I’ve spent some time in these venues. With tenure, there’s no way a single episode of this (non) magnitude would be enough to push him out. Seems to me, just reading between the lines, that the school board was already giving this teacher grief for previous lesser “infractions” (i.e., teaching the kids the real way of the world and the 1%, etc.???), and he finally hit the wall and said fuck it, if you think that shit was bad, try THIS on for size.
The linked news article has more details. The poem was presented to the teacher by a student during that class period and who asked Mr. Olio to read it aloud. He did, and the rest is much commentary. The next day, another student from Mr. Olio’s class, asked the teacher of another class to be excused from taking her/his quiz. Some commenters to the article speculate that Mr. Olio was specifically “pranked” by some students, with unintended consequences.
I wonder what job security protections exist for teachers in CT? In NYS, tenured teachers have the right of appeal to impartial arbitration.
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I love Ginsberg, love the Beat era, but I don’t necessarily find this too upsetting and don’t think the full story is being conveyed. Just because someone is a classic artist or writer doesn’t mean all their work is appropriate for kids. This is the poem where Ginsberg asks his “master” if he can press his face in his balls. This is the sort of poetry that in high school we expected we’d learn in college.
Uh, it’s quite a bit more than that.
Oh, I don’t doubt that it was a stupid thing to do politically, but it’s real literature, and I don’t like the idea that a teacher is fired for teaching it.
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Yeah, I figured it was something like this.
Except this was an AP class which means it is being done for college credit, so one would expect that it would be approached more as if it were a college level class. I have to agree with those that say that, unless there is more to the story that the article doesn’t include, termination seems a bit extreme.
Edit: Frankly reading the additional information in the linked article, regarding the fact that it was a student who requested reading/discussing the poem, his rather excellent reputation, and additional commentary on the literary merits of the poem, just makes the termination seem even more excessive.
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I’m light years from being thoroughly conversant with all of Ginsberg’s work, but in comparison to “Howl” or “Sunflower Sutra” or “The Baggage Room at Greyhound” or “A Supermarket in California,” the use of language in “Please Master” is far less interesting and memorable. Frankly, in comparison to those other works, I think it’s little more than a straight-out bit of porn.
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I’m a high school AP English teacher, in a progressive school. We read a lot of things that have sex and violence (and sexual violence) in them. But this poem, read aloud, is beyond the pale. It’s salacious no matter what context you put it in. Read it at home, alone, and then talk about it, okay. But read aloud by the teacher? Way out of line. If I read this aloud, I would feel like I was sexually harassing the students. I wonder if this teacher had done other vaguely sexual things and this was the final straw. If not, he should not have been fired. But damn, what a stupid and outrageous choice for a teacher to make.
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So? Those weren’t the poems that one of the students requested be discussed. Was it a mistake to indulge that student and not find a different Ginsberg poem to discus? Maybe, but this was a class for college credit and the fact that he didn’t put the kibosh on a poem that one of the students asked to discuss because it was graphic, doesn’t seem like a mistake worth firing a teacher who had been at the school for nineteen years and had a solid reputation including having received one of the highest awards for teaching excellence in the state in question.
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I have to agree, but I still applaud the teacher. Ginsberg was a genius and man am I having a giggle right now.
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It would have been best if it was listed in the class syllabus, but this is an AP class, I expect a little more understanding of content and context there. Maybe better as an assignment, not as read in class.
The linked article includes more details, but to summarize it wasn’t a planned part of the curriculum it was a piece one of the students brought in and asked to read/discuss towards the end of a class session.
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I have to say that comparison doesn’t even qualify as a comparison. Maybe if Jay-Z stuck in some verbiage like “puffy zygote oven” or maybe “throbbing mind control probe” or whatever…but even that’s probably too flowery. As Please, Master proves, Ginsberg was a master of stating things outright and in your face just as much as he could “wax poetic” with allegory, etc.
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Well, Columbus, a city of a million people housing the nation’s largest university, is a little bigger than Sweet Apple. But I’m interested to hear that your impressions of America are defined by popular entertainment that debuted during the Eisenhower administration. Are you sure you aren’t a Republican? That seems to be their methodology.
Eesh. Well, he should have demurred, but that mitigates quite a bit.
I’m sure the Ted Cruz Free Speech Brigade will be rushing to his defense momentarily.
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The university permeates the culture. I’m not saying there’s no prejudice, but it is hardly the picture of a bigoted and narrowminded place. Cincinnati, now that’s a southern town with a history of bigotry. Columbus has an educated population and good schools and libraries. The last couple GOP governors have done a lot to hurt the schools, but OP is an ignorant, cheap shot.
TPM:
The Ginsberg incident didn’t make much of a splash until one student tried to bail on a test the next day, citing the previous reading of the poem as a harmful distraction. At that point, the story went viral and the school took action against Olio, according to the Beast.
Sounds like the headline to this story should have been:
Student Gets Teacher Fired To Skip Test
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This makes me think that for every Mohammed cartoon rally we see in front of a mosque, we should hold a Please, Master howling session in front of a Catholic church. I’ll bring the bullhorns…
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