Kurt Vonnegut wrote (I’m quoting from memory) that banning fiction “is like donning a full suit of armor to attack an ice cream sundae.”
If that’s true, certain kinds of ice cream sundae make certain kinds of people awfully nervous.
In Toronto, 12th grade students taking an English exam were assigned to write a short fictional “essay,” and one of them, a kid named Brendan Jones, created the literary equivalent of a jalapeno-pepper-hot-salso sundae. In his little fiction, a girl who doesn’t like a particular teacher, has him trapped in the basement of her home, and as the story ends, she brandishes a baseball bat, saying, “Sorry, Mr. McAdams, schools (sic) out….”
Jones, an average kid, not known to be troubled, was immediately and summarily expelled, three credits shy of graduation. What he had done was roughly equivalent to making a “bomb” joke at the airline counter. No matter how harmless you are, that’s something you just don’t do. When the matter reached the principal’s desk, post-Virginia Tech liability fear seems to have clicked in as the driving factor, and the overreaction was inevitable.
Brendan Jones’ exam fiction has been removed from most of the internet sites where it was briefly posted, but you can still read it here.
It’s not a very nice story, to be sure, but neither is “The Casque of Amantillado.” A Facebook group has been started by the kid’s friends to defend him (yes, he has friends, and they are furious). His personal explanation and apology are also posted there as well.
The full explanation (which I’ll post tomorrow) doesn’t ramble, isn’t a rant; it’s not angry or “crazy,” nor does it rumble with apocalyptic warnings. Jones claims he was trying to complete the detailed requirements of the assigned task (and he lists them) under great time pressure. There’s an innocence in his tone that may be somewhat stretegic, but does not ring false. There’s always the possibility he was trying to get someobody’s goat, and if so he did. He may have deserved reprimanding or even some minor sanction for being a smart-ass. But expulsion? For a student, that’s the nuclear option. the death penalty. We don’t have the Principal’s side of the story, because she’s made herself unavailable for comment, but it looks like she handed it down without regard for extenuating circumstances.
A personal note: in reading hundreds of student stories, over 12 years, I saw fictional representations of torture, murder, suicide, sadism, brutality of many kinds, in stories intended to frighten. I also saw beauty, love, hope, and other good things depicted in stories designed to make you feel good. In all those years, only one student gave me cause for mild alarm. And it was mostly his behavior, not his work per se that was disturbing. Reading the reports of the Brendan Jones case, unless there is somthing hidden in it that hasn’t been reported, I can’t help but feel that decisions of this sort should not be made by people (administrators) prone to rash, fear-driven impulses, or ill-equipped to consider the broader contextual details that should guide them to a wise decision.
But suppose a teacher really DOES see things the rest of us don’t. Creative Writing teachers at Virginia Tech accurately spotted something upsetting in the work of student (and future mass murderer) Seung-hui Cho. Program director Lucinda Roy pulled him out of a class and tutored him one-on-one, while at the same time repeatedly warning University officials that Cho was one dangerously sick puppy. The University essentially did nothing. Cho remained in school and we know the awful result.
So which is preferable: early warnings about possible danger, sounded by professionals trained and intuitively disposed to understand the potential meaning in what they are seeing? Or a war on ice cream sundaes, waged by bureaucrats untrained in reading the dark possibilities (or lack of them) in the writers or their texts?
Or could there be a middle-ground?
No one can deny that humanity has been spectacularly successful in gaining control of the physical world. Why then, as Masters of the Physical Universe, do we turn into pumpkins when faced with with the inner realms, like personality, motivation, and intuition?
What do you think?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
This really disturbs me on so many levels. Years ago I was substitute teaching in a 10th grade English class. I was one of those subs that actually taught, so we were working on poetry. I wrote the first line from an Emily Dickinson poem on the board and asked the students to go on from there with their own poem (fyi — the poem was Snake). They all wrote, some were funny, some were just plain bad, but there was one clearly about drug use. Other teachers got all worked up and wanted me to report the student to the principal. I refused. First of all, the teachers urging me to report the student didn’t even understand the meaning of the poem. Yes, it was about drugs, but it was an exploratory poem — he wasn’t advocating drug use, he clearly wasn’t a pusher, it was more of a confused mind trying to sort out a major adolescent problem. Isn’t that what writing is all about….sorting out problems in life, in love, at work, on the farm, during the Civil War? How many books have been written about assassinating the President or the Pope? Many have gone on to become best sellers — no one tossed those authors in jail.
I think what I am trying to say is I agree with Bill. In my case, the teachers and principals would gladly have hung this boy out to dry and not that I am a poetry expert — far from it, but they were quick to jump, quick to react, and that was pre Columbine. They made judgments based on the kid’s general actions (he was an anti-establishment, buck the system kind of kid). Who knows perhaps today he’s developing a cure for cancer or giving millions to worthy charities. Or maybe, just maybe he is a writer.
I think the heart of the matter lies in your observation that the other teachers “didn’t even understand the meaning of the poem” yet were still eager to act decisively on it anyway. There’s a term for this: rush to judgement. You were right to stand your ground.