Reply to APS - 10th Grade English

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Did anyone go to Back To School Night last night at APS?  My child's 10th-grade English class back-to-school night was a little surprising.  Yes, it is an English class, but all lessons are focused on global communities, absolute power, and reading options based on POC struggles, etc...  There was a BLM fist in the presentation.  I had to reconfirm that the class was actually English, and not an elective or sociology.  A parent asked if this was the same for all Arlington 10th-grade English classes, and the response was yes.

Am I the only one concerned that English classes are now being hijacked to push social justice?  Not complaining about social justice per se, but seems like this really distracts from what most people think a student should learn in a traditional English class.  I am not a Younkin supporter, but I do feel this is over the top.
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[b]What should a student learn in a traditional English class? I[/b] went to a terrible, underfunded, majority white (rural New England) public school in the 1980s, but we still read To Kill A Mockingbird, A Raisin In The Sun, The Pearl, The Grapes of Wrath, The Outsiders, The Crucible, Fahrenheit 451, Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, and the Great Gatsby. Seems like kids today are just reading about the same themes with more modern/diverse characters and new authors, but many of the books I see on these lists are still award-winning, best-selling books that will be classics the The Kite Runner, Never Let Me Go, and The Color Purple. [/quote]

Quite frankly, I'd like my kid, and any other kid in the classroom, to be able to have an open discussion without fear that one wrong statement/misstatement that is not politically correct is going to get them labled by a teacher that appears to have a more active agenda than most English teachers.[/quote]

My guess is that someone who teaches English in a public high school and chooses books like this does so because they expect to be helping young teenagers learn how to understand complex themes and formulate and articulate responses to the material. You wouldn't last long in a 10th grade classroom if you punished kids who said dumb things. At the same time, students need to learn the difference between having and stating an opinion about class material and being offensive, and a high school classroom is a safer place to learn that than, say, the workplace. [/quote]

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