However, as an administrator, not to mention a person who went to Catholic high school where the religion teacher NEVER tells you what she thinks but encourages you to develop your own thinking (unlike those fundamentalists in college who tell you WHAT to think, and if you’re a fundamentalist and don’t do that, you just defined yourself out of my fundamentalist stereotype), you shouldn’t ever be able to figure out what I think from I write.

That said, Lolita is only safe if everyone understands the nuances of meaning, embraces controversy as a way of achieving deeper understanding of who we are in relation to the world around us, and …

to be quick since lunch is upon you, just as bedtime crouches (see? it comes from reading too much Stephen King alongside Revelations and Yeats), knocking at my chamber door (sigh), if *I* were teaching writing and reading with young adults/adults, I’d go for the jugular.

But, hey, that’s why I’m an administrator now. . .removed from harming children with high-powered ideas, reduced to making the world “safe” for the fearful, not free for the brave.

argh, good night. Thanks for letting me ramble on, Bud and fellow readers.

Miguel
http://eduwrite.blogspot.com
http://mguhlin.net

Here’s the pedagogical justification for the novel as the perfect truly modern novel, in the framework of “the Big Four”: Darwin (shift from theology to biology), Marx (shift from Free Will and essentialism to historico-materialistic determinism), Freud (shift from rationalism to irrationalism), and Nietzsche (shift from absolute to “revaluation of all values”): Lolita encapsulates all of those things. I’m teaching the class as a chronological survey of literature from the Renaissance to the post-modern, which these students are just ready to synthesize after studying Freud in AP Psych and studying the birth of the modern in the Norton Anthology.

I just deleted the attempt to restate my post’s point about what I would call an educational responsibility to alert the young to the realities of the Humberts and Lolitas of the world (and I wonder how many of us have read the novel?) – but I’ve already done that on my post, and it’s time for lunch.

I liked the style of your response, Miguel. While I’m still not real clear on where you stand on the issue of safety (as in CYA), I think I get the thrust of the rest, and agree.

Funny afterthought: I’m in Asia. Not being a Christian is normal here, so parents don’t view non-theists (or non-astrologists, or non-anythingists) “negatively” – they view them as “normal.” It’s a cultural thing.

In short, the last paragraph might be revised in this way:

The teacher, more than any other, suffers when s/he sets out to take the road less travelled by…for where the teacher goes, so must the students.

Or, another way:

Far better the teacher who, like the local Fireman’s Halloween Haunt House, enjoys the trust of the community that nothing found in that House will be judged objectionable by anyone….

1) Teachers who lack the skills to facilitate a balanced, consider all the perspectives conversation, and even less, to do so online via a discussion board.

2) Students who misinterpret and misrepresent–unintentionally or intentionally–the discussion in class to their parents and other adults who are not part of the conversation.

3) Administrators who are focused on ensuring that academic learning is taking place without the heat and noise that is a by-product of learning…and often, is necessary for learning to take place.

It’s the last I wish to speak to. Being in school is often about indoctrinating children and pushing an acceptable point of view–Society’s and/or the dominant culture. I still recall Jana’s fear–she was a published online author of sensual poems and 8th grade teacher–that feared her children would go online and find her writing there, take it home and share it with their Bible-thumping parents.

Would Jana have been dismissed? Yes, if it became an issue that became center-stage rather than what kids should be learning. Rather than seize a teachable moment, schools expect teachers to focus on academics and accepted school curriculum. If the teacher becomes the teachable moment, that teacher is out of a job.

The benefit of writing in journals or notebooks–rather than the web–is that children can explore their ideas, decide what to share in the insular, closed community. That’s just not possible or desirable in the Read/Write world.

Any discussion of books deemed controversial–and any book can be found to be so depending on the culture depending on how it is handled–must always be prefaced with a clear understanding of what the instructional goals are. Those have to be communicated clearly to students, parents, administrators alike and the ramifications explored in advance.

That’s why sticking with the approved curriculum is safer than dragging any old book in and discussing it. But if you must drag one in, it is better before one word is spoken, or essay written, that students be aware that controversy and consequences resulting from idiocy, fear, prejudice, and/or intellectual snobbery lurk in its pages.

The victim of those dark creatures will not be the student awakened to other worlds, the parents who bemoan the loss of innocence, or the administrator who must explain why that nice teacher–who, yes, happens to be an atheist, even though that’s immaterial yet reflects negatively, from a Christian perspective, on the man’s morals–introduced the text. Instead, it is the teacher who unleashed the beasts that slept, chained behind the closed doors protected by a paper-thin facade.