Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about adolescent sex. We spend a great deal of time and money here wanting our students to have the very best tools, from footballs to flutes. We make certain the kids are alright and have personal hygiene kits available at school, and free lunch programs. We have classes of students — hell an entire school — that are bilingual. We even have exchange programs to other countries. So wanting students to have access to and discussion groups for the best literature of our times seems pretty elementarily critical.
There was an alert sent out a few months ago to the membership of the PEN literary society when Davis county, here in Utah, banned a record number of books: 52 — with 32 more under review. PEN sent us the highest alert over this ban. Because banning books is always about more than what is between the covers.
Sherman Alexie’s memoir “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” makes lots of banned lists. Not because he attacks life on The Rez , which he does (and he carefully mined his years growing up on the Cour d’Alene Reservation in Idaho), but he also addresses some of the universal emotions of a 14-year-old male. Understanding what is happening to your body as it goes thru puberty is one of the threads through his award-winning book. Park City audiences were introduced to Alexie the year the Eccles Center opened, but not for his book; he hadn’t even written “Indian” yet ( which is the term he prefers to Native American) . What he had co-written ( with Chris Eyre) and produced and starred in, was an independent film that played at Sundance Film Festival in 1998. “Smoke Signals” was fresh and funny and the critics and judges loved it. It won the Filmmakers Trophy AND the audience award and it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize. Pretty heady stuff.
A few years later, I booked Alexie to speak at the Eccles Center. He was a fresh voice on the planet and I had had a brush with him at Sundance and knew he was irreverent — my favorite kind of human. And he had a new book, “Indian.” I thought it would be great for our joint-use mission between the schools and the community to bring him to town. Before the show I offered to take Sherman to dinner — we often paid performers a per diem and they foraged for their meals but that was different if you were, say, a band traveling with other band members. He was solo. I took him to a nice restaurant on Main Street where he pushed back on every conversation I tried to introduce. He accused me of being a soft liberal with big ideas but no real experience, say, about the Indian condition on The Rez. I pushed back because I had been traveling twice a year to The Navajo Rez to help the elders there. We got along better after I explained that.
Once onstage, he was outrageous about well-meaning liberals ( most of the audience) and about President George W. Bush in his flight suit on the carrier of that ship declaring a war was over that clearly was not. The audience laughed for over an hour and also had their privilege checked. Having his book banned in so many places was almost a badge of honor for Alexie: it proved his premise that we white folks didn’t want raw experiences shared, only highly varnished images of how we wanted to imagine other cultures.
Around that year the Eccles Center opened, the Park City School District brought a speaker in for an assembly, just for staff, to the start the school year. I remember Superintendent Nancy De Ford being pleased she had a space where all the teachers and administrators could gather together for the first time ever for inspiration. I don’t remember the speaker’s name but I very clearly remember pieces of his talk. He started out talking about a truckload of blueberries being delivered to a restaurant each day and they just had to use the blueberries that got dumped ther. Some were misshapen, not yet ripe, overly ripe, green maybe, but very few were ready and perfect that day to work with. The baker just had to use what was delivered, day after day.
He said teachers had the same predicament, each day a different truckload of kids gets dropped at their door in a variety of different conditions. Kids come to school hungry or abused or tired or mentally ill or scared or sad. And on different days, different kids assume different behaviors. And the teacher simply has to work with what shows up. Every day. Every damn day. So while we think the things our kids are exposed to are in our control, well, they never were.
Did you first learn from your parents about the wonder of birth because your cat had kittens? Or did some ill-informed or more sophisticated kid tell you what went where and when and how? It doesn’t matter anymore how YOU learned about sex because kids now learn from their devices or another kid’s device if theirs is blocked. They learn from all the sexual content and context on mainstream television, on the internet, in song lyrics, on T-shirts. Where they don’t learn in Utah is in the classroom, because sex education is no longer taught here.
Thanks to Planned Parenthood of Utah and the years of work by Annabel Sheinberg of that organization, kids can learn at free after-school classes, held off site, all over the state of Utah. It was a fact that Cecile Richards, founder of Planned Parenthood, highlighted just this week in her talk as part of the Wasatch Speaker series hosted by Intermountain Health Care. It is crucial our young people get equal and accurate information — she emphasized that over and over. Which brings us back to the bushel/truckload of blueberries showing up each morning in all our classrooms.
We have no idea how they arrived at their desks, hungry, tired, afraid, self- conscious, awkward, confident, arrogant, joyful, or just weird. Regardless, they will all shape shift before the week is out. Delivering information in written form for students to read at their own pace in their own place is one of the great gifts a teacher can offer and one of the lifelong pleasures a student can learn. Banning information from inquiring minds only forces them to look elsewhere for answers they aren’t likely to directly ask of their parents. Let’s spend less time and energy on banning award-winning books and more time on providing a healthy atmosphere to mature. One blueberry at a time. Even not on school days, maybe just on a Sunday in our Park…