversial for kids who are of an age to understand the ideas presented.

The age of the book is not a problem. You're quite right that old books have value. The question is, if this lesson is supposed to be about racism, is this the best book for it? Or are there other books that we could be using, that fit the lesson plan better?

Here we have a book told from the perspective of a little white girl living in the 1930's. It's a good book! But, how does it relate to my students' experience of racism today? Is it relevant to a world with Black Lives Matter, and "Hands up, don't shoot!", and Muslim bans, and jerrymandered voting districts?

If we're learning about the social issues of the 1930's, great! If we're pairing this book with a more modern one, in an attempt to give historical perspective to modern issue, great!

But, if the lesson is, "Racism was a problem back in the 30's. See how far we've come? Yay, us!" then we have an issue. Because while we don't have separate drinking fountains, the fact is that schools are more segregated today than they were in the late 1960's.

I read TKaM in school. I loved it. But, I also grew up honestly believing that racism was a problem of the past, over, dealt with, and done. If black people were still having problems, I thought, it must be because they weren't trying hard enough to take advantage of all the opportunities offered to them. After all, my ancestors were poor Irish, and we did okay! It's obviously a lot more complicated than that. I was naive and very wrong.

What it comes down to is, a book set in the 1930's may not be a very good vehicle for addressing racism. It is still a good book for learning about the 1930's, though! And fun to read, just on its own merits, of course.
 
My daughter hated it, but that's not why I replied. You were required to read this more than once???

I can't imagine with all the books available to us that it would be necessary for any student to be assigned the same book twice for any reason from K-12 (assuming they spent K-12 all in the same district). That's just poor planning, IMO. That lack of planning is why I got stuck studying the Renaissance Period for all of 4th-6th grades.

I moved from a private school (K-8) to a public high school. We did TKAM in 7th grade in the private school, then we did it in 9th in the public school. I also want to say it was on an optional list another time, so I chose it since I really loved it. So, officially only twice, and I did change schools.
 
My daughter hated it, but that's not why I replied. You were required to read this more than once???

I can't imagine with all the books available to us that it would be necessary for any student to be assigned the same book twice for any reason from K-12 (assuming they spent K-12 all in the same district). That's just poor planning, IMO. That lack of planning is why I got stuck studying the Renaissance Period for all of 4th-6th grades.

Sometimes it's just bad luck.

I had to do Wolfe and Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham three years in a row, thanks to changing schools once, followed by a province-wide rejigging of the Canadian History curriculum. Ugh! I was SO sick of that period of Canadian history!
 
I wish they would state what book they are adding as a replacement. Hope it's not Shakespeare or Ethan Frome. Ugh, I hate Ethan Frome! I'm trying to get our school district to change some of the books our HS students read. Too much Shakespeare (4 plays, all tragedies), too much white guy angst.

Too much Shakespeare? Never! Seriously, we could take AP Shakespeare as a class but we had to also read from works before that class as a pre-req. Now one of my BFFs teaches it!

I like Ethan Frome, but there are FAR better novels to be teaching, hell, there's much better Edith Wharton, I've always wondered why it's taught vs. The Age of Innocence, but I always figured it was an easier book to teach.
 

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