<h1>198 ^^ It is in his best interest to be seen as the father because his family has benefited. It has damaged his relationship with his family but they are much better off financially. They were sharing a bed because of the cold. Now they have heat. The daughter has glasses. I am going to read it again.</h1>
<h1>199- I KNOW that isn’t your intent. I think sometimes we have to pick our battles. I don’t know how to pick in this instance. It may be a question of the lesser of evils?</h1>
<p>poetgrl: In response to this thread my book table now includes: Invisible Man, Native Son, Go Tell It on the Mountain in addition to Blood Done Wrote My Name, which I was already plowing my way through and finding way too grim.</p>
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<p>Although I agree with you about what’s going on politically, I will state again that this particular situation involved one county out of 100. I’ve never read the book, so I can’t speak from first-hand knowledge. However, based on the descriptions of some of the book’s sexual content, I can easily see why some parent might be disturbed by it. No one even needs to look for a racial motive there.</p>
<p>And, just for the record, my children read anything they wanted to. They read so voraciously that I couldn’t have stayed a step ahead of them even if I had tried. :)</p>
<p>As I read it, Matty Lou (Trueblood’s daughter) was asleep when the intercourse started! When Trueblood woke up from his dream, he found Matty Lou “beatin’ me and scratchin’ and tremblin’ and shakin’ and cryin’ all at the same time like’s she’s having a fit.” This doesn’t read like the reaction to something that she had initiated. It is true that later on, when Trueblood still had not withdrawn, Matty Lou “grab[bed] holt” to him. But this was rather late.</p>
<p>Which is the lesser of two evils depends very much on your point of view. Personally, I would rather have a sympathetic understanding of the difficulties still faced by African Americans conveyed in a different way.</p>
<p>alh–comment in #201 about #199: I knew you knew that wasn’t my intent. I was just acknowledging that I do see the dilemma of the situation.</p>
<p>Marsian: It is only one county. One county concerns me. It’s precedent. The mother in question may have only objected to sexual content. I agree with poetgrl about rapey books. However, I am trying to think what we are left with if we remove all the so-called classics by male writers with scenes of rape or sexual violence. It may be worth doing. It will have a huge impact on what is available to read in schools.</p>
<p>adding: </p>
<p>correction. my mistake! There will be plenty available. There will just be completely different reading lists from what we are used to.</p>
<p>From a strictly anthropological perspective what Harold bloom called the cannon is an interesting study in white male domination and that perspective. </p>
<p>It would be easy to sample this, along with the newer, post modern literary perspectives without great loss of literature. </p>
<p>But books do not need to be banned. </p>
<p>JMO</p>
<p>There will be plenty available, until someone decides that some of the content in the remaining books is also too disturbing for whatever reason.</p>
<p>Several posters have made the point that their children read whatever they wanted to read. QMP read anything she wanted to read, plus some books that were required, which she didn’t want to read.</p>
<p>I still think that there is a strong distinction to be made between what should be available (in the school library) and what should be required. I support having close to everything available at the school (well, not snuff videos, obviously), but using some sensitivity in deciding what should be required. The “one book fits all” approach of the public schools is problematic in this regard.</p>
<p>Yes. The one anything fits all approach in almost all public school settings is largely problematic. No doubt.</p>
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<p>Like this?</p>
<p>[On</a> the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin - Free Ebook](<a href=“http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1228]On”>On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin | Project Gutenberg)</p>
<h1>208, #209 - agree</h1>
<p>If my kid is heavily involved in PETA and Moby Dick causes anxiety and nightmares, I am going to tell the school my kid is not reading or discussing Moby Dick. If necessary, I have the luxury of pulling my kids out of school and I realize that isn’t an option available to most parents. If everyone picks their own book and reads it in the library with no discussion that is so much more desirable a situation in my opinion than the classroom QM describes.</p>
<p>QM: You have said you think all books are not appropriate for all age groups. Did you try to create an environment where QMP had limited access to age inappropriate books? Or did you trust QMP to put a book down that was too grim? How did you decide?</p>
<p>the one size fits all approach doesn’t work for parenting either</p>
<p>Hah, hah, limited access! We have 11 bookcases that are 7 feet tall each, on the main floor of our house, two more in the basement, a bookcase in QMP’s room, books on the desk, books on the floors, books on the bedside tables, books in boxes . . . two more 7-foot bookcases in my office, and one more on order. We gave her books as gifts, that we though would interest her. But she could pick up and read anything in the house that interested her. I almost never throw any book away–perhaps 4 books over time.</p>
<p>My issue is with the public school requiring a student to read something that really bothers that student, and having class “discussions” that come awfully close to sanctioned harassment sessions.</p>
<p>I suppose it would creep me out if a parent forced a child to read a book that was obviously troubling to the child.</p>
<p>Oh, just as I was leaving my computer, I realized I left out a couple more bookcases, though they are not 7-footers.</p>
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<p>I would find it abusive.</p>
<p>otoh- I did force my kids to listen to me talk about a lot of things they didn’t want to hear</p>
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<li> I think high school students should have the experience of reading things that “really bother them.” I sincerely hope that most, if not all, high school students would be “really bothered” by The Invisible Man, and many other stalwarts of the curriculum. It’s a disturbing book that challenges readers. If they aren’t bothered, it’s because they are jaded or apathetic, or not actually reading.</li>
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<p>Getting really bothered by something is an important first step in trying to understand it fully and maybe to do something about it. That’s true whether it’s a social problem or a conundrum in physics.</p>
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<li><p>Reading alone (with no class discussion) is not an educational substitute for having a whole class read the same book at the same time and then talk about it together. Learning to talk about something effectively in a group, and learning to listen to the other people talking about it, even when that “something” is difficult, challenging, uncomfortable . . . that’s really a core part of liberal arts education.</p></li>
<li><p>There is no excuse, none, for a teacher letting a class discussion devolve into a harassment session against the girls in the class. (Well, there is a valid excuse: “I was inexperienced, and I lost control of the class. I will find a better way to handle it next time.”)</p></li>
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<p>QM, some of your comments make it very clear that we see literature through our own lenses, perhaps rose-colored ones at times. I get that this book really troubles you, and really troubled your daughter. But you are completely missing or choosing to ignore an entire race’s hundreds year old history of the same exact treatment that a handful of episodes in this one book bring to light.</p>
<p>You say, “…Elizabeth Smart. Jaycee Dugard. Hannah Anderson. Amanda Berry. Georgina DeJesus. Michelle Knight…”</p>
<p>But Ellison was writing from the perspective of knowing the hundreds, THOUSANDS or nameless, faceless young girls and women were treated much worse, because they had NO hope of ever being rescued. This book took on the still existing double-standard of the way white women and black women, white men and black men were treated. If you can’t see that, I don’t know how to help you. </p>
<p>This double-standard still exists today. My older D has a friend whose cousin disappeared after school a couple of years ago. It got very little notice in the news, even locally, whereas Elizabeth Smart made national news. The local press interrupted their broadcasts when she was found. She was invited to the White House. Missing black kids? Eh, whatever.</p>
<p>At the time Ellison wrote his book, black men and some women were still being lynched, sometimes for things that never happened. Around that time, a relative of my H had to leave town in the dead of night because he insulted a white guy. Someone tipped him off that he would be killed if he stayed in town. </p>
<p>But you say, “However, I think that news 50+ years after the publication of Ellison’s book does affect the reading of it.”</p>
<p>Yes it does. But you’re completely ignoring the news of THAT DAY. Not that much of what happened to blacks at the timer MADE the news. Heck, they had PARTIES for some lynchings. But I do understand that your lens is of modern life and modern times. That’s why you say, </p>
<p>“Personally, I would rather have a sympathetic understanding of the difficulties still faced by African Americans conveyed in a different way.”</p>
<p>But here’s the thing. You CAN’T have the injustices and terror and turmoil forced on blacks ONLY when the people/characters are sympathetic. Not all of them were. Ellison wasn’t trying to gain sympathy only for the “good Negroes” (a term my H uses). The evils of racism applied to ALL of them, good and bad, sympathetic or not. And I will go farther and say that what was happening, and why, drove some real life blacks to respond in the way his characters did. Should we REALLY feel less for them because they weren’t sanitized for sensitive readers?</p>
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<p>I remember a teacher telling our senior year English class that when he had reached a certain point in the book he had assigned us he was so upset that he threw the book against a wall and left it there for a week before he could return to it. The teacher in question was an amazing educator, head of the English department, later to become the headmaster of the school. He inspired me to become an English major in college. I reread the book in question every couple of years and it still makes me cry.</p>
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<p>Just look at the conversation we’ve had here, with the varying interpretations of text and differing opinions of various works.</p>
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<p>I agree and would add that adolescent boys, if given the chance, can make something scatological or smutty out of almost anything. Encouraged to be mature and use their brains they can rise to the occasion.</p>
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But where does this end? Unless your kid had some kind of medical diagnosis, I wouldn’t excuse him or her from reading Moby Dick for such a reason, any more than I would excuse him from studying evolution, the history of slavery, or any other topic that is important. The curriculum of a public school is set to reflect the public interest, and I don’t think individual parents should be allowed to treat it as a buffet without some really good reasons.</p>
<p>I know JHS to be extremely well educated, from posts on this and other threads. However, it seems to me that we are in effect reading a somewhat different book. </p>
<p>For example, it appears to me that Matty Lou was dreaming about her boyfriend. Whether she might have unknowingly initiated intercourse while she was asleep is unknowable, I think. But when I look at the description of the dream, it appears to me that the “agency” in the dream is the man’s (“I was climbin’ . . . I climbed . . . I knows it’s wrong, but I can’t help it. I goes through the front door . . . I sees a door and goes through that door”). I will omit the tunnel, the power plant, the steel wool, and the bright light.</p>
<p>I think that a discussion with JHS would probably be valuable. He (I am making an assumption with that pronoun, maybe incorrect) brings things to the book that I do not. But we are both parents, not high schoolers.</p>
<p>I agree that students should know the history of oppression of African Americans, and not just the oppression of the present. Both are shameful. If a student responds to factual descriptions in a history class, viscerally and with deep emotion, as well as repugnance on an intellectual level, does the student also need to be compelled to re-encounter the events in literature? I understand that people may have different opinions.</p>
<p>Also, if a student were bigoted, would reading The Invisible Man make the student less bigoted? Frankly, I doubt it.</p>