Lori Klein and her aides write some of the goofiest bills found in a reliably goofy legislature, her latest being SB 1202, the one that would fire teachers for using "partisan" materials or teaching in a "partisan" manner.
If the Trib article accurately portrays the bill - and it does - then when I taught literature, I would've repeatedly violated this law:
• Heart of Darkness - a "partisan" picture of the European rape of Africa.
• The Great Gatsby - a "partisan" picture of the wealthy's immorality.
• Invisible Man - a "partisan" view of race.
• To Kill a Mockingbird - a "partisan" view of race relations.
• Death of a Salesman - a "partisan" view of capitalism.
All great literature, in fact, provides what Klein's legislation calls a "partisan" view. Her bill, then, would have a chilling effect on what is taught in schools, potentially cleansing curriculums with the great literature kids should have a chance to read.
Beyond that, we have some charter schools in the East Valley that advertise their schools emphasize patriotism and American exceptionalism. Sounds partisan to me. Should their teachers be fired, too?
A ridiculous piece of legislation. I'd like to know how much just introducing a bill costs taxpayers, because stuff like Klein's legislation is a complete waste of our money. The Trib would do a great public service by reporting to us just what garbage like Klein's bill costs us.
Mike McClellan
Gilbert
Tookie88 posted at 1:13 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
This is a crazy law! As a teacher, I too would be in violation of this law just by simply teaching about the Revolutionary War! Don't these people have anything better to do than micro-manage everything?!
sockratties posted at 1:30 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
Under the guise of preventing partisan materials from influencing our kids, Klein is pushing her own agenda. She got her bloomers in a knot because of the Tucson Schools ethnic studies program. Her legislation would even prevent a teacher from bringing a current newspaper article to the classroom without government approval. Talk about “dumming down” the students. This is another far-right fanatic trying to get the government to interfere with education. We’re already at the bottom. Next thing you know we’ll be teaching the earth is flat and 6000 years old.
Leon Ceniceros posted at 1:56 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
Here is a list of the "required reading" by teenaged Tucson Unified School District's "ETHNIC STUDIES/LA RAZA" curriculum.
"Pedagogy of the Oppressed".
"Occupied America"
"The X in Chicano"
"Chicano"
"An Epic Program"
Here are some quotes from the above books; "The Latinos are now realizing that the path to control Atzlan (Southwestern America) may once again be in their hands", "Mexicans are no better than Indians", "History of racism and oppression directed against Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and the Hispanic population", "My Land is lost and stolen. My Culture has been raped...we have to destroy capitalism...overthrow a governmetn that has committed abuses".
The author of the "Ethnic Studies/La Raza" course taught to these teenaged, impressionable, Hispanic, Native-American and Black students was authored by a Brazilian "MARXIST" (aka Communist) by the name of ....PAULO FREIRE.
Look up.............PAULO FREIRE.......in Google or Yahoo Search....and then make up your own mind.
ONE MORE THING.......WHEN DID ....LIBERALISM AND PROGRESSIVISM BECOME SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM.
sockratties posted at 3:00 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
So Leon – the class was closed to students who were not of the ethnic heritages you mentioned? Not hardly. You don’t think our young people can discern between opinion and fact? They don’t all suffer from a predisposition as you do. If young people learn about the effects of racial bias and hatred before it is internalized, they have a chance to live in a far better world than the one you envision. Have you read any of the books you list? I thought not; you might burn them but you’d never read them.
John Huppenthal, has spent years crusading against ethnic-studies programs he claims are “brainwashing” children into thinking that Latinos have been victims of white oppression. When he was an Arizona legislator he was against ethnic studies and still carries that axe. The Tucson program had to be cancelled or the district would have lost $14 million in state funding.
School officials in Tucson and elsewhere strenuously disagree, saying he misunderstood and mischaracterized a program that brought much-needed attention to a neglected part of America’s history and culture. Students protested the movement to no avail. It is another example of Arizona bias promoted by the likes of Huppenthal and Pearce.
JMJ posted at 3:25 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
But, look at all the publicity she is gaining for writing this attention-seeking legislation!
And, look who is defending MPS's "professional conduct" policy for MPS in the headline article for the Trib, today! I guess that person got a crash course in "professional conduct", so now knows what it means...?
My former principal in Mesa censored books because of ONE parent complaint. I'm sure there would have been a bonfire, too, if that idiot had known that people who censore have conducted bookburnings, too.
So uneducated; so MPS.
The leadership in MPS is a prime example of what is NOT professional, but teachers who are in the trenches are there to teach kids to THINK FOR THEMSELVES, eventually, not to sway them one way or another. We don't censor great literature. So, we didn't ever tell buffoon-head after that, and still read great literature.
Present information, digest it, discuss it, and, hopefully, youwill have individuals who graduate from high school with an inkling of what they believe as individuals, with all kinds of propaganda being thrown at them by people such as Lori Klein.
The Arizona Legislature is a living political lab. What will they invent next week...?
Nobody who is too smart is a leader in MPS, no worries there. It's not the teachers, either. It's the leadershi.......
Cerulean posted at 5:12 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
"The Trib would do a great public service by reporting to us just what garbage like Klein's bill costs us."
[thumbup][thumbup]
Dale Whiting posted at 7:06 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
Mike,
I once witnessed a Chandler Public School bus driver dispute what a high school science teacher said about the issue of global warming. Being a chemist by training, I have understood the theory behind global warming for over 40 years, long before Al Gore took up his torch. And as best I could determine, that high school science teacher was helping his students get the theory behind the dispute, not taking a position on the relative merits. But the driver, a copy maching salesman, lambasted the teacher and told the student to close his ears.
Had it been up to me, that bus driver would have been walking home!
Leon Ceniceros posted at 7:38 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
"GLOBAL WARMING".....has been going on for millenniums. Al Gore didn't invent it...lol.
End of Ice Age was around 12,000 B.C. Then around 7000 B.C. it became warmer than it is today. This lasted till 3000 B.C.
It then became cooler (but still warmer than our weather is today) until 1000 B.C.
Another warming period started around 800 A.D. all the way to 1200 A.D.
Then the Earth experience another "cooling" period until 1800 A.D.
GLOBAL WARMING ISN'T A MODERN PHENOMENON CAUSED BY CAR EXHAUST OR TREE CUTTING IN THE AMAZON LIKE THE ...........LIBERALS, THE PROGRESSIVES, THE DEMOCRATS, THE SOCIALISTS AND THE COMMUNISTS WOULD LIKE YOU TO BELIEVE.
CAPITALISM DID NOT CAUSE....GLOBAL WARMING.........AND AL GORE CAN HANG HIS CHAD ON THAT.................[wink]
Rich posted at 8:58 pm on Sun, Feb 19, 2012.
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado
Terra Nostra - Carlos Fuentes
Like Water for Chocolate -Laura Esquivel
Since Leon put up five. I would venture to say that, an "ethnic studies" program that consisted of reading these books would be of greater value and less controversial. The problem with "ethnic studies" is that it doesn't really study much of anything and tends to proselytize. Every ethnicity has a value and that value is what a society created. And in the end all we have left to know that is art that got left behind. Dealing with the beauty, and not the politics, is probably preferable.
Rich posted at 9:09 am on Mon, Feb 20, 2012.
Actually here's what has been bugging me since last night. This is a former Lit teacher's list:
• Heart of Darkness -
• The Great Gatsby -
• Invisible Man -
• To Kill a Mockingbird -
• Death of a Salesman -
All rather shockingly 19th century models for a novella, three novels and a play. Where is the whole twentieth century and it's development of the art of literature? The Beats, with not only the prose of Kerouac and Burroughs, but the poetry of Ginsberg, Corso? Where is nouveau roman? It isn't negligible in the development of twentieth century literature Claude Simon won a Nobel writing it. A little Magical Realism, maybe? The publishing companies restricted new development of art and language throughout the century to self-publication and small presses, why did the educational system follow? To sell the books of Random House? We are in the Twenty-first century, as beautiful as the language of Gatsby is, it is a charming old antique, nothing that needs to be taught to anyone who is not studying a dead language. As publication opens for our children, and they learn language as much from texting on a cellphone as in the classroom, teaching nineteenth century form and grammar that no longer applies to speech and communications patterns seems to me much worse than holding up "The Pearl" and saying "bad, Socialist." We haven't even gotten to an "angel-headed hipster" and that's over fifty years old. "Partisan" does anybody really care? If you going to pass laws for teachers to follow, the word "relevant" might be a better one to use.
Mike McClellan posted at 11:56 am on Mon, Feb 20, 2012.
Of course, this is far from an exhaustive list -- included in what I taught kids over the years were works like On the Road, A River Runs Through It, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, Sophie's Choice, The Centaur, Ballad of the Sad Cafe, Doctorow, Irving, Kennedy, Russo, McKewen, Proulx, Duarte, Frazier, Smiley, to name a few.
You might note, too, Rich, that all of the works I originally mentioned were in fact 20th Century works, including the great Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a work -- like Gatsby and Salesman and Darkness -- still lives today, both in style and substance.
Kids reveled in discussing the language, structure, and ideas of those works. In a 30 student class, I could usually count on commentary from almost all kids every day, and they actually enjoyed digging into those styles, along with Garcia-Marquez.
Kerouac? Not so much.
And despite what you might read in the media, kids seem able to discern the level of language context requires, so I saw very little "text-speak" leak into kids' writing.
Unless, of course, they did it for effect. Which some could do quite well.
Rich posted at 6:52 pm on Mon, Feb 20, 2012.
Structure Mike. The books were written in a nineteenth century structure that began with the sensation novels, which changed language and structure, how you tell a story.
Purple prose, the last of the old structure is probably best accessible through Bulwer-Lytton or Disraeli, both of whom are still available. The structure hasn't changed since that change, as you are showing. The only new structure on your list is a touch of Magical Realism, the closest to the old structure. Where is Kerouac, or W.S. Burroughs? And where is nouveau roman, the 'new novel' that arrived in most of the world in the fifties? And has colored everything but American fiction? And where is poetry? Apparently 'Macavity wasn't there.' Gatsby is a sordid little story written about as well as anything ever has been, Salesman close to the same and originally performed about as well as anything ever has been. Darkness is a perfect story written by a Pole in a language he had to be exacting in because it wasn't his native language, and the Invisible Man a brilliant man working through his problems within a nineteenth century framework.
Did the twentieth century exist at all in literature as an art form? In most of art there was a breakthrough. People like Picasso, Dali, Pollock, where is this in the works you show? You were teaching Caravaggio, the first modern painter, to a class that was ready for Oldenburg and Warhol.
It is strange to me to think of you as a Liberal, because what you just said, considering literature as an art form, is the ultimate Conservatism.