Outrageousness (Yes, I Know It's Technically Not a Word)

1-26-10

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me...

I was in the Student Center before work, eating a Besst Wrap, and watching CNN when a story about California comes on the air. This story. Also, see here. (Same story, different source.)

Removing dictionaries from a classroom? Seriously?

I got my first dictionary (the one currently sitting on top of my printer because I'm using it in my etymology paper) on my tenth birthday. (Yes, I'm a weird English nerd.) Of course there are definitions to "offensive" things in there, but it's a dictionary. Sheesh, I wonder what would happen if they had the Oxford English Dictionary in those classrooms--loads and loads of offensive words.

Now, I understand that it might not be age-appropriate, and that there are dictionaries for kids. But the questions I have are:

1) Why did the kid in question "come across" the word? Obviously they were looking it up on their own because they already know what it is and, instead of dealing with it maturely, the parent complained to the school. I thought denial was only a river in Egypt.

2) Why is the school overreacting? Are they just afraid of getting slapped with a lawsuit? It's the same dictionary that is used for the spelling bee (so the article says) and so it makes sense to use those dictionaries.

3) Why are the parents flipping out over a word and its definition? Wouldn't it be worse if the school was teaching the students about such acts (especially since it's the fourth and fifth grade)? Or worse, encouraging them to engage in such acts? [I think that would be infinitely worse.]

4) What is this teaching those kids about words?

I'm planning to become an English teacher. I think this is ridiculous. I collect quotes, and I remembered this one, by Samuel Butler: "Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use." Another quote, by Charles Peguy: "A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket." But the quote I like the most is this one, from author Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Words--so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."


"Innocent and powerless" when "standing in a dictionary," but full of the potential for both good and evil. At least, that's how I read that quote.

Hmm. Perhaps those fourth and fifth-graders are learning that words and definitions, by themselves, are either good or evil. That words and books are scary and are meant to be taken away. That the written word is so powerful that even the presence of the words is a bad thing.

Perhaps they're too distracted by iPods, cell phones, and television to read, and this doesn't bother them, anyway. Perhaps this will interrupt many students' learning process and keep them from learning properly. Perhaps this will drive some young students to read the dictionary behind their parents' backs. Perhaps they'll keep looking up words that they heard flung at them from other kids on the playground, from their music, from the television, from the Internet, and (oh my) their parents.

I'd hate for the world to be a place in which reading the dictionary is a revolutionary act. I hope we never come to that point--or else we'll just have to breed a whole bunch of Guy Montags to combat it.

~Ashlee