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Some thoughts about this unfortunate decision from an English teacher who just finished teaching through The Great Gatsby himself with his 11th graders (albeit in the oddness that comes with the sudden transition to a virtual environment). https://twitter.com/sarahemclaugh/status/1253754665403133953">https://twitter.com/sarahemcl...
One of the most important questions we need to ask with regards to the books our high school students read is: what do we want our students to be prepared for? And along with that: how are we preparing them for that?
One of the primary reasons why these books seem to have been deemed inappropriate (besides the fact that certain board members never even read them and just used sparknotes when they were in school 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙄" title="Face with rolling eyes" aria-label="Emoji: Face with rolling eyes">) is that they’re dealing with sexual topics and difficult problems.
) is that they’re dealing with sexual topics and difficult problems." title="One of the primary reasons why these books seem to have been deemed inappropriate (besides the fact that certain board members never even read them and just used sparknotes when they were in school https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙄" title="Face with rolling eyes" aria-label="Emoji: Face with rolling eyes">) is that they’re dealing with sexual topics and difficult problems." class="img-responsive" style="max-width:100%;"/>
Let me say upfront that I get the fact that there are certain topics we& #39;d like to not have to handle within the classroom. It would be great to teach without dealing with the subject of rape in the literature that we cover.
One of the books I regularly cover with my high school students is Ovid& #39;s Metamorphoses, an ancient text detailing the Greek/ Roman myths. There& #39;s a lot of stories in the book of gods raping women (and occasionally men) in Greek mythology, and those are not easy stories to teach.
I would prefer skipping over such stories and not dealing with them. I would also prefer if they didn& #39;t have to live in a world where rape and sexual harassment didn& #39;t happen. But that isn& #39;t the case.
Given the fact that both of those things do happen, then, students need to be prepared to live in a world that can be a pretty dark place at times and be ready to think through and respond to sexual harassment and abuse in appropriate ways.
If I cut these stories out of my curriculum, my class would certainly be easier to teach. But I wouldn& #39;t have the opportunity to help students think through how to respond to the sexual harassment/abuse they& #39;ll see in life and how to grapple honestly with life in a broken world.
Now, I do balance out the stories we read so we rotate between works with harder themes and easier themes (we don& #39;t cover all of Ovid& #39;s Metamorphoses). But cutting the harder themes out entirely won& #39;t help us guide students through thinking and acting with wisdom & virtue.
(About to jump on a Zoom call for a tutoring session with one of my students, so I& #39;ll return to this thread later on).
