One of the primary justifications for including diverse literature in any school curriculum is that fiction promotes empathy. How many people alive in the United States today think and feel as they do about the Holocaust largely because of Anne Frank’s diary or that little boy in the striped pajamas? How many of our perceptions concerning right and wrong in society and government have been shaped by our connections with Boxer in Animal Farm, Piggy in Lord of the Flies, or Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games?
I’d never claim to truly know what it’s like to die from cancer just because I loved The Fault in Our Stars, but it’s given me a far better appreciation for the range of ways in which people respond to severe illnesses. I’ve never been Black or female or gay, but I’m a tiny bit closer to being able to connect with and value those who are because I’ve been allowed to become those things in a small, temporary way when I read.
But it’s not just a better understanding of others we often find between exposition and denouement. Many novels, short stories, and other texts mess with our understanding of ourselves as well.
These are complicated times, and in the interest of serving ALL students (and avoiding as many problems with parents as possible), I’m renewing my commitment to avoid pushing my own personal values and ideology and just sticking to the facts.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. (Ralph Waldo Emerson) I’ve long loved New Years. It may be my favorite holiday. I don’t make New Year’s resolutions anymore. I’m convinced most important changes are evolutionary, torturously slow and staggering as we claw incrementally forward. It’s not that I expect much to be so very different in the next calendar year... I suppose it’s more of a symbolic thing – this idea of perpetual re-creation.