e-mail letter to my 6th grade son's teacher

I wrote this last month to my son's teacher, and thought blog readers might find it interesting. You will note that this letter was dated March 29th, two days before Terri Schiavo died.

Subject: Chris' project(s)
Bcc: to Grandma (and now to blogosphere)
Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 14:59:14 -0700

Mr. <Language Arts Teacher>,

I want to let you know that Christopher is having alot of trouble working on his Lowry Trilogy project. We know that another iteration of it was due a couple of weeks ago, and yet where he used to be animated in his ideas in getting papers done, he now has ground to a dead halt, where he just sits and stares at it, and nothing comes out. He had told me in the struggle to complete the last round, that in order to get through reading Lois Lowry's books, he had to make himself go numb. I think now it has reached the point, particularly with the horrible current events in the news, that wallowing in Lois Lowry's euthanasia as children's entertainment is just more than this 11 year old boy can handle.

I am kind of at a loss as to how to help him. I believe he can do the work, and that it is only the subject matter that is causing the problem. Being a boy, I think he doesn't like to admit just how sensitive he is. But he is no dummie. He sees how all this is playing out in the real world.

I hope that you might have some suggestions, or at least patience. I think where Chris was going with it was to have a couple of the characters somehow re-educating' the villages involved and saving the day. But now he knows in the real world, that some folks just prefer not to understand, or are even cruel just for the sake of being cruel, and that's hard to process.

Suzanne (last name & phone number)

Recruiting for Culture of Death begins in Middle School

You know, my daughter (now in 9th grade) is more resilliant (within limits) than my son is. (He's now in 6th.) So I didn't really catch on until this year what was going on with the active recruitment of my children into the culture of death. I had thought, fine, if he doesn't want to go to sex-ed, and he doesn't, I'll just let him sign himself out. He doesn't give a cr*p that only a couple of boys out of 50 are not sitting in there absorbing far more information than he needs or is equipped to handle at this stage of his life. But it goes much further than that.

My daughter also liked to sign herself out of sex-ed, but what I didn't realize is that she was also signing herself out of reading assignments of books she didn't like. Too much bad language, killing, and evil child characters? No problem, she'd just ask permission to read a different book, and the teacher, knowing she wasn't just being lazy because she was indeed reading something, would just let her do it. Theresa has a way of ... persuading people. And she wasn't rejecting Harry Potter, which even I love, as the child characters there are striving to overcome evil.

With Christopher, though, I'm really getting my face in it, this active recruiting of young minds into the Culture of Death. Have any of you taken a real hard look at what is being assigned to middle school children in between all the fluffy talking animals of The Redwall Series? I'll tell you! It's Lois Lowry's (Newberry Prize winning, no less) trilogy of "The Giver", "Gathering Blue", & "The Messenger", all three whose central theme is Euthanasia as Children's Entertainment!

As I helped him type up book report after book report, multiple reports on each book -- total immersion don'tcha know -- I found myself more and more shocked at what was coming out of his mouth. Stories of societies who give shots in babies' heads, to kill those babies who have even minor birth defects, and stories of older children rescuing, hiding, and raising younger children, to save them from this fate, and how once old enough, everyone in a society must take a daily pill in order to conform, shut down their minds, (and hearts), to begin participating in this themselves. On and on and on these stories go, cruelty after cruelty, until I finally asked my son, "How DID you manage to get through reading these books?" His answer, "I just go numb to get through it."

But I'll tell you what --- he's now 2 or 3 book reports behind, and failing his class because he can't bring himself to immerse himself in this garbage anymore, and I haven't been able to bring myself to immerse myself in it either to type them for him. So to get him through it, we are going to have to spend a block of concentrated time and just plow out all three, because with his Boys Chorus singing career taking off, he can't afford any bad grades on his report card, or they'll boot him. But now that I'm on to the whole process, we can write anything we want in the book reports.... heh heh heh. And we will. He will learn how to speak up against the Culture of Death. Maybe get his own blog ;-) (Heck, his sister has one.) Chris knows I'm on his side.