ANTHROPOLOGIES: She didn't try to push her views...

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2023

...except on her classroom's walls: As a matter of personal belief, Mary Wood was a political liberal. Also, she was teaching school in a largely conservative community.

More specifically, she was teaching an Advanced Placement English Language and Composition course at Chapin High School in Chapin, South Carolina. According to Hannah Natanson's lengthy report in the Washington Post, Wood had grown up in a largely conservative world, but she had become "a self-professed liberal" by the end of her college years:

NATANSON (9/18/23): Chapin was [Wood's] hometown. Chapin High School had been her school, the place she began to question the conservative, Christian views espoused by her classmates, friends and family.

No teacher ever assigned her someone like Coates, Wood said, but her father Mike Satterfield, a teacher and later principal at Chapin, encouraged her to pursue whatever outside reading she found interesting. That led her to left-leaning authors. By the time she graduated from University of North Carolina Wilmington, she was a self-professed liberal.

[...]

She knew most students leaned right and guessed that many of her colleagues did, too, based on their social media presence and offhand remarks. The popular circles at school are red, current and former students said.

Stating the obvious, there's nothing wrong with being a self-identified liberal. There's nothing wrong with being a person who holds conventional liberal views. 

During the last school year, the problem began when Wood began to teach a three- to four-week unit on a potentially controversial book. After only two days, two of her students complained about the assignment and a great deal of turmoil ensued.

The book in question was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, "a book that dissects what it means to be Black in America" (Natanson's language). When it appeared in 2015, the book was critically praised and became a widely discussed best-seller.

That said, two of Wood's students complained to the local school board, saying that Coates's book "made them ashamed to be White" (Natanson's language). Wood was told she had to stop teaching the book. Also, she received a formal reprimand, apparently because the principal hadn't been informed about the use of Coates's widely praised book.

Was Coates's book a sensible choice for an Advanced Placement English Language and Composition course? Plainly, that's a matter of judgment—and according to Natanson, Wood's department head had "signed off" on the choice of the book. 

Beyond that, it seems clear from Natanson's report that Wood is a good, decent person—a person who's thoroughly sincere about the way she conducts herself in the classroom. 

Natanson never saw Wood's lessons on the Coates book. But in the following passage, she starts describing the way Wood went about such tasks:

NATANSON: Elizabeth Jordan, now 20, was one of [Wood's previous] students. Raised in a conservative, Christian household, Jordan was unhappy to learn Wood would be her AP English teacher back in 2019, Jordan’s junior year.

At first, Jordan found Wood’s lessons unsettling—especially the classes focused on mass shootings or transgender rights, during which Wood held up left-leaning viewpoints for students’ inspection. Jordan could not understand why Wood was asking high-schoolers to discuss controversial current events.

“All I was thinking was, ‘This isn’t allowed, this just isn’t allowed,’” Jordan said. “Just because it was a complete 180 from anything I had known."...

Over the course of the year, though, Jordan’s opinion shifted. She noticed how students seemed to pay more attention in Wood’s class. She noticed that Wood never pushed students to adopt viewpoints but challenged them to account for their convictions. 

According to Jordan, Wood didn't try to persuade students to adopt her liberal views. According to another student, this continued to be Wood's practice right through the past school year:

NATANSON: By 2023, when Wood assigned Coates, her strategy hadn’t changed: She still gave difficult texts about hot-button issues, convinced it was the best way to keep students’ attention—and teach them how to argue, an AP Lang exam requirement. She still demanded students consider novel perspectives, setting the essay question: “Explain Coates’ problem with America’s tradition of retelling history. Explain your support or disagreement with his position.”

For the two days Wood got to teach “Between the World and Me,” classroom discussions were lively and open, said Connor Bryant, 17, one of the students who took AP Lang last year. Bryant, whose father is a Chapin English teacher, said his peers debated systemic racism and what it’s like to be Black in America, agreeing and disagreeing with Coates, without Wood picking a side.

As a teacher, Wood wasn't "picking a side," but she continued to focus on (certain) "hot-button issues." On this occasion, two students and at least two parents complained, with community turmoil to follow.

Was there anything "wrong" with Wood's selection of Coates's book for lengthy review and discussion? Was there anything wrong with the way she conducted her classes?

Those, of course, are matters of judgment. For ourselves, we'll admit that we wondered a bit about her (well-intentioned) judgment when it came to this:

NATANSON: [Wood] knew most students leaned right and guessed that many of her colleagues did, too, based on their social media presence and offhand remarks. The popular circles at school are red, current and former students said.

But amid a red sea, Chapin’s English department was a blue island. And Wood was known as the bluest of the bunch—conspicuous for decorating her classroom with posters of Malcolm X, Ruth Bader Ginsburg quotes and LGBTQ pride stickers.

“She had that granola-crunchy vibe,” said a former Chapin teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional and personal retaliation. “It wouldn’t be difficult to guess how she votes walking into her room. I think that’s what made her a sort of lightning rod.”

Aubrey Hume, a recent Chapin graduate, recalls seeing the Malcolm X poster and immediately clocking that Wood thought differently from most people in town. She also taught Black, female and queer voices that most students never heard in other classrooms nor at home—which Hume said she liked. But other students didn’t.

Stating the obvious, there's no reason why Wood shouldn't feel free to "think differently from most people in town." That said, should the classroom of a public school teacher serve as a place in which she broadcasts her personal views?

It seems to us that the answer is a very solid no. It seems to us that imperfect judgment may have been involved in the conspicuous decorations on those classroom walls.

Opinions may differ on that, of course—but, at least as a matter of theory, we liberals can sometimes exhibit imperfect judgment too. According to anthropologists, this will almost never happen—but as a highly unlikely matter of theory, it perhaps maybe possibly could.

Especially at highly fraught times like these, we liberals can display imperfect judgment too! We'll allege a few examples tomorrow, starting with the first few pages of Coates's widely praised book.

Tomorrow: PEN America's thumbs on the scale!