the modern version of witch trials

[cimorene]

[Poll #948913]

"The fact that my principal chose door #3 explains why I get called into his office so often," says my fake-big sister Lisa, who teaches English in rural Virginia. According to her, this isn't an isolated incident: there are many people in her town who worry about witches and who might be one.

She reacted to the principal's calling her into his office about whether she was a witch as you, I, and most sane people would probably be hard-pressed not to react: she laughed in his face. He was disapproving of this reaction, since he wanted to have a serious conversation. The end result was she had to modify how she taught The Crucible. What, exactly, was the cause of concern?

Her lesson plan included an interactive internet game in which her students were in a webquest which resulted in all of them being hung as witches, duplicating the manner of the Salem witch trials. Even though they've been taught explicitly how the witch trials worked, and also have read a book about them, her entire class were too stupid to come within miles of grasping the point of this exercise, and instead explained that her "glee" about the entire class being found to be witches meant that she was obviously a witch (since no one else would think hanging was funny).

Of course, this obviously means that the book has also missed its mark, and perhaps the school should look into requiring some alternative reading, such as Harold and the Purple Crayon.

Comments

[anglepoiselamp.livejournal.com]

That was sort of the problem when the novel began to emerge as a dominant form of writing in Europe, in late 18th - early 19th century. People were used to thinking of texts as something that states a truth and needs to be literally adhered to, and they had trouble understanding the novel didn't work that way. Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, for example, caused widespread moral panic because people were afraid young men would imitate Werther (which they did, in a wave of art-inspired suicides).

But it really, really, REALLY hurts my brain to think that Western civilization is still stuck on the same issue. *sigh*