Those Who Burn Books Will, in the End, Burn People.*
Mamacita says: Banned Books Week is coming up this month – Sept. 30 – Oct. 6, 2012. It always saddens me to be reminded that there are such huge hordes of ignorant masses in the United States, and yet, sigh, there they are, forbidding this and banning that lest their children learn something their parents hadn’t already run through the personal values laundromat since, heaven forbid, the kids might come home asking questions and – we can’t have it, we just can’t HAVE IT – thinking. Maybe even. . . ASKING QUESTIONS! (shudder)
First of all, I despise censorship. Banning books is akin to banning people; both are abhorrent to the collective intelligence, and both bring us down as a culture. It’s one thing for someone to decide that a certain book will not be allowed in his/her house – every parent has that right – but it’s quite another thing for this person to decide that a certain book will not be allowed in my house, or yours. Or in a library, or school; for one person, or a handful, to be allowed to dictate what the masses might be exposed to is ridiculous, cowardly, stupid, and evil. Someone is offended? There are choices. Such people can remove themselves and their children from the nasty thought-provoking sources. They could also grow a pair and encourage thinking and questions, but that’s too hard and scary for such people, I suppose. God forbid their children might come home from school with. . . . ideas. Brrrrrr, can’t have it. Besides, people who advocate censorship and book burning banning don’t usually know the answers; their thoughts are scripted by others. It’s a lot easier to live that way; thinking for oneself can be so hard, you know.
Many book censors are too insecure in their own backgrounds and beliefs to risk questions from others, and a huge lot of them are just plain too ignorant to deal with anything that isn’t very, very simple. Learning is hard. Stick with what we already know. Go that extra mile to make bloody sure our kids aren’t exposed to anything that might threaten what these adults consider “safe.” Again, every parent has this right – in his/her own home. Outside of that home, guess what? Other people have rights, too. Imagine.
This post is a rerun, but before Banned Books Week actually begins, I want to share with you again this memo from a college-educated man who was in charge of a building full of impressionable middle school students.
I firmly believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator, should contain no idiocy or errors.
I also believe that any memo, letter, or piece of written information that is sent by an administrator that DOES contain idiocy or errors should be posted publicly and that the general public should be allowed to mock it.
I suppose that my belief that administrators should be required to be intelligent and able to proofread would be thrown out by the PC police.
This is the letter a principal gave me several years ago, demanding requesting that I take down my bulletin board about Banned Books Week. I had used that same bulletin board for over ten years, and in those earlier years, he had actually praised it for being timely and creative. That was, of course, before he saw Waldo on there.
This is the same school system that had a virtual meltdown because I was bringing in speakers; the curriculum director didn’t want me to bring in people from the outside to talk about careers because, and I quote, “it might give the students ‘ideas.'” These people volunteered their time, and would have continued to volunteer their time, and it would have been of enormous benefit to the students, but no. Ideas are scary, and, to the ignorant, dangerous.
A few years later, the same man who denied permission for me to bring in speakers for free, spent nearly a million dollars of taxpayer money to take all the middle school students to town and have paid speakers talk to them about the same thing I could have done for free. By this time, you see, the Trend Wheel had spun back around, and it was now permissible to give the students ‘ideas.’
One of those speakers represented General Motors, and her speech was 
excellent, although it didn’t sit well with administration. She spoke about high school ‘graduates’ for whom a diploma was nothing but a piece of paper that connoted untruths. She spoke about how an employer should have the right to assume that a diploma pretty much guaranteed literacy and general competence. She spoke about all the money big corporations were having to shell into remedial programs for employees who had diplomas, pieces of paper that represented four years of showing up and not much else. She spoke about how businesses would really appreciate a diploma that told the truth: that if a student had been graduated out of respect for really trying, the diploma should say so, discretely of course, but in terms that the business world would be able to interpret. If the student was just going through the motions of graduation for self-esteem’s sake, the diploma should say so. And if the diploma was rightfully earned because the student had become fully literate and generally competent and had genuinely and individually and truthfully learned how to care for himself/herself in the world in general, the business world should be able to see that kind of diploma and interpret it for what it was: a real diploma.
Oohh, the remarks that were scattered throughout the auditorium. And when we returned to the individual buildings, there was much talk of blueberries and self-esteem.
My friends are mostly lawyers, musicians, writers, speakers, businesspeople, and other educators. Before the edict went out, I often had one of them come to my classroom and talk about what they did all day, and then the students would ask questions. Silly me, I really thought it was helpful.
Sure, they asked my lawyer friends about their individual rights and stuff, but. . . . .
Oh. I get it.
We certainly can’t have our students understanding their basic civil rights and those of their fellow citizens of any age, now can we.
What a narrow escape.
P.S. A few years later, I dared to submit a speaker proposal for my classroom again, and it was again turned down, but this time the reason was different. 
Apparently, it was unfair to other students if one group got to have a speaker and others didn’t. I suggested that other teachers could just as easily invite a speaker into their classroom, too, but nobody else cared to go to the trouble, so I couldn’t, either.
Are our schools in trouble? Darn right they are, and most of it isn’t coming from the students.
Censorship and book banning, indeed. If our society gets any more politically correct, it will be so boring and insipid and cowardly, it will be indistinguishable 
from an ant colony.
Except, of course, that ants are not cowardly.
Book banners are, though.
Censors. The lowest common denominator of humanity. Can there be anything lower than those who strive to keep the rest of us in the dark? Those who fear creativity, ideas, questions, and knowledge are somewhat less than human, by my way of thinking. The human being was created to soar, not bury its head in the sand of fear.
Do I read banned books? I do. And so should you.
*Heine
My Mother’s Hands
Mamacita says: My mother hasn’t been feeling very well this week, so I’ve gone over there every night after school to bring her some food, do a few little chores, and make sure she’s still there. If you know what I mean. She’s still weak and shaky, as she’s described her own illnesses all our lives, but she’s getting better, thankyouforcaring.
As a kid, I never thought of Mom and style in the same breath. She looked like the other girls’ mothers, and back then, moms weren’t supposed to look like anything but moms – what we would, these days, call frumpy. 🙂
Not anymore. There’s nothing frumpy about Mom now; however, I personally tend to lean that way. Mom outclasses everyone else, Red Hat, boa, and all.
Oh, she doesn’t wear the Red Hat and boa every day; I just wanted to make sure you all knew she had them. And wore them. Mom has a better social life than anybody else I know personally.
Mom is one classy broad.
After all the kids grew up and moved out, Mom decided she’d had enough frump for one lifetime and bought some new clothes – bright colors, which look great with her coloring. She looks especially good in red. Her hair is dark and stylish, her makeup is subtle, and her voice has always been beautiful. When Mom was younger, she was breathtaking. Pictures of her, in her late teens and twenties, look like photos of a movie star. No exaggeration.
What I hadn’t noticed, until this week, were Mom’s hands.
They’re lovely.
Mom’s hands have had quite a workout over the years; with four kids, that’s a lot of hair brushing, shoe-tying, hugs, backrubs, buttoning-up, cleaning, washing clothes, dishes, cooking, and all the other activities good moms do.
Most women my her age have hands that have begun to show wear, but as I brought Mom some ice this week and leaned over her bed to give it to her, I noticed that her hands did not reflect her actual age at all. She has the hands of a young woman, smooth and shapely. I can close my eyes and see those hands playing paper dolls with little girls, and stacking blocks with a little boy and those same little girls. I can see those hands trimming a Christmas tree, wrapping gifts, and feeding ham into a grinder that was clamped to the edge of the kitchen counter. I remember Mom’s hands rolling out pie crust, breaking eggs into a big yellow bowl*, unpeeling Band-aids, tweezing out splinters, sewing little nightgowns, holding a book and turning pages as she read out loud to us, and turning frying chicken in a big black frying pan. Mom’s hands, changing diapers, bathing babies, washing little kids’ hair. . . I can picture perfectly my mother’s hands caring for my bedridden father, pouring Ensure in a feeding tube, checking the bedside IV stand and all its connections, monitoring every detail of his last few years. I can see her, washcloth in those hands, cleaning the faces of little children and, later, Dad. In my mind’s eye, her hands looked then exactly as they look now. This isn’t wishful thinking, either; I got a good long look at her hands, resting quietly on her body as she lay in her bed, and those hands are absolutely beautiful. Mom was, and still is, the pivot around which all the rest of us revolve. She held our world in those hands.
She’s feeling a lot better today. Tomorrow, I hope she feels even more like herself.
I’ll tell you the honest truth: I am NOT ready to be grown up all by myself without my mommy right there to help me figure things out. I’m counting on her to live to 110, still in her right mind and able to wipe her own butt.
Actually, those are my own goals as well. ( So far so good with the latter; not so good with the former.)
*Oh, and that big yellow Pyrex mixing bowl? She gave it to me. I break eggs into it now. Mom got the whole set of mixing bowls as a wedding gift in 1950. They’re, like, you know, old and stuff.
Hands Off My Pencils or You’ll Be Sorry
Mamacita says: Hey, it’s THAT TIME again, so say “hello” to my annual post about how community school supplies are a terrible idea and are, in fact, contributing to the lazy downfall of our nation. . . . .
School will be starting soon – or maybe it already has – for most kids, and each year at about this time I like to re-run this post about an issue that really, really makes me want to kill somebody and put his/her head on a post in the WalMart parking lot bothers me a lot: community supplies in the classroom.
When I was a little kid, one of my favorite days of the year (besides Christmas Day) was the day the newspaper posted the list of required school supplies, and Mom took us to Crowder’s Drug Store to buy them.
I loved looking at that list, and Mom always let me be the one who got to put the little checkmark beside the items as we put them in our basket.
Prang paints. Check. Paint pan. Check. Rectangular eraser. Check. Blunt-tipped 
scissors. Check. Etc. Check.
On the first day of school, I loved bringing my beautiful shiny school supplies into my new classroom, and I loved arranging them all inside my desk. I loved to look inside my desk and just savor the sight: all those cool things I could draw with and paint with and write with. . . and they were mine, all mine, and nobody else could touch my things unless I gave them permission. Me. I was the boss of my desk things. I took such pride in my school supplies, and mine were usually still looking pretty good even at the end of the year. They were mine, you see, and I had a vested interest in them; therefore, I took pains to take care of them. Back then, down in lower elementary, the school supplied only the special fat pencils and the weird orange pens.
I always envied the lucky kids with the giant 96-count Crayola box, so big it had the sharpener built right in, but I never considered helping myself to it. It wasn’t mine.
When my own children were little, I looked forward to Buying School Supplies Day with just as much delight as I did when I was a little kid. New binders. New pencils. And the most fun of all, choosing the new lunchbox. My own children loved the new school supplies, too. I think it is of vital importance that all children have their own school supplies; it is the beginning of them learning the pride of possession and the importance of caring for one’s own things in order to keep them for any length of time.
It’s not like that in many schools nowadays. I learned, to my horror and dismay, that many teachers do not allow their students to have their own supplies now; the little sack of a child’s very own things is taken from the child on that first day, and dumped into the community pot for all the kids to dip into and out of. There are no “my scissors,” there is only a rack or box of scissors for everyone. “Look, there are the scissors I picked out at Walmart; my name is engraved on them; I wish I could use them but they’re so cool, other kids grab them first every time. . . .” There are no more personalized pencils or a child’s favorite cartoon character pencils to use and handle carefully; there is only a bin of chewed-on germ-covered pencils grabbed at and used by everybody in the room.
And since nothing belongs to anybody, who cares about taking good care of them?
I fully understand that the community pot of supplies is much easier for a teacher to control. I wasn’t, however, aware of the fact that teacher convenience was any kind of issue here. I taught in the public schools for 26 years and I never expected things to happen for the convenience of me; that wasn’t why I was there.
I fully understand, too, that some children’s little sack of supplies won’t be as individualized or cool as another child’s sack of supplies. I know for a sad fact that some children will never have their own little sack of supplies, at least, not one brought from home. That’s life; that should not even be an issue. Some children’s shoes aren’t as cool, either; do we throw shoes in a box and let the kids take pot luck with those, too? I understand that in some classrooms, a child’s packed lunch is sometimes taken apart and certain things confiscated or distributed, lest some child have a treat that another child doesn’t have. When my kids were in grade school, my mother would occasionally stop by at lunch time with a Happy Meal for them – and for me! – and I was told this had to stop because other children didn’t have that option. Well, you know what, my children were often envious of another child’s dress or shoes or lunch or cool pen, but I would never have tried to ensure that other children would never be able to have anything my own kids couldn’t have. Good grief. Such insanity!
Teachers should keep an eye out for those kids who don’t have supplies, and the school should supply them, but after that point, they become the child’s own and he/she should be required to take good care of them, just as any and every kid should be required to take care of his/her things.
Children who take good care of their things should not be required to supply children who had their own things but didn’t take care of them properly. As a little child, I was horrified at the thought, and as a parent, I’m even more horrified. It was like a reward for being negligent! Every year, I donate tons of school supplies to a local school; I’m delighted to do this, and I recommend this to all of you. Perhaps, if schools have enough donated supplies, our little children will be allowed to keep their very own supplies once again.
When I was a child, I had very little that was my very own. Everything that was supposedly mine was expected to be shared with anybody else in the house that wanted it at any given moment. But at school? In my desk, in my very own desk, were things that were inviolably mine, and I can not even describe for you the sensations that went through me when I looked at those things that my teacher had ruled were mine and only mine. Kids who violated another kid’s desk were quite properly labeled ‘thieves,’ and they soon learned what happens when a person put his hands on property that was not rightfully theirs.
Things are very different now. I hate it. The rare teacher who takes the time and 
trouble to allow his/her students to have their own things is often castigated by the other teachers who are taking the easy ‘community property’ route. Kids are sharing more than gluesticks and pencils, too; I don’t even want to THINK about the incredible pot-o-germs they’re dipping into daily. Gross. My child using a pencil some other child gnawed? I guess so, because teachers who don’t want to bother with a child’s private property are forcing the kids to dump it all in the pot for everybody to use. “Don’t be selfish.” “Share.” Well, you know what? I don’t like that kind of forced sharing. I had to share everything, EVERYTHING, and that little pile of school supplies was my only private stash of anything. I do not feel it was selfish, or is selfish, to want to keep school supplies that were carefully chosen, to oneself. Children who have their own things learn to respect the property of other children. Children with no concept of personal property tend to view the world as a buffet of free, unearned delights awaiting their grasping, grabbing hands. Both tend to grow into adults with the same concepts learned as children.
This business of everything being community property in the classroom causes problems in the upper levels, too. Junior high, high school, even college students, are expecting things to be available for them without any effort on their part. Upper level students come to class without pencils, erasers, paper, etc, because they’re used to having those things always available in some community bin somewhere in the room. They have never been required, or allowed, to maintain their own things, and now they don’t know how to. The stuff was always just THERE, for a student to help himself to. And now that they are supposed to maintain their own, they really don’t know how. Plus, why should they? HEY, I need a pencil, Teach, gimme one. No, not that one, that other one there. Indeed,
Well, it worked down in the lower grades, with community property. You just get up and help yourself; everything in this room is for me, ain’t it? Gimme that pretty one, I want it.
But guess what, kids, it’s evil enough down in the lower grades, but it doesn’t, or shouldn’t, work at all when you hit the upper grades. I’d like to have a penny for every hand that tried to help itself to things on my desk, because, well, they were there. I’ve even had students who opened my desk drawers, looking for supplies. Not poor kids who didn’t have any; just a kid who didn’t bring any and expected everything to be supplied because, well, down in the elementary, everything WAS.
Oh good grief, teachers, let the little kids keep their own things, put their names on them, and learn how to be responsible for them. Secondary teachers and future employers will greatly appreciate it.
I know that in some cases, it’s not the individual teacher’s decision – it’s a corporate mandate. This is even more evil. It’s like a national plot to make future generations needy and dependent and reliant on others to fulfill all their needs. And don’t we already have more than enough of THOSE people?
Let me sum up, as Inigo Montoya would say: Community school supplies are 
wrong on every possible level. Period.
Parents, if I were you – and I am one of you – I’d buy the community bin stuff at the Dollar Tree instead of the overpriced educational supplies store in the strip mall that the school supplies newsletter instructs you to patronize. Send them to school and let them be dumped into the bins for mass consumption and germ sharing. Then you and your children go shopping and pick out the good stuff. If your school informs you that it’s against their policy for any of the children to have their own supplies, you inform the school that you don’t give a rat’s ass about such a policy; you did your chipping in and now you’re seeing to it that your children have their very own stuff and that you expect your children’s very own stuff to harbor no germs except your own children’s germs, which will be considerable, but that’s another topic. What’s more, if your children come home and tell you that their very own supplies are not being respected and are in fact being accessed by others without permission of their rightful owners, you should high-tail it to that classroom and raise bloody hell.
I am happy to see to it that all of the children in the room have adequate supplies, but I can’t stress strongly enough that each child needs and deserves to have his/her very own personal private stash of supplies that nobody else can ever touch. How can we teach our children to take care of things if they have nothing of their own to take care of? Again, I want to stress that no child should be without classroom supplies, but those who can’t supply their own and who are furnished with supplies should be required to take good care of them.
Do I seem overly obsessed about this topic? Darn right. The very concept of community school supplies makes me so furious I become incoherent. Which is apparently happening right now so. . . .
