"Burn 'em to ashes, then burn the ashes."

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?"

He laughed. "That's against the law!"

"Oh. Of course." - from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

As the late Frank Zappa once said, "It's not getting a whole lot smarter out here..."

TUSCOLA, Texas (AP) Oct. 23 - A popular English teacher has been placed on paid leave — and faces possible criminal charges — after a student's parents complained to police that a ninth-grade class reading list contained a book about a murderer who has sex with his victims' bodies.

Kaleb Tierce, 25, is being investigated for allegedly distributing harmful material to a minor after the student selected Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy's Child of God off the list and read it.

Tierce, a third-year teacher and assistant football coach at Jim Ned High School, has not been arrested, but his case has caused an uproar in this West Texas town of 700 people. Last week, more than 120 parents and students crowded into a meeting where the school board voted to keep Tierce on paid leave.

Most parents say Tierce should be reinstated, regardless of whether the book is too graphic for teens.

"He's a great teacher and coach and motivates the kids like no one else can," said Chris Garcia, whose daughter was in one of Tierce's classes. "If you're trying to protect your kids from things in books, you may as well turn off the TV and video games. You try to protect them as much as you can, but these days kids are just exposed to so much."

Tierce, who has not been charged with any wrongdoing, declined to comment when asked by The Associated Press about the allegations.

Some students and athletes have worn armbands to school and football games emblazoned with Tierce's initials, hiding them under clothing. Others said teens were meeting secretly to decide how to help the teacher they believe did nothing wrong.

"He was the only one who understood us," said Patrisha Ramirez, 15. "He would joke around. He would make English interesting, for once."

In Tuscola, south of Abilene, Child of God was on a list of titles compiled by all of the high school English teachers for a pre-Advanced Placement class.

Although administrators' approval was not required for the list, school officials have since removed the book because they deemed it inappropriate for ninth-graders.

The book tells the story of a town's outsider who is falsely accused of rape, then begins killing people. The character ends up living in a cave with his victims' decomposing bodies. The 1974 novel "plumbs the depths of human degradation," according to its back cover.

The parents of one ninth-grade student filed a police report on Oct. 1 with the Taylor County Sheriff's Office earlier this month. Before contacting law enforcement officials, they complained to the teacher and principal, said district Superintendent Kent LeFevre, who declined to reveal their discussions...

Parents have sought to ban various books, including John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series, as well as books on Cuba or gay penguins, according to the American Library Association. Last year, schools or public libraries received nearly 550 requests to remove books, the Chicago-based association said.

The entire article is here.

Now, this is an especially timely story for me. For one thing, my eighth grade students are currently reading Of Mice and Men, which is one of my favorite books to teach, and one which, when I survey my kids at the end of every year, turns out to be one of the most popular books on our reading list. We're right smack dab in the middle of it right now. It's a "classic" that kids can tackle, that doesn't talk down to them, that they find challenging but still a "good read." When we're done reading it, we watch the movie. It makes us all cry. It's a wonderful experience.

But the recent experiences we've had in our school district make us teachers worry now. We've started to look over our shoulders a bit. We talk in low tones about whether we should teach this or that, whether "they" will "come after us." It's distressing for agitators like me. In the town next door, a parent wants a book pulled and banned from the school library. The book, The Burn Journals, is a memoir of a young man - an eighth grader - who tried to commit suicide by setting himself on fire. It's a pretty rough book, I must admit, and it should only be read by mature youg readers. It is powerful stuff, but I will say that some of the sexual references are a bit gratuitous. There's not much of that, though. Most of it is gripping. This book had to be signed out with the parents' permission, however. The kid brought it home, the parents looked it over and didn't like what they saw, BUT, instead of simply refusing to allow their child to not read the book - you know, acting like parents - they decided to throw a public tantrum and get the title banned from the school shelves, so that no one can read it. Nuh-uh. In America, we're supposed to be against censorship. Supposedly.

Look, it's a scary world out there for kids, and for parents. It's especially scary for adolescents. I get that. I teach 'em, and I have two in my house at the moment. But in my house, I am the censor. And I am proud of it. I decide what movies come into the house and what gets played on the DVD player I paid for. I get veto power over what titles get downloaded from iTunes (it's my credit card that pays the bill, after all), and I get to delete what slips by the first time, because I actually torture my senses and listen to my kids' "music." I check out what my kids are reading, for school and for pleasure. Sometimes, Mrs. Agitator and I even - get this - read along. We've been doing this since our kids started reading. This - again - is called parenting.

The parents in our neighboring community acted correctly, up to a point. They investigated what their precious darling was reading, they didn't approve of it, and they denied the child the privilege of reading the book. That is their perogative. BUT they do not have the right to have the book pulled off the shelves of the library, to deny the other students in that school the right to have their parents make that same decision, or to decide otherwise. In other words, the right for them to parent their kids. The adults in the first case, however, are just plain wrong, and that includes the administrators here. They never should have suspended this teacher for a single second. I hope he has a lawyer, and I hope he has a strong teachers' union to protect him.

Yes, it is a truly scary world for children. I sympathize with all those parents who struggle every day to do battle with all the stuff out there that they and their kids are faced with. That's what teachers and school librarians and administrators are supposed to do. We love doing it. But when we are bullied, we need to fight back. That's what we tell the kids who are victimized by bullies to do: stand up, look them in the eye, and tell them "NO!"

It's time to start practicing what we preach.

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture.
Just get people to stop reading them."
-- Ray Bradbury --

(Strictly gratuitous Julie Christie photo from the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. You'll pardon me for this, I hope, as I have been madly in love with her since my own adolescence...)

PS: I have closed up shop for good at my own blog. I hope to continue to post here, when the spirit - and my outrage - moves me.

-David

What I'm Doing On My Summer Vacation.

So, I spent last week in a rented house down at the Jersey shore, one of my favorite places in the whole wide world, with my wife and younger son, a fifteen year old to whom I refer as The Liberal-In-Training, mainly because he's already quite the well-informed, compassionate progressive. We had an almost perfect week, relaxation-wise and weather-wise (which is good, because few things can be worse than a rainy summer day at the shore, stuck in a house with a bored teenager), and the waves were (for a change) big enough for some serious boogie boarding almost every day. I did pass on the para-sailing, however. I don't do heights.

Anyway, we came back this past weekend, and I got down to work, getting some things done before I have to get back to my middle school classroom in three weeks. One of the first things on my August "to do" list was to write a letter to my son's soon-to-be guidance counselor at the high school which he will be attending this fall, letting him know that we are "opting out" of the No Child Left Behind-mandated program which forces high schools that receive federal money (which means all public high schools, basically) to provide personal and normally confidential information about soon-to-be recruitable students to the military. You didn't know about this? You should, especially if you have kids. The Pentagon has access to all your child's personal stuff, and unless you tell the school you don't want them to have it, the school must provide it. (Read more about it here.) Most parents don't know about this, and many don't care. But, see, we here in The Garden State do care. I'm a devout Quaker, and even though neither of my sons are Friends, the whole family agrees on this issue: the military, in our opinion, has no business using the schools as a rent-free recruiting office. Students, who are a captive audience under our system of compulsory education, should not have to put up with military recruiters in their classrooms, in their cafeterias, at their school activities and athletic events. If a kid wants information about enlisting, she or he can freely visit one of the (several) local recruiting centers in our town. They're easy to find. But my family's unlisted phone number, and my son's Social Security number, amongst other things, should not be available for the asking to some stranger who just happens to wear a uniform. Nuh-uh. Nope.

So I wrote the letter, and I downloaded and filled out a form for my son's school files, and stuffed it all in an envelope, and stuck on the stamp. And then I settled in to catch up on some of the news I had missed (I - happily - had no Internet access at the shore, and had avoided watching the news, at least until the end of the week when I first heard about those trapped miners in Utah), and one of the first things I came across online was this piece:

ANNVILLE, Pa. (AP) - Brittany Vojta survived boot camp. It was high school she couldn't make it through. Now, however, she has benefited from a program the National Guard started this year in Pennsylvania for privates who drop out of high school after signing up.

In an old barracks at Fort Indiantown Gap, the 18-year-old Cleveland woman and other dropouts spent three intensive weeks in class this summer to help them pass their GEDs — so they would meet the minimal educational requirement for staying in the Guard.

Straining to fill its ranks with the Iraq war in its fifth year, the military is taking on an ever bigger role providing basic education to new recruits. The strategy is potentially risky for the military as it strives to maintain the quality of its force, but it's giving dropouts like Vojta a second chance.

"Something happened in that soldier's life that was bad. ... We have the ability to stop another bad action from happening — them getting discharged from the military," said Sgt. 1st Class John Walton, 32, who started the Pennsylvania program. He says it is not about filling quotas but helping the troops.

The rest is here. Now, I have no problem with folks who go the GED route. I used to teach high school, and I know that kids don't always finish on time with a diploma for all sorts of reasons. And getting a GED shows that, in spite of difficulties and obstacles, many young kids still value an education and will do what they have to do to get their diplomas. But. There's something kind of insidious and also telling about this. It's like those so-called "prep schools" that get athletes ready to be exploited by top-shelf NCAA football and basketball powerhouses, making sure they have the minimum "grades" and test scores to be eligible, in spite of the fact that they (the universities) know the athletes will never (or rarely) graduate. I know something about this: I tutored some of these guys at Temple University back in the day, and I also worked with athletes at the community college where I worked before taking my current job.

The military claims it's mostly meeting its monthly quotas (at least the Army says so: yeah, I trust them), and people in the Bush administration and at the Pentagon are running away from our new "war czar's" comments last week about bringing back the draft, but stories like this make me wonder about just how well things are going on the recruiting front. Maybe our young people and their families are finally starting to wise up about what really goes on when it comes to military recruiters and their lies. And maybe that comes from watching the news.

Hopefully, at least, they'll be staying away from my kid. But I'm not counting on it.

PS: This is my first post as a member of The Unruly Mob. I am truly honored to have been invited to contribute to this blog, and I hope my work proves worthy of y'all's faith in me.