Free Republic

ST. JOSEPH, Mo. - A high school teacher has apologized for asking students to write about who they would kill and how they would do it, and officials said he will likely keep his job. Michael Maxwell, who teaches industrial technology at Central High School, said his request that students in his beginning drafting class describe how they would carry out a murder was merely a writing prompt. It was not clear why he asked the drafting class to write fiction. "I made a horrible mistake that I regret," Maxwell said. "I want to apologize to my students, my colleagues...

JOHN Howard believes the postmodern approach to literature being taught in schools is "rubbish" and is considering tying education funding to ending the "gobbledegook" taught in some states. The Prime Minister made the threat after accusing the state education authorities of "dumbing down" the English syllabus and succumbing to political correctness. "I feel very, very strongly about the criticism that many people are making that we are dumbing down the English syllabus," Mr Howard said. Australia's most distinguished literary scholar, Leonie Kramer, yesterday agreed with the Prime Minister's criticism of how English is taught in high schools. Dame Leonie, professor...

English teachers at Malibu High School are supporting a student committee's selection of a controversial novel about adult-oriented subjects for a campuswide reading event for grades 9-12. The book, "Lovely Bones" by Alice Sebold, rocketed to bestseller......in 2003. It is written as a narrative in the voice of a 14-year-old girl who had been raped, murdered and dismembered by a neighbor. The girl watches from heaven as survivors grapple with her death, and as her family falls apart. ( snip) "This book is a very touchy subject," said Laurel Thorne, a Juan Cabrillo Elementary School teacher, who spoke as the...

(AgapePress) - A school district in Maine has reaffirmed its reinstatement of a sexually explicit book several parents want removed from the local high school's curriculum. The Orono School Committee recently voted to retain the controversial novel Girl Interrupted in the ninth grade English literature class at Orono High School.Girl Interrupted, a novel written by Susanna Kaysen, was affirmed for use in the high school curriculum over the objections of parents and local residents who take exception to the profuse profanity and sexual content in the book. Michael Heath, head of the Christian Civic League of Maine (CCLM), says...

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Remember when a noun was defined as a person, place or thing? In a teen magazine that is becoming part of the Baltimore middle-school reading curriculum, the noun is being redefined as "stuff." That makes a verb "what stuff does." It's part of a new approach in the Baltimore school system to teaching reading and writing in middle schools. Some say the new method doesn't have much of a track record. The change is being made after a dismal performance on state standardized tests this spring. The Baltimore Sun reported Sunday that officials have spent at least...

After a dismal performance on state standardized tests this spring, the Baltimore school system decided to overhaul the way it teaches reading and writing in middle schools. Putting convention aside, officials spent at least $2 million on Studio Course, a curriculum that uses teen magazines, places grammar on the back burner and lets kids write about whatever they want. ... The program has a track record in only one other city, Denver, where middle schools have seen reading and writing scores stagnate. "I can't imagine Baltimore would be so ignorant to think it's research-based," said Kay Landon, a sixth-grade teacher...

BENNINGTON, Vt. --The school superintendent whose district includes Mount Anthony Union High School has labeled "inappropriate" and "irresponsible" an English teacher's use of liberal statements in a vocabulary quiz. "I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes," said one question on a quiz written by English and social studies teacher Bret Chenkin. The question referring to the president asked students to say whether coherent or eschewed was the proper word. The sentence would be more coherent if one eschewed...

Gov. Jeb Bush is encouraging Florida schoolchildren to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a parable of the New Testament gospels, for a contest timed with the release of the movie version by a company owned by a prominent Republican donor. The $150 million film opens Dec. 9, and three sets of winners will get a private screening in Orlando, two nights at a Disney resort, a dinner at Medieval Times and a copy of the C.S. Lewis children's novel signed by Jeb and Columba Bush. As to the religious themes in the book, Openshaw said the story...

Across the board, pupils' language skills dip BY PAUL GOODSELL WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER Teaching kids to speak and write English properly can be a big challenge these days. Popular culture - movies, television, music and everyday conversation - feeds children a steady diet of double negatives, verbs that don't agree with subjects and incorrectly used adverbs and adjectives.

All right, boys and girls, it's been twelve years since that September morning in 1993 when your mom gave you one last hug, brushed away your tears, and told you to listen to your first grade teacher. Well, you've made it. You're graduating high school. In the next couple of months, you'll be walking down that long aisle, watching your step as you climb to the stage, taking that diploma from your principal's hand — and then, afterwards, posing for photos with weepy relatives. You're ready for college . . . Not so fast, Poindexter. Here's a pop quiz (answers...

Today my 13 year old daughter came home from school telling me about this “disturbing” book she’s reading with the class. The name rang a distant bell in my head, but I couldn’t put my head on it. I went to the store and she got online to do a bit of research for herself on the book.When I came home she was walking out of the bathroom, holding her stomach, crying. I asked her what was wrong and she couldn’t talk for a bit. Finally she yelled, “They’re going to kill a baby later in the book!”I asked her...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. There are some things I just do not understand, and I am at a point where I have given up on figuring out many of these puzzlers. But there are still some conundrums I am determined to solve. For the life of me I cannot understand how it is that we have reached this level in our academic careers and we still cannot speak proper English. We have all taken at least seven years of secondary English classes prior to coming to Penn State, and once we are here, we must...

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - R. Craig Hogan, a former university professor who heads an online school for business writing here, received an anguished e-mail message recently from a prospective student. "i need help," said the message, which was devoid of punctuation. "i am writing a essay on writing i work for this company and my boss want me to help improve the workers writing skills can yall help me with some information thank you". Hundreds of inquiries from managers and executives seeking to improve their own or their workers' writing pop into Dr. Hogan's computer in-basket each month, he says, describing...

NORTH BERWICK, Maine — Plans for freshman at Noble High School to read J.D. Salinger’s "The Catcher in the Rye" in January may be in jeopardy following Thursday night’s School Administrative District 60 Board of Directors meeting. Andrea B. Minnon, a Lebanon parent whose 14-year-old son, Spencer, is a freshman at the high school, demanded the book be pulled from the curriculum because of its content. She submitted a Citizen’s Challenge of Educational Media form to the board outlining her problems with the book’s place in public schools. Minnon explained she never read the book but scanned through it and...

Yesterday, I ran a polite article entitled, “English for lesbians, feminists, queers, and communists.” The article began with a reference to a previous article that had offended a liberal reader. And now it appears that yesterday’s article has offended yet another liberal. In fact, it appears to have offended several liberals. Here’s what just one had to say after I wounded his inner child: “Dr. Adams, I just read your article on Town Hall. You misled me. You gave a list of English faculty at Cornell with expertise in Marxism, and queer and feminist literature, but you didn’t mention others...

Bill Nevins, a New Mexico high school teacher and personal friend, was fired last year and classes in poetry and the poetry club at Rio Rancho High School were permanently terminated. It had nothing to do with obscenity, but it had everything to do with extremist politics. The "Slam Team" was a group of teenage poets who asked Nevins to serve as faculty adviser to their club. The teens, mostly shy youngsters, were taught to read their poetry aloud and before audiences. Rio Rancho High School gave the Slam Team access to the school's closed-circuit television once a week...

A n old joke used to ask, Where are the last bastions of Marxism? Answer: the Kremlin and the Duke University English department. But now that the Soviet Union has dissolved, the last defenders of Karl Marx's ideas may indeed reside on a pretty, Gothic-style campus in the pinewoods of North Carolina. For literary traditionalists, the riddle is apropos. They have long bemoaned the effete nature of postmodern literary theory, calling it as hopelessly out of touch with both reality and literature as was Lenin with real-life economics. But theory's impact on the study of literature in the US has...

Dylan Finkle likes scary movies. The "Halloween" series is his favorite. But when the aspiring writer modeled a fictional story after the films in his creative writing journal for English class, Dylan, 11, of Syosset, was suspended from Harry B. Thompson Middle School for more than six weeks in October. His parents, who gave the sixth-grader permission to write the story using his name in place of celluloid slasher Michael Myers and his friends' names as supporting characters, were baffled. "It's such an overreaction," said Andrew Finkle, Dylan's father. "We were aware of the story ... and we had no...

“If the kids are not allowed to use profanity,” said parent Pam Helms, “Then why is it ok for them to read it?” Parents voiced their concerns about a controversial book More fuel is being tossed into the fire, over a reading assignment for an English class at East Bakersfield High School. Parents are demanding a controversial book be banned from the classroom, and some members of the community agree with them. At Monday night's meeting of the Kern High School District, many parents spoke out against the book entitled “The Bluest Eye,” with reaction crossing racial lines. “If...

The class started off innocuously enough. We were in our fifth week of an undergraduate honors seminar, reading Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo, and I was starting to explain how the novel is built on a series of deliberate anachronisms, on the way to asking what these tropes from the 1960s were doing in a novel ostensibly set during the Harlem Renaissance. I began in an obvious (though always fun) place, with Abdul Hamid's encounter with PaPa LaBas at a rent party, where Abdul delivers a tirade presaging the rise of the Nation of Islam and protesting U.S. draft...