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.”
“literally”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
However, the book DOES have “literary importance,” as determined by it winning the National Book Award, winning the Kirkus Prize, and being a Pulitzer finalist.
Though I notice elsewhere in the thread you refer to those as “literature prices” multiple times, and would like to point out that they are, in fact, “prizes”. Prices are the cost of things you buy at the store. Prizes are awarded for achievement in a given field.
As such, I do not believe you are fit to be the arbiter of what gets to be taught in English class. It is clear you could use a few lessons on the subject yourself, and besides, before espousing that a book should only be taught in one type of classroom (Social Studies) and not another (English), a person should probably read said book. You clearly haven’t.
Hey, I changed my mind. It turns out the teachers also thought that the book is superbly written and being excellent material for rhetoric. This information was missing in the original post, that created impression that she gave the book only because it is about racism.
Good for you for admitting you changed your mind. Most people don’t have the courage to do that.