Celebrate Banned Books Week 2012

Instead of writing a whole new post for Banned Books Week, I'm just going to reprise my post from last year. This is an issue that, as an English and literature teacher, hits very close to home for me. If you're an English teacher like me, just remember: fighting the good fight can be exhausting. Giving up and giving in is often easy because we can sometimes feel it's just not worth the effort anymore. Know that you have a community of teachers and authors who stand behind you, so keep fighting. The National Council of Teachers of English has an entire center dedicated to anti-censorship so use it to educate yourself and your community.

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Celebrate your right to intellectual freedom this week by reading a banned book. Prove to book banners around the country that the only thing they do by challenging books is generate more revenue and publicity for the authors. Because, really, the only thing you do when you ban a book is incite curiosity and cause more people to read it than would have if you had just kept your mouth shut.

For parents out there, the temptation is very strong to challenge books that are against your morals and beliefs, but rather than inciting outrage and uproar, use the book as a teachable moment to talk to your children about right and wrong. Just because authors write books and teachers use them in their classrooms does not mean that we are condoning the sex, alcohol, drugs, and violence that appear in these books. Just because book characters behave in certain ways does not mean that we're asking you to see them as role models. I don't think there's a person out there who reads The Catcher in the Rye and thinks, "Wow! Holden is so cool! I want to be just like him." Ummm... no. Even my lack of sophistication at critical thinking when I was a sophomore in high school saw what a pathetic mess Holden was. So book banners, the fact that you're worried that kids will see these characters as role models regardless of what is taught to them in the classroom shows what little faith you have in teens to think critically. And the only thing you're going to do by attempting your sanctimonious disregard for the first amendment is make kids and adults alike want to read the book all the more.

Another thing that irks me about book banning, well besides the whole going against the first amendment thing, is that people who challenge books are putting pressure on schools to teach books that are clean and about benign topics. Obviously these people are asking literature teachers to teach something other than literature then because the very nature of literature is conflict. And the older students get, the more complicated conflicts become. That's just life. And it's precisely the reason why you saw Harry Potter get darker and darker as the series progressed. He was no longer a little kid at the end. The older Harry got, the darker and more complex the conflicts in those stories became because adult problems are more complicated than kid problems. When choosing books for teens, it is very difficult to find literature that isn't controversial because if you don't have conflict in a book, then, well, you don't have literature! So if that's the case dear book banners, what then do you suggest literature teachers teach in place of, well, literature?

I'm going to leave you with John Green's video from a few years ago where he discusses his frustration over people trying to ban his book, Looking for Alaska, in schools. He makes the point so much better than I do about authors having characters behave in morally reprehensible ways, not to say that it's OK, but just the opposite. Again, as I said before, just because authors are writing about it, doesn't mean they're saying to go out and do it! Have faith in your kids to be able to discern that.



Enter my Banned Books Week giveaway hop: 
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

Other posts related to Banned Books Week: 
Stand up and SPEAK out against censorship
The Dirty Cowboy: a book review turned diatribe about book banning
My take on the Huck Finn controversy
Recap of John Green's NCTE anti-censorship session, 2011

Recap of John Green's NCTE anti-censorship session and Giveaway: SIGNED chapter sampler of The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

One of the highlights (i.e., THRILLS) of going to the NCTE conference was getting to meet John Green and hear him speak. He did a session on defending intellectual freedom and it was incredibly exciting and enlightening.

Some of the thoughts he shared from that session:

• The work of intellectual freedom is mostly done by teachers and librarians and very little with authors.
• When he wrote Looking for Alaska, he actually thought that critics were going to tear it apart for having too much of a naive Christian message. Which is why he was shocked when  people tried to ban it from schools, in particular because of one awkward sex scene that he wrote to juxtapose the contrast of empty physical encounters vs. emotional intimacy.
• Public schools shouldn’t exist for parents or even students. It’s for the benefit of the social order and a more educated work force (in response to the teachers who offered another reading option when they assigned LFA)
• When books are challenged, the easy thing for teachers and school boards to do is to just choose another book that won't cause uproar, but that is allowing ignorance to win. Teachers, librarians, and administrators need to keep fighting for intellectual freedom (which he recognizes is easier said than done).

Oh! And if you didn't already watch it, you can see me in the audience of his intellectual freedom session in one of his recent Vlogbrothers videos. I'm the one in the second row in the red sweater around the 0:11 mark.



Anyway, a little while after his session, John did a book signing at the Penguin booth and I got both of my books of his that I own signed (Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns), BUT they were also giving away chapter samplers of The Fault in Our Stars which he also signed one of those for me. 

I have read the chapter sampler and I can't even begin to describe how amazing this book is going to be. In the first two chapters, you immediately laugh, cry, and fall in love with the main character, Hazel. She is battling terminal thyroid cancer, which metastasized into her lungs, when she meets Augustus Waters at a cancer support group. What you expect to be a sad, downer of a narrative, has already managed to be hilarious and irreverent (as well as sad and tragic) in two short chapters. I already know this is going to be one of those books that makes me cry so hard I give myself a headache. I already managed to shed tears of sadness and laugh out loud in a mere two chapters.

With that, I bet you probably want to win my one and only signed copy of the chapter sampler of The Fault in Our Stars, right?

Just do the Rafflecopter thing and you are entered to win. 

Throwing My Hat in the Ring: My Take on the Huck Finn Controversy

I was browsing through the blogs I frequent this morning when I came across Liz's eloquent post over at Consumed by Books regarding the recent Huck Finn controversy. I have been stewing over this issue for the past week, but Liz's words finally gave me pause and were the impetus for me to sit down and write about my feelings regarding this issue.

First of all, the professor who approached the New South Books about creating this edited version had good intentions. He wanted to make the book available to a wider audience. Given that Huck Finn is the fourth most banned book in schools today due to the use and frequency of two particular racial slurs, Professor Gribben figured that by replacing the words, it would allow for more students to have access to this great work of American fiction.

But that is where my admiration for Professor Gribben stops. You see, personally, the changes make me angry. Racially charged books like Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird used those racial slurs to try to expose the ignorance and intolerance of their times, not celebrate it. When we take those words out of the books and replace them with something more PC, it's like we're trying to rewrite history. NO ONE back then would have ever DREAMED of calling someone a Native American, which is what Professor Gribben decided should replace the word Injun. Truth be told, I'd rather have students NOT read the books than for them to have some sort of mis-represented view of history. Those words are SUPPOSED to make people uncomfortable. Students aren't going to learn to be bothered by injustice if they don't see it in its most raw form.

And it's interesting that I just so happen to be reading Fahrenheit 451 for the first time because I just came to the part where the head fireman is talking to the main character, Guy Montag, about why their society started burning books in the first place: because too many groups of people were offended by certain books and they just decided that the ideas inside them were too volatile. Intellectualism is dangerous, ignorance is bliss. Ummm... does anyone not see some frightening parallels here?

Hmmmm... might this be the next step? First change the words, then burn the books?

Stand up and SPEAK out against censorship

Laurie Halse Anderson posted this article on her blog today about a professor, Wesley Scroggins, in Missouri who is calling her book Speak softcore pornography.

As an English teacher and someone who has read Speak, I am disgusted that someone could reduce this story to mere titillation. And, as Anderson stated, "The fact that he sees rape as sexually exciting (pornographic) is disturbing, if not horrifying." Speak is one of the most well-known, contemporary books taught in high schools today. It deals with a teen girl who used to be social and well-liked but has turned inward due to a violent sexual encounter. The book is in no way graphic. Shielding teens from this topic does nothing to educate them about violence against women. It is meant to spur discussion, not encourage promiscuity!

But once again, we have a book-banner here in America who is choosing to judge the merit of a book based on its parts rather than looking at the big picture. Speak is NOT about glorifying sex or dysfunctional families. It's about finding your voice. It's about how not speaking out can impact your life. It's about giving young girls the power to refuse to let men treat them like objects. And it's about showing young men that you DON'T treat women like objects.

Or is that what REALLY disturbs Professor Scorggins so much about the book?

If you, too, are appalled by this censorship attempt, write about it on your blog, and leave Laurie Halse Anderson a link on her blog. Given that Banned Books Week is coming up soon, this is a great time to SPEAK out about this issue.

ETA:
Please read author Myra McEntire's blog post about this issue. It brought tears to my eyes. Giving a DIFFERENT Christian perspective, McEntire shows just how misguided, if not downright sinful, Scroggins's logic is.

Something else McEntire proposes is to go out and purchase several copies of Speak to get it back on the bestseller list. Don't let the likes of close-minded censors prevent teens from reading books that deserve to be and SHOULD BE read!