Speak Loudly

Banned Books Week starts in six days. Read about it here and here.

If you think we live in a world where a celebration of the freedom to read freely is an anachronism...ancient history...a problem long solved, you are sadly mistaken. I've posted about this ad naseum, I know. But censorship just won't die. It keeps raising its ugly head.

Laure Halse Anderson's young adult novel, Speak, has been called "pornography" by a man in Missouri, Wesley Scroggins, who is looking to remove it from classrooms and school libraries.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

For those who haven't read Anderson's novel, it is the story of a girl who is raped in the summer before she enters her freshman year of high school. She spends her freshman year struggling with the physical, psychological, and social aftermath. She struggles to find her voice so she can SPEAK about what happened to her.

Because of the two rape scenes in the book, Scroggins says the book is filthy and immoral. Anderson responded better than I could when she says:

The fact that he sees rape as sexually exciting (pornographic) is disturbing, if not horrifying. It gets worse, if that’s possible, when he goes on to completely mischaracterize the book.

Click here to read Laurie Halse Anderson's entire post on the issue. She includes links for her readers and supporters to speak loudly against Scroggins' efforts.

My students love this book. Anderson writes realistic fiction with which real teenagers identify. (Heck...I identified with it. I know the teachers she creates in this book. I am one of them.) Anderson SPEAKs to teenage readers, especially a certain kind of reluctant reader. Our library almost always has a waiting list for this book, and we have multiple copies. Kids are lining up to read it.

I want to shake people who advocate pulling high-interest books off the shelf. Their political/religious/social agenda is more important than creating a society of readers and thinkers. They are the modern day equivalent of High Inquisitors.

Even worse than the potential loss of a high-interest book is the potential loss of a book that might help a kid who has been raped. Anderson wrote an amazing poem pulled almost entirely from the letters of kids who have read her book. I've pulled the video from her blog. It's powerful, and it demonstrates that books can give kids the courage to SPEAK and to heal.

Dissent

I started my Pre-AP classes today with a quote from chapter II of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty.

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Dissent is such an important component of a free society. The majority is not always right, even though it believes it is because it's the majority, and majority rules. Sometimes, the majority has a nasty habit of painting dissenters as wrong-headed, frightening, immoral, even evil.

Cool discussion starter, huh?

I love teaching Fahrenheit 451. This is the 12th time I've started the school year with Bradbury's classic. The book never stops being relevant because the day-to-day living out of our constitutional ideals never stops being a struggle. Watch the news. You'll see that struggle playing out within the first five minutes.

In his "Coda" to Fahrenheit, Bradbury said, "There is more than one way to burn a book, and the world is full of people running around with lit matches."

I've posted this link before, but it bears repeating. The ALA keeps data on all formal challenges to public libraries, school libraries, and classrooms. This is their most challenged/banned list for the last decade. They also sort the data by year and by author, or you can see which classics are the most challenged/banned. For the most recent years, they also post the reasons why a particular book was challenged.

I gave the lists for the last two years and for the decade to my students. They were flabbergasted that books like the Junie B. Jones children's series are on the list. That particular series is beloved by a lot of kids because they discovered their love of reading with Junie. Goosebumps and Captain Underpants are on the list too.

Some of my more naive students were surprised to find the Harry Potter series at the top of the decade list. I explained that Harry Potter is challenged because of religious viewpoint. One confused student said, "But it's about how love is the most powerful force in the universe."

Out of the mouths of babes...

Interestingly, J.K. Rowling falls off the author list after 2003. I interpret this to mean that most of the challenges came early in the decade and that people have cooled down a little over Harry and the gang. One can only hope.

I asked students to tally the number of books they had read on the banned lists. The competition became fierce as students tried to add books to their tally they had started, but not finished. Or they wanted to count every Junie B. Jones they had ever read separately. One student had legitimately read 35 books on the combined lists. I've only read 44, so I was impressed. I'm challenging them to add to their tally before their freshman year is over, and we're going to count again at the end.

My favorite moment came when one young man asked me with wide eyes, "What happens if you read a banned book?"

I responded solemnly, "You burst into flames."

The poor kid doesn't know me yet, and "Oh my god...my teacher is crazy" crossed his face. Then, he realized I must be joking and laughed. I did have to explain that he would not be committing a crime if he read a banned book. I went further and said I believed the people who had the books removed from a library had committed a crime against every patron of that library.

I'm subversive like that.

But I'm not the only one. Mills said that suppressing ideas robs all of humanity of the opportunity to pursue the truth. President Eisenhower said, "Freedom cannot be censored into existence."

If we can't respect our neighbor's dissenting idea, then we have to find a way to respect his right to have a dissenting idea without limiting access to it. Censorship is a society killer.

You don't have to take my word for it. Read Fahrenheit 451.

Challenged Books

The American Library Association (ALA) published their annual list of most frequently challenged books last week. As this past year was the last one in the decade, they also posted their Top 100 most frequently challenged books of the decade. I use these lists every year when I'm teaching Fahrenheit 451, which, ironically, is on the Top 100 list. As always, these lists make me shake my head in dismay.

The ALA defines a challenge as a written, formal complaint requesting that materials in a library or school be removed or restricted. A challenge does not include a parent asking that their student not read a particular book. I've encountered both of these situations, and although I found both disheartening, there is a distinct difference.

Early in my career, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men (#5 on the Top 100) was required reading for freshmen on the pre-AP English track. One parent decided that not only was her daughter not going to read it, nobody else's child should either. She sent a long letter to the school in which she had a list of every curse word in the novel and how many times it appeared. The "shits," "hells," "damns, " and "son-of-a-bitches" were all neatly listed in a table with a number next to them to show how many occurrences there were in the book. Underneath the table, several passages were quoted to show the profanity in context.

I'll never forget that moment with the English department as we read the letter together and were rendered speechless. Steinbeck's masterpiece on loyalty, loneliness, power vs powerlessness, dreams, and most importantly, friendship was reduced to a list of four letter words. Kids are moved by this book. They remember it long after they've put it down, and it has nothing to do with the 42 (I made that number up. I don't know how many times it's in there.)occurrences of the word "shit." It has everything to do with that final tragic scene between George and Lennie. Discussion as to whether George's final act was selfish or selfless continues over multiple class periods. Kids think critically, form an argument and then articulate it, and challenge their own pre-conceived notions of friendship. It's good stuff.

In the end, the parent backed down with an agreement to give her daughter an alternative assignment. The girl wasn't in my section of the class, and I don't even remember what the alternative assignment was. I do know her daughter missed out on a rich educational opportunity. What really hacked me off was the parent's attempt to deprive every other child in the pre-AP program of that opportunity. I respect a parent's right to make decisions for her own child, but I don't believe she has the right to make decisions for mine or anyone else.

Just this school year, I had a parent insist her son not read Paul Volponi's young adult novel Black and White. I blogged about it, and you can read the whole story here. The incident made me ill, but it didn't outrage me in the same way as the Of Mice and Men challenge. This parent took the book out of her own son's hands, but she wasn't trying to take it out of any other child's hands. I don't like it, but I can live with it.

At the beginning of every school year, I do a reading survey with the kids to get a sense of their reading habits and to discover what books they've read and loved. Many leisure activities compete with reading for a kid's time and interest, but I've discovered that most of them will still give a book a chance if it captures their imagination. The list below represents books on one of the two ALA lists that one or more my kids has named as his/her favorite book ever.

The Perks of Being A Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
Twilight (series) by Stephenie Meyer
My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodi Picoult
Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling
Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Meyers
Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous
The Giver, by Lois Lowry
Killing Mr. Griffen, by Lois Duncan
The Face on the Milk Carton, by Caroline B. Cooney
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson
Harris and Me, by Gary Paulsen
The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold
Cut, by Patricia McCormick
Friday Night Lights, by H.G. Bissenger
A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeline L’Engle

What was your favorite book as a teenager? Did the experience of reading that book affect your subsequent reading habits? I wonder how the kids who listed these books would have been changed if someone had deprived them of their favorite book ever.

Black and White

Today marks the end of Banned Books Week...the the ALA's celebration of our freedom to read. I make note of the week every year, if for no other reason, to spark a student's interest in reading. The forbidden fruit of a challenged book appeals to some kids. My pre-AP class takes note of the week because they read Fahrenheit 451 over the summer, and the tie-in is obvious. Honestly, a brief conversation on library day is all the mention Banned Books Week usually gets from me. This year it was a little more poignant.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to take a book out of a student's hand for the first time in my career.

My principal came to me after school one day. "Kathy, has the English department added a book called Black and White to the curriculum?"

"No."

"Have you specifically assigned this book to a student?"

"No, but I have recommended it to several. I require each student to read one book independently each 9 weeks. They choose the book. My only requirement is that they choose a novel, a biography, or narrative non-fiction."

"Okay, so if a student has that book for your class, then it's because they chose it themselves in the library."

"Yes."

My principal went on his way, and that was that...or so I thought. The next afternoon he was back.

"Mom wants her son to select a different book. She was offended by the content of Black and White."

I shrugged, "I'll help him find something different the next time we go to the library."

I didn't get too bent out of shape in that moment. I completely respect the right of parents to help their kids make choices that are in line with their values. This mom wasn't challenging the book's placement in our library, so she wasn't trying to make choices for my kid and every other kid that patronizes the library. She was simply concerned about her own son. Fine.

Several days later, we went to the library. I was surprised to see the boy with Black and White in his hand. I was even more surprised to see him go to the desk and renew it. I had assumed (yes, I know all about assuming) he would immediately turn it back in when his mom told him to because teenage boys always do what their moms tell them...right?

Yeah.

The librarian raised her eyebrows at me. The principal told her about the situation in case the mom decided to challenge the book's placement in the library. When the line at the checkout desk dwindled, we put our heads together. Neither of us wanted to tell him to hand over the book. Finally, I sucked it up. I'm the teacher. I pulled the boy aside, and the librarian started scanning the sports section for something different he might like.

"Um...student...weren't you supposed to turn this book back in?"

His face turned beet red. "Yeah."

"Well?"

"I want to know how it ends."

Well crap on a stick. The kid liked the book...was about 50 pages from the end and wanted to know what happened...and I had to take it away from him. As an English teacher, an avid reader, a writer, and a lifelong bibliophile, it made me truly ill. Instead of throwing up, I smiled ruefully, put my arm around him, and walked him to the desk where the librarian had several basketball themed novels artfully arranged.

In a surprising turn of events, he opted not to choose a sports book, going instead for a science fiction novel. The librarian suggested The Dead and the Gone, and he checked it out. I sincerely hope he likes it. I hope he gets to finish it.

I still support a parent's right to make choices for her child. I don't know what this parent found offensive about Black and White, but I can't imagine anything in a young adult novel that would override a boy's enthusiasm for reading it.

I wish she could have seen the look on her son's face when he dropped the book into the book return. I saw it, and I never want to be the cause of that expression again.

A Whiff of Kerosene

Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is required reading for my honors class. The premise of his novel is that books will not die with a bang, but with a whimper. People will quit reading, quit caring, and quit thinking, and very few will take note when the firemen show up to burn down their book-hoarding neighbor's house.

The firemen showed up this week in an unlikely place...retail book giant, Amazon. For those of you who haven't followed the controversy, a brief explanation is in order. Amazon assigns sales rankings to everything it sells. These sales ranking not only identify top-sellers on the site, but also provide the algorithm to conduct searches on Amazon. When an item on Amazon is stripped of its sales ranking, then it becomes invisible in Amazon's search engine unless you are specifically searching by author or title. On Sunday, the Internet exploded at the discovery of an insidious new policy at Amazon. The retail behemoth has stripped the sales ranking of anything that it deems "adult content." So unless you specifically search DH Lawrence or Lady Chatterly's Lover, you won't find it on Amazon.

Romance novels, books that provide help to rape victims, and most notably, almost everything with a gay or lesbian theme (including an analysis of the impact of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" on the military) have been stripped of their sales ranking. Still maintaining a sales ranking...A history of Playboy Centerfolds, the memoirs of several straight porn stars, and a wide variety of sex toys. Somehow the first group is considered "adult content" and the second group isn't.

Hello Firemen. Hello Censorship.

Initially, Amazon explained the policy as an attempt to keep offensive content from popping up in a search by an unsuspecting patron. You can almost smell the kerosene...hear Captain Beatty's voice. Amazon is saving us from ourselves. Later, after the great Easter Twitter/Blog explosion, Amazon backpedaled and called it a "glitch". As of this writing, there has been no apology. On Monday afternoon Amazon called the incident a "hamfisted cataloguing error" and began to reinstate the sales-ranking of some of the 57,000 titles affected.

The positive aspect to this story is the outcry from bookish people everywhere. We're not willing to watch the firemen burn, shrug, and go on about our business. Social media gives individuals a collective voice that is loud and far-reaching. And maybe the whole story isn't as sinister as I'm making it sound. Some have suggested this is not an intentional ploy to censor gay/lesbian content, but evidence that in a giant corporation, the left hand is often unaware of what the right hand is doing.

Either way, the power Amazon wields in publishing by virtue of its size is frightening. Stripping authors of their sales rankings cost them sales when potential readers didn't find them in a search. Even worse, readers' choices have been arbitrarily limited. And that is the very definition of censorship.

My Twitter friend Criss, has an extensive collection of links on her blog. So in the interest of not reinventing the wheel, here is the link to her blog.