Saturday, November 15, 2008

Censorship

It is ironic that my "name" on this blog is Granger, which obviously is an allusion to Fahrenheit 451 and also illustrates my intense love of the book and it's message, and the fact that the high school where I teach has just banned Feed by M.T. Anderson. Both Feed and Fahrenheit 451 are similar, which is why I recommended Feed to our Book Review Committee and why it was originally adopted. Well, it was adopted two years ago, under a different school administration and a different school board...now, um, the inappropriate language (the F-word) is causing it to be banned. I was not the one who was teaching Feed at the time of the controversy. A new English teacher in our department was teaching it and a parent complained that she didn't want her daughter to read the book; the teacher gave the student an alternate book; end of story, right? No, the parent also complained to a school board member, who then complained to our new first year principal, who then decided...to suspend teaching of the book and made the new English teacher personally confiscate each copy of the book from each student. My students were just finishing Fahrenheit 451 and heard about the controversy. One of my students came up to me after class one day and said that it all reminded him of the Coda from Fahrenheit when Bradbury writes about how there is more than one way to burn a book. That says it all. You can't fool students and you should never underestimate them. That school board member and the new principal provided the most relevant text-to-world connection my students could ever encounter with their reading of Fahrenheit 451. Oh, and yeah, since we have so many copies of Feed, we are still allowed to offer the book as "independent reading." The next week, the new English teacher offered the book as independent reading and every single student, except the one whose parent complained (who actually really wanted to read the book), chose to read the book. It's interesting how things work out in the end.

1 comment:

Jenna said...

Thanks for the book recommendation. We don't have it in our Library, but the librian is working on finding it this weekend so I check it out!

It's sad that it was banned, but what a great teachable moment... I love teaching F451 too, maybe we can trade ideas sometime?