Why I Saved Instructing To Kill a Mockingbird When Others Would not

Harper Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, which tells the story of a white lawyer’s protection of a Black man who was falsely accused of raping a white girl, is taken into account a traditional of contemporary American literature.

It’s additionally among the many books most continuously challenged and banned from center and highschool curricula.

Profanity; racially charged epithets, together with the n-word; and a rape scene prime the explanations critics need it out of school rooms. Others, like lately retired instructor Ann Freemon, who taught highschool English for many of her 34 years as a instructor and To Kill a Mockingbird for simply as lengthy, staunchly defend instructing the e-book.

Freemon retired on the finish of the 2022-23 college 12 months from Mariner Excessive College in Washington state, a majority-minority highschool the place greater than half of scholars qualify free of charge or reduced-price lunch. She by no means anticipated that Mukilteo, the progressive college district of about 15,000 college students on the Puget Sound simply north of Seattle the place she taught, would problem the e-book that she lengthy thought of one in all her favorites to show, and positively essentially the most impactful. She undoubtedly didn’t anticipate fellow highschool English lecturers to be those to problem it.

However two years in the past, lecturers from a neighboring highschool in her district did simply that, arguing that the novel is polarizing, facilities on whiteness, and fails to have fun an “genuine Black standpoint.” Among the districts’ Black college students reported that the e-book misrepresented them, as African Individuals. Finally, the e-book wasn’t banned, however the district granted lecturers permission to not assign the novel that beforehand had been a part of the district’s literature curriculum for a number of years. In 2022-23, Freemon’s final 12 months as a highschool English instructor, she was, to her data, the one instructor in her district to assign the e-book.

Freemon’s title surfaced in an in-depth Washington Submit article on the controversy revealed in early November. In a more moderen interview with Training Week, she explains, in her personal phrases, why she feels strongly that To Kill a Mockingbird ought to stay part of the highschool English literature curriculum, particularly when taught in a trusting atmosphere that begins with considerate preparation, omits studying of offensive language, and ends with open dialogue.

The dialogue has been edited for size and readability.

I learn To Kill a Mockingbird at school as a teen. After you undergo this many pages with characters, you develop one thing for them; you simply wish to see them do nicely. I recall everybody in my class being overwhelmingly upset with the injustice of all of it. That prompted—identical to it did with my college students—conversations about that injustice.

It additionally impressed conversations about compassion and empathy—particularly, feeling compassion and never being afraid of those that are completely different than us, together with these with psychological disabilities or those that have a unique pores and skin coloration. These are all fears, and thru studying this e-book, we are able to have these conversations and perhaps attempt to work on being higher human beings. That’s what we talked about after I was a scholar, and that’s what I attempted to do after I’ve taught To Kill a Mockingbird through the years.

Once I taught the e-book, I’d hit what college students are required to know, when it comes to literary units and methods, all of which this e-book has in it. However I additionally lay the groundwork on getting ready college students for what they’d discover. It’s important to give them historical past on it first and begin engaged on it. Then they begin to belief you. This isn’t the e-book I start the 12 months with.

First, we might discuss in regards to the e-book cowl, what they see, what they anticipate, whether or not anybody has heard something in regards to the e-book. We’d discuss their background data. And I’d say to them: We’re going to be going to a reasonably darkish place.

The subsequent day, when college students got here in—and that is earlier than we ever crack the e-book open—I’d hold photos across the room taken from the Jim Crow legislation period, with the writing reduce out, so it’s simply the photographs. I’d hold eight to 10 of them on the partitions. The children would go in teams of two to have a look at them. I gave them three minutes, with their associate, to soak up the small print, resolve what they thought was happening within the images, what particulars inform you that. And I’d ask them to justify their causes.

Then they might get a homework project on Jim Crow legal guidelines. They’d come again to class very, very somber. Then we’d discuss in regards to the photos that they had checked out. A few of them are actually powerful. I’d say to them, What do you assume is going on? That might generate dialog. And I’d inform them: This image represents the segregation of the racially segregated water fountains, etcetera. We’d discuss that. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards granted a posthumous pardon to Homer Plessy [who was arrested for refusing to leave a train compartment designated for whites in 1892] whereas we had been studying about Plessy v. Ferguson. The scholars had been like, ‘No manner!’ It made it tremendous related.