David Olio, a Connecticut high-school English teacher, has resigned rather than face being fired after reading a racy Allen Ginsburg poem to his class. Olio not only teaches AP (Advanced Placement) English, but won Connecticut’s highest award for teaching excellence. You can read the poem, “Please Master,” here. There’s no doubt that it’s salacious, but it’s also likely to inspire a good discussion.
But the circumstances are even more exculpating than him just reading an inappropriate poem to students. As The Daily Beast reports, he was more or less blindsided by it:
It was the kind of moment teachers covet. An Advanced Placement English class focusing on poetry, and a student brings in a poem that caught his eye, hoping to discuss in the waning moments of the period how the poet uses language in his work.
The teacher, David Olio, a 19-year veteran of the South Windsor School District and winner of Connecticut’s highest award for teaching excellence, didn’t know the poem in question, but he took a look and walked the students through it in the remaining time.
The poem the student discovered and brought in was “Please Master,” an extremely graphic account of a homosexual encounter published by Allen Ginsberg in 1968 that begins: “Please master can I touch your cheek / please master can I kneel at your feet / please master can I loosen your blue pants.”
Clearly, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” this wasn’t. But the students were 17- and 18-year-olds, some of whom were taking the AP course in conjunction with the University of Connecticut and receiving college credit.
One day after the class, Olio was placed on indefinite, unpaid leave by the district. Seventy-two hours later, the district began termination proceedings against him. Three weeks after that, he agreed to resign.
If you read the Daily Beast or the CNN accounts, you’ll see that this incident has severely divided the town, with many taking Olio’s side. I am one of them. Perhaps he made a misstep reading the poem, which after all is pretty graphic, and for that he was admonished for upsetting his students. The school superintendent, for instance wrote him this:
“It was irresponsible for you to present this poem to children under your charge,” she wrote. “Some of your students are minors, and you gave neither the students nor their parents any choice whether they wished to be subjected to the sexual and violent content of this poem. Moreover, some students reported being emotionally upset by having to hear this poem.”
And I can see their point of view. Had I been him, I would have either warned students (but maybe he didn’t get the chance, for he was simply presented with the poem), or asked them to read it on their own, letting them know it was graphic. Yet one can defend the poem, too, as a sort of metaphor:
In the series of poems written around the time of “Please Master,” Ginsberg was trying to explore every aspect of the human experience—intellectual, egotistical, spiritual, and sexual, no matter how messy or unpleasant. Like Walt Whitman, he was attempting to catalogue every aspect of the self, “even those we normally hide from ourselves in order to feel better and flatter ourselves and to make ourselves feel like important people,” said Steve Silberman, a San Francisco-based writer who was a student, teaching assistant, and friend of Ginsberg’s for 25 years.
“Allen thought that by bringing material into poetry that were previously considered unpoetic, he enlarged the poetic occupation,” Silberman said.
Read literally, the poem is about Ginsberg, presumably, describing his sexual abjection before a lover, in this case usually considered to be Neal Cassidy, a bisexual sometime lover of Ginsberg’s and the hero of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. But there are other readings. Silberman puts the piece in the long tradition of religious poetry that crosses all faiths and which involves a submission to a figure who represents the divine. It can be read, too, as a metaphor for a society that represses and marginalizes those who engage in the kind of acts described.
Well, maybe. Regardless, it’s just dumb to fire an award-winning teacher for reading a poem that one of his students gave him—a poem that he only just saw and didn’t have time to review. At best, he could have been reprimanded. But I worry that his incipient firing will keep other teachers from reading “challenging” poems to students. Given the nature of students these days, in fact, I don’t think this poem would shock many of them. Have a look for yourself and weigh in below.
These aren’t elementary students, and this is an AP class. Many universities accept AP classes for university credit, so why shouldn’t there be university level content.
Well, given his record and accomplishments I hope he finds a good job at a better school. I feel bad for him; it sounds like he was trying to do right by his student and trust the student(s) to pick out their own material for analysis, but got a bit blindsided by a student who chose a poem because it was salacious.
What I want to know is what the hell went wrong with the generation that are now 40-50 years of age. They are responsible as parents and powers-that-be for the current puritanical pearl-clutching going on these days on campuses.
Seriously, not enough Thunder Cats? Too much Space: 1999? Was The Littlest Hobo too traumatising? Did Happy Days melt their brains? I don’t get it, and I’m in that generation.
Maybe that’s because no generation is uniformly conservative or progressive – you might think that Millenials are progressive, but you’re still going to find a lot of pearl-clutchers among them, too.
When you grow up thinking Thatcher and Reagan are the best thing since sliced bread, things get a little weird. And of course the authoritarian streak seemed to be on top then.
Omg, Littlest Hobo!!
My favorite crime fighting dog!
D*g I mean.
Humblest apologies.
A peace offering:
http://cdn.fashionablygeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/batcat.jpg?f187b0
The short answer is the Aids crisis.
For example, all the freedoms the lgbt community conquered between the 60’s and the 70’s were undermined by the fire and brimstone crowds of the 80’s. Coinciding with the great rise of the televangelists.
They suddenly had ‘evidence’ to prove more liberal attitudes to sex and sexuality were evil. Instead of fighting that notion, many abandoned both the feminist and lgbt ideological camps and ventured towards a campaign that emulated the values of the conservative community.
The idea that we had the right to be ourselves was pushed aside and we went with the more establishment concept that we should have rights if we behave just like them. Don’t question the traditional institution of marriage, be a part of it. Don’t question military action, join it and so forth…
I don’t believe that AIDs was the crucial catalyst you portray it is. Do buy into that would mean believing that without AIDs, somehow today’s XIans would be embracing gay marriage? Maybe I misunderstand you…
What I mean is that Aids played a dramatic role in what through the 60’s and 70’s was a very strong movement.
Feminists, gays and progressives in general backed-down, leaving a tremendous amount of space for conservative religionists to peddle their wares.
In high school, we read all of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Nobody made any comment or though that much about it. I’m 67 now, and I have no idea why everyone seems to get upset at the smallest things…
To paraphrase the opening line of “Howl”, we’ve seen the best minds of that generation destroyed by the madness of puritanical political correctness.
Another red-herrring. You’re going to blame Political Correctness for 3 decades of Conservatives run amok? I don’t think so.
Who’s discussing “three generations”? The question posed in Comment #3 above concerned people in the 40-to-50 age range. This is the cohort that was in college when political correctness and postmodernism first hit their stride in academia. They are now the parents of high-school and college students — the ones whose children are clamoring for “safe spaces” on campuses and “trigger warnings” in texts. You can’t see the connection?
Tough call. I’ll wager Mr. Olio was having second thoughts about his decision to discuss the poem as it was being read aloud, but perhaps felt it was too late to turn back and close the book at that point. But I have to agree that that poem was not high school level, regardless of how AP the class.
This put the school district in a tough position, no doubt, and of course, they erred on the side of political correctness and wanted to avoid seeming in any way to condone this essentially pornographic work of art as being appropriate for minors.
Sad. I’m sure some other more courageous town will snap this guy up.
Is it though?
The poetry of Catullus is just as explicit, if not more so; and yet it was right there in my Latin textbooks in high school. No-one fainted or freaked out or got offended. And I was not at a liberal school. Maybe the fact that it was Latin, and therefore required translation made it “safer”.
I remember an English edition of the ‘Satyricon’ (Modern Library) in which all the dirty bits remained in Latin.
Same with the lyrics of Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. (Old Spice advert, for the rest of us). Let’s just say that 11th and 12th century clergy thought debauchery was hilarious.
Nothing mucky in these lyrics! You must have misheard them.
OMG, that’s side-splitting!
😀
Brilliant!
http://www.classical.net/music/comp.lst/works/orff-cb/carmlyr.php
b&
It was almost the same with the first English translation of Jin Ping Mei ‘The Plum in the Golden Vase’ (late sixteenth century) – all the ‘dirty bits’ were rendered into latin, and the suggestive title was changed to ‘The Golden Lotus’
Yeah the first thing I thought about was Catallus. We had a tame poem in our textbooks but being geeks, we looked up other poems in the library and brought in all the dirty ones. My Latin teacher was impressed with us and told us how smart we were as she was going to share those naughtier poems with us but we found them before she had a chance.
I guess parents couldn’t get upset because it wa in Latin and therefore hidden. Same was Shakespeare – like Latin, Elizabethan English is completely foreign so the dirty bits are missed.
http://www.negenborn.net/catullus/
A bit of random clicking…and this one seems particularly apropos to this subject:
Come here, nasty words, so many I can hardly tell where you all came from. That ugly slut thinks I’m a joke and refuses to give us back the poems, can you believe this shit? Lets hunt her down , and demand them back! Who is she, you ask? That one, who you see strutting around, with ugly clown lips, laughing like a pesky French poodle. Surround her, ask for them again! “Rotten slut, give my poems back! Give ’em back, rotten slut, the poems!” Doesn’t give a shit? Oh, crap. Whorehouse. or if anything’s worse, you’re it. But I’ve not had enough thinking about this. If nothing else, lets make that pinched bitch turn red-faced. All together shout, once more, louder: “Rotten slut, give my poems back! Give ’em back, rotten slut, the poems!” But nothing helps, nothing moves her. A change in your methods is cool, if you can get anything more done. “Sweet thing, give my poems back!”
Cheers,
b&
Yeah Catullus isn’t the best of poets but Romans weren’t the best of writers either. He spent most of his time slandering people he didn’t like or slamming women who didn’t like him anymore.
I just had a random thought, and you’d know the answer if anybody would…
…what’re the chances that Catalus was seventeen when he wrote that…?
b&
I don’t know too much about him other than I think his poems were found stuffed somewhere as garbage. Poor Catullus.
Judging just from that one poem…I can somehow see him both appreciating and being furious at the irony of that fate.
…makes you wonder at all that didn’t survive (especially with the heavy-handed Christian censorship for centuries), with obvious parallels with Evolution and all the species that never do leave fossils.
And we get maybe a century if we’re superbly lucky to sample all of that? And have to spend the majority of that time slaving away for a bunch of idiots at work?
Damn….
b&
“Romans weren’t the best of writers”?
Vergil, Ovid, and Horace? Cicero, Julius Caesar, and Sallust? I’d say they did pretty good.
I didn’t say they were bad, just not the best and I’d consider Cicero an orator.
Chaucer, Boccacio and Shakespeare are racy as well. They even put Christabel on the GCSE (that’s 16 years old) syllabus and that has a saucy lesbian sex scene. I am sure the people who chose it had not even considered this because schools are stultifying places.
To be ‘essentially pornographic,’ ‘Please Master’ would have to excite the reader sexually. Well, I know the poem and it is not pornographic to this reader. Rather, it is Ginsberg’s consciously writing to shock– through the speaker’s repeated invocation of ‘please master,’ followed by the graphic catalog of predicates of BDSM sex and the submissive’s ecstasy, culminating ‘I do love you/ please Master.’
The effect is not arousal but a reading encounter with the ‘shock of the new’ (1968). A radical poem then, as Walt Whitman’s cognate poetry was a century earlier. For me, Whitman is the better poet by far. But there’s no doubt that he and Ginsberg were talking about the same thing: gay sex and its affects.
But I wonder: what high school senior taking AP English wouldn’t know, say, the ‘Fifty Shades’ books or the movie? An R-rating wouldn’t have kept them away from the theatres, nor an embarrassed librarian from the novels. And in any case ‘Fifty Shades’ probably confirmed what they knew already about hard sex.
Which is all to say that the teacher did the right thing and should have been praised rather than condemned.
My daughter wouldn’t have.
“My daughter wouldn’t have.” Wouldn’t have what? It’s not clear what you’re replying to.
He says “What high school senior taking AP English wouldn’t know, say…” Do you mean “My daughter wouldn’t know.”?
Yes. My daughter was (still is, for that matter, despite having, uh, some experiences by now) the most resolutely innocent person I’ve ever met. As I am a child of the 60’s, it’s fair to say she didn’t get it from me. She’s a sweetheart, and easily embarrassed. (But tough as nails when necessary.)
She sounds like the ideal student to be able to handle this kind of material without undue trauma, as well as an ideal candidate to gain a broadened perspective from it.
(She also sounds like a wonderful daughter and a splendid person.)
There was a fine selection of Harlequin novels in my middle school library. Whatever you may think of them as literature, they were available for the browsing of 10 year olds without restriction.
The obvious forerunner to “Please Master” seems to me to be de Sade — whose more graphic works may not be taught in many high schools, but are generally available, sans plain brown wrapper or age limitation, at most public libraries.
Also
I was confronted with that at the tender age of 14 in my English class. Shakespeare is full of salacious language but perhaps, the fact that it is archaic and a lot of people don’t know what it means now makes it OK. Unfortunately, in order to understand Iago, you need to know exactly what he is saying here and our English teacher did not shrink from the task.
He didn’t get fired for teaching us about Othello.
TRIGGER WARNING: This post contains bad words and an ethnic slur:
When I was in school, “Slaughter-House 5” was required reading. I still remember a poem a character recites, 35 years later:
“In my prison cell I sit/With my britches full of shit/And my balls are gently bouncing on the floor/When I see the bloody snag/Where she bit me on the bag/O, I’ll never fuck a Polack any more.” We read it and all survived. However . . .
If Olio wasn’t familiar with the poem, then he should have told the student that he would take it home and read it before deciding whether to share it with the class. He is the teacher, he chose to read it, so he is responsible. I know that the students aren’t babies, but I’m not sure I’d want my kids reading a poem that graphically describes anal sex and analingus in High School English class, whether the characters were straight or gay. Would feminists be okay with the poem if the narrator were a woman begging to be dominated?
I don’t think that he should be fired though. If we all got fired every time we used poor judgement, no one would have a job.
And yes, I know that they hear worse stuff in rap music.
‘Would feminists be okay with the poem if the narrator were a woman begging to be dominated?’
See Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy,’ the most notorious line of which is ‘Every woman adores a fascist.’ And, yes, feminists have made an icon of Plath.
Please insert a name in the future. As I said, I am going to stop posting comments by people who don’t fill in a name and are posted as “Anonymous.” You can’t tell one “Anonymous” from another!
As I emailed you privately, Prof. Coyne, I thought I was posting by name–as I always have before–but came up ‘anon,’ anon. Hope it’s fixed now.
Yes, thanks.
Interestingly, you still have the same icon (for those of us who can see icons).
So, different anonymodes should be distinguishable by different icons.
/@
WordPress builds the icon thingy using your email methinks.
Yes; I suspect it some sort of an hash function. It’s a 60 x 60 pixel square. That’s 3600 pixels. It’s a kaleidoscopically repeating pattern; the same 45-degree slice is reflected and rotated to create eight copies of the same data…meaning they’ve got at most 450 bits to work with. And It’s not just a random 450 bits; there’s too much apparent structure for that. Plus the color varies, but I haven’t checked to see by how much…that could give them another 8 or 24 bits to work with.
I’d guess they run the email address through a standard hash function to get 128 or 160 or 256 bits basically guaranteed to be unique per email address, and then feed those bits into something that expands it in a deterministic and non-chaotic manner to get the 450 bits for the icon.
Creating something similar shouldn’t take more than a day for a competent programmer. Aesthetic tweaking might take longer. Implementation and performance details, such as caching and generating proper HTML and what-not, will take longer still.
b&
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-identicon/
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Ah — thanks! Looks like I was right…though the plugin you identified doesn’t seem to be the same one Jerry’s using here. But the one you linked to uses four tiles per email address, and each tile is picked from a palette of 45 tiles. That gives a 90 bit address space…likely “good enough” for its function, but not for anything serious.
b&
I’m not quite sure how you arrived at “90 bit address space”, combining 4 tiles out of a set of 45 gives you 45^4 ~ 4M icons /of each colour/.
Not good enough for Facebook, but probably for WEIT!
/@
Not 45^4; 4^45 = 2^90 =~ 1,237,940,039,285,380,274,899,124,224…but, you’re right. I didn’t consider color….
But the “not good enough” part that I was referring to is that that’s a very small hash space such that it shouldn’t be too difficult to generate collisions — that is, pick somebody you want to impersonate and generate some other completely different email address that creates the same icon.
b&
So a number with four decimal digits has, what? 4^10 values?
/@
Oh, shit…I fucked that one up.
Again.
Damn…you’d think I’d have figured that one out by now.
<sigh />
So…45^4 = 4,100,625, or log2(45^4) ~= 22 bits. Tiny, tiny space, lots of collisions expected — every couple million email addresses on average. And even Google lets you arbitrarily create as many email addresses as you want; just add a plus sign plus whatever between your “real” address and the “@.”
b&
Yeah some developers at my old job built something using the same idea at a hackathon and explained it all to me. They were mathy guys so I think they glossed over it first before I asked them to go over how it works with me.
Never mind!
Here’s my attempt to de/re-construct the identicons on this page as of a few hours ago.
Each full identicon is made up of four groups of four tiles, with each group rotated clockwise as you move clockwise around the icon.
Within each set of four tiles, it seems to be the case that the top-right and bottom-left tiles are always identical. The bottom-right tile can be the same as these. But it seems to be the case that the top-left and bottom right are always different. Colours are unique within this cohort.
I haven’t counted the individual tiles yet, but there are clearly others that could logically exist by rotation, inversion and translation.
/@
Not bad…and seems to line up pretty well with the documentation here:
http://scott.sherrillmix.com/blog/blogger/wp_identicon/
b&
Easy in your case…asking a lot for those of us with WP geometric design icons…
I suppose some ambitious reader could make Jerry a Key to WEIT WP Icons… 😀
As a feminist, yes because it is saying something about the poem’s narrator. That fascist line is a great one from Plath and I can relate.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178960
b&
I like that poem and I recall a class where we all laughed about poems and stories about relationships with fathers (including many Disney stories and Star Wars) where the relationship is terrible. When we laughed about it, we decided we all must have really weird dads because we kind of get that cultural ethos.
It says something — not sure what, but definitely something — that that sort of relationship is so common. I feel quite fortunate that I missed out on that, with no more than the usual adolescent “You can’t tell me what to do!” angst — and not even all that much of that. But, I fear, I appear to be something of an outlier….
b&
My high school teacher gave me a copy of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions with the stipulation that I not tell anyone who gave it to me. He was my AP English teacher in 1973. He was one of my best teachers and we still keep in touch. He gave me a collection of Walt Whitman as a graduation present.
I think the principal was a little spineless and a bit of a KV *.
“Would feminists be okay with the poem if the narrator were a woman begging to be dominated?”
That depends. Many submissives in the BDSM community are feminists. I’ve known three different women personally that identified as feminists while they were practicing subs.
You may well be right, but your limited sample size should urge caution in setting an upper bound on your confidence level.
My comment was only to illustrate that being a feminist and being a submissive are not mutually exclusive concepts.
I know; I was just kidding around.
A quibble: the poem alludes to, but does not “graphically describe” anal sex and analingus, although a more lyric and explicit description of gay sex can be found in W. H. Auden’s “Platonic Blow” (did all the great poets write smut?) Flipping through my various anthologies of gay poetry, I find a Ginsberg poem that is far more explicit than “Please Master.”
[Digression: I’m fond of a Tennessee Williams poem, “Life Story” which alludes to a anonymous hotel encounter. It’s clean, but if you read attentively, it’s clearly two men. The last line shows Williams’s macabre sense of humor.]
Still, I think most teens today would view it as a difficult poem, not a shocking one. Though clearly one did to rat out teacher to mommy and daddy. May that student be doomed to an eternity of Victorian moral verse.
T. Williams was very upfront, and at times quite graphic, about his sexuality in the “Memoirs” he published a few years before his death — although for decades his sexuality had hardly been a secret to anyone even remotely paying attention.
Doug: thank you for you prominently displayed “TRIGGER WARNING.” But… that is not enough, now. When I see “TRIGGER WARNING,” my heart starts beating faster, and I feel anxious. So please find a way of alerting me personally, as I have delicate sensibilities.
It’s hard to do jazz hands online! 😀
Oh, I don’t know. this guy seems to have figured out how….
b&
Your YouTube fu dazzles like that guy’s smile.
Thanks! But, just for the record, my YouTube fu wasn’t made surgically permanent….
b&
OMFG, Ben. I’m not going to be able to lose that image:-(. Has anyone ever seen an UNsexier dancer???🙀
Well…there’re the hippos in Disney’s Fantasia….
b&
Well, I think one could argue that those hippo tutus were marginally more sexy than that guy doing Elvis…
You mean you actually paid enough attention and watched it long enough to see him doing Elvis?
…I think somebody has a crush….
b&
@Ben – barf as to having a crush😱
Well, I can’t argue for great literature, but I dimly seem to recall that at school we all knew the words of “The good ship Venus” and some of “Eskimo Nell”…
There was also a well-thumbed copy of Lady Chatterley that would just naturally fall open at 11 particular pages.
If AP high school students aren’t ready for beatnik poetry, then the fault lies not with the teacher teaching them about it but with the teachers before him who failed to properly prepare them.
I don’t see any need to pull “but think of the children” on this one. By the time you’re in AP classes, you’ve already had all the sex education, you’ve already read Shakespeare tragedies with all the really sick and twisted mindfuck games characters like Iago play, you’ve already studied current events that include (right now) the debate over gay marriage…
…if that’s not enough preparation for Ginsburg, then your education has so well and truly failed you I have no clue where to begin to try to pick up the pieces.
b&
Ben, you’re not a parent. (That I know of, anyway.) You really can’t describe all kids categorically like this.
All kids? Of course not.
…but AP classes are supposed to be equivalent to college freshman and sometimes even sophomore classes, and many of them even earn the students college credit hours.
Students in those classes damned well be ready for hippie sex shock rants — else what’re they doing in the class in the first place?
b&
I’d hazard that most of these kids are taking it because it helps them get into college, not because they are the equivalent of a college freshman intending on majoring in English lit.
Secondly, age and maturity matter. I had a 16-year old in my freshman class; while she certainly crushed most of us in the IQ department, she definitely was not as socially advanced and couldn’t necessarily handle sexual subject matter we dealt with easily. Could she have done critical thinking about poetry in line with an AP requirement? Absolutely. And she probably would’ve done it better than my 18-year-old self. Could she have done it for this poem, thinking “academically” about explicitly sexual material? From what I remember of her, no.
I should add that I don’t see any reason for the teacher to be fired. However, I can also think there may be good pedagogical or even pragmatic reasons why an AP lit class would focus primarily on developing collegiate-type and collegiate-level critical thinking skills, while ensuring the subject content used to develop those skills is still appropriate for 16- and 17- year olds.
(Aside, I think that lesson applies in general: IMO you don’t start off teaching critical thinking by attacking someone’s deeply held beliefs. You start by applying it to material they have an easy time ‘thinking academically’ about. Then you slowly expand the material you apply those skills to, to less and less comfortable subjects.)
Well said.
Gearing material to the most sensitive or to the emotionally unstable is a sure path to censorship, the route to keeping provocative and challenging material away from the majority who can handle it and would benefit from the exposure.
“Gearing material to the most sensitive or to the emotionally unstable is a sure path to censorship, the route to keeping provocative and challenging material away from the majority who can handle it and would benefit from the exposure.”
Agreed. I think the only sense in which what the teacher did was “wrong”, was that it cost him his job. Society needs more teachers like him, and fewer people who have a problem with that material.
One what basis do you know that only the most sensitive 16-year old would take issue with ‘please master?’. How many count as most sensitive – 10% of the class? 20%? 40%? Got hard statistical data on that? Neither do I.
…which is why when professional educators like the school’s say that this is inappropriate for that class level, I listen rather than armchair quarterback it. I also listen to folk like Yakaru who are professional educators and disagree, who think its entirely appropriate. So I do think there is room for reasonable disagreement here, but I don’t think its as cut and dried as you and Ben make it out to be.
Eric, it’s right there in Jerry’s summary that this is an AP (“Advanced Placement”) class for high school seniors and that they can earn college credit for it.
The most sensitive 16-year-old has no more business being in that classroom than in the college classes where the equivalent credits are awarded.
b&
In a college the most sensitive 16-year old would be able to pick from all available English Lit courses and avoid the literature they don’t like, because they all give college credit. Here they can’t; there is one and only one English college credit course. True, AP isn’t mandatory; they could always choose to put themselves behind their peers by not taking it. But the practical limit on number of AP offerings means that the school board has a reasonable justification for thinking carefully about what should be in the curriculum, and ensuring it will work well for most of the 11th-12th graders who will want to take it.
In an ideal setting where the advanced high school students could easily access the entire course curriculum of the local university, then I’d agree with you, caveat emptor. But that’s not a practical possibility for most HS students so it makes sense to ensure the one AP English Lit course available to all the students is one that will be interesting and appealing to most of the students.
Erm…I still think you’re missing the “advanced” part of “advanced placement.”
If a student isn’t advanced enough at 16 to fully participate in the advanced academic requirements of college-level coursework, then the student doesn’t belong in such an advanced environment.
But you’re arguing that they’re already behind their peers. So why on Earth are you wanting to encourage them to overextend themselves even further, by giving them the false impression that they really are advanced when you’re arguing so vociferously that they really aren’t?
Think sports. You might have a twelve-year-old sprinter who can run rings around the wide receiver on a college football team. Would you put her on the high school’s senior varsity football team because she’s so fast, and then insist that they must now only play flag football so as to avoid injuring her? Or would you just tell her that she’s still got some growing up to do and she can look forward to trying out for the team when she’s ready?
b&
If a student isn’t advanced enough at 16 to fully participate in the advanced academic requirements of college-level coursework…
AFAIK none of the students are complaining about the coursework. This poem wasn’t part of the curriculum.
So to use your football analogy, the 12-year old sprinter did just fine playing football. However halfway through the season one of the linemen suggested everyone be required to do a 200-lb bench press. The coach adopted it. The 12-year old is now complaining about that; it wasn’t what they signed up to do and while related to football, its not critical to showing they can actually play football. I have no problem seeing their point here.
You completely missed the point of the analogy.
You’re hyper-focussed on the fact that your precious snowflakes have one very specific intellectual capability, and ignoring the fact that — by your own emphatic and repeated description! — they’re severely underdeveloped in other critical ways.
Football isn’t just about running fast; sprinting is the sport that’s just about running fast. Football is about running fast, about outmaneuvering your opponents when possible…and about running them the fuck over and smashing the shit out of them if they don’t get out of your way.
Our hypothetical pre-teen girl may well beat everybody else on the team out of the sprinter’s blocks, but that’s nearly irrelevant when it comes to the qualifications for playing football.
She may well also outscore the AP Lit seniors on sentence diagramming and logical syllogisms…but so what? AP Lit is where you’re assumed to have the techniques down and it’s time to start practicing the art of rhetoric, of persuading and moving people. And our hypothetical special flower is as far from ready for that sort of thing as she is to break a tackle.
So what, exactly, is she supposed to get out of this AP class?
You can’t do Romeo and Juliet because she might decide she should kill herself over a boy. You can’t do Macbeth because of that whole bloody hands / domestic violence thing. You can’t do 1984 for all the torture and sex and what-not.
As I wrote: you’re making the varsity football team play flag football just to protect your prodigy because she can run faster than anybody else and you think that’s the only qualification that matters, and having her on the team is more important than even playing football.
I’m sure Ginsburg himself would reply to that notion with something along the lines of, “Fuck that noise!”
b&
Eric– Well put, I was afraid I’d be the only skunk at the garden party. The fact is/was that the instructor is ultimately responsible for the curricular materials presented to his/her students. As described in the preamble to this story, the Ginsberg poem “Please, Master” was proffered by a student “out of the blue”, the instructor took a quick look and apparently said to himself “What the hell, let’s see where it goes.”
I wish I had the balls to do that in my classrooms, but I’m happy to predict that I would’ve taken a pass on that one, likely proffered on a dare among the students and serving, to my mind, no educational objective other than to shock the students.
I’ll argue that if a teacher of AP English hasn’t built into the curriculum at least a bit of shocking lit in the course of a well-reasoned progression, he/she isn’t very good at his/her job. To entertain students with a deliberately provocative tract but with no forethought given to pedagogical outcomes seems to me to be irresponsible.
Skunks Я Us.
You sound like the kind of teacher we parents always hope for.
I think I shall join the skunks in this – I should be happy to direct young people to reading such poems themselves if they wish to (I certainly did! – one wants to discover things, and I didn’t want a bloody teacher preaching about it), but I think to bring in a poem such as that, out of the blue, virtually, was unwise – particularly in the USA, where – if the historian Tony Judt is right in his remarks and in his comparison – it is curiously difficult to discuss sexual themes in an intelligent way even at the university level. Certainly anglophone teachers in Japan often remark on how refreshing it is to be able to discuss sexual matters in the university classroom without the tensions that seem to attend such discussions elsewhere. Ginsberg’s poem is a splendid provocation, as was Verlaine & Rimbaud’s sonnet to the arsehole, or asshole (which is a better poem, I think). And somebody was provoked, alas (as was Mary Whitehouse by a translation of the Verlaine/Rimbaud poem). But I certainly do not think this teacher should be forced to resign. That is disgraceful.
I would hardly call it irresponsible. Daring or perhaps impulsive is more like it.
I agree with you folks. Add me to the skunk list. The decision to read the poem was ill advised, to say the least. And this is from a girl who 1) loves gansta rap 2) my favorite song is Stagger Lee by Nick Cave
However, he should *not* have been fired. At all. Not even disciplined. It was just a bad idea because sex is something that is always guaranteed to trigger someone, somewhere.
A well reasoned progression of (psychologically) easy->hard material sounds like a great idea to me. This was not that. 🙂
Then those children have no place in that classroom.
Let me take a side trip into an analogy that, I’ll be upfront about, is not a direct parallel, but that, if you stick with me all the way through, will be most applicable in this case.
Imagine that there’s an AP biology course that never teaches the students about Darwin nor Evolution in order to protect the delicate sensibilities of the Christians in the class. And, as was explicitly stated is the case for the English class in question here, this course gets you college credits.
What happens when those students go to an university and use those credits as prerequisites for an advanced biology class? Think of the plight of the professor: she’s got an allegedly brilliant young kid, a real hotshot in high school who aced advanced biology classes…and it now turns out that the student is utterly incompetent in the subject matter.
I think we’d agree that that would be a real problem, and, if it persisted, those AP classes would no longer be recognized by the university as valid credit-worthy coursework.
You will instantly object that you can have a perfectly valid English education without even mentioning the Beatniks, let alone Ginsburg, let alone reading aloud one of his more salacious poems.
And your narrowly-focused objection would be valid…
…but the impetus behind the objection is every bit as crippling for the students as a Creationist’s objection to Darwin.
Sure, you could leave, “Yes Master,” on the table. But, if you’re going to do so because it’ll disturb the more sensitive students in the class…you’re also going to have to leave out Huck Finn, because Huck calls Jim a nigger. You’re going to have to leave out 1984 for its graphic depiction of torture in Room 101 and because of its descriptions of Winston and Julia’s illicit lovemaking in the countryside and hidden apartment. You’re going to have to leave out Fahrenheit 451 for its mentions of abortion. You’re going to have to leave out Macbeth for the graphic brutality of deadly domestic violence.
You are not, in other words, going to give your students the basic competence in English literature that they will need in order to survive in an university environment.
I cannot stress this enough: students not mature enough for college-level coursework have no place in a college-level course.
It is incredibly unfair to the students who are mature enough to handle advanced subject matters to deny them the opportunity to do so because they’ve got an immature child with impressionable ears in their midst whose delicate sensibilities need to be protected.
And what of universities themselves? If some ten- or twelve-year-old prodigy goes off to college and easily meets the prerequisites for an upper-division literature class, should the students there be forbidden from working with Lady Chatterly or de Sade because of the child in their midst?
Children who need to be protected from such subject matter should absolutely be protected — by not putting them in classes where challenging materials are fair game. When that protection extends to the adults in the room, you’ve created a far bigger problem than a young child learning that adults sometimes do strange things with their pee-pees.
b&
…but the impetus behind the objection is every bit as crippling for the students as a Creationist’s objection to Darwin.
No, it’s not. Basic biology without Darwin is far more crippling than basic English Lit without Please Master. Its a terrible analogy because you can’t teach biology meaningfully without reference to Darwin, but you can teach literary analysis, poetry analysis, without Please Master. This should be obvious from the fact that the poem wasn’t in the curriculum in the first place, so obviously the professor didn’t think it was needed.
I think the point you’re trying to make is that college courses cover psychologically tough material, so AP courses should too. My response is: maybe. First its not necessarily clear to me that freshman introductory courses do that. Yes colleges offer courses on the Holocaust, on salacious material, and so on. Those are typically geared towards upper class course majors, however, not freshmen seeking a course to fulfill their general humanities requirements. You will have a bit more of a difficult time convincing me that appears regularly in the “101” courses. Secondly, I have no problem with a course leading students through progressively psychologically tougher material. In fact neither you nor I know whether the course in question didn’t do that; it might have. What we do know is that this poem wasn’t originally in the curriculum, so the professor had no plan to use it, so I think we can safely presume he thought analyzing it wasn’t necessary in order to do college-level work. Do you disagree with any of that?
I am a parent and when my kids approach high school, I will prepare them for such poems. I certainly would never complain about such poems being read to my kids, though if I was in high school I would feel uncomfortable and giggle a lot. That is part of growing up. A good teacher, too, could explain the poem and the context of why such literature exists.
I will prepare my kid too. But I’m okay with the school limiting their assignment selections to less racy stuff than what I let my kid read on his own. I also plan on letting my kid have the occasional glass of wine after 17 and don’t intend to campaign against drinking age laws. Shhhh. 🙂
I don’t demand that social policy follow exactly what I think is best for my kid; the state and school administration has to find a good ‘one size fits all’ policy whereas *I* do not. So of course we (me vs. the state) are going to come up with different solutions.
I also let my kids read almost anything, and offered them alcohol before they were 21. In both cases they knew why I was doing it. When I said my daughter would have felt uncomfortable in this teacher’s classroom I was thinking largely of class dynamics, various levels of maturity, etc.
But why is it supposed that young people need teachers all the time to introduce them to literature? Why this odd obsession with being educated? Yes, I am thankful for some of the people who taught literature at school, but I, and others who were interested in the arts, went out and found out for ourselves about what was going on – it wasn’t any teacher who introduced me to Ezra Pound, Charles olson, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, J.H. Prynne, Alan Ginsberg and a host of other writers.
That’s the function that schools have served at least in the States at least since the time of Dewey.
And, indeed, I believe at least some of it goes back to Socrates….
Yes, you’d be quite disappointed if a student never showed any initiative. But you can’t seriously be suggesting that children should be left to educate themselves?
b&
Which is the best way to find them!
Thank you, Diana, it is.
Speaking as a qualified teacher (I even worked as a teacher for a while a decade or two ago!), I say that as far as I can tell from the context the guy did absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong.
The poem is clearly a work of literature and anyone who wants to exclude literature from a literature class has nothing to contribute to this discussion.
The fact that a student brought the poem and he simply read it out suggests to me that this is why he is so highly regarded as a teacher.
The acts depicted in the poem are clearly consensual. No need even for a trigger warning, in my opinion. Nothing even close to edge in that. It should be treated like any other work of literature: as if it were a poem about goldfish or something.
Congrats to Ginsberg for still being able to shake up the prudes nearly sixty years on.
Any students who claim to be offended should be forced to turn over their internet records.
I’m guessing that the problem here is more the parents than the kids. And the administration may fear outside (i.e., non parental, nonstudent) political backlash given that the fundie right is hypersensitive about anything gay right now.
I’m kinda skeptical any of the students – even the ones who had problems with it – would want him fired over it.
It might even be just one parent who is willing to go on the warpath.
Well put! I am definitely over 60, somewhat conservative, but still find it rather odd that these students, who spend a considerable amount of time on the Internet, would be aghast at–or learn anything new from–this poem. It is literature.
LOL@Any students who claim to be offended should be forced to turn over their internet records.
Good one.
It may have been a bit negligent for the teacher to plunge into this poem without having reviewed it first, but it was by no means a firing (or resigning) offense. It seems likely, given the teacher’s history, that he was thrilled that a student had sought out, and then sought to share with the class, relevant outside material and simply got caught up in the moment.
I would have to disagree. I don’t see how it could be negligent to read a poem by a world famous poet to a class of that age. One purpose or intention of the poem was to bring to consciousness an inner dialog of the kind that people have without being aware of it. If anyone is shocked or surprised by it, then that demonstrates the effectiveness of the poem.
This is exactly what literature is all about. That is exactly what should happen in a literature class.
There’s absolutely nothing at all wrong with that poem, and nothing wrong with a trusted teacher reading it aloud before students of that age.
I agree with you completely, Yakaru. During my many years as a professor of English, I discovered that the best ‘teaching moments’ usually occur outside the lesson plan. A curriculum is nothing more than a basic plan and must be instantly adaptable at any time during a class. If an instant of kairos strikes chronos is suspended.
I meant negligent only in the sense that it’s probably prudent for a teacher to familiarize himself with the material being taught in advance of presenting it to a class.
Had Mr. Olio done so here, and still decided to go forward with the poem in class, I’d have all the more respect for him.
Half the kids have iphones with a data package, so their parents are basically piping pron right into their pockets.
A naughty(ish) poem is the least of their problems!!!
I am not sure if Ginsberg would be thrilled or disappointed that his poem upset someone almost 60 years after it was published. As a father of two girls, I think the puritan repression to which we are subjected by the conservative blox is almost as damaging as the same group’s acceptance of gun violence.
Grow up kids. And parents.
Safe to say that AG would have been disappointed there were still such prudes 60 years on — but thrilled that, inasmuch as there are, it was his poem giving them fits.
Sub
Ok, I’ll be the outlier, here. I think that poem would make quite a few kids extremely uncomfortable in a high school class. I think that having “just been handed the poem” is no excuse whatsoever to excuse this incident. An “award-winning” teacher esp. should be canny enough not to fall for that.
Seriously, does anyone think the student was honestly interested in literature, rather than just trying to have the teacher read the most salacious poem the student could find?
I’d be furious if that happened in one of my kid’s classes because I know they’d be extremely uncomfortable.
That said, firing (essentially) someone is a severe measure that should be reserved for only extreme situations–someone who pulls a Hastert, say. I can think of many better ways to handle this.
But isn’t the whole point of advanced literature classes to push the students outside of their comfort zones?
Haven’t they already read works like The Lottery and Macbeth, both of which should make any human with a pulse mightily uncomfortable? Tom Sawyer and To Kill a Mockingbird?
Practically the whole of Dead Poets Society comes to mind as a quotation for rebuttal….
b&
You’re trying very hard not to see the difference between “Please Master” and those works.
I’m not trying hard…I really don’t see it. Unless it’s the sexual / erotic component you think matters? If so, would you object to the Song of Solomon, or bawdy madrigals, or Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.?
And if the anatomically explicit bits…shouldn’t honors English seniors already be assumed to have had either Sex Ed or assurances from their parents that they’ve given them an equivalent education?
Somebody else made a comparison with Fifty Shades of Gray, a novel I know basically nothing about save the hype. But would you object to that being taught to these students?
I get that it’s a shocking poem — Ginsburg wrote it very much with the intent to shock.
But…well, if we want students to be well equipped to deal with shock, to take the sting somewhat out of the shock, and to equip them to do a bit of shocking on their own…don’t they need to read some shocking literature?
Again, this isn’t elementary school kids, or even awkward peripubescents. These are seniors, many of them legal adults, all of them in an advanced college-level literature class. Isn’t this sort of challenge exactly what classes like this are supposed to be all about? I mean, they’re supposed to be well past diagramming parts of speech and where to start a new paragraph; this is when they’re supposed to get into the real meat and potatoes of analyzing and authoring serious stuff.
…and, if not AP Lit, then when? Would you be okay with something like this in an university’s ENG101 class? Could an English major do a junior or senior thesis on Ginsburg? Is this off-limits until graduate school, or even for any level of academia?
I’d personally draw that line at college and equivalent — and AP classes are supposed to be “equivalent.”
b&
While the naughty poem doesn’t offend me (I’m more offended by oppression but I’m willing to read about oppression if it is there to make me think about the perspective of the narrator), I don’t know what the mental development of those students are at that age. I know their brains are still maturing and they are very emotionally immature. So I can excuse some kids being disturbed and unprepared for this level of raciness.
At the same time, I also don’t think the teacher should be punished at all but perhaps a better way of handling this in the future could be agreed upon.
I guess at the end of it all. I’d want to know if any student sis indeed feel harmed by this poem being read out loud in class or are these reactions all “ifs” and “maybes” the parents are coming up with?
Might these delicate flowers be permanently damaged by seeing their teacher fired? I’d suggest they’ll remember that unjust event long after they forget the poem.
sub
I’m at a loss to see how a student could be harmed from reading and discussing a poem. Some transient discomfort, sure, but “harm,” in any meaningful or lasting sense, perchance how?
‘Harm’ wouldn’t be my concern. My concern is that they get nothing out of it because the subject matter gets in the way of them exercising their critical thinking/academic analysis. Yes, the way to overcome that problem is to have them do more analysis on psychologically tough material, not less. But ideally you plan a progression (of psychologically ‘easy’ to ‘hard’ material) so that everyone’s ready when you get to the hard stuff. This was kinda just dropped on the class; not even by the teacher but by a student.
Ideally I think the response should’ve been no punishment at all for the teacher, but an admonition “next time, read the student-suggested material before you present it.”
I’m sure there are many other poems presented in Mr. Olio AP class that some students may get nothing out of, maybe because they find the subject-matter boring. I don’t hear you or others raise a concern about, or propose alternative lesson-plan progressions for, those poems.
Ginsburg’s poem drew attention solely because of its explicit non-heteronormative sexual content. In the absence of its causing any “harm” — which you seem to concede — why does the teaching of this poem merit your concern anymore than any other poem that lacks pedagogical efficacy because some students may not be able to relate to it?
And in the absence of any potential “harm,” why the paternalistic concern over the potential reactions of young, immature, and emotionally fragile students to this poem?
I don’t hear you or others raise a concern about, or propose alternative lesson-plan progressions for, those poems.
Actually I just did, and I did it before I read your post here, I swear! See my response to Ben up in the middle of the #6 thread. Yes, I think because the college-level-lit-courses are far more limited for high schoolers than they are for actual college students, high school administrations should spend more time thinking about what should go in them. You’ve got a lot of varied kids that are going to be pushing through this narrow doorway; you should think (more carefully than a college might) about what it should look like.
Swap “what” for “who” and I’ll agree with you wholeheartedly.
If you’re not ready, for whatever reason, for AP classes, you’re most emphatically not ready for college itself. You are, in other words, not advanced, and do not belong in advanced coursework.
b&
Again, everyone was prepared to do the coursework; this wasn’t in the coursework.
But putting that aside, I can’t believe you’re not seeing my point. If I have to design a single history course for all my advanced high schoolers, its going to look a lot different than the 5-10 history course choices that they may get at a college. Difficulty has nothing to do with it; the fact that I have to design one course to serve a larger and more varied group of students means I will pick my subject matter differently. I don’t have the luxury of designing one course for non-majors, one for early history majors, one for modern history majors, etc… I’ve got to make one course to serve all of those types of students. So its going to look different (compared to any of those). An AP course should be as difficult as an intro collegiate class; no argument there. That doesn’t mean it will cover the exact same content.
But, don’t you see?
I think we can agree that, for you especially, “Please Master” is “difficult,” and college English Lit students are expected to be able to deal with something as difficult as that.
If you can’t handle, “Please Master,” then you also can’t handle 50 Shades of Grey, you can’t handle Lady Chatterly’s Lover, you can’t handle anything by the Marquis de Sade, and on and on and on.
Why are you insisting on pretending that children who, in your own vehement argument, are too immature for mature content, are nevertheless mature enough to study mature subjects?
Maybe you should be explicit, here.
What, exactly, is it in, “Please Master,” that you think has no place in an AP classroom, and why is that more objectionable than 1984 with its Room 101 and Winston and Julia fucking in her secret apartment?
Or would you also keep 1984 out of the AP classroom?
b&
If you don’t know how a student could be harmed I’d say ask them. I don’t know either. I know there are movies I’ve wished I’d never seen because I’ve remained freaked out forever about the content. Some people may wish to protect themselves from content that upsets them. I, for one, cannot watch horror movies because I would be anxious and terrified for months after. It is not unreasonable to assume that others have sensitivities in different areas. I happen to have a big amygdala (I assume). Maybe these students have other brain anatomy that makes this content unsuitable to them.
There’re definitely movies I wish I’d never seen…in particular, one low-budget slasher blood-and-gore flick that a fellow music major starred in when I was in college.
…but, at the same time…before then, I didn’t really know that that’s the type of reaction I’d have. I’d seen plenty of other “messy” movies, like Alien, and didn’t have the same sort of reaction.
Circling back to poetry…I have a difficult time imagining Ginsburg being the sort of thing one should reasonably expect will promote an unacceptably extreme scarring reaction, save, of course, for people actually suffering from real PTSD (and not the fake “My poor fweewings!” PTSD the SJW crowd is obsessed with). And somebody with a serious psychological malady such as PTSD, once again, no more belongs in an AP class than an amputee belongs on the varsity football team. (With, of course, exceptions for those who can actually make the cut despite the disability and without special treatment.)
b&
Perhaps not reading the poem, but participating in the reading of the poem in a public setting would be the thing that is damaging to someone with sensitives that would include social anxieties.
A recurring theme of my English classes from junior high school through college was students reading passages for the class, and even acting out scenes from plays. And it usually embarrassed the shit out of us, no matter the content. And, in retrospect, I don’t think there was nearly enough of that…were I designing a school curriculum today, I’d have drama as a required subject from the get-go, and each student required to perform the lead role in something-or-other every semester (obviously something short due to time constraints) as part of the passing grade requirement.
Drama teachers already devote much of class time to exercises for getting over stage fright and terminal cases of embarrassment, and that’s stuff that everybody, most especially awkward teens and pre-teens, should have under the belt.
…if for no other reason than that, once you (fairly quickly, in reality, with good teachers) get past the worst of the embarrassment, you open up a door into a vast new world that simply isn’t imaginable if you’re trapped on the other side. As with any other subject, unweaving the theatre rainbow gives you far more insight and appreciation into the art of the play (and the movie and the motivational speech and the rest) than simply sitting passively in the audience ever possibly could.
b&
I’ve yet to meet anyone, or even hear a rumor of anyone, who has ever been harmed — let alone harmed in any serious or lasting sense — by reading poetry.
I think a moment’s contemplation will disclose why the burden of establishing potential harm necessarily rests on those who wish to exclude material from the curriculum. Or must we establish lack of harm for every poem presented in the classroom? Can you prove that no student will be harmed from reading Emily Dickenson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the Brontë sisters?
I don’t know, man…I still can’t get out of my head the tintinnabulation of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells bells bells….
b&
Ya got tinnitus??
Yeah…it’s dogging me bad. Might even be rintintinnitus.
b&
It’s not a poem, but was written by a great poet: Goethe’s ‘Sorrows of Young Werther’ led to a spate of suicides. Works of literature do have consequences in the real world, and the work of the Beats certainly was certainly influential on people’s lives.
Apart from that, I am all in favour of art that might well be morally bad for you: Christopher Marlowe’s wonderful dark mischief, Rochester’s & Rimbaud’s poetry, Lautreamont’s Maldoror, Georg Trakl’s poetry, the novels of Celine, the plays and novels of Witold Gombrowicz… and really do not like seeing such work brought into the safe space of literary education where some teacher, however good, seeks to render them toothless for his charges – something that happens not so much because of her or him personally but because of the institutional situation.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
For rintintinnitus I’d recommend playing soft barking in the background.
Rintintinnitus
+1
It’s not hard to come up literature used in high school classes that have things more “offensive” than Ginsburg’s poem. Ben’s examples all contain things more “offensive” than Ginsberg’s graphic, but still fairly matter of fact, depictions of consensual sex. Is it permissible to teach the bible as literature, with all it’s rape, murder, genocide, incest? As a bonus, murder and genocide presented as good and holy things when commanded by G*d.
I wouldn’t be so sure that the student brought the poem for because it is “salacious”. I loved William S Burroughs when I was younger. Maybe part of the initial attraction was the explicit drugs and gay sex, but I really liked it, and still do to some degree. If it was today, not 1982, when I was a senior in high school, I could see myself bringing something of his to class. Not because it was “dirty” but because it really meant something to me.
From a teaching/learning, classroom-dynamic point of view ‘uncomfortable’ is good–or at least it used to be when teachers and students both took as their goal intellectual and existential growth. Nowadays too many students and their parents are forever poised to jump on anything that suggests the customer isn’t getting money’s worth (that is, an unchallenging ‘A’ in the course). What is unexpected, what is eccentric, what is a minor temblor to the status quo–all these are unwanted in a regime of commodified education.
‘Seriously, does anyone think the student was honestly interested in literature, rather than just trying to have the teacher read the most salacious poem the student could find?’
It’s quite possible that he was: what about a young man still in the closet who feels the kind of sexual stirrings Ginsberg so explosively chants? What if the poem spoke to him as a lyric poem is designed to: deeply affecting and life-altering?
You may not be aware that you’re insinuating things about me that are not true.
There are uncountable sources of discomfort for kids to be challenged with without resorting to something this salacious.
As for the kid–a teacher’s priority is the whole class. If what you hypothesize were true, he could have met the kid after hours for discussion, or steered him to some of the gay student organizations. A good teacher knows how to balance the needs of the few with what’s best for the many.
I intended no offense toward you and am baffled to understand what you think I insinuated. Looking over your other posts, and mine, I simply find that we basically disagree, both about the poem itself (it’s not ‘salacious’ in the full sense of the word–i.e., ‘pornographic’) and the mission of a teacher in high school (junior-senior) and college-level literature classroom.
Perhaps the “what’s best of the many” is to give students, at times, freedom to bring items for class even if they included depictions of consensual sex.
Maybe the “needs of the few” are a few students who are offended by those depictions.
Then, “A good teacher knows how to balance the needs of the few with what’s best for the many” works the other way.
Make that two outliers.
Three outliers is… what? A new trend?
/@
I’m with Diane on this one. We certainly have enough literature to read and analyze without having to jump straight to the extreme stuff. Some kids have been exposed to it while others have not and I respect the teen (and their parents) enough to give them the time and space to discover such things in their own time. The “age of discovery” is a process, not an absolute. I don’t think the high school teacher should go there. After the age of 18, perhaps.
Explicit descriptions of anal sex, beastiality, or sadomasochism are as extreme as ultraviolent acts like serial killer murders and the like and I’m against exposing both to kids on similar grounds. I remember a devoutly religious teacher in high school (I was 17) showing us images of aborted fetuses to make his point of right-to-life. I remember being horrified–by the extremely graphic images of dead babies but also by the disregard that this asshole had for our right not to have to be exposed to sickening and graphic propaganda. Granted, this wasn’t a literature class but happened in a debate class. Pretending that fine art and poetry cannot be blatantly pornographic or depict extreme violence seems disingenuous to me (for argument’s sake, an X rating not an R rating).
Disclaimer: I’m an atheist, non-prude, parent of a 13 year old who doesn’t want the teacher of this story punished in any way.
“I’d be furious if that happened in one of my kid’s classes because I know they’d be extremely uncomfortable.”
Why, I mean why would they be uncomfortable?
I lived in Germany for the first 13 years of my daughters life. Broadcast television was virtually uncensored. The German version of Teen Beat has soft core porn pictorials. I never denied her access to any art, literature, or movies. By the time she reached high school age she would have seen this as relatively tame.
You mentioned earlier that your daughter was innocent. Despite all this. or rather I believe as a result of all this mine was as well. She played with Barbie dolls till she was 16. She didn’t have sex until college. She’s never done drugs, and to the best of my knowledge didn’t drink before she was of legal drinking age.
I guess my point is it’s societal. and most importantly parental attitudes that determine how a child will react when exposed to things like this.
I think genetics plays a part in this just as much as is does in other things. Some people just are naturally more uncomfortable with things like this regardless of their culture. I don’t want to criticize these people as being wrong as they can’t help who they are.
Yes — and even more so if we expand it past genetics to include all the other critical environmental factors such as the neonatal environment, early parent-child interactions, and so on. A lot of this is pretty plastic for the first few years but sets more and more firmly with age. Perversely enough, by the time you’re old enough to have the cognitive facilities to be capable of critically analyzing things like this for yourself, your innate attitudes are generally fixed enough such that change isn’t so easy any more….
b&
What’s so wrong w being uncomfortable!!?? It’s a fact of life and an avenue for growth
( except when applied to uncomfortable clothes or furniture…)
Depends on the discomfort. Maybe something makes me squirm or maybe it makes me unable to sleep for months.
Hearing what Boko Haram is doing to those girls in Nigeria makes me sick to my stomach, but I still think I need to know about it.
Knowing about it is very different than watching it.
Agreed with Diana.
There’s an inescapable dilemma here.
I absolutely agree that Boko Haram’s evildoing should be exposed and shouldn’t just be swept under the carpet or allowed to fade out of sight. On the other hand, the world is a huge place and we can’t fix, or know about, everything. Undoubtedly there are bad things going on in too many other places in the world to even list – ISIS, Saudi Arabia, the drug-trade-fuelled murder rate in Mexico, and all the way down to the treatment of pregnant women in Ireland or the execution of prisoners for drug offences in Indonesia, or the treatment of prisoners in Texas, not to mention governments spying on their and other countries’ citizens**. No-one can give full consideration to all those things, or even contemplate them all without becoming severely depressed.
** I do NOT mean to imply that all those I’ve listed are equally bad.
A very few of those things I can do something about, even if it’s only throwing a few bucks the way of some organisation who is trying to do something about it. In doing so, though, I’m conscious of the fact that there are undoubtedly many other injustices I’m ignoring or haven’t even heard of. If I had more money than Bill Gates, I still couldn’t donate enough to all those organisations to fix all the wrongs. I also have an uncomfortable suspicion that 99% of all the injustices go unnoticed unless, by a fluke, some news organisation picks up on them and publicises them. That’s not a justification for ignoring the wrongs we do know about.
So – do I *need* to know about the Boko Haram girls, or any of the other injustices? Not unless I’m in a position to do something about it. Even then, do I need to know all the details? Not really. I chose to have a heart operation, which was successful. I know a few details. I deliberately haven’t researched all the gory details of heart operations because I find them repulsive and I don’t need to know, any more than you-all need to know the details of how your car gearbox works.
(I do feel desperately sorry for the Boko Haram girls, by the way).
I’m not at all saying that I want to watch these girls get abducted or see those aid workers and journalists be beheaded, or even dwell on them too much ( i give something monthly to Médecins san frontières hoping it can do some tiny bit.). But back to our original special snowflakes discussion,I don’t think it’s desirable for us to bury our kids’ heads in the sand for them and not expose them to the realities of the world they need to live in. By all means expose them to all the beauties of nature and art and music and literature, but don’t send them forth with blinders on.
But I’m not sure this is a “special snowflake” case. Firstly, we don’t know if the students themselves were uncomfortable with the poem or if the parents were the ones outraged. Secondly, we know some people are far more sensitive than others and having something that really upsets you forced on you with no option to do something else isn’t a very nice thing to do – being forced to pray comes to mind.
With praying you can always roll your eyes…
No, with praying you can keep your eyes open & while everyone’s head is lowered in prayer, you get to meet other atheists!
…and then the two of you do the synchronized eyeroll. No point in doing it before.
b&
perfect!
I agree with you there, Merilee.
There’s obviously a compromise. I choose not to subject myself to uncomfortable things unless it’s unavoidable. I wouldn’t, given the choice, have sat in a class if I knew something unpalatable or awkward was coming up. But, given that it did happen (and not by deliberate intent of the teacher anyway), I’d just say ‘shit happens’ and let it go.
I certainly wouldn’t favour a tedious inquest / witch hunt which probably only makes the whole process worse for any of the class who were disturbed by it.
Yeah, this stuff shouldn’t be taught in the classroom; it should be taught where kids have always learned about it, in the john while sneaking a smoke or while playing hooky at a friend’s house. How many kids are willingly exposed to much raunchier material than this under those circumstances — and how many of them go home and complain to a parent about it?
An AP English class on poetry taught by an award winning teacher is exactly the place where such a poem should be read and discussed.
Perhaps there should be an AP English class that covers poetry about sex from across the centuries: Greek and Roman,the Bible (King Solomon’s poem), the Kama Sutra and/or other Indian classics,Shakespeare,as well as the more modern poets.Humanity has always had an intense interest in sexuality, especially in the teen years.I would hazard a guess that most teenagers of yore, and now, delve into salacious material in private, if not in public.
As a teenager and inveterate reader of library books, this oldster remembers selecting a book titled “The Iron Mistress”, about James Bowie and the Bowie knife. My mother was quite concerned about the book based on the title, until I told her what it was about. I can remember reading “Fanny Hill” and “Tom Jones” in high school Advanced English classes instead of listening to lectures and/or studying.
This teacher should not have had to resign.
Heh on the ‘concerned mom’ thing. I remember reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. This was in Australia, where the covers at the time included topless women in Boris-Vallejo-like artwork. At first my parents were very concerned that I might be reading something explicit. So my dad read A Princess of Mars. After that, I was told “just cover the book with paper or something, so some other adult doesn’t get the wrong idea.”
I should think ERB’s “Tarzan” would be right up an Aussie’s alley.
I wonder if it was a shocking poem, but dealt with pure violence with no sexual component, whether there would’ve been an issue?
I don’t feel I’m in a position to judge whether this poem was appropriate for this class, but at that age (c. 1981) and from a very conservative background, I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. I wouldn’t have told my parents about it though!
Even if he made an error in judgement on this occasion, I don’t think he should lose his job. He’s clearly an outstanding teacher, and his students will be the ones to miss out. One error shouldn’t destroy a career, and there’re obviously plenty who don’t consider it an error anyway.
I think the poem was obviously inappropriate and am surprised the teacher did not understand that. It seems like there must be more to the story.
Not at best but at worst he should be reprimanded. At best nothing should be done whatsoever.
I’ve always liked the irreverence of this poem. I have a Ginsburg box-set where he reads this poem with moaning and yearning and desperation in his voice; the way he reads it makes the poem even more salacious, and he is obviously trying to make the audience uncomfortable and provoke a response…like all good literature does. Indeed, he still succeeds in provocation- mission accomplished.
That being said, I think I echo a lot of people here that the teacher should have read it first before reading aloud; I wonder if he would have refrained. I’m also a little surprised that an experienced AP English lit teacher had never read or heard of this poem and was caught off-guard.
But the school-board definitely over-reacted. Why couldn’t the teacher just apologize and learn from his so-called mistake? Prude parents probably wouldn’t abide a slap on the wrist. Good teachers like this are a valuable commodity, and should be treated as such.
The first unassigned novel I read, at the age of fourteen and with my socially conservative parents’ knowledge, was John Updike’s Couples. We should want our children to understand life as a wide variety of people experience it. Ginsberg’s poem provides a challenging example of that. That it is considered, in 2015, something to which an AP English class must not be exposed, is simply depressing.
Be advised that for the generation mentioned by Grania in comment #3 — and especially for that generation’s feminists and some of its fiction writers — Updike is considered anathema. I find the monomaniacal focus in his fiction on a particular stratum of small-town, middle-class white America a bit stifling. But there’s a strong argument to be made that, on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis, Updike wrote the best, most-pungent, most-elegant sentences of any American writer of his generation. And in his non-fiction (criticism, essays, some longer pieces) he tended to be more catholic in his interests.
Am I the only one who is upset that a teacher who may, I’ll not be the judge of that question, have made a mistake that pushes the boundaries of the students in the right direction is rushed out the door while creationists across the country knowingly bring their religion into the classroom, despite well-known legal precedent, and are given only a slap on the wrist unless they physically harm a student?
I live in South Windsor, CT where this occurred. Months ago, when the story first surfaced, I was aghast that the school board was up in arms over a provocative poem, and assumed it was a tempest in a teapot. Then I read the poem! I applaud Mr. Olio for his courage, but was amazed at his choice, given the overall conservative nature of this town and its high school. In my view, there is no basis to railroad him out of his position, but reading this poem was like reaching for the third rail, so his judgment faltered somehow. Nevertheless, it’s still a bit of a teapot tempest given that the student body is likely already very savvy about sex. I remember a few years ago there were incidents of nude selfies of middle school students being shared among other middle schooler. Police, outrage, etc. It’s a shame that a man with courage is now unable to present challenging material to minds that need it. I’m sure he would welcome having Dr. Coyne’s support. Very kind of you, Dr. Coyne.
I have always believed that the true power of poetry is in its spoken form, so I’ve found what is purported to be the only recording of Ginsberg reciting “Please Master”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWxl-HvwjJs
(this YouTube video was marked as “age restricted” so I’m not sure how that affects one’s access to it.)
I’m not sure whether this will matter to the debate, but it should be noted that students in an AP class are not necessarily seniors, in fact. AP classes can be taken by students as early as 9th grade. From the College Board’s website (they make the AP exams, I think): “The AP designation may only be applied to authorized courses offered at or above the 9th grade level which have received authorization through the annual AP Course Audit process.” (http://apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/Appropriate-Grade-Levels-for-AP-Courses.pdf). If I were a teacher of an AP English class, particularly with younger students in it, I think I’d require that parents sign off on any literature whatsoever being acceptable for the class, to avoid precisely this issue. If a parent won’t sign off on that, their child should not be in the class. (Well, their child probably *should* still be in the class, in fact, but without the explicit backing of the principal, the risk is quite clear and the teachers puts their neck on the line ignoring it.) That said, that’s all catering to the prudishness and Puritanism of Americans. As far as I personally am concerned, anything should be OK in an AP English class. As someone said above, it is supposed to be a college-level class. Both students and parents ought to know what they are signing up for. Deal with it.
Several years ago one of the most popular English lit / drama teachers who had taught for 20 years at a private girls school (teacher male and gay) got fired after showing an Oscar nominated short subject that had nudity AFTER he gave trigger warnings and obtained parental permission slips which contained same said warnings. It was a relatively new principal who had as a faculty member disliked the firee for some time. She threatened to try to get him registered as a sex offendor!!
The positive outcome is that many alumni of the school who had donated money to it generously filed protest and withdrew their donations resulting in a modest monetary shortfall for the school. There was even an entire website mounted by both students and alumni analyzing the situation.
Reblogged this on Craftmanic Mommy.
I don’t know if something similiar exists in the US, but here in Germany at age 17-18, we had classes where you could bring a work of your choice to read to your fellow students, and the teachers didn’t give “screening permissions” in advance – you brought the book, and it was as surprising to them what it would be as it was to the students. It could have been The 120 Days of Sodom, though I guess there would have been some kind of trouble for that!
Though, interestingly, none of us ever brought something as explicit as that or this Ginsberg poem, isn’t that about as reckless as you can be in your responsibility as a teacher? And pretty much what happened here, a student bringing along a work of literature, which was read to the class? Yet I doubt our teachers would have seen reprimands, if someone had chosen Please, Master.
There may be a cultural difference here, in regards to student attitudes towards authority and ‘taking school seriously.’ IMO, in the US, yes you would’ve had most of the class take it seriously…but you would also very likely get 3-5 students attempting to out-do each other in finding the most offensive and salacious material they could possibly get away with, for no other reason than to tweak noses.
…and this is a problem…why?
The whole premise for censorship in this case is to prevent students from being exposed to offensive and salacious material. But if the students themselves are actively seeking it out, that censorship stops being protection of the students and starts becoming a boot in their face, to use a phrase from a provocative work of literature, to prevent them from seeking out offensive and salacious materials.
And if you’ve got a bunch of your best and brightest (AP, remember?) actively searching for the offensive and salacious…well, what the fuck makes you think they’re not going to be springing that stuff on their delicate snowflake classmates outside of the classroom?
Wouldn’t you be far better off having them do so in the classroom?
Isn’t that the whole point of “safe spaces”?
In my high school chemistry class, we worked with all sorts of really nasty shit…but it was a safe space such that we were exposed to the danger in a controlled environment such that almost nobody ever gets hurt. I never took any sorts of shop classes, but the same thing applies: you’ve got all these dangerous tools, but it’s a safe space to work with them. Sports…you’ve literally got students throwing spears and shooting arrows, but it’s a safe space for that. Drama classes have students make idiots of themselves in front of their peers, but it’s okay because it’s a safe space.
Why would you deny students a safe space for dangerous literature?
b&
I’m sure that’s the point of many of the conservative parents and students. Its not the pedagogical reason, though. The pedagogical reason why you might not pick it is because if you think students won’t learn poetry analysis if they’re focused on the salaciousness, then a salacious poem is a really frakking bad choice for teaching poetry analysis.
And the analogy to chem classes is completely ridiculous because I’m not making a safe space type argument implying poor widdle minds will be harmed by bad words. I’m making the argument that the best content to teach 15-18 year olds literary analysis may not be the same content which is best to teach 18-21 year olds literary analysis, even in the case where your 15-year-old is in a class learning the complex analysis that the 21-year-olds are learning. The class is about literary analysis and critical thinking, yes? It wasn’t about beatnik poetry, correct? So the beatnik poetry isn’t the critical part of the content or lesson plan, correct?
Incorrect.
Very, very, very incorrect.
The lesson plan, made quite plain, was for the class to discuss poetry that the students brought in that they themselves wanted to discuss.
That’s a very powerful — and, obviously, advanced — pedagogical technique. It’s exactly what Dead Poets Society is all about, most especially all the bits about the power of poetry to shake people to their very core.
You can’t have an open-ended poetry discussion with post-adolescent teenagers without either setting ground rules — which would defeat the whole “open-ended” thing — or expecting the students to push the boundaries as far as they’re willing to push them and to shake the teacher, their fellow students, and themselves to the very core.
What the fuck is the point of all this fancy language if you’re not going to do anything with it!?
And if your best-and-brightest senior AP college credit students aren’t prepared to shock and be shocked, their education up to that point has been an utter failure and a complete waste.
Let the smart delicate flowers skip ahead a grade or so to keep them from getting too bored.
But, for fuck’s sake, man! Don’t shove your boot up the asses of the freshly-minted adults in the class and puppet them yet again through the library paste and coloring books!
It’s one thing to never want to see your little precious grow up…but, seriously? To infantilize those who have grown up in order to shield your little precious from them?
b&
Exactly, Eric.
The funny thing is, I was one of those students who liked to tweak noses – very much so. And me and a lot of my classmates were appalled when anyone, be it a teacher or a textbook author, thought of us as snowflakes who couldn’t handle strong stuff. And yet, with reins totally loose, no one brought pornography to reading class. In part, I think, because we didn’t want to hear the gamy remarks by our pears, in part because we understood that it was a sign of trust and respect, not to be misused on a whim, and in part because there was no point – if you are not censored, why protest against censorship by being as salacious as you can get away with? Better bring what you actually do like.
Good points, Robert.
Yes, a few students will probably blush and be unable to make eye contact; a few will snicker and make wisecracks; and some will seriously undertake the task at hand — pretty much the same reaction you get in biology class when it comes time to dissect a frog. Students survive that; they can survive “Master, Please” too.
Awkward moments children’s bible:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/149217744X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=149217744X&linkCode=as2&tag=wwwfriendlyat-20
If only parent(s) were aware of what their angles do when they’re not around. Stupid parents.
Acute angles opening up to the world of the obtuse; triangles coming together to form squares; right angles unrighting themselves… Oh, the humanity!
Sorry, I couldn’t help it.
Sorry angels. What didn’t you error correct my comment.
Of course you couldn’t help it; not being able to help it is a corollary to the Pythagorean Theorem.
We live in a culture saturated with violence and sex to which children have ready access from the age that they gain internet access. Many of these kids undoubtedly watch Game of Thrones. And people are upset at this merely suggestive poem? Give me a break.
Personally, I’m much more concerned about the constant depictions of unrealistic violence. The sex they need to learn about. But they see countless illusory and unrealistic examples of problems being solved with guns and torture. Tell me which one is worse for society.
It would be interesting to know how many kids have typed ‘sex’ into Google Images just as soon as they were old enough to become curious about such things. Sure beats the well-thumbed copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that we had to make do with in my generation…
“Sure beats the well-thumbed copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that we had to make do with in my generation…”
National Geographic was my porn of choice. I don’t know how many issues I thumbed through in search of breasts. I even read the occasional article.
Isn’t that what they all say about Playboy? “I only read it for the articles”.
Coincidentally, I was just re-watching (on Youtube) the 1983 BBC series “The Cleopatras”. Ever seen those Egyptian murals where the women are all topless? Well the Beeb was noticeably faithful to that, which caused some comment at the time. I certainly remember that from 1983.
(It somewhat obscured the story, which was dramatic enough – I just downloaded a Ptolemaic family tree to sort it out. The Ptolemies not only kept marrying each other, they also kept killing each other, often the same ones. Between Cleopatra II and Cleopatra VII I count 23 names in the tree – five of them died natural deaths, two were killed by outsiders, the rest were all killed by (or on the orders of) their close relatives. They were, after all, gods, so I guess they just did what gods do best…)
I read thumbed as thumped.
Perhaps this says something positive about poetry and real-life spoken word vs. TV and the internet; if the former two are having a much bigger emotional impact on them than the latter two, isn’t that a good thing?
Morality being defined by whatever culture one lives in with fluctuations from region to region, I can imagine various reasons offered for firing him, reprimanding him, or even nothing. With so much experience, I would think he’d be able to guess the possibility of a negative outcome for himself and his students a little better. Well, sometimes life gets a bit boring and maybe one decides to perform a risky experiment if only just to see the outcome, useful or not…
It seems to me that the student brought in the poem in for discussion on use of language, and the teacher took up the challenge. He didn’t wimp out. Maybe if he thought a bit faster on his feet, he’d have censored it, but to his adult ears, like to mine, the poem might have sounded fit for general consumption. (I rather enjoyed it.) If he had censored it, it’s possible that he could have lost the respect of at least some of the students. It’s wrong that he should be losing his job over this. I bet many of the students have seen and read more explicit stuff than this.
The question is were the objections raised more about explicit gay sexual language or explicit sexual language?
Reblogged this on JerBear's Queer World News, Views & More From The City Different – Santa Fe, NM and commented:
The teacher should have, perhaps, been admonished but should never have lost their job. Instead this should have been the teachable moment it was as this post explains so well…
This poem is nothing compared to most of William S. Burrough’s stuff; maybe all the references to “Moloch” had something to do with it (not to mention the fact that it’s waaay too long). I think about how many of the students in that class got in their cars to go home and turned up the volume on the rap music they like: “So ah jacked the M*****F***** an’ ah capped him wit mah ‘nine’; ah took all hiz dope, an’ ah made hiz bitches mine….”
What of Burroughs’s stuff do you have in mind — “Naked Lunch” or “Junkie” or the “Nova” books or, maybe, “Interzone”? There was, among the Beats, quite a bit of cross-pollination (some of it quasi-literal) including between Ginsburg and the bisexual Burroughs (who inspired the “Old Bull Lee” character in Kerouac’s On the Road).
“Tis friction’s brisk, rough rub that provides the vital spark!” –after Alexander Reid Martin
My sister had to read lady Chatterly’s Lover at school… looked a bit tedious to me!
My first thought in reading this was “Where is the Teachers’ Union in all of this?” Perhaps it’s different in the US, but here there would certainly have been action on the part of the union to challenge such an abrupt action on the part of the administration.
My other thought is that choosing to inject this into the classroom without any sort of preparation wasn’t the best choice of action. There are a number of factors to consider including how the content interacts with the other material and subjects being taught (Is there any teaching on consent in the sex ed curriculum? Safe sex practices? I think this would have a significant impact on how the poem may be understood) as well as what sort of implicit or explicit behavioural covenants the school has made with the students and the community (Can one student go up to another student they find attractive and ask them to drop trou so they can lick their ankles? Why not?).
There are lots of good discussions that could come from this poem, and many of these discussions will extend into other subjects and lead to questioning of the status quo for standards, norms and beliefs. To facilitate that effectively requires preparation, which was skipped in this case. It shouldn’t be a firing offence, but it should be noted as a lapse, just as the excellence in teaching was noted.
Relevant:
Pre-traumatic stress disorder
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0527td.html#.VWw9LiIatS4.reddit
What kind of a moron would read this poem aloud to their high school class?! C’mon man-think before you act. This is an XXX rated, explicitly lubricious, prurient, lascivious poem- if you want students to appreciate the use of meter, repetition, poetic capturing of a heated sexual encounter, ect. ect. have them read it themselves, or find some other examples- there are plenty. Imagine being in that classroom listening to the teacher read this out loud—awkward!!!
There’s another, far more insidious angle to the story and even much of the commentary here that I haven’t seen anybody really address in depth.
And that’s that this wasn’t something the teacher brought to the class, but rather something a student asked the teacher to read.
If it was wrong of the teacher to read the poem, we must also conclude that it was wrong of the student to ask the teacher to read it. And there should be some form of proportionality between the two offenses — presumably, with some leniency for the student who can reasonably be said to not be old enough to know better.
But if it’s a firing offense for the teacher to read it, it’s an expulsion offense for the student to bring it to class. If the teacher deserves to be admonished for reading it, the student deserves to be admonished for having it with him at school.
I don’t care what the student’s motivations were for asking the teacher to read it; not even the most mild criticism is a response. Though I would strongly argue that the poem is perfectly appropriate for the class, the most I could support would be a teacher apologizing to the student that the poem is too advanced for the rest of the students in the class — and promising to the student to put together a reading list or other special project of similar advanced materials for out-of-class study.
But let’s turn back to the student and have a look at this from his perspective.
Yes, he’s probably being intentionally obnoxious and looking to get a rise out of people. By overreacting, you teach him that, yes, this is indeed how you get a rise out of people; by taking him seriously, you teach him that, yes, this actually is something serious deserving of adult attention — and you demonstrate by example how that sort of thing is done. Likely with some discomfort and embarrassment and nervous giggles…but also squarely and resolutely.
It may well also be, as somebody above suggested, that the student is himself not heteronormative and may be attracted to the BDSM scene and is actively exploring or wanting to explore that side of his own personality. And if you’d be fine with using Romeo and Juliet to explore straight teenaged romantic relationships…how can you tell this student that his kinky teenaged romantic relationships are off-limits, and presumably offensive and without redeeming merit?
On further reflection, I think that’s the part that I find most disturbing about all of this. We’re happy teaching kids about Cinderella finding her one true love, the Prince, and marrying him and then they live happily ever after. But how can we be ashamed of teaching advanced college-ready students about Ginsburg’s own form of love — a form of love that, realistically, is much more commonly found than true-to-form Cinderella stories? It’s not something that I’ve had any experience nor interest in…but there’re almost as many gays as atheists, and, if I had to guess, probably more people in the BDSM scene than atheists.
Do we really want to teach impressionable youth that homosexuality and kinky sex are even more strictly off-limits than Cinderella’s wedding night activities?
Or should we maybe respect them, especially the ones who themselves broach the subject, and have adult conversations about the matter?
Those of you who’re parents…do you really think your 17-year-old children would have been incapable of having an adult conversation about kinky gay sex? I’m sure it’d be a plenty awkward and uncomfortable conversation…but if adult talk about it from a 17-year-old — especially one on the college fast track — is off the table…a poetry slam in the English classroom is the least of your child’s problems.
Cheers,
b&
Averting students’ eyes from what those in authority deem objectionable helps to separate those students who may seek greatness from those who may accept the pedestrian and, in so doing help us to determine who deserve true AP.
Some students being squicked out by the explicit subject-matter of a poem.
That’s what this whole issue boils down to. I suggest that being squicked out by a poem is a potential life-altering experience only in a positive, enlightening sense — if the student manages to get past its squickiness to see the poem’s beauty, or if the student comes to realize that the squickiness resides not in the poem itself, but solely in his or her reaction to it.
The maximum downside to being exposed to a squicky poem? A couple minutes of teenage emotional discomfort, perhaps — such momentary distress, as I recall, being a mainstay of teenage emotional life.
The emotional distress involved probably pales in comparison to waking up on prom morning to discover a newly hatched zit on your nose, or learning that your high-school paramour was seen leaving study hall in the company of a romantic rival.
When I was in high school, I chose to read, of my own volition, Catch-22 and M.A.S.H
I must admit, I felt pretty bad-ass, what with all the talk about maids in lime green panties and wh*res!
I had forgotten all about the maid in the lime-green panties!! I even had a pair of such undergarments back in the day (TMI:-) – purchased in Berzerkeley, natch.
Kinky sex is fun, but a poem about it is no fun at all. Poetry shouldn’t be allowed in schools; school is already boring enough. For this reason the sacking was justified.
The. You should like one of my favourite poems:
We Real Cool
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
🙂
Why’s everybody (from Mark Twain to The Music Man) always picking on pool? 🙂
I guess it is timeless. It would be so 80s to talk about playing pacman in the arcade.
We got trouble that starts with “T” which rhymes with “P” and that stands for Pac-Man? Doesn’t seem to scan quite as well…probably need to re-work it to include some wakawakawakawaka….
b&
The sexual jokes in Romeo and Juliet are ruder!