Reply to Just got disturbing email regarding English class for my rising freshman

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Unfortunately yes. Teachers are required to alert parents! However, parents can ask for specific titles, read them and opt their child out of any they feel are not appropriate. Teachers are required to provide an alternative assignment and to avoid any action or statement that would be critical of the child or parent. [/quote]

But if my child is the only one doing the alternative assignment, they won’t be part of any class discussions. How would that work? Won’t it be harder?[/quote]

It will make more work for the teacher, and your kid won't learn nearly enough, but you'll have saved your kid from the trauma of reading Romeo and Juliet.  Plus, it's always fun to embarrass your kid![/quote]

It’s not a classic, unfortunately. I would totally be on board with a classic. It’s a woke novel with “masturbation, heavy naked petting,” etc.[/quote]

If you know the book, why don't you name it?  So weird to be secretive.  [/quote]

It's probably something most people would consider a classic [/quote]

For 9th grade, Romeo and Juliet AND The Odyssey both fall under this policy and we have to send this warning to parents. Most would probably say both of these texts have value and aren’t sexually explicit though. Nonetheless. Because Odysseus sleeps with Cersei and Calypso we have to send the warning. [/quote]

Yes, and THAT is the problem.
Parents roll their eyes and go “oh—is that all?”
And then they assume it’s for Romeo and Hukiet and The Odyssey.
And they don’t actually read The Poet X, and its extremely detailed descriptions of masturbation and “feeling his hardness pressed against me” and the many other explicit sexual references that—without you having sent this notification, you’d be side-eyeing a teacher for introducing and discussing these pornographic passages with your fifteen year-old.
[/quote]

I’m a child of the 70s and 80s, and by the time I was in 9th grade I’d already read all about sex and masturbation in my harlequin and silhouette romance novels, the VC Andrews smut that was all the rage then, and Danielle Steele, Harold Robbins, and Sidney Sheldon novels too.

You people are ridiculously uptight. Your 15 year old probably already knows all about sex from talking with friends or engaging with the internet encyclopedia; or if not, will not be traumatized by learning about it. It’s a normal part of being a mammal. It’s okay to talk about and it’s negligent not to talk about it with a girl who is maybe only one year or at most 3 years from the legal age of consent. Y’all should be talking about sex abundantly, and helping her to know all the reasons it’s good to wait and oh by the way, it’s okay to masturbate and here’s a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves and another of The Joy of Sex and you should spend lots of time in self exploration but wait until you really know a boy before remotely considering it. [/quote]
SAME. My mother, a former English teacher who doesn't come within a country mile of being "progressive" let me read VC Andrews in elementary school - [i]My Sweet Audrina[/i] is even more yikes than [i]Flowers in the Attic[/i].  (Frankly, I found [i]Pet Semetary[/i] more traumatizing.) I lived off of Judy Blume. She felt it was better to have an open discussion rather than create situation that involved sneaking around.

Our school sent one of those notices to all kids in my younger one's grade level with a list of books that they may be reading - and it turns out my child's class is not reading any of the books that were on the list. I am, because I'm always looking to expand my reading list and they sounded pretty good. (My biggest gripe thus far has been that my child has now had two books they read in middle school on their HS reading lists.) The branding of some of the books/passages listed here as "pornography" or "erotica" is absurd. Sex and desire is part of the human condition, and pretending like your high schoolers don't know a thing about it or that teachers are engaging in detailed discussions about sex in the classroom (except I guess some Langley football coach - so one teacher at one school in one of the largest school systems in the country, maybe?) is ridiculous and, in some cases, displaying an unfortunately poor understanding of literately analysis. And your precious classics have references to sex, some in language that was scandalous when they first came out but is staid now.

I also find it hard to believe that there are school that are not at least reading some classic literature, whether excerpts or in full. Mine are reading a mix of things that were classics when I was in school and more modern books - 50/50 or 60/40 leaning toward books I read in HS/college (and I'm old). One assignment last year was to choose your own classic to read.  I read the books they read in class either in advance or along with them. Having read quite a bit of it, much of classic literature is not very representative (and *gasp* includes all sorts of references to sex and other mature topics), and reading is a great way to see the perspectives of others and broaden horizons. Reading things that you don't like or that you don't agree with is part of getting an education.  I think Thomas Hardy blows chunks, yet somehow I survived both [i]Tess of the D'Urbervilles[/i] (rape and the death of the resulting child) and [i]Return of the Native[/i] (premarital sex, adultery, and the most boring book I've ever read - 50 pages on the description of the heath alone).  Art, sometimes, will make you uncomfortable or to have differing opinions on it's merit, interpretation, and value.[/quote]

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