A Book I Never Thought I'd see banned

**Just read this entry at The Write Space, an educational blog affiliated with Connecticut Writing Project-- a subdivision of the National Writing Project, Since many of my readers are in the educational field, I thought they would appreciate this story**

**I have my meeting with the Board concerning the personal days this afternoon @ 6:20. Wish me luck!**

Dictionaries and Vending Machines

Down the hall from my office are soda and snack vending machines, and both are notorious for stealing money. The Coke machine sometimes just takes your $1.25 and gives you nothing in return. The snack machine typically has food get stuck somewhere in its descent into the bin. The lucky undergrad who finds a stuck bag of Fritos can sometimes win two bags for the price of one by purchasing one of the same item and hoping it falls in such a way as to knock down the stuck bag. Yesterday I walked out of my office when I heard the snack machine being assaulted. I saw four undergraduate girls attacking the machine. One rather long-limbed girl looked as if she were trying to scale the side of the machine. She was standing at its side, feet planted wide, knees almost embracing the ends, hands clasping both upper corners. I realized she was trying to get enough leverage to tip the machine forward—while her three friends stood in front of the machine, alternately banging, punching, and pounding on the glass. If the long-limbed girl ever got sufficient leverage to tip the machine, she would surely bring it down on top of her more conventionally-limbed girlfriends.




I walked over to the assailants, stood aside in case the climber succeeded in her attempts to tilt the machine, and asked them (rhetorically) if the machine had stolen their money. All three girls in the pathway of doom replied at once. Apparently, not only had the first bag of Doritos they had attempted to purchase gotten stuck, but the second and third bags they had attempted to purchase in the hopes of knocking down the previous bags had also gotten stuck. There was now a stack of Doritos bags right about at the girls’ eye level just taunting them by its refusal to fall. The long-limbed girl was still at it, and so I asked if they had ever heard of the Darwin Awards, which are awarded each year to “those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.” Basically, the award is given to people who unintentionally kill themselves in the most absurd ways, like the guy who tried to kiss his pet scorpion. When it stung him in the face, he got angry and tried repeatedly to force the now terrified and defensive animal to accept a kiss. It stung him repeatedly, and he later died from the poison. None of the girls had heard of it before, so I explained what it was, and I pointed out that I distinctly recall reading about one young man who won the award by pulling a soda machine down on top of himself. The girls seemed incredulous at first, but the climber was sufficiently credulous that she stopped wrestling the machine. I assured them that I was serious, and then left to finish my errand. I could hear them resume their banging, punching, and pounding of the glass, but no more tilting or climbing.
So I chose to share this odd story because of something I read in the paper this morning, and which inspired me to propose that we develop and grant a similar award in the field of education, maybe call it the Dewey Award or something like that, and give it to the educator's) who make the most boneheaded, educationally unsound decisions each year around the country. We’d have to have a separate category for idiots who seduce their students, or else they would dominate the awards. It seems like we have had at least a half dozen of those in Connecticut alone just in the last couple of years. But I digress. This award would be solely for educators who make unsound educational decisions—poor pedagogical or administrative decisions, not just stupid personal decisions that impact education.


Anyway, I have my first two nominees. They are Linda Carpenter and Linda Callaway. Mrs. Carpenter is the Principal of Oak Meadows Elementary School in Menifee, California, and Linda Callaway is the Superintendent of Schools for Menifee Union School District, Mrs. Carpenter’s boss. David Kelly of the Los Angeles Times reports that last week a single, unidentified parent called Oak Meadows Elementary School to complain about the inappropriate content of a book being made available to students in the fourth and fifth grades. The book? Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. The parent was particularly concerned about the dictionary’s definition of oral sex. I checked. The entry reads “oral sex, noun, oral stimulation of the genitals: cunnilingus, fellatio.” Now an isolated complaint from a single parent is not uncommon, especially about sex in a book (I still can’t get my mind around why I never hear of complaints about violence) but Mrs. Carpenter’s response was uncommon. She ordered that the offending books be removed—“temporarily housed off location”—and that a committee “of parents, teachers and administrators” be composed to meet and discuss “the extent to which the dictionaries support the curriculum, the age appropriateness of the materials and its suitability for the age levels of the students.”

I should know enough by this point in my career to not be aghast, but I am. They are banning the dictionary. Fortunately the school board president has called the decision “absurd,” and others have come forward to protest the decision of the principal. I particularly like one quote from Peter Scheer of the First Amendment Coalition. He said that when you ban books “eventually you end up with a library that is empty or partially full of dumbed-down or redacted versions of books. … Given what’s on television, let alone the internet, it is refreshing that students are actually looking up sexual terms in a dictionary. … At the end of the day, if my kid is digging through the Merriam-Webster dictionary to find words he and his friends are going to giggle over but along the way find other words they will use, I think that is a day well spent in school.”

Feel free to comment here or at the original Dictionaries and Vending Machines.