WARNING: Please, PLEASE.... Trust your children's teachers. Even if you don't always agree with them.
Teachers, whether they are whatever box you want to put them in, are essential good people. We have got to learn to let them DO THEIR JOBS! If there are "cursed words" in contemporary literature, they have been trained to deal with it. They are working very hard and facing community, administration, union, and student pressures all at once: All for a relatively living wage.
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It's hard to unearth exactly why someone was so hell bent on keeping "The Freedom Writers Diary" out of this classroom. Maybe it was the use of a particular racial slur, the one that keeps getting people riled about "Huckleberry Finn" and that provides the perfect teachable moment for discussing racial divisions in America—at least if you're not paralyzed by cowardice. You have to wonder whether the school-board members even read the book. Maybe they never made it to the entry by the student who said, "Who would have thought of the 'at risk' kids making it this far? But we did, even though the educational system desperately tried to hold us down." It's a they said/she said situation, difficult to parse because so much took place behind closed doors. The board lawyer said Heermann was told not to use the book and she did so anyhow. She says after months of silence from higher-ups, she assumed they just didn't care.
If the school board of Perry Township wanted to counter "The Freedom Writers Diary," it certainly did. The book teaches that open discussion about challenging subjects is always best, that engagement always trumps silence. The members of that board were outraged by alleged insubordination when they should have been outraged by the glacial pace of decision-making by their top administrators. Insubordination is what built this country, and a glacial pace in education means you lose kids.
Have I mentioned that it's hard to get really good people to become teachers?
Connie Heermann will be teaching three courses in the fall at a local community college. She'll be making less than $5,000, but she's grateful for the opportunity. She was forbidden to contact her students after her job was yanked out from under her, was forced to go overnight from a powerful presence in their lives to a complete cipher. What made it worse was that she knows they are kids who assume they'll get the shaft. That's what "at risk" means, too. She hears that some stopped going to class. It looks as though her students are not going to wind up the way Erin Gruwell's did. That makes her so sad, but she doesn't regret what she did. "You know what?" she says. "My students have the book. They kept the book!" And then her voice breaks.
© 2008
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