Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
And to the teachers out there - how much control do you want over your students? Do you believe that parents have no idea how to teach, what their kids need, and should simply shut up, like they wanted Mr. Baer to do, because he clearly has no right to be upset that his 9th grade daughter was assigned porn?
If you consider that "porn", then you must be even more unfamiliar with real actual porn than I am.
And if you think it's the fault of the Common Core that in 2007 a local school district put a book on its list of suggested reading, then I really don't know what to say.
Are you stating that CC does not have, on its list of recommended books, any book with graphic sexual material? hint: 'The Bluest Eve'
Yes, I am stating that the Common Core does not have, on its list of recommended books, any book with graphic sexual material. That is because the Common Core does not have a list of recommended books.
What the Common Core does have is passages from books that illustrate a given reading level. For Grade 11, one of these passages is one paragraph from "The Bluest Eye", by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison. Here is that paragraph:
One winter Pauline discovered she was pregnant. When she told Cholly, he surprised her by being pleased. He began to drink less and come home more often. They eased back into a relationship more like the early days of their marriage, when he asked if she were tired or wanted him to bring her something from the store. In this state of ease, Pauline stopped doing day work and returned to her own housekeeping. But the loneliness in those two rooms had not gone away. When the winter sun hit the peeling green paint of the kitchen chairs, when the smoked hocks were boiling in the pot, when all she could hear was the truck delivering furniture downstairs, she thought about back home, about how she had been all alone most of the time then too, but that this lonesomeness was different. Then she stopped staring at the green chairs, at the delivery truck; she went to the movies instead. There in the dark her memory was refreshed, and she succumbed to her earlier dreams. Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another—physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
Is that what you consider "graphic sexual material"?
(You can find it on p. 152 of Appendix B Text Exemplars and Sample Performance Tasks for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts & Literacy in History, Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects, here:
http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Appendix_B.pdf )