| BANNED BOOKS WEEK |
[Sep. 25th, 2006|07:10 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bitchy | ] |
So this morning I dragged myself bleary-eyed in to work at 7:00 a.m., and before I even had a chance to put my stuff down, our new principal was bustling into my office, wanting to grill me about the Banned Books Week displays we have up around the library. I immediately felt defeated, pissed off, and defensive, because I was still holding all my crap, hadn't had any coffee yet, and was having a bad hair AND face day on top of it all. Not to mention that I was really PROUD of the thing I'd drawn for the hallway display case. It's a giant comic strip, four panels, with two kids talking about Banned Books Week, and intellectual freedom. Anyway, the principal's panties seemed to be particularly bunched up about some other posters I'd just put up that say "READ BANNED BOOKS." These posters happen to be from the American Library Association, and have really great quotes from classic authors like Mark Twain. So clearly these posters were printed in Hell by Satan himself (funded by the ALA?), just to corrupt our youth. Because the American Library Association is like that.
To be fair to our principal, after the grilling session, he let me keep everything up, and I found out from a coworker that the whole thing was sparked by a teacher who came into the library on Friday when I wasn't there, and apparently pooped her pants angrily (or at least this is how I imagine it) about the posters that say "READ BANNED BOOKS," and ran directly to the principal to complain. So he was only investigating what we were doing because of that bitch's frenzied tattling.
What really pissed me off is that ever since my involvement in the censorship case, which was YEARS ago, we (the librarian and I) have had to defend our professionalism and our ability to do our jobs in an appropriate way EVERY FUCKING YEAR during Banned Books Week. BEFORE the censorship case, we celebrated and promoted Banned Books Week every year, and no one said ANYTHING, or questioned us at all. Now suddenly we're "ones to watch," and they act like this is something sneaky we're doing, and they'd better keep tabs on us, and make sure we're not handing the kids porn, with dildos for bookmarks. They seem to forget that we're the GOOD GUYS (and girls), we're the ones trying to protect intellectual freedom. That's what the censorship case was about. Censors : bad. Library : good.
Anyway, after explaining what the posters mean in detail to the principal, and detailing to him exactly how I would discuss it with the students, and assuring him that we're not trying to hand the kids anything that is clearly not appropriate for a junior high school, he seemed to turn around and become supportive. Which is good, and I feel better about HIM now, at least. But I'm concerned about that teacher who ran and complained to him, because all it takes is one very vocal moron like that to cause real problems for a library. Hopefully it will end there. But I can't forget that our censorship case was sparked by just ONE instance of an asshole teacher making some very ugly, bigoted comments about a series of books we had in our library. That teacher walked away without ever filing a complaint or a challenge, but because of his off-handed ugly comments, our (previous) principal pulled the entire series off our shelves, and set the whole chain of events in motion. |
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