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.
I couldn’t even imagine an English teacher refusing to teach any books that involve history. I would get my daughter transferred to a different class because that is not a good learning environment.
My daughter is in middle school. They were given three book options to study. One of them is an award-winning autobiographical graphic novel about two child refugees in Africa. I suppose the person we’re talking to would say that would only belong in social studies too. I mean it involves Africa and war and it’s a true story. Does any of that belong in English? (Yes.)