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Teacher Suspended For Reading Ender's Game To Students
An anonymous reader writes "Forbes reports that a middle school teacher in South Carolina has been placed on administrative leave for reading sci-fi classic Ender's Game to his students. According to blogger Tod Kelly, '[A parent] reported him to the school district complained that the book was pornographic; that same parent also asked the local police to file criminal charges against the teacher. As of today, the police have not yet decided whether or not to file charges (which is probably a good sign that they won't). The school district, however, appears to agree with the parent, is considering firing the teacher and will be eliminating the book from the school.'"
I'm glad to see "book burning" is alive and well in America. I guess that's what the conservatives mean by restoring America. Now we just need to find some really cheap labor.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
I'm drawing a blank here but about the only thing I can think of that would qualify as close to pornography is the part where Ender beats the shit out of that bully and the book talks about how his medical sheet reads "bruised testicle." Which, if two adolescent boys bruising up each other's private parts arouses you in anyway, you are probably the one that needs help.
... wait, that's already far more reading and research than this individual is capable of.
The other possibility is that the book is too descriptive in some parts (maybe when Ender burrows into the giant's eye in the simulation?). And they're in ye olde Southern Cackalacky where the definition of pornography is just anything that gets too descriptive for their comfort. So, you know, like anything that's written well.
Or perhaps one of the parents caught wind that Orson Scott Card is Mormon and different and therefore evil. And then they looked up the White Horse Prophecy and put
My work here is dung.
Because of this particular scene in the book, I've always felt that it should not have been promoted as a children's book. I have also felt that Orson Scott Card is, IMO, unsavory for cooperating in promoting it as a children's book.
Bruce Perens.
People who try to ban things "because someone might be offended" are themselves the problem. And it is a wide-spread and serious one.
I only hope we can get over this state of permanent panic before it kills us.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
The problem isn't the outrage, it's that it's aimed at useless targets. By and large, the bigger problem with our society is complacency. When we really need outrage, e.g., to put bankers in jail for their crimes, the same busibodies are nowhere to be found.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They are ok with literal genocide committed by a child soldier, but the moment the kid has to take a shower (and fight a bully), NOW it's pornographic?
I don't want to live on this pl- no. I don't want THESE people to live on my planet anymore.
The USA is pathetic. I am glad I emigrated.
It shows society naked. That IS pornographic.
It talks about relationships between siblings, teaches children to think critically, demonstrates adults can and do lie, shows how society is and can be manipulated by media and wont some please think of the children harmed by the reading of this terrible book !!!!
There was some violence in that book, yes. But was there anything sexually graphic? I can't think of anything. I don't even think there was an profanity. Can anyone think of anything that even comes close to being pornographic?
No wonder the educational system is going to shit since any parent can bully teachers. Seriously, if you're so annoyed about the teacher asking your kid to read any specific book then ask the teacher for an acceptable replacement (for your kid only of course). Or take your kid somewhere else. Or accept an F for that specific assignment.
I wish principals grew a spine and supported their teachers on this kind of stuff.
Bet this kid is popular.
He's 14 and running home to mommy because a book had naughty words in it..
I can see a parent running across the book and going full on "I'M A MOTHER, AND AS A MOTHER I FEEL.." mode while the kid stands there horribly embarrassed .. but for the kid to be the one who started it all... kid must be living in a bubble.
At any rate, firing the teacher would be more than sufficient if the school decides it was a major no-no.. criminal charges is beyond ridiculous.
Firing the teacher would be absurd, criminal charges would be truly insane. The former only seems in any way legitimate because of the total insanity of the latter - not for one second does a teacher deserve to lose their job for reading a perfectly innocuous (and pretty damn good, IMO) scifi novel to a class of 14 year olds.
if this, then Shakespeare has got to go as well.
Not to mention several books from The Old Testament.
Idiots...
So no more penis, but also no spine.
The thing about protesting that kind of thing, is you put yourself at risk. This is largely why I am part of that complacent mass. I have a job, a home, a bright looking future. I think there's lots of problems with the world that should be fixed, but I sure as hell am not going to risk losing what I have. The only people who can protest this stuff are people who don't have much to begin with, and they just get shrugged off as "jobless hippies". It's actually a suspiciously well engineered little system.
Calling up the school in a huff because the cafeteria serves junk food on the other hand.. very low risk for the bored stay at home mom..
It was read to the class. Doesn't it mean it was pornophonic? Which has to be less severe. I mean... if it were the same in terms of arousal effectiveness, I imagine radio porn would be rampant.
Let's TP the mother's home. My mom was/is very conservative but she never made a fuss about literature she found objectionable. She simply told the teacher that her kid would not be reading that book/seeing the movie until he was older (high school). That's the proper way to handle it. Like an adult instead of a whiny little bitch demanding the teacher be fired.
Nudity == nudity not porn. It is our natural state and nothing to be ashamed of.
Porn == sex. I don't recall any sex in Ender's Game (or the sequel Speaker for the Dead). So NOT pornographic.
This is as crazy as the government arresting teens who took nude photos with their phones, and then claiming it's porn. It isn't porn if there's no sex stupid cops and stupid politicians. Arrest them for the actual crime committed (nudity)..... oh that's right. The SCOTUS said nudity is not a crime.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Your circumstances are perfect for getting involved politically.
Start locally. Have you written a PAPER letter to your Congress critters yet? To your governor? To your state legislature?
If not, why not?
Have you volunteered for a political candidate?
Congratulations slave, you have proven the Conservatives right, they believed that making the working class home owners would turn them into good reliable little workers unwilling to risk the house they can't afford with silly things such as looking for a new job, or even thinking about striking.
Why bother with capturing slaves when the feeble just whip themselves?
Mind you, you wouldn't be so bad, if the bleeding hearts wouldn't feel sorry you if you get slaughtered in the revolution. But somehow, your kind then suddenly turns into "innocent" citizens and not supporters of the regime.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The teacher should be fired. The kids should have been reading their own books instead of having the book read aloud to them. How can everyone else be so far off topic?
To continue on the serious note, everyone, I mean everyone, complains that boys don't read. The fact is that if a boy is brought up int he average school, he is given nothing, and excuse my language, but chick lit to read. The only reason I read was because my father read and it was stuff interesting to boys. Heinlein, Pohl, etc. It was pulp, but it got me into the habit of reading so i could read more of the conventional and socially acceptable stuff.
My kid had no interest in reading until I got him started on Ben Bova's Orion series. He's 11 and loves it. Yes it's full violence, and sex, and "porn" - I mean, sex with a goddess while covered with animal entrails amid a stone age civilization? It doesn't get any better!
The early Card stuff is next; Planet Called Treason, Ender's Game, you name it. Those are boy books!
I mean school is so screwed up that when we read the Canterbury Tales, the cool tales were the ones that could not be assigned.
Hehe... I read The Wife Of Bath with my 14 year old daughter. Nothing like the prologue where she rants about the uselessness of virginity. Again, want to hold a teenager's attention while reading the classics? Show then the classics!
The bible is one of the most pornographic and violence filled books ever.
Two of the more pornographic passages, yes the second one is incest, no it is not taken out of context in the least.
Ezekiel 23:20
There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.
Genesis 19:32
Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.
I have a job, a home, a bright looking future. I think there's lots of problems with the world that should be fixed, but I sure as hell am not going to risk losing what I have.
Then, frankly, you don't belong in a democratic society. The whole point of our society and especially how the U.S. was set up to begin with was so that anyone in the populous could fight for what they believe is right without the fear of losing everything they have for speaking up. I am beginning to think that complacency isn't the real problem here, cowardice is. When did America get castrated by the corporations and the bullies? It's a sad day in a democracy when the people are afraid to say something is right or wrong because they are afraid to lose everything.
Yeah but in the minds of conservative, sex negative parents (or non parents for that matter), acknowledging that sex exists, or even that there are differences between "boy parts" and "girl parts" is basically the same thing as showing the kids a full length interracial, midget, anal gang-bang.
Between Santorum, Limbaugh and the rest of those jokers bible thumping their way into our bedrooms
I don't care much for Bill Maher, but he was spot-on when he said "even gay men don't think about gay sex as much as Rick Santorum does".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Your sniveling cowardice makes me want to vomit. You deserve to be stomped. Unfortunately, your disgusting weakness will only get OTHER people stomped. I have been raising hell about getting critical problems fixed for 20 years or so, occasionally WINNING those fights, and guess what? There have been NO destructive consequences to my life. None. Zero.
Nothing can be done for people like you. Go whimper in your little corner, terrified of any word or act that might challenge the absolute dominance of your Rightful Lords And Masters.
Agreed. I can't help but chuckle at the outrage when I tell the neighbors that we had a fairly decent intro to mammalian reproductory systems in grade 4 biology. Oh yeah, we did have biology and history as separate subjects starting in grade 4, then chemistry and physics starting in grade 5.
The biggest conservative idiocy IMHO is the whine about sexualizing/objectifying children. Well, it's the adults who do it for crying out loud, not kids! For a kid, learning about the reproductive system has no subtexts at all, and is just as much of a non-loaded topic as learning about, say, basics of organic chemistry like perchance simple hydrocarbons. People who believe that knowledge of the reproductive system is somehow a taboo/dirty subject are the ones where the problem is -- it's not with the subject, nor with the kids, it's with the parents who unfortunately were not brought up in a sane environment, and their minds got so warped around those subjects that they can't deal with them in a normal way.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
These are the same people who bombard the FCC the moment Janet Jackson flashes a boob but have no problem with hours of people being shot to death on TV.
They are ok with literal genocide committed by a child soldier, but the moment the kid has to take a shower (and fight a bully), NOW it's pornographic?
Having gone to a high school where no less than ten of the students I saw everyday became mommies long before graduation, but no attempts at xeno/genocide, it doesn't really come as a big surprise to me.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Of course they should. What do you think the school system is for exactly?
No offense, I'm against this book ban and any other on a school wide scale, but parents should always have the last word on education (since they could after-all simply homeschool if they had the resources). There's no reason a public school system should have the right to dictate education without parental approval, unless you believe in something other than the freedoms America no longer stands for, of course.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Your sniveling cowardice makes me want to vomit.You deserve to be stomped. Unfortunately, your disgusting weakness will only get OTHER people stomped. I have been raising hell about getting critical problems fixed for 20 years or so, occasionally WINNING those fights, and guess what? There have been NO destructive consequences to my life. None. Zero.
You seem to have a childish, cartoonish view of conservatives. You should get out more; it's good for you.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I don't care about the crazy soccer moms here. I care that the school board is failing utterly at their job. They are supposed to insulate teachers from crazy parents. They are supposed to be rational, and say "Yes, Mrs. Smith, we heard you, but we leave individual book assignments to the teachers. If you're unhappy with the content the public education system provides, take your child down the street to the private school that more closely matches your morals. Yes, we know it's expensive, but that's your choice."
And yes, a vocal minority of outraged parents (bonded together by a common hatred of porn / literature / science / logic / foreign accents / whatever) will put up their own flat-earth candidate, and will get that school board member fired. Term limits of one would prevent them from worrying about it too much.
Instead, what this school board did is told all their teachers "you're going to get fired for teaching anything that goes against the arbitrary capricious whims of any nutcake parent." And they told every nutcake parent in the district "want to get that unmarried pregnant teacher fired? Just accuse her of having dyed her hair, we're just as crazy as you and we'll fire her for you." That board may as well not exist for all the good they're doing their school system.
John
It has probably to do with the fact, that fully blown genocide actually requires skill, while getting pregnant (yourself or getting someone else pregnant) mainly requires the absence of skills - skills one can be taught by actually being educated about sexuality.
Your first two statements are true. The last is provably false if you're referring to writing skill. He may have skill in water polo or stacking blocks of wood into tall towers, but he can't write for shit.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Well, 1-900 numbers were pretty big before the internet came along and undercut them on price.
And as long as you keep it text, even Dr. Girlfriend can be an operator.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I don't have kids so I don't really know what's going through these people's heads. I've always suspected that everybody hopes that if nobody brings it up, it'll never occur to the teenagers to get up to mischief. It becomes a perpetual "no it cannot be a problem right now, maybe next year" sort of thing. So if something like sex-ed comes along, it causes the issue to come up at an inopportune time (note: There is no opportune time...) , so they get frustrated that this particular problem is coming up right now. The result? People don't want their kids exposed to things that'll make them think about sex. I'd like to think I'm right, but the thing that baffles me the most about this is all these parents, for some reason, don't remember what being a teenager was like. Remember Back to the Future? Remember Marty's Mom? "I never did things like call boys or park in a car with a boy" and all that other stuff? That's the image I get in my head when I think about these people.
Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. Whatever their motivations, I agree that trying to keep their kids as pure as the Flanders family is not a useful solution. I just don't see why they'd even have violence on their radar until they start seeing their kids actually hurting each other. Until then, there actually is some sense in being offended by pornographic imagery and turning a blind eye to violence on TV. It's a non-argument, sorry.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
...as opposed to feeding them everything the state wants them to believe, thereby eliminating differences in thought.
I'd rather have a system with a few misguided nimrods than one where the state provides everything and has people depend on it thereby. Nice concept of freedom there.
Then, frankly, you don't belong in a democratic society.
Let me get this straight... You think he doesn't deserve to be in this society because he isn't willing to give up his house, family, career and future, to protect the rights of kids to read a particular book in class. (They aren't even his kids)
I don't like censorship either, but there is a reason that revolutions are started by the young. If this book got banned nationwide because of these dumb complaints, are you willing to go to jail over it? If speech alone isn't enough, are you willing to kill to keep this book uncensored? I know you aren't talking about violence and don't mean to imply that. I'm just bringing it up for examples of how far people are willing to go to protect something.
It is impossible for a person to fight every injustice on the planet. Most people settle for the things that matter to them the most, like their own family and kids and house.
Glad I'm not the only one who wondered why OSC is so revered. I loved the Ender short story, and read quite a few of this guy's novels thinking they would be just as thought provoking, but each book I read made me like him less and less.
I guess you don't like his writing style. I don't know that it's very prosaic but he does tell a great story. I remeber so many great authors I had to read in English lit. They had great style. Really wonderful writers. They couldn't tell a story for shit though. Theodore Dreiser? Really. What shit. Sylish shit is still shit. I think I read more polished turds in High School than I knew existed.
No, his style is not the problem.
Yes, I think I read Ender's Game in high school. But I also read The Tempest, The Forever War, Ringworld, Pale Fire, Crime and Punishment and Gravity's Rainbow, so I was ultimately able to tell the difference between gold and shit. I also learned that "teen fiction" like Ender's Game is insulting to teens. It is possible to write for an adolescent audience without telling you what to think, like Card often does. And most "teen fiction" or "young adult fiction" is really most appropriate for 10 and 11 year olds who have to be convinced to read a book. By the time a kid is 13, they no longer need to be pandered to.
Orson Scott Card is one of the most overrated writers ever to write juvenile fiction. He and Ayn Rand are #1 and #2 on that list, but I admit to not being able to decide on the order.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, everyone but the child (who doesn't know any better) and the teacher (who was doing their job) is at fault. The parent for failing to do actual parenting. The school for knuckling. Etc.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"