All right, this is very hard to believe … in fact, my very bosom is trembling. The intercourse between what is acceptable and what’s inappropriate has gone down on a slippery slope. I’m going to slip you something that will blow your mind … you’re going to have your socks rocked, baby.
Frank Rozanski of William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens was teaching a lesson on social psychology and perceptions. The questions each had a non-sexual answer but …
… words like “discharge” and “penetrate” could lead the reader to a racier interpretation.
Parents of a few students complained and school officials agreed that the questions were inappropriate. Principal Joseph Lee would not disclose how Rozanski was disciplined, but said Rozanski continues to teach at the school.
All right, seriously, this is freaking ridiculous.
Rozanski was teaching an advanced placement psychology class. Advanced placement classes are essentially college classes in that students taking the A.P. test can receive dispensation from general electives or even possibly course credit, depending on the college they choose to attend.
If this course was a required part of the curriculum, I’d still find it silly that some parents have their panties in a bunch, but I could at least see the argument. An A.P. class, however, is an elective … an elective chosen by students wishing to receive rigorous, challenging, and, yes, adult work.
In a day and age where elementary school kids mutter, “That’s what she said!” on a regular basis, it is completely asinine to freak out when students that elect to take a class intended for serious and challenging work.
And perhaps ironically, it proves the point that I assume Mr. Rozanski was trying to make. What lesson do you think his students got regarding social psychology and perceptions? I’m sure it was pretty telling …
My daughter is in Advanced Placement English as a junior this year. She has been forced to step outside her comfort zone through some of the readings she has had to do. For example, after reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, her teacher had the class explore the controversy over the use of a certain word and why there has been recent discussion about removing the word “nigger” from new editions.
I mean, the book is a classic, never mind an accurate representation of a part of our history that a lot of people would like to forget. Somehow, I don’t thinking referring to a character as “African-American Jim” is going to change a part of American history that doesn’t necessarily, in retrospect, reflect well on the country.
My daughter’s class read passages from the book aloud. She had to speak the word “nigger” aloud. She has been raised in an extremely open-minded and accepting household, and this was troubling to her … but a wise person once told me that change, that thought, that growth does not come without discomfort.
We are doing a disservice to our youth when we try to cover their eyes with rose-colored glasses … and an even greater one when teachers who use original and creative methods to prove valid points are taken to task instead of being praised.
I’m going to harvest my beets,then go talk to that dude!
I can see why this could have upset parents (I suppose), but sometimes in AP classes you talk about sex because they’re college-level classes. One of the poems I read in my AP English class was a man essentially telling the object of his affections that her chastity was killing his passion and making him an all-around sad panda. It was a hilarious and entertaining discussion (especially since I was lucky enough to have that poem crop up on the national AP test for thorough analysis). At some point people in high school should be allowed to talk about possibly naughty subjects, especially since the majority of them are engaging in it already.
I love Montana girls,we’re practically neighbors you know.
These are probably the same type of people that think Pole Dancing for Jesus is perfectly okay. Maybe the test should have had the phrase “for Jesus” after every option so that it would be okay. Discharge (for Jesus); Penetration (for Jesus)..
.
How do you feel about girls raised in Montana but have since escaped?
I have a half-way house for runaway Montanians.
Well sounds like I’d better run away and find it!
There be a shit storm a brewin’.
Uh my junior year in high school our IB English teacher had us read One Hundred Years of Solitude (at the end an incestuous relationship is described in great detail, including how the girl loved playing with the guy’s cock, even dressing it up in little outfits!) and The unbearable Lightness of Being (which includes bits which describe how the main character would screw a girl hard from behind and not hold her despite her pleading him and saying she couldn’t come otherwise, because he could feel her orgasm dripping on the floor). And those are pretty routine moments in those books… Other noteworthy novels from the year are Native Son (In which a guy starts sexy times and then murders his boss’s daughter by smothering her and then chopping up her limbs and throwing them in a furnace and his girlfriend by smashing her head in with a brick and throwing her body down an air vent if I remember correctly) and House of the Spirits (In which several women are raped and one is even taken by guerrillas during the revolution and raped repeatedly by several men, given electric shocks, kept in a watertank, the usual, an entire chapter is dedicated to her torture). Those were some of my favorite books! Well not Native Son, that book was just frustrating.
I read Lolita in the 9th grade,I’ve always maintained that Vladimir Nabokov ruined all my future relationships.
That book fucked with my head so much.
It was so well written that at times I found myself afraid for him to be caught.
The I realized, he’s a horrible pedophile! I WANT him to get caught!