White Kids With Problems Are A Joke

Fancy White Trash by Marjetta Geerling

  

Geerling, M. (2008). Fancy white trash. New York: Penguin Group.

 

A university in a town where I once lived had student clubs for students whose skin was black, brown, yellow and red…but nothing for students whose skin was white.  The same was true for special scholarships.   That’s how I feel about how white students are treated in books like Fancy White Trash by Marjetta Geerling.

Being a youth has always been hard, and today it seems harder than ever.  Our children are all surrounded by internal problems of growing up like making moral choices, ethnic identity, charting a career path, etc.; not to mention external pressures like drugs, gangs, alcohol, sexual assault, broken families, etc.   Consequently, we need to give all our students every bit of compassion, support, respect and understanding that we can. 

There are a growing number of books available today that do an admirable job of telling our minority students that we recognize the challenges they face in their lives, we sympathize with their turmoil, and we want to help them in every way we can.  But these same kinds of challenges are felt by all young people…including those whose skin happens to be white. 

Yet white students’ hardships by comparison are traditionally overlooked, trivialized, or ridiculed, as in Marjetta Geerling’s Fancy White Trash.   Geerling writes of the “problems” facing a white family like it’s one big joke designed to make the reader smile or even laugh.  But when a student is in a dysfunctional family like Abby Savage’s, it’s no laughing matter – no matter what color his/her skin is.  White students need the same caring and consideration that we bring to all their classmates of color: respect for yourself and your culture; compassion for all the hardships you face growing up; and all the support we can give you.  If minority teenagers in were depicted with the same kind of comic trivializing that the white teenagers are treated with in Fancy White Trash, I’m sure there would be a universal outcry of protest.  So, when it’s done to white teenagers, why are we supposed to laugh?

Unfortunately, this kind of book is a racial fact of life that has been going on now for far too long.  When do we start telling all of our students that they should be proud of their ethnicity; that the problems they face are serious; and that we are there to love, care for and support every single one of them – without treating some like they are invisible and will be just fine anyway.  While I obviously did not like this book, I am sad to say I expect many students will laugh at it – including the invisible white ones – because that’s what we’ve taught them to do.

Google Images: barnesandnoble.com 

If We just Ignore It, It Will Go Away

November Blues - Sharon Draper

Draper, S. (2007). November blues. New York: Antheneum Books.

 

 

            When I was in high school, there was a girl who was Miss Everything – popular, inteligent, school leader, etc.  Then, one day, she suddenly disappeared.  She left school and left town… because she had gotten pregnant.  After the flood of whispered rumors subsided, life resumed in our little community, and she was summarily forgotten.  Today, in the school district where we live, this topic is a common fact of life.   There are over 130 girls who are pregnant, most with accompanying STDs.  The youngest is 12.  And still most parents vehemently oppose any mention of pregnancy or any form of school-sponsored sex education – including any mention of family planning.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

            Consequently, I was very glad to read Sharon Draper’s treatment of this topic in her book November Blues.  Teenage pregnancy is an ever-growing problem that won’t go away by adults ignoring it.  In this story, when a teenage girl named November Nelson learns she is pregnant, she and the adults in her life must face the realities of her circumstance and plan for the future.  In a way, this serves not only as a story that pregnant teenagers can relate to, but might even be a deterrent to those young girls who look at this possibility in their own lives with nonchalance.

            The book is also timely in the way it includes teenage death in the story.  It’s a tragic fact of life that teenage deaths – both accidental and suicidal – are on the rise.  In addition to the girl who got pregnant in my old high school, one of my classmates committed suicide.  Teenagers today live in a world of Virginia Tech, Columbine, etc.  Because of its reality and contemporary language, November Blues would be very appealing to contemporary teens.  Personally, I welcomed it as an open and honest treatment of issues that need to be discussed with our youth.

Google Images: sonderbooks.com

No Chewing Gum...Or Shooting Your Classmates!

Dark Dude by Oscar Hijuelos

In 1950, a poll was taken in which American teachers were asked one simple question:  “What are the biggest problems you face in the classroom?”  Their answers included:  passing notes, chewing gum, whispering, etc.  In 2010, the poll was taken again, with American teachers being asked the same question.  This time, their answers included:  guns in the classroom, students taking out a contract against me with local gangs to punish me for giving them a low grade they actually earned, students coming to class on drugs and doing harm to themselves or others, etc.  When you consider that Columbine is a middle-class suburb, think what happens in inner-city schools.

All of this came to my mind as I read Dark Dude by Oscar Hijuelos.  Rico is a 15-year-old Cuban living in New York City who looks so much like a white person that racist teenagers attack him.  But when he tries to escape this by moving to a little town in Wisconsin, he still encounters hostility from those who know he’s Latino.  No matter where he goes, Rico’s world – like the world of so many teenagers - is filled with violence, racism, sex, drugs, etc.

While the book appealed to me with its honestly, it simultaneously saddened me with its glaring truth that our children are losing their innocence in an ever-increasing downward spiral.  If that aforementioned poll is taken of teachers 20 years from now, what will their answers be?

Google Images:  yanewyork.com

     Hijuelos, O. (2008). Dark dude.

               New York: Antheneum Books.

  

A Female "Prince and the Pauper"

Annie on My Mind - Nancy Garden

Garden, N. (1982). Annie on my mind. New York: Farrar - Straus - Giroux

            I've always learned a lot more in the real world than I ever did sitting behind a school desk.  For example, one of the most valuable lessons I learned in college came one night when I held one of my best friends in my arms while he wept uncontrollably because he was a homosexual.  He agonized over critics who claimed that gays should be damned because they “choose” this lifestyle.  As he recounted the kind of torment he had gotten all his life from people who ridiculed him, he cried out, “Why would anyone think I would ‘choose’ this kind of abuse?”

            It was that life experience that prompted me to read Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden.  The book literally moved me alternately from tears of heartbreak to tears of joy as the author recounted a female Prince and the Pauper – style story of two teenage girls, Liza and Annie, who see their friendship blossom into love.  It’s a sign of the times that there are a growing number of social support groups for teenagers who are realizing they are gay, bisexual, etc.  So Annie on My Mind should be very appealing to them and should be considered required reading for anyone dedicated to "multiculturalism."

Google Images:  en.wikipedia.org

Gimme That Ol' Time Religion!

                     The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier

   

   Cormier, R. (1974). The chocolate war. New York: Dell Laurel-Leaf.

        I need to write this blog as quickly as possible, because I know that, at any minute now, I am going to be sent hurtling into the fiery pits of Hell.  You see, I just read The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier.  When I was growing up in a VERY conservative Catholic household, my parents would take me to church where, every year, we would stand up with the rest of the congregation, raise our right hands, and take “The Pledge” – a promise not to read any books that the Church felt were “inappropriate” (the religious term for “tisk-tisk, naughty-naughty”).   Since I am sure that The Chocolate War must be on The List, I need to write this critique as quickly as possible before I am turned into a charcoal briquette.

         I felt the author did an admirable job of depicting the atmosphere of a religious school where irresistible forces (the religious domination from authorities like Brother Leon and the peer group pressures from other students) meet immovable objects (the resistance of students like Jerry who are experiencing the defiance of youth mixed with the sexual tensions of budding adolescence).  These personalities and experiences were so familiar to me that I found them most appealing; but I’m sure they are so universal that they would be likewise understandable to people who did not share my childhood upbringing in “an old time religion.”

    Google Image:  marshall.edu

A Year Down Yonder

                      by

                 Richard Peck

 

                           Newbery Medal Winner (2001)

Peck, R. (2000). A year down yonder. New York, NY:

Scholastic, Inc.

If you look at almost anyone’s list of “The 100 Most Authentic American Plays” you’re sure to find one called The Old Homestead.  A man named Denman Thompson, who lived in a little town called Swanzey Center, NH around a century ago, wrote it.  The good folks of Swanzey Center put on a re-enactment of this show for three days every summer to raise money for the local churches.  The reason I know this is that I grew up there and I was part of that annual production for most of my formative years.  The reason I mention this here is that reading A Year Down Yonder was like a homecoming for me.

           

The Old Homestead focuses on a simple country senior named Josh Whitcomb who proves to be unusually wise, caring, comical and loveable.  That characterization has a female counterpart in A Year Down Yonder’s Grandma Dowdel.  When a teenager named Mary Alice needs to leave her Chicago home while her parents try to find work during the Great Depression, she dreads having to go to live with her grandmother in the country.  But she gradually realizes that her Grandma Dowdel is like a barnyard menagerie all rolled into one old lady: she’s as sly as a fox, as caring as a mother hen, as adorable as a puppy, and as wise as an owl.  By the story’s end, a post-World War II Mary Alice gets married on her grandmother’s porch to a young man that Grandma Dowdel introduced her to during that “year down yonder” when Mary Alice lived at “the old homestead.”

One reason why Denman Thompson’s play is a beloved classic is that he filled it with sight gags.  Richard Peck did the same thing with his book.  As the story unfolds, readers are treated to such literary images as Grandma rigging up a trap that sends a shower of hot glue down upon a boy who is trying to tip over her outhouse.  Or Grandma bilking the rich town banker into paying five dollars for a ten-cent cup of stew. And that time when grandma’s pet snake got loose and scared a woman who was modeling nude for an artist renting a room in Grandma Dowdel’s house, sending the terrified lady running buck-naked down the streets of town.  Whether on stage or between the pages of a book, sight gags are a sure-fire success.                

PICTURE SOURCES:

nysoclib.org

amazon.com

etc.usf.edu

nocaptionneeded.com

          Slaughterhouse-Five

                                           by

                      Kurt Vonnegut

   

                             100 Most Challenged Books

Vonnegut, K. (1996). Slaughterhouse-five.

New York, NY: RosettaBooks, LLC.

Have you ever known someone who channel-surfs?  They take the remote control to the T.V. and just keep hitting buttons to skip from one station to another.  They have an incurably itchy remote trigger finger and an attention span of .02 seconds.  I’ll bet Kurt Vonnegut was one of those folks.

           

Reading his novel Slaughterhouse-Five is a lot like watching Kurt channel surf back and forth between television shows that flash by so quickly it’s hard to tell what they are.  They blur into one collage that somehow makes up a unified literary whole.  And along the way, a boy named Billy makes three new friends:  Hogan, Donna and Rod.

           

“Hogan’s Heroes” gets a new recruit when the Slaughterhouse-Five’s protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, joins the army, gets captured by the Nazis, is imprisoned in a meat locker that provides the book’s title, and survives the bombing of Dresden.  

Donna Reed gets a new neighbor when Billy returns from the war, gets married, and settles down into the perfect post-war domestic life. 

Then Rod Serling gets a new visitor to “The Twilight Zone” when Billy remembers being captured by aliens.

But this lovely scene of literary channel surfing resulted in a wipeout when Kurt introduced into his novel such un-Donna-Reed-like items as profanity, sex and homosexuality.  Tisk-tisk.  Naughty-naughty.   Those made school districts remove Slaughterhouse-Five from classes and libraries, until the Supreme Court stopped such censorship.  Thank heavens the last T.V. show Kurt apparently settled on was Judge Judy.      

 

PICTURE SOURCES:

sffbr.blogspot.com

automation-drive.com

oldcitytshirts.com

tvacres.com

myspace.com

netflix.com

crockettlives.wordpress.com