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Update: I read the challenged book to my 9th graders to prove a point and got a call from the district 3 days later
I teach 9th grade English at a school in Ohio and I kept hearing parents at board meetings say a certain challenged novel was dangerous and had no place in a classroom. I had never read it myself, so I just assumed they knew something I didn't. I read the whole thing in two nights back in October and honestly, it was a book about a kid dealing with grief and a bad home life, nothing close to the monster everyone described. So I put it on my free reading shelf and talked about it in class, and within 3 days I got called into the office because 2 parents complained about the cover alone. What I learned is that most people yelling at these meetings have never opened the book, they just heard a snippet from a Facebook post or a podcast and ran with it. The book didn't teach anyone anything bad, it got one of my quietest students to actually check out a novel for the first time all semester. If a book can do that and still get banned, what exactly are we protecting anyone from here? Has anyone else put a challenged book on their shelf and dealt with the fallout from it?
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max_hernandez271mo ago
What happens when those two parents find out the book is also in the school library and always has been? That quiet kid checking out a novel is the whole point, and no podcast clip will ever change that.
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