International Baccalaureate student objects to assigned book - Page 3

Aaand I'm done. Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen.

Hey, where are you going? You should have to write a 1500 page paper on why you're done with this thread, if you're no longer going to participate.

Really? You would actually want to read that?
I wouldn't, I've got things to do.

Then it's a good thing you aren't her professor.

The whole thing just smacks of - here it is a week before class.

"Hey honey, did you finish that 1,500 page paper on that book you were supposed to read?"

"Uh, no. I got to this part and it was all gross."

"Hmm. Well, I'll just write you a note dear, it'll be fine."

SURPRISE!

Why does this girl's personal life, background or experience have anything to do this? She made a stink over not wanting to do an assigned project, her reasons being unobjectionably immature. Which would be one thing if this was kept a private matter between the school and herself. But instead it now has media coverage, which makes it a broader issue. We should be looking at the details of the specific case, (as given in the article for the purposes of discussion. I'm not suggesting turning this into an investigation and trial, something I don't feel needs to be said, but considering the semantical nature of much of this discussion, I guess has to be) not trying to delve into the psychological makeup of teenagers or the personal life of the girl. That's all I'll say, becasue I recognize how annoying I'm coming off in this thread.

My interpretation in two parts:

1) The school's IB program should have a notice at the beginning of the year that the media that will be assigned and discussed in class may contain mature, sexual, and/or violent content. This is just a no-brainer. I'm, frankly, shocked that the school did not do this. It's not a censorship thing, it's not a repression of free ideas/expression, and it's not coddling. For better or worse, the parents have the final say in what their child should be exposed to, and they should have a reasonable warning of what to expect from their children's school material.

2) The student should grow a pair. Having a reaction of "ew, gross" to a passage in a book in a frickin IB class betrays to me a lack of emotional maturity. A lack of emotional maturity is a big problem when trying to study literature, and that should be addressed. If she doesn't want to study such literature, she shouldn't be in the IB program.

I remember getting into shouting matches with my AP Lit teacher about the book Beloved, because I didn't like how Morrison was trying to make the main character sympathetic. I didn't have the emotional maturity to truly understand what Morrison was doing, but at least I read it and argued.

Exactly. And I never said she was emotionally mature ... beyond what's expected for her age. Nobody confused intelligence with maturity here.

Wouldn't you agree that the ability to successfully analyze and critique advanced literature requires some emotional maturity? I'm not talking about experience, but maturity. If she had, as others have stated above, written a paper explaining her objections to the material in a mature way, or at least approached the teacher with her concerns, we would all be having a distinctly different reaction to this story.

But her reaction to a piece of literature was, "ew, gross." That's not a reasoned expression of her objection to the material. That's an emotionally immature response to something she's not ready to read about or comment on. She shouldn't be in that class. There's nothing wrong with her or her reaction. She's just not ready to successfully read or study mature literature.

Breaking news: teenager fights status quo. Older people - enraged! Film at 11.

So she isn't emotionally mature enought to handle Murakami. Fine. From the sound of things she also doesn't seem emotionally mature enough to handle Judy Blume.

It's an inarticulate reaction, but it was one given verbally to her mom at the moment that she read the passage. It's not necessarily the one she might give if asked to give her reasoning on paper.

This is a ridiculous discussion. We know virtually nothing about this girl's reasoning. She may have said "ew, gross," but there might have been deeper issues driving her discomfort with the passage and the book. Here's the thing - it shouldn't matter.

A lot of you seem to be framing this argument as "she's in the IB program, so she should be mature/intelligent/driven enough to take on whatever material is given to her." It's equally possible that her status in the IB program is possibly enough to give her the benefit of the doubt. She may be more equipped than her non-IB peers to make these sorts of choices and not be dismissed so quickly as immature, unintelligent, selfish, and what-have-you.

MissZooey brought this up already, but the respect for intellectual freedom, like being pro-choice, works both ways. This girl isn't attempting to dictate anything to anyone else, but seeks to have control over what she reads. While this is obviously somewhat more complicated as it's grounded in the educational system, she's clearly not doing this simply as a means to avoid doing work in a class on literature - she and her parents are actively pursuing a fair solution. This isn't a sex ed class in which the "objectionable" content is key to the intended point of the course; it's not like you can't teach magic realism without The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles.

What strikes me is that you could even still have a representation of Murakami's work and not have it have those 'questionable' themes. A Wild Sheep Chase, Norwegian Wood, even the short stories in After The Quake are all quintesential Murakami and handle their themes of sexuality in less transgressive or passive ways.

If I was teaching a class of 16 years old I'd have real concerns about introducing them to some of Murakami's work and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles is up there with Kafka On The Shore in the 'don't go there' stakes.

Okay, I know I said I was done, and it makes me a dick to go back on that, but I really wanted to respond to this. The thing is, aren't advanced placement classes supposed to be college level courses, or at least prepare a student for them? In college lit classes, you read work with mature themes, I dare say often far more mature themes than Murikami (based off what I know of him, like I said earlier, I haven't read the work in question). If the girl cannot handle the material for this class, for whatever reason, whether we give her maturity and intelligence the benefit of the doubt or not, can't we at least agree that she's probably not best served taking the course. This isn't her flunking out of the school, just her maybe taking the regular English class where they'll be reading books no less important, but maybe easier to handle (Catcher In The Rye, Great Gatsby).

And no, you don't have to teach Murikami to teach magical realism, but should you really have to bypass it because of the objection of one, or even many, students who can't handle the subjects and themes, despite the fact that when they get to college they';ll have to deal with them anyway? And far as it goes, what seminal piece of magic realism would you teach that doesn't deal with often grotesque, sexually mature themes? They're abundant in other seminal works like Hundred Years of Solitude, Obscene Bird of Night, etc.

FInally, DaveB, I take issue with the point Zooey made about respect for intellectual freedom, at least in regards to the subject at hand, which is literature. Not that it shouldn't go both ways, but that it doesn't. It only ever goes one way. Catcher in The Rye gets banned in libraries, it doesn't get shoved down everyones throats. Harry Potter gets burned, it doesn't get blessed by the Pope. Classrooms that want to teach Kazantzakis Last Tempatation of Christ get assualted by angry parents, bookstores that carry it protested. YOu don't see angry parents yelling at teachers for not making their kids read it, you don't see protests for bookstores that don't carry it. With the exception of religious books and political doctrines/manifestos, when is the burden of intellectual freedom in literature ever, put on people for not reading something. It's always the other way around. No ones claiming the girl should be forced to read it, only that the advanced class not make a special case for her.

The thing is that an AP lit class (or IB, I presume) should prepare you to handle the heavy lifting of difficult reading. We're not really talking about level of difficulty here - we're talking about subject matter.

It's quite clear that the student understood Murikami. Murikami's a fucking cakewalk, frankly. It's not difficult reading, and her intellectual development is not going to be stunted because she doesn't want to read literature with sexually explicit passages in it. Maybe it says something about the type of personal relationships she'll have later (or maybe it doesn't at all - I knew a guy who was still squicked out by sex when he started college; this quickly changed when he and his girlfriend actually started having it). But, though literature may open our eyes to all sorts of things, it's not exactly the role of a high school literature class to shape young minds with regard to sexuality. Y'know, it might happen - but it's not exactly the point.

Not at all. She might smoke the other students in terms of writing skills, interpretive skills, and sheer intelligence. To count her out on the terms that she's not comfortable discussing fucking in an academic environment is completely wrong-headed. Why deprive her of a solid education in literature because the teacher decided to go with this particular book? Any other year, he might have picked another entry with no sexual content, and this might not have been an issue at all. Instead, we should penalize her because of the luck of the draw? Nonsense.

Like I said above, ease is not the issue.

I don't remember Hundred Years of Solitude being particularly explicit, and neither is Love in the Time of Cholera, really. Not all of Murakami's stuff is explicit, not all of Rushdie's is, or Calvino's, when he's in magic realism mode. Or you could even go back to Kafka or Borges. Seriously, you can pretty easily swing a bat in magic realism-ville without hitting heavily descriptive sex (and I haven't read Wind Up Bird Chronicles, so I'm not sure how descriptive we're talking here, but I maintain that it's not all that important in this argument).

I think it's notable that she's not one of those people. She and her parents aren't arguing that anyone else shouldn't be able to read the book. As such, your argument is completely irrelevant. If it went down like this every time a kid or parent had a problem with a book in a library or class reading list, the world would be a BETTER place for intellectual freedom, not a worse one. You're taking your overstated outrage out on the wrong kid.

Yup. Somehow people keep overlooking this for the easier route of calling people assholes or condescending or whatever. Kinda weird that this story would get the level of outrage that I'd expect from an article about book banning.