The really disturbing question here is what the mother was doing rummaging through the 14-year-old’s bag. No book, movie or pornographic material of absolutely any kind can cause as much damage as an intrusive parent who denies the child personal space and rummages through his or her personal stuff.
What’s really horrible is that this vicious freakazoid doesn’t even feel any shame when she announces to the world how easily she violates her son’s privacy:
The school has been on break for the past month. Ladson says when classes resume on Monday, she plans to protest outside the school with other parents.
And now she will make her son the butt of every joke at school. We all know how teenagers react to 14-year-old boys whose Mommies make a public spectacle of policing their sexuality.
I’m sure this freak is convinced she is a great mother.
Clarissa's Blog 
A different question: do you think the teacher was within his rights to give such a book to the student? And, if not, what would the appropriate reaction of his principal or/and parents be? And why does the teacher pay for the book from his own pocket at all? “In-class reading”, what about loaning books from a school library?
Reminded me of this book (saw at the library, haven’t read):
http://rebeccamakkai.com/work/the-borrower/
A LIBRARIAN TURNS KIDNAPPER. AND KIDNAPPED.
Lucy Hull, a young children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy’s help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly anti-gay classes.
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That a teacher ends up paying for class materials out of his / her pocket? Doesn’t surprise me at all sadly.
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“A different question: do you think the teacher was within his rights to give such a book to the student?”
– I don’t think it makes sense for me to question the actions of my colleagues without knowing the whole story. FD is right, there is a variety of reasons behind this.
“And, if not, what would the appropriate reaction of his principal or/and parents be?”
– To what? To the fact that the boy reads?
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I wonder when your child reaches 14 and as many 14 yr olds do they decide that talking to you or N is not high on their priority list at the moment. You notice a negative change in their behavior(more than just hormones) and believe there is a strong possibility that they are using drugs. Will you not look in their school bag or check their room for possible evidence? Or will you just let them be and respect their privacy and hope that it just all goes away?
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But the mother of this boy hasn’t thought of any drugs, as far as we know. Changing the situation to drug search is not intellectually honest.
Do you regularly check your kids’ bags as a rutine, preventive (to calm down one’s fears) measure?
– el
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How odd. I managed to be a teenager during the drug-fueled 1970s without doing any drugs whatsoever. Also, I liked to talk to my parents. We weren’t a perfect family, but my parents respected me as a person and gave me my space and it gave me a sense of security these “caring” overbearing helicopter parents don’t seem able to give to their kids. Gosh, I wonder why acting like a jailer instead of a father or mother turns a kid into an uncommunicative, neurotic person who often turns to drugs to compensate.
Anyway, as for the teacher, well, their motivation might have been to go through it to teach the kids what is wrong with the book (it’s faults are legion, from awful writing to internalized misogyny to misrepresentation of BDSM culture). To tell you the truth, though, I don’t know what the teacher was thinking. I am trying to imagine the English classes of my day giving in to pop culture and studying the best sellers of the 70s like Harold Robbins et al and I’m failing.
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“Gosh, I wonder why acting like a jailer instead of a father or mother turns a kid into an uncommunicative, neurotic person who often turns to drugs to compensate.”
– That’s exactly how it works. Invasive parents who deprive a child of personal space create future drug addicts and alcoholics. The trauma of this kind of invasion is absolutely enormous. And in this situation, it isn’t just the boy’s space that is being invaded. It’s his budding sexuality that is being probed and made public by his own mother. Imagine your father discussing your sexual preferences with the world when you were 14.
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Of course, I would never do such a horrible thing to a person. How can you even ask?
I want to remind you that I already raised a teenager in very difficult circumstances, and there was everything you get with a normal teenager. However, we still have a beautiful relationship and she is a very healthy adult precisely because I never violated her privacy.
And, by the way, the reason why she ended up living with me was because her own parents couldn’t accept the idea that the teenager needed her own space that would not be violated.
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I can’t believe she went to the media about this. Has the woman no sense of proportion? She even wants the teacher sacked!
She would have been better to (not snoop) sit her son down and ask in a reasonable way why he had the book. She might have asked for a meeting with the teacher in private, but that’s as far as it needed to go. There was certainly no need for all this hysterical over-reaction.
Actually, to be fair, you can come across stuff accidentally. These last school holidays our cat sprayed my son’s school bag because he left it on the floor and we were all away. I had to empty the bag and put it in the washing machine. What I found on the floor as a result was the canteen invoice for last term which had to be paid by a couple of days previously. 🙂
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Of course, things can happen accidentally. But only to normal parents. This woman hardly seems normal.
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Indeed, from the sound of it, she went for a rummage in his bag to see what shouldn’t be there. And she found it.
It’ll make national news when she finds the condoms…
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“It’ll make national news when she finds the condoms…”
– Yes, that will be the end of the world. Poor kid.
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Gahh. My brain got stuck at ”going through teenager’s bookbag.” if you have to go through a teen’s things like that then you have bigger problems than what they are reading.
I actually think assigning it as reading and class discussion is a genius move by their teacher.
A, there is not a cat’s chance that they aren’t reading or haven’t already read it, at least the smutty bits, B, many of their peers will be writing/reading similar stuff (fan fiction) as originated the book, C, the book provides an excellent spring board into lots of issues – copyright, transformative works, as a starter before you even get into the wider social issues surrounding relationships and sexuality and D, the parent is incredibly stupid because if there is a better way to take the salaciousness out of a book than reading and analysing it for class, I can’t think of one!
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Rats, forgot E, we happily accept reading lists that deal with murder, trench warfare, cannibalism, slavery, genocide, incest, assassination and suicide – sex between two consenting if screwed up adults is noting compared to that!
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At the age of 14, this boy has probably seen all kinds of porn online, compared to which this book is as erotic as Cinderella.
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“C, the book provides an excellent spring board into lots of issues – copyright, transformative works, as a starter before you even get into the wider social issues surrounding relationships and sexuality and D, the parent is incredibly stupid because if there is a better way to take the salaciousness out of a book than reading and analysing it for class, I can’t think of one!”
– Good points. I gave my students two short stories by the famous Catalan writer Carme Riera. The stories were very erotic because that is how she writes. I don’t want anybody to create a drama around my decision to assign this reading and create drama over it. In reality, it is hard to find a book that will not look dangerous and offensive to somebody for whatever reason. Should we stop reading now?
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The interesting thing that I noticed was the teacher bought the student a book which he had ordered on the Internet with his own money. In these days of teacher bashing, we tend to ignore the commitment of the profession to those given in trust to their care.
“The Buena Vista Education Association convened most of its 27 teachers on Monday for what some described as an emotional meeting. They voted to continue teaching, despite learning on Friday that the school district would be unable to pay their salaries starting in mid-May — because it had run out of money.
What a way to ring in Teacher Appreciation Week.
The teachers voted to continue teaching because, as Joe Ann Nash, president of the teachers’ union, put it: “We stick together.” Nash teaches third grade. On Friday, her students asked her if she’d been fired. “I told them, look, the district doesn’t have any money to pay us,” she recalled. “They told me, wherever we go, they’re going to go with me. They’re sweet.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/06/buena-vista-michigan-teachers_n_3225456.html
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I’ve been buying teaching supplies with my own money for years and years. All high school teachers I know do the same. But you are right, it is much more fun to engage in teacher-bashing.
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Follow up:
Inspite of the teachers’ willingness to work for free until the end of the school year, the school board closed the schools as of yesterday and the children will receive no education for the rest of the academic year. This is a good example of the management’s concern for the students.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/07/buena-vista-public-schools_n_3231086.html?1367951852
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Even though I think this is an inappropriate book, I agree with your post.
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It’s a very stupid book and as a literature professor I would also prefer that he’d be reading Les Miserables or Don Quijote. But the guy is 14. I remember myself at 14, and porn was a lot more interesting than the entire world literature. I eventually got over that idea, though. 🙂 🙂
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And this book is not a so-big porn.
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Compared to what is easily available online, the book is nothing.
The reason why the mother is creating such a drama over the book is her sexual frustration and unresolved incestuous desire for the teenage son. She needs to place herself in the context of his sexual experience and satisfy these urges in such a societally acceptable manner. This is what happens when sexually frustrated parents have to face the sexual awakening of their adolescent children.
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I agree.
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I remember getting all worked out at that age about reading the book ‘Groupie’ surreptitiously. Lame stuff these days.
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And I remember getting a copy of unabridged, unexpurgated 1001 Nights. Good stuff. 🙂
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Except our generation was reading “Fanny Hill”.
And I still don’t get how people manage to get turned on by the “50 shades of Gray”. The sex scenes in the book is so uninspiring, that all I remember from them is the stupid and endless “down there” and “considerable length”
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http://www.rippdemup.com/2013/04/middle-school-denies-students-lunch-food-tossed-trash/
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We discussed this already. I think this is a very good idea.
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I can’t find it now. Missed your reply. Why is it good? For some students, especially without basic knowledge in high grades, it’s nigh impossible to succeed. Meanwhle, a child is hungry, ashamed and guilty for lack of money. How can it be a good idea?
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If parents simply read to their children every day, the children’s chance to succeed in school improves dramatically. And if the parents don’t work anyway, I don’t see why they shouldn’t start doing just that. as for “hungry, ashamed and guilty”, this is child abuse, and if that happens, social services should remove the child altogether.
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What do you mean not working anyway? The parents could have been working very hard for years, between several jobs, and became unemployed f.e. when a child is in high school. In addition, parents could be barely literate themselves (or born in US or immigrants). Also, not everybody has the same abilities. Some children would do better in more practical-skills, job-teaching programs (like car-fixing), which aren’t everywhere, I suppose.
“ashamed and guilty” isn’t child abuse, it’s natural feelings of a child, who already can’t at this advanced stage to bring much needed money by good enough grades.
Removing the child from his family because they lack money (and putting more money per child in orphanage than would be enough to give his family to be able to eat) is a horrible idea and real child abuse. Lets invest more money to punish poor people than would be needed to help them to eat! Being taken out of a family is a horrible trauma for children.
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“The parents could have been working very hard for years, between several jobs, and became unemployed f.e. when a child is in high school.”
– But at this particular moment in time I assume they are not working? Because we are talking ab out unemployment benefits.
” In addition, parents could be barely literate themselves (or born in US or immigrants).”
– Then they can spend time taking children to museums, botanical gardens, libraries, etc. What are we arguing about? Whether parents should participate in bringing up their children?
“Removing the child from his family because they lack money (and putting more money per child in orphanage than would be enough to give his family to be able to eat) is a horrible idea and real child abuse.”
– If adult people in the developed world are incapable of feeding their children AND guilt-trip the children for that, this is child abuse.
” Lets invest more money to punish poor people than would be needed to help them to eat!”
– Do you really not understand that a parent who makes a child feel “guilty and ashamed” for his or her own failure to be a good parents is abusive in other areas too?
“Being taken out of a family is a horrible trauma for children.”
– For abused children, it’s the best thing that can happen to them.
I have a feeling that you infantilize the unemployed and see them as incapable little kids. Why do you need to do that when all the parents can do to solve this issue is simply pay attention to their kids for 20 mins a day, is a mystery.
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Many people seem to think that the can dump the kids at school and that’s the extent of their investment into the children’s education. As a result, we have crowds of completely ignorant people. It is not the school’s responsibility to teach the children to read and write, for instance. It’s the parents’ .
And before we hear a fresh round of drama, my mother, who had to work 14-hour days 6 days a week while I was growing up in an economy so harsh Americans can’t begin to imagine it and who never even got to see me, still managed to teach me to read. Without seeing me.
And my mother’s family was that of very poor peasants with 6 children. All of the children knew how to read and write before going to school.
This is why I don’t believe in these fake excuses of people who don’t feel like investing time and effort into their own children.
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// – But at this particular moment in time I assume they are not working? Because we are talking ab out unemployment benefits.
When a child barely has basic knowledge in higher grades to do something “at this particular moment” fast enough to get the benefits is simply impossible.
// – Then they can spend time taking children to museums, botanical gardens, libraries, etc.
And how would it help children to know math and physics? And in time to get the benefits?
Btw, museums cost money, which some families don’t have. Also, in rural or/and in the middle of nowhere parts of US those museums may simply not exist. And very poor family may not have a car or money for fuel to begin with.
Last but not the least, the parents often are frantically searching for a new job! With limited skills and transportation opportunities (and financial crisis), it’s very hard and time consuming. I don’t think poor people eat bonbons and lie on the couch all day. Many do all to find a new job.
// What are we arguing about? Whether parents should participate in bringing up their children?
No. You think that every child is capable of getting good grades. I disagree. While still at middle school, I often helped some classmates with their studies. After understanding my explanations with difficulty, they forgot them next day and generally continued to make stupid mistakes. And they wanted to know and weren’t the worst. Not all children have equally good memory and abilities.
// Do you really not understand that a parent who makes a child feel “guilty and ashamed”
You think it’s always the parents. Children, especially older ones, are more than capable of putting 1+1 themselves: knowing laws and why family doesn’t get benefits.
In general, I think benefits save people, including adults who are people too, from starving and help people to rise themselves from poverty. F.e. give time to search for a suitable, long term job, instead of taking the 1st thing (like washing floors in people’s homes or sweeping streets all day, and not having time to search for a better job), even if it’s not really suitable and/or long term. Economists talk about this, how safety net helps society as a whole by leading to better job allocation, I haven’t made it up now. Childrens’ grades and museum trips aren’t connected to this.
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Yes, I think parents are responsible for their children. I also am absolutely convinced that any parent can bring up a child who does well in school and doesn’t feel ashamed or guilty, irrespective of the parent’s economic status.
Research shows that the children who fall behind in school are not the ones who don’t have capabilities to do advanced calculus or nuclear physics. It’s the ones who simply can’t read. This is all that is required from parents of such students: get them to read. Surely, that is not too onerous.
I firmly believe in reproductive rights. Everybody should feel completely free to decide if they want to procreate, when and how much. But rights come with responsibilities. If we expect outside authorities to do even the most basic things for us – like teaching our children basic reading skills by the age of 15 – we cannot possibly expect those authorities not to tell us when and how to procreate.
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I think we are talking at cross purposes here because there is a very specific American reality behind this issue. I’m at the dentist so I can’t give links right now but you can just Google “reading skills American schools”, and you will see that all is needed to get more kids not to fail the really simple and basic high school program is just to teach them to read.
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Here for instance is a study of students who fall behind in readings skills http://www.reading.org/Libraries/srii/ECLS-K_SES_Report.pdf?sfvrsn=0
“Overall, the data presented
in this report show that poor children start kindergarten with lower entry level reading
skills and take longer to acquire higher-level reading skills as they move through elementary
school. It also illustrates that many wealthier children have not mastered higher level reading
skills by the end of fifth grade.”
Note that the lack of reading skills is not specific to poor families. As I’ve been saying all long, this is not an issue of poverty or wealth. This is solely an issue of parental responsibility.
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“Our national reading crisis persists despite many attempts to mitigate it: U.S students continue to lag behind those from many countries in their ability to understand what they read—including Hungary and Bulgaria.” http://www.lsi.ku.edu/news/featured/catts.shtml
““We’ve made major gains in math over two decades, but, in reading, frankly, we haven’t — there’ve been only modest improvements,” said David Driscoll, the chairman of the governing board that oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Department of Education’s standardized testing program.
Mr. Driscoll and other officials and experts put forward several hypotheses to explain the trends. Children learn most of their math in school, and even though math instruction in the United States in general lags behind that in some high-performing countries, the experts said, it has improved over the past two decades. Reading achievement, in contrast, reflects not only the quality of reading instruction in school classrooms, they said, but also factors like whether parents read to children and how much time students read on their own outside school.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/education/us-students-math-skills-sharpen-but-reading-lags.html?_r=0
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When I ask students to read aloud, there is a significant number who find that hard. This is the real problem, not advanced calculus.
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All I can think of is Florence King’s wonderful “Southern Ladies and Gentlemen” where she writes about a stereotype of southern failed manhood she refers to as “Momma tried” (to make her son asexul or gay so he would never leave her to defile his penis with trashy girls).
A nice example in popular culture is Hoyt’s mother on True Blood.
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“All I can think of is Florence King’s wonderful “Southern Ladies and Gentlemen” where she writes about a stereotype of southern failed manhood she refers to as “Momma tried” (to make her son asexul or gay so he would never leave her to defile his penis with trashy girls).”
– I haven’t read Florence King but this is exactly what this is. And the curious part is that Mommas do the same thing to daughters. Less often, of course, but I have seen these sad, sad cases of daughters forever glued to their mothers and with zero personal lives.
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IIRC (according to King) part of the motivation is often revenge against the husband though the precise details escape me.
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I have that book. It’s hilarious, especially if you’ve grown up in the South. I think you would like Florence King, she’s awful down on (among other things) people like this mother.
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I love Florence King. I don’t agree with her on everything, but she has a clarity and wit that is hard to find in more liberal writers. I would start with her biography, or a collection of her book reviews.
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Look what I just found by Florence King:
“”The American way of stress is comparable to Freud’s ‘beloved symptom’, his name for the cherished neurosis that a patient cultivates like the rarest of orchids and does not want to be cured of. Stress makes Americans feel busy, important, and in demand, and simultaneously deprived, ignored, and victimized. Stress makes them feel interesting and complex instead of boring and simple, and carries an assumption of sensitivity not unlike the Old World assumption that aristocrats were high-strung. In short, stress has become a status symbol.””
Beautiful!!!
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