<p>I’ve never read “The Invisible Man.” Is it worse with regard to gratuitous sex and violence than “Native Son”?</p>
<h1>120 No one was bringing porn into my house - :)</h1>
<p>In the days before CC, I just had a lot of time to talk to them about everything they were reading and watching. If they had questions. A lot of it just flew over their heads till they were older.</p>
<p>I found Disney about the most sexist viewing around when my kids were little. It’s part of the common culture. I couldn’t ban Disney. We did talk a lot about it.</p>
<p>alum- I don’t remember. I’m getting ALL the books tomorrow. I am interested in the answer to that question,too. And possible differences in rape portrayals in novels by men vs novels by women.</p>
<p>I’m sure nobody was bringing porn into your house, alh!!</p>
<p>There are plenty of things out there that are extremely sexist when you actually think about them, that’s for sure. Talking about it helps. My kids got the point, I think, as I was always ranting and raving about how the women in movies were always helpless, and victims. They would stand there uselessly while the man, the hero, was getting beat up or killed. Pick up the gun! Kick the bad guy, don’t just STAND there! I very much appreciate that nowadays, women are shown as more capable, and even the heroes themselves.</p>
<p>I’m curious as to what the normal slate of novels are in the school curriculum. I don’t really know since I didn’t go to a normal school for part of high school. It seems like “Great Expectations,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” (not a novel) are staples. After that, it seems to be ones that deal with the minority experience. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’ve never heard of Jane Austen, Hemingway, or Steinbeck being part of mandatory reading. I wonder why.</p>
<p>Great Expectations seems to be too lengthy, today. We read it in 9th.</p>
<p>Austen, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Tolstoy, Shakespeare- I could go look at D1’s bookcase, but they read a range.</p>
<p>Hemingway and Steinbeck are out of critical favor somewhat.</p>
<p>I can’t remember everything my kids read for school (in part because that was a relatively small and uninteresting subset of what they were reading, generally). I know they both read one Shakespeare play per year, I think, Romeo, Othello, Hamlet, and The Tempest (in that order, but maybe Macbeth, not Hamlet). Everyone read Song of Solomon, Jane Eyre, The Things They Carried, and The House On Mango Street. I think there was no Dickens (which upset me) or Austen. I think they both read Siddhartha (Hesse is back in), The Great Gatsby, The Stranger, and Dubliners. Some Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller plays, and others (probably including For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide . . . ). Also, The Invisible Man. My daughter, when she was at a private school, had a spring mini-course where she read Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov, but nothing that ambitious happened at their public school.</p>
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<p>All three authors were required readings when I attended high school. Could there be a regional difference? I attended a private baptist high school in the south, and I remember reading:</p>
<p>The Grapes of Wrath
Of Mice and Men
Old Man and the Sea</p>
<p>“Pride and Prejudice” was an optional book, but I think I chose to read something else because I don’t recall that one.</p>
<p>We were at Seattle Center for some event during the summer and various groups and programs for youth were set up in the main building. One of them was a teen writers’ program in which the kids produce small novellas that this group publishes. H and I had been commenting recently to D about all the bleak novels she reads-and then we looked at the plots of these books, written by middle and high schoolers. Most were minority youth, but not all. Most were low-income youth, but not all. So no central casting of kids, a good mix.</p>
<p>The novels were about…bullying, suicide, drugs, teen pregnancy, homelessness, and sometimes several of these at once. The person at the table said that most, though written as fiction, were based on the author’s real lives.</p>
<p>So I’m wondering just who we are protecting when we want to keep our young people reading lighter fare without difficult scenes or plots? Do we really think our kids don’t know classmates who have experienced them? Do we really think they can’t deal with knowing this stuff is out there?</p>
<p>IMO, what BETTER time to have kids reading about bullying, drugs, suicide and abusive families, than the times they and their friends are looking for answers about how to deal with this stuff? Last year alone, my D knew two kids who were cutting, one who was on her second miscarriage another going through a bitter custody fight between his parents, and other who had a drug problem. And believe me, these were NOT kids from bad families, or the “ghetto” or low-income, etc. It’s all around us. Keeping our kids from READING about it isn’t going to make it go away.</p>
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<p>Perhaps the parents are afraid of some of these writings coming a bit too close to home, in terms of describing problematic situations similar to those in their own home.</p>
<p>Anyone who is wondering about my view of the oppression of African Americans in the US currently can look up my contributions to the discussion of the arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in <em>his own home</em> in Cambridge, MA. I found it absolutely outrageous, and still do. </p>
<p>My discomfort with the scene involving Sybil had nothing to do with the black/white aspects of the scene, and everything to do with QMP virtually crying while telling me about the protagonist writing on Sybil’s stomach something to the effect that she was “raped by Santa Claus.” Now, at this point, I don’t know how this is related to the book overall, because I have just finished Chapter 2 (see above comments–it will take me about a week to finish the book, maybe more).</p>
<p>And re ucbalumnus #130, what an insinuation! No!</p>
<p>I don’t object to joyful sex in the context of a loving relation (between two adults) being covered in a book taught in a literature class. I can’t think of any examples of this in the literature QMP read, offhand. Perhaps there are some I am not thinking about. In any event, shouldn’t that be covered first?</p>
<p>Finally, I don’t think that The Color Purple in any way stacks up as literature, compared with The Invisible Man, based on what I have read about the latter, and what I have read so far. However, I think The Color Purple is a much better book for a 16 year old.</p>
<p>I’d like to ask sseamom whether cutting was a common or even known occurrence among her contemporaries, when she was in high school? I knew of no one who had that practice. Now there are young women among QMP’s friends who have done it, and it seems to be relatively widespread. How do you account for this change? (Assuming that it is a change, relative to your experience–it certainly is, relative to mine.)</p>
<p>I’d like to go back to ucbalumnus, #75 and sally305, #76, on the (apparently unrelated) issue of slavery as a cause of the Civil War. There can be no doubt that a deplorable interest in the preservation of slavery was the cause of Southern secession. That does not make it the cause of the war, actually, however. I think that it is reasonably clear that Lincoln decided that war was necessary to preserve the Union. Indeed, I believe that there is a record that Lincoln remarked that if he could preserve the Union by freeing all of the slaves, he would do it; and if he could preserve the Union by freeing none of them, he would do that. The Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until 1863, after the victory of the Union forces at Antietam, which turned the Southern army back. And even then, it freed only the slaves in states that were then in rebellion against the Union. </p>
<p>I think that Lincoln was a good man, and I think highly of him. I would think more highly of him if he had covered all of the people held in servitude with the Emancipation Proclamation, and if he had issued it sooner.</p>
<p>When it comes to what one tells one’s children about the nature of the world and of humankind, I think that one of the best expressions is the brief column, “A Time of Gifts,” by Stephen Jay Gould, published in the New York Times on Sept. 26, 2001.</p>
<p>It can be seen here:
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/26/opinion/a-time-of-gifts.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/26/opinion/a-time-of-gifts.html</a></p>
<p>I think it is extremely important for young people to know about the many daily acts of kindness that are performed throughout the world–they act as a counter-balance to the true horrors that are there, too. But I sincerely believe that they outweigh the horrors.</p>
<p>If you have read Gould’s piece, please count me among the bringers of apple brown bettys.</p>
<p>I can beat you all for age-inappropriate literature assigned in school-- my kid’s very first short story in 6th grade English class was Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (the story ends very abruptly with the protagonist shooting himself.) </p>
<p>But I was glad that I decided to talk to the teacher (who had never taught kids that young before) instead of following my first impulse to march into the principals office and demand a schedule change–he turned out to be the far and away the best English teacher the kid had in K12.</p>
<p>No, QM, I didn’t know anyone who cut. But kids back then didn’t openly share their problems as much as they do now. There most certainly were problems with eating disorders, pregnancies, drugs-lots of drugs, etc. My older kids had friends they knew were being neglected/abused, had been in foster care, in addition to drug problems, pregnancies etc. My youngest seems to have a bead on much more going on in her friends and acquaintances’ lives than previous generations. I think this is both good and bad-good because a friend can get them help, bad because not all kids are sensible about who they tell.</p>
<p>Are you thinking that BECAUSE cutting is in literature now it’s CAUSING kids to cut? I think it’s the other way around-it’s happening, so it’s in the books.</p>
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<p>In terms of the immediate starting of the war, the CSA fired first.</p>
<p>In terms of the long series of politics and events leading up to secession and war, how can slavery not have been a major issue in the politics and events that pushed the two sides apart enough to go to war?</p>
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<p>Yes, that is true. But it does not change the fact that the seceding states were heavily motivated by the preservation of slavery, and the perception and fear that the Lincoln administration would try to curtail or end it. However, there is substantial public opinion today that believes that slavery was not a major cause of the war: [Why</a> the U.S. Is Still Fighting the Civil War - TIME](<a href=“http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2063869,00.html]Why”>Why the U.S. Is Still Fighting the Civil War - TIME)</p>
<p>First of all, I don’t think the fact that a novel makes a teenager cry is a good reason not to assign it. Sometimes, crying is the appropriate response to a scene. I bet plenty of students cry while reading Night or Beloved. </p>
<p>In this case, and knowing the scene in question, it seems that QMP was probably crying more because he was disturbed by what he was reading than because he was moved or grief-stricken by it. That is more problematic - but it isn’t necessarily the teacher’s problem. Has your son learned about 9/11? Does he know about the Holocaust? Did he hear any coverage of the Newtown massacre? If, as I’m assuming, the answer is yes, how does he cope with all of these things, and why is someone adult enough to be exposed to real-life atrocities not adult enough to be exposed to a fictional rape scene (or, rather, a fictional rape fantasy)? And is this sensibility going to be magically turned off at the age of 18?</p>
<p>There is no end to the number of topics in literature that could be disturbing to a highly sensitive student. There is a scene involving the death of a child in The Brothers Karamazov that I have skipped every time I have reread it, including when I was teaching it. There are sexist, racist, sexually explicit, violent, and just downright depressing parts of any number of novels, especially twentieth century novels. You happen to find Invisible Man more disturbing than the Color Purple.That is subjective; there may well be people out there who find certain scenes in The Color Purple more offensive and scarring than anything in Invisible Man. Do we have to ban both books, now? </p>
<p>It isn’t that I think everything is appropriate for a high school curriculum. I would question, for instance, teaching The Bluest Eye, where the entire plot revolves around incest and the rape of a child, or Portnoy’s Complaint, which I’ve heard described as the longest sex joke ever written. I think the values of The Taming of the Shrew are so out of whack, from a modern perspective, as to make it a poor choice for anything other than a class dedicated either to Shakespeare or to gender in literature. But Invisible Man is a brilliant novel about race and identity that also happens to contain some extremely disturbing, arguably misogynistic sexual passages. Once you remove that from a reading list, you’re opening the door for eliminating just about any novel that contains anything objectionable - or, even worse, any novel that fails to satisfy some feel-good notion of what literature should be.</p>
<p>“Yes, that is true. But it does not change the fact that the seceding states were heavily motivated by the preservation of slavery, and the perception and fear that the Lincoln administration would try to curtail or end it.”</p>
<p>The immediate cause of the Civil War was the refusal of Lincoln to intervene in the affairs of the northern states who refused to return slaves to their masters in the south. The South wanted big-time federal intervention, including the deployment of federal troops to enforce the Dred Scott decision, in violation of so-called “states’ rights”. Lincoln had no initial intention of intervening in the affairs of states in either the North or the South.</p>
<p>Not just that. Some of the seceding states wrote down why they seceded, listing numerous slavery-related reasons: [Declaration</a> of Causes of Secession](<a href=“http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html]Declaration”>http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html)</p>