Larry Hill on To Kill a Mockingbird

9 comments on “Larry Hill on To Kill a Mockingbird”

1. Citizen Reader says:
   August 27th, 2009 at 9:38 am

   How do I nominate Lawrence Hill for King of the World? Or maybe King of Canada? (I don’t know how your politics work up there.) Man, I love him.

2. Dave says:
   August 27th, 2009 at 11:04 am

   What Lawrence points out concerning TKaM can be repeated for pretty much ANY novel that is handed out to student to read these days. While high school was a l-o-n-g time ago for me, I do recall being given novel after novel to read that was written ages ago. Take the Great Gatsby for example. First published in 1925. For SURE there are more recent novels that offer the same types of ‘life lessons’ that students are supposed to be taught.

3. Sarah Neville says:
   August 27th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

   As a former high school English teacher (who has actually taught TKaM), I can give you a very simple, perfectly obvious and utterly true explanation for the preponderance of Gatsby, TKaM etc. It has nothing whatever to do with curriculum or lazy teachers or any ideology. It’s mostly because 70+ readable copies already exist in the book room.

   Remember that unlike book clubs or universities, high schools have to provide the novels that they expect students to read. Remember that books don’t all wear out at the same rate, and that generally a department head trying to save $ would order only what was absolutely necessary. Remember that most English teachers teach 2-3 sections of a single class at the same time. Outfitting 2 Grade 10 English with sufficient copies of, oh, gee, The Book of Negroes, would cost upwards of a thousand dollars.

4. Lilian Nattel says:
   August 27th, 2009 at 2:17 pm

   I totally agree. There is so much more literature. Why aren’t students reading wonderful books that have diverse authors and characters?

5. Dave says:
   August 27th, 2009 at 5:04 pm

   Here’s an option: Song Yet Sung, about runaway slaves on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
   The book, by James McBride (The Color of Water, Miracle at St. Anna)
   has been chosen for Maryland’s 2009 statewide reading program. It has everything
   you asked for: interesting black characters, teaching moments on history and links to modern life.
   (There are even references to Canada.)

6. Chris Banks says:
   August 27th, 2009 at 9:19 pm

   Sarah is absolutely right. I teach English at the secondary level and there are so many other things stacked against getting new books into the curriculum and an English Department’s budget is right at the top of that list. The English department has to buy new textbooks every year for the texts they already have which students either stole or didn’t return or destroyed. This is a major expense when you consider on average 3-5 textbooks go missing from each section a classroom teacher teaches. There is some new funding for Advanced Placement courses but this benefits only a very select few students, maybe thirty, when you consider the entire student body is over a thousand. Also you need to get all the teachers teaching the same course to agree upon a new novel which is incredibly hard before going to the department head who then must go to the vice principal to ask for the money. Honestly, one part of teaching, or at least in Ontario, is trying to pass along this wonderful special gift you were given by a teacher long ago, a love of literature, to your own students and you do the best you can with what you have and you try to make changes along the way. But another big part of teaching is the day to day bureaucracy which ties up and sinks so many well intentioned plans by teaching professionals. I’m glad people are talking about this problem and if people continue to talk about it, there is a greater chance that some new opportunities for students will appear. But the funding formula needs to move away from an X number of dollars per student model in Ontario if you are going to see any real changes.

7. Chris says:
   August 28th, 2009 at 7:55 am

   I think Hill’s point is an important political one; I think Chris Banks points to an important political solution. If we can put Hill’s argument in terms that provincial governments understand, there might be a chance to rejuvenate the high school curriculum. Seems like good political capital to say “we’re the government that ended all the stories about a lack of Canadian material, modern material, diverse material etc. in the classroom.

   Hey, look! A pie just fell out of the sky.

8. Sarah Neville says:
   August 28th, 2009 at 2:36 pm

   Chris, every provincial government tries to “fix” education by changing the curriculum. As a survivor of Bob Rae’s “destreamed” grade 9, John Snobolen’s Bill 160 and a teacher in McGuinty’s era, I gotta say that the supposed diversity of taught books has little import on the kinds of education students are actually getting.

9. Nadia Scores says:
   November 9th, 2009 at 6:57 am

   It’s true that To Kill a Mockingbird has faced a lot of criticism over the one-dimensional African American characters in the book and this might be slightly true. In my personal opinion however, the powerful anti-racist message in the book is why the novel should continue being taught to students even now. In To Kill a Mockingbird the theme of racism goes beyond the simple message that “racism is bad.” Lee tries to go deeper and examine how racism actually works. According to her, there are different forms of racism that arise from different reasons. Some might be as a result of hate, some due to complacency, and others due to laziness. To Kill a Mockingbird indicates that the main reason however is due to a lack of seeing the fundamental similarities in each other and therein lies our greatest downfall.

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