Blog Sep 7 2016
Or, more to the point today, a good woman. Turns out it’s quite easy, in fact: all you need is a phone or an email account, and a certain kind of craven cowardice.
Quoting Sisyphus, whom I introduced in my previous post:
Hello again, Peter.
I enjoyed your blog post, though thank goodness I didn’t suggest reading it in any way with my class. As it turns out, I am no Sisyphus, and before I even began to teach the novel, one parent had written an email, and another called the principal (neither spoke to me) both outraged at the idea of teaching a novel which had at one point contained such language. I told my administrator, who is a completely reasonable man, by the way, to call off the dogs. If it was this big an issue before we’d read a single redacted page, it was going to become a catastrophe. I will continue to teach “Ambassador” in the future. And as for the kids who began reading the novel on their own, they were quite disappointed and asked if they might still be able to discuss the novel with you over Skype at some point.
Thanks for even considering this. It’s unfortunate how things turned out; in the words of Kurt Vonnegut: so it goes.
So it is not enough to be a good teacher. It is not enough to be a challenging teacher. It is not even enough to be an accommodating teacher, one so dedicated that she sought me out and enlisted my support for an act we both regard as downright odious—but were willing to commit if it meant that students could be exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking. It is not enough to hold your nose and slash the prose and spread your cheeks in an attempt to appease these ranting, rabid Dunning-Kruger incarnations made flesh. They will not be appeased.
It is not enough to gut a book of its naughty bits. That the book ever had such bits in the first place is offence enough.
We do not know the names of those who complained; they struck out bravely under cover of anonymity. I do know the name of the school at which this travesty went down, but if I spoke it here the teacher would be fired. I find it curious that those so full of self-righteous fury, so utterly convinced of their own virtue, would be so averse to the spotlight. Are they not doing God’s will? Should they not be proud of their handiwork?
Strangely, though, these people don’t like to be seen.
In the end, it probably doesn’t matter. It’s not as though this is an isolated case, after all; it hails from the heart of a country where more adults believe in angels than accept evolution, a country where—in the race to rule a hemisphere—an orange demagogue with zero impulse control is once again even in the polls with a corporate shill who revels in the endorsements of war criminals. The problem is not one outraged parent, or one school, or one county. The problem is the whole fucking country. The problem is people.
Naming names in one specific case—even if that did do more good than harm—would be like scraping off a single scab and hoping you’d cured smallpox.
But there she is, doing her goddamned best in the center of that shitstorm: Sisyphus, and all those like her. Today she lost the battle, but I know her kind.
The war goes on.
