SuperWonderBang

I used to live in Georgia. I was born and raised there. I still consider it my home. Most of my and my wife’’s family are still there. So, I become really concerned when I hear that Georgia’’s legislature has decided to allow classes on the Bible to be taught in public school.

I have mixed emotions about this because I am a student of literature. I still spend a lot of time reading and thinking about literature and how it affects our lives. So, I understand how important the Bible and its themes, characters, and symbols are to a deeper understanding of western literature. I profess the Bible’’s importance as a foundational document for the study of literature, though I do not ascribe to its religious worship.

At the same time, I am deeply concerned that in the hands of teachers whose primary knowledge of and about the Bible comes from his or her religious experiences and not from his or her education experiences the line between study and worship may become blurred. I believe deeply in the separation of church and state. I believe even deeper in the dangers of indoctrinating young people with religion. They are not equipped to handle the big questions religion asks.

Within this heady brew of religion and state separation and the importance of thorough and well-rounded education, especially in the humanities, I see the state of Georgia throwing its teachers, who are notoriously underfunded and undertrained, into a precarious situation where personal beliefs are central to interpretation. It is neither fair nor intelligent to create such a path toward failure as this situation seems to do.

As a former teacher of literature at the high school level, I know full well how difficult it can be to be “neutral” on a wide array of topics while discussing things as personal as some literature becomes. How do we broach the use of the n-word in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn? How do we unpack Atticus Finch’s seeming collusion on hand with the racial injustice against which he fights on the other hand?

These are difficult literary questions even when something as clearly wrong as racism is involved. How then would we ever hope to study the Bible in a classroom where some of the students are likely to believe that the document is the word of God? How can we possibly go about interpreting the stories and symbols when some students will surely believe that the Bible is nothing but a literal list of dos and don’ts?

In the end, the dangerous part of all of this is not that any great injustice will be done to the students. They will be able to benefit from any discussion of religion and literature. The truly dangerous part is for the teachers themselves. How long until one of them is sued? It will take only one slip of the tongue or one interpretation, even if it is prefaced as only a possibility, to which someone takes offense.

Religion is still a part of this country for whom many people will suffer no slights. By its own definition, at least within many more literal Southern adherents, religion is not something you discuss, it is something you do. With that in mind, how is it possible to discuss the Bible within a classroom of kids and not have some of them think you are compelling them to do rather than to think?

Our English department is developing new electives for our seniors to take. These are year-long classes that each teacher develops based on their own personal interests in literature. They range from outdoor writing to science fiction to Greek myths. My class will focus on contemporary literature, predominantly novels. For the purpose of the class, I am defining contemporary as nothing older than 20 years ago and a significant number of the novels are within the last 5 years. The poetry is a bit older.

What follows below is the short write-up I put together to give to my department head. Let me know what you think.

Contemporary Literature Roundtable

Time creates perspective and history tells us that it is impossible to name a movement of art or thought while living within that movement. Accepting that as a given, we will try to take a circumspect view of the literature of the last 10-20 years. This will include poetry and fiction from several genres including graphic novels and children’s literature. Our goal is to arrive at some understanding of the interests and pressures affecting today’s writers. Not for those with short attention spans.

First Trimester

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Book 1: The Golden Compass (Northern Lights in UK)

Book 2: The Subtle Knife

Book 3: The Amber Spyglass

Excerpts from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience as needed.

A fantasy trilogy that features as its literary heart a rewriting of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Touches on themes of bildungsroman, myth, religious tolerance, sin and redemption, loyalty, and honor.

Second Trimester

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathon Safran Foer

Deals with themes of history, familial obligation, linguistics, wordplay, the Holocaust, myth, cultural differences, and the search for place. Recently made into a movie.

The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

A love story complicated by the uncontrollable time travel of the husband in the marriage. Tackles the gnawing sense of loss and regret we have all felt as part of our emotional responsibility while also dealing with how much do we know or want to know about our loved ones.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta

Skewers the beautiful façade of modern suburbia. Through subplots of infidelity and a pedophile returning home, Perrotta mirrors the lives of children against the lives of adults attempting to recapture that childhood invigoration.

Third Trimester

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

Limited, yet unique point-of-view drives this novel of the disintegration of a family at the hands of modernity. A flailing protagonist wanders through a maze of deceit which he can’t even see.

Parasites Like Us by Adam Johnson

Satire dealing with academia, science, fear mongering, biological terrorism, consumerism, and love.

Watchmen by Alan Moore

Graphic novel (originally published as individual comic books) dealing with themes of nuclear threats, moral responsibility, and other geopolitical issues. Also provides and interesting view of narrative structure based around the metafiction it uses as ephemera.

Poetry

Contemporary poetry will be interspersed throughout the second and third trimesters as needed thematically or as mental breaks from the fiction. Some poems may not be within the prescribed time scale, but it will be published in the timeframe and should be from the past 50 years or so. Poetry including Billy Collins’s Sailing Alone Around the Room, Kenneth Koch’s New Addresses, Wislawa Szymborska’s Poems New and Collected, Fernando Pessoa’s A Little Larger than the Universe, Seamus Heaney’s Opened Ground: Selected Poems, and other work from the last 10 years (all provided by me).

Technorati Tags: education, literature, books

Once again, our school goes through the deaths of its students. I’m not going to go into details as I did the last time, but two more of our students have died in a plane crash.

It’s a devastating thing to happen anytime, but here among the holidays, as many of us enjoy the company of families, there are at least two families very close to me going through hell. I simply cannot imagine the depth of grief suffered by those left behind. I hope I never have to experience the death of my children. It’s simply not something that should happen.

I was speaking to a student today who is a fairly religious person. As many students do, he is getting older and beginning to question all that he thought was certain just months before. We talked about how God could let something like this happen. His girlfriend offered platitudes, “God does everything for a reason.” His response was “There’s no reason a 17–year-old kid needs to die.”

I’m not terribly interested in the religious value of the debate, but I am interested in this idea of how events like this make us question our most central and core beliefs. It sometimes makes them stronger, sometimes it shatters them. It will be a signpost for everyone close to the situation, a moment in time that no one forgets.