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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.'"
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.
Hansel and Gretel shove a little old lady into on oven and broil her, and that's been broadly accepted as children's fare for two hundred years. A little justifiable homicide shouldn't be a big issue all of a sudden.
No relation to Happy Monkey
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.
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.
Tricky moral situations are essential for children's reading. Feeding children sanitized narratives only primes them to accept the sanitizied narratives that are fed to us by government and media. Expose children to grey moral areas early, and they will be better equipped to handle grey moral areas in life.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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"
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!
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
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.
At any rate, the teacher should be reinstated and the damned administrators should be fired.
Naw, I'm pretty sure it went like this:
.... um.... (quickly googles ender's game pornographic) .... See! It's right there, at the top of google! Ender's Game is pornographic! .... by the way, are you voting for Santorum? Google "Santorum" and let's see what comes up....
Parent: This book is pornographic and the teacher is reading it to my 14 yr old!
Superintendent: Ender's Game? (thinking: I haven't read that) What parts are pornographic? (read: take quotes out of context and make them sound bad)
Parent: (thinking: shit! I haven't read it either! I just hate that teacher!)
Superintendent: OH! Well! That changes everything! I will definitely fire that teacher!
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
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.
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
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)
Problem is that second fact of yours isn't one. This issue isn't one where the behavior is the same on both sides of the aisle.
I'm a librarian, and I've been on the other end of a few attempts at book bans, and have probably heard more about them than most non-librarians. I have never seen nor heard an account of an "overly liberal parent" who objects to "books that they consider too racist or insensitive" to the point that --and this is an important distinction-- said person demands to have a book removed from a collection and made unavailable to students/people/kids.
I've never seen this behavior, I've never heard of it, and your own links don't provide even any anecdotal references to it. Your second link does describe how many liberals will often stock their libraries with books that support their own worldview, and how they will push to have these books included on school reading lists. That might be true enough, but it is absolutely inaccurate to equate this with book banning/censorship, as the article does. Sure, it is advocating one's own world view. However showing preference to certain books is very, very different from removing access to certain books. Only one of these things is censorship.
Book banning is censorship, and it is a typical (and a stereotypical) conservative solution, not a liberal one.