South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.
Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.
Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.
“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.
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Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.
“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”
Social studies and language go hand in hand, and learning both at the same time is way more efficient than separated, which is why for example in Sweden, Swedish class includes mostly local but also some global cultural studies, litterature, religion, etc.
English class includes some of British and American culture studies as well.
We don’t have a class only for social studies, we get graded on both at the same time based on the knowledge we present, and how proficient we are at presenting in written and verbal form.
Maybe it’s because this is how I grew up that I think it is better, but I just don’t see the point in separating them.
Sounds like you didn’t have a combined class, you just didn’t have a social studies class. Naturally learning about literature introduces you to broader topics about social systems, but if you didn’t study society specifically, then you didn’t have a social studies class.
We did study specifically about social studies though, it was a segment of Swedish class that lasted a few weeks every year throughout the second half of elementary school. Though it looks like there was one single class in high school, and it looks like I had it too. Maybe I just forgot. Before that it was all one class though.
Interesting. I wonder why Sweden doesn’t (or didn’t) break it out into its own thing.