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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.

  • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    9 months ago

    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?

      • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        Is this book influential? I doubt so.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me#Reception

        On November 18, 2015, it was announced that Coates had won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me.[20] NPR’s Colin Dwyer had considered it the favorite to win the prize, given the book’s reception.[6] It also won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction.[21]

        The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list for nonfiction on August 2, 2015, and remained number 1 for three weeks. It topped the same list again during the week of January 24, 2016.[22]

        The book was selected by Washington University in St. Louis and Augustana College[23] in 2016, as the book for all first-year students to read and discuss in the fall 2016 semester.[24] In the same year, the book was ranked 7th on The Guardian’s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.[25]

      • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        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?

        • MxM111@kbin.social
          0·
          9 months ago

          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.

          • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
            0·
            9 months ago

            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.

            • MxM111@kbin.social
              0·
              9 months ago

              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.