Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again.
Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again.
South Carolina teacher Mary Wood decided over the summer that she had to teach Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” again.
South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.
Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.
Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.
“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.
...
Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.
“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”
Good for her.
I love what she's doing. That said-
“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
I doubt they're unfamiliar with racism, what with being raised by white conservative southerners. They probably heard the N-word a thousand times before they could say it themselves.
Of course, they're very unfamiliar with being at the receiving end of racism, something that Ta-Nehisi Coates can teach them a lot about.
Gotta keep them little snowflakes insulated and indoctrinated at home. Lest they get out into the world and find out their parents, religious hate mongers... sorry I mean leaders and most Southern teachers are full of shit.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Hey! She's trying to edumacate us!
If anyone needs to be taught what it's like to be black in America, it's white people in America.
This book is so good, if you have not read it please do. The audiobook is narrated by the author.
-- Gen x northern European dude
Mr Coates is an American treasure of literary prowess generations should lift up by buying and reading his shit and respecting his opinions on the Civil War, classic video games, and racism.
Comparing with all the weird stuff I've read in school, this is nothing worth noting.