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.”
A large part of English classes are about influential literature, not learning how to read. The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, etc. They all have a message, and that’s part of English literature classes. If a book doesn’t have anything to say it isn’t worth reading. What books should be allowed to assign, in your enlightened opinion?
Is this book influential? I doubt so.
You probably should have taken an English class, then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me#Reception
Yes, it is a good social study book. It is not taking those prices for literature achievement.
Yeah, it was only a finalist for a pulitzer prize. It’s probably not worth considering.
However, your comment wasn’t about it being influential. It was about whether topics, such as this, should be examined in an english course. Again, what books do you deem appropriate for such a course?
Yes, it is socially important book. I do not see it is getting any literature prices. As I said, it should be a read in social study classes.
Dude, it was a finalist for a Pulitzer prize! What more do you need?
Also, again, what books are acceptable! You say not this one, but you can’t answer what is OK.
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.
… But the fact that it won awards didn’t convince you? Bullshit.
Good on you. Thank you.