Thread by @InMythology

A thread about our newsletter article by @tem2 on the 12/27 @WSJ Opinion piece by #kidlit book reviewer @MeghanGurdon about #DisruptTexts and an alleged banning of Homer's Odyssey. mythoversal.substack.com/p/banning-homer

We publish Greek mythology stories on a mythology website. No one wants to put Homer in classrooms more than we do. We also oppose censorship, Twitter mobs, and cancel culture. Gurdon's article seemed designed to press all of our outrage buttons. Or someone's outrage buttons.

But the article turned out to be slanted and untrue. The first lie came in the headline. The school/district/department/teacher cited have not banned any books. #DisruptTexts also is against banning books. NO ONE quoted in the article favors the banning of books.

Cruel-hearted schoolteachers are not actually denying access to the musty shelves of classic literature that children love so much. This is a lie.

Not teaching a book at a specific grade level is not censorship, not a ban, not book-burning, not making books unavailable, not discouraging students from discovering or reading books on their own.

Holding and expressing critical opinions about a classic work is also not a ban.

Context-free quotes from YA author Padma Venkatraman were constructed from sentence fragments and invention.

Her original @sljournal article can be found at: slj.com/?detailStory=w…

Venkatraman's words in their original context oppose erasing the past or banning books. She advocates developmentally appropriate cross-curricular study that includes historical context.

So much for her being an anti-intellectual bent on canceling the classics.

A teacher is quoted who'd rather die than teach The Scarlet Letter.

Okay.

Teachers can have opinions and the right to express them. If he can meet class objectives more effectively with other texts, why not let him?

YA author Jessica Cleuss got slammed for a violently aggressive tirade publicly berating and threatening a prominent educator of color for her opinion. Cancel culture or unprofessionalism?

It’s generally considered unprofessional for authors to use their platform to launch public attacks on teachers, reviewers, readers, booksellers, librarians, agents, or editors. The resultant backlash is hardly cancel culture.

An English teacher got the Odyssey removed from her grade-level curriculum. This, also, was not a ban. Books can be removed from a curriculum for any number of reasons, especially during a year turned upside-down by the coronavirus pandemic and remote learning models.

Is the Odyssey trash? As Greek myth fans we strongly disagree, but just as strongly believe everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even teachers. And some parts of the Odyssey are problematic...

Odysseus orders his son to torture a group of women to death for being disloyal to his household, and is framed as the hero. That's a messed-up story to drop on a class of 9th graders. At least not without some heavy scaffolding and discussion.

Homer didn't consider themselves to be white. Homeric tradition predates modern race theory by thousands of years. If the Odyssey has been wrongly taught as White and Western, it needs to be taken back. Ancient stories belong to everyone.

If classics cancel culture is real, whose voices got canceled first, by whom, and exactly how long ago? Why do we have so few surviving fragments by Lesbian poetess Sapho? Why do we celebrate Hesiod’s Theogony while his Catalogue of Women was hard-canceled back in ancient times?

Why are some people advocating so hard for the Iliad and Odyssey, but not raising a finger to restore the stories of Amazon warriors and Ethiopian heroes that once bridged the gap in between?

In 2021, we look forward to interacting with teachers, especially those who have removed Homer from their curriculum and asking what resources and what support they would need to bring them back. (Yes, Homer is they/them)

We especially look forward to learning more from #DisruptTexts on how to help teachers provide an inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum--and hopefully one where Greek mythology still has a place.

We trust that #DisruptTexts educators @triciaebarvia, @juliaerin80, @nenagerman, @TchKimPossible and their colleagues are not ideologues advancing a nefarious plot to ban the books of old white men, but dedicated professionals invested in the future success of their communities.

And regarding Meghan Cox Gurdon, please don't use this article or thread as an invitation or excuse to send any hate her way. She also is entitled to her opinions and as a right to express them.

Although in an ideal world, @MeghanGurdon would feel bad about the vitriol that poured from her article into online spaces and inboxes, and she would apologize to each author and educator she unjustly smeared as a child-harming book-banner.