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Listen to the mustn’ts child
Listen to the don’ts
Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles and the won’ts
Listen to the never-haves, then listen close to me
Anything can happen child
Anything can be.
-Shel Silverstein
The Poem Masks was always my favorite:
She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through,
Then passed right by-
And never knew.
I don't remember ever reading that but damn does that sting.
I will not play at tug o’ war. I’d rather play at hug o’ war, where everyone hugs instead of tugs, where everyone giggles and rolls on the rug, where everyone kisses, and everyone grins, and everyone cuddles, and everyone wins.
Draw a crazy picture, write a nutty poem, sing a mumble-gumble song, whistle through your comb, do a loony-goony dance ‘cross the kitchen floor, put something silly in the world that ain’t been there before.
I read this poem to the tune of the Eiffel 65 song
Aw shit, that’s what radicalized me
I imagine an old sweet librarian reading that poem to elementary school children. Then the scene cuts to kids screaming "burn it down" as they destroy the library and flip over cars in the parking lot.
"Did you see what they did to the pooooool?"
They flipped the bitch!
Good lord what a throwback. Haven't seen a Clone High reference in like ten years
This has me laughing so hard!!
Your reply rhymes with the poem and makes it 10 times better omg
Straight up 😂🙏🏼
Now tell me, do you want to be you and me Forever (-Unfinished) or are we caught in a Reddit thread.
It’s communist propaganda! We can’t just have people going around thinking….. stuff!!!
pen in flames gif
Banned because it’s hard enough to teach people to use apostrophes correctly as it is
As a child, was I supposed to know what that meant? Because I didn't.
🔥🔥🔥
That was one of my favorite books in elementary school!! I loved shel silverstein so much that I got a big textbook sized book of all his stories and poems. Why would they ban it? Seriously how is this “bad for children’s minds”?
Banned in 1986. For rebellion and profanity
That’s crazy!! That’s before I was born .. I didn’t read it in school, my mom got me where the sidewalk ends one day and then I wanted to read more Shel Silverstein and got a few more books before my favorite gift of the collection of his works
Shel wrote the Johnny Cash song “A boy named Sue” on YouTube you can watch the episode of The Johnny Cash show featuring Shel Silverstein. He looks into Johnnys eyes and screams “NOW YOU GONNA DIE!” Johnny walks off the stage and Shel continues, and seems to go more than a bit crazy. It’s a must watch.
There is also an absolutely filthy follow- up song to Boy Named Sue.
Whoa omg I’m checking it out now!
Banning for profanity a book that has no profanity is the most '80s thing I've ever heard of.
In the 80s Frank Zappa had an album given a parental advisory sticker despite it being instrumental jazz with no lyrics.
Fuck Tipper Gore and the moral panic crowd.
He kinda praises Alice (wonderland) for trying drugs - I think it’s that.
threatening soft squealing lush racial shelter wasteful capable dinosaurs sheet
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
Rebellion of entrenched ideas is my hope for all youth in every generation.
Do you know where it was banned? All I can find is it was banned at a single school in Wisconsin in 1986. I don’t see any ban anywhere else. Certainly still a ban, but at a single school isn’t quite the same thing as what you’re trying to imply here.
When our teacher read it to us in 3rd grade in the 80s, it was already known as banned book in some areas and in banned book lists then. So it was more than a single school in Wisconsin. It wasn’t like this would make national news in the 1980s for 3rd graders to be aware of its status.
I saw the Wisconsin story (https://dailytargum.com/article/2022/09/when-it-comes-to-banning-books-stringent-restrictions-inhibit-learning) and that seems to be talking about it being banned in 2022, not the 1980s.
I apologize - it seems different towns in Wisconsin have being going after it for decades. It wasn’t only Wisconsin, but they show up the most.
This video goes over a lot of poems censors likely had issues with. As people commented below there was a lot of banning going on. https://youtu.be/53rGxPbsffQ
This was my principal’s favorite book in elementary school, like if you were to walk into her office you would see no fewer than three copies
Don't look for logic in book bans.
Look for who benefits from controlling your access to information.
I remember my teacher hated the book because in one of the poems the characters dies at the end and she thought it would traumatize us.
And then she’d shuffle us into the gym so the entire school could watch Where The Goddamned Red Fern Grows for the fourth time that year. 🤷
I remember my teacher read “where the red fern grows” to us in fifth grade. There was one scene where a kid gets axed in the stomach or something, and the blood bubbles up out of his throat, and it was some of the most vividly described gorey imagery I’d heard up until that point
I think he’s running with an ax, trips, and falls on it. I specifically remember that he begged the main character to take it out of him, so he does and the blood just gushes out. I haven’t read that book in 20 years but that scene stuck with me.
Yeah the kid was a bully who was trying to beat up the main character and is chasing him with an axe, then accidentally falls on top of it. He begs the main character to take it out but the main character is too traumatized and instead runs away to go get help. The bully was a legit psychopath but that scene actually makes you feel bad for him and his fate
Oh yeah, that was it. Yeah, it was one of the most memorable scenes for me, I didn’t feel scared, just really interested in how it was in a book that I assumed was for kids
I remember I had to put that down for a night and got in trouble for not finishing my reading the next day lol. That was an incredibly vivid description and I can still see it in my head
Now, seriously though, because we're skating around the pivotal question about educating children in general.
Do any of you feel worse off or better off for having experienced that imagery? Would you say it presented you the horror of death and bodily harm in a way that you were able to digest, and maybe you still think about that scene when you're about to do something stupid with something sharp, or you see assholes that didn't read the book driving dangerously at highspeeds in the gorey deathtrap of heavy machinery we call a "car?" Cus I do.
Was it horrific? Sure. But books are like dreams that prepare you for any similar thing in real life, and that's why it's important not to coddle children. End up with a bunch of psychopaths.
This is now how I know I read this book In school. All I remember is this vivid axe death and I can say I've never ran with an axe.
Well that’s a suppressed memory I didn’t remember I had.
Damn, I read this school and definitely do not remember that. I remember being extremely sad by the dogs at the end, but definitely not that
I didn’t remember the axe scene until just now 😳. Definitely remembered bawling at the end w the dogs, but yeah it all came bubbling back to me right now.
Yeh it sticks with you like an axe in the stomach you might say
Not running, they were rolling around and fighting if I recall correctly.
That book was wild. I was an “advanced” reader in elementary school and no one thought to warn 3rd grade me or my parents when I started reading that book.
My 5th grade teacher was reading through this book, and she would give us little rewards (I don't remember for what, just that everyone got something, one at a time). She opened the box, looked at me, looked back in the box, thought a second or two and then said that I might like this, and pulled out a copy of Where the Red Fern Grows. I was surprised and really happy. She started reading her book and I followed along in my copy.
I do think we watched a movie at some point, but horrifying ax death doesn't ring any bells. I do remember some vague movie with a big old Victorian style house, and a black actor as one of the main characters, and I'd seen it before on some TV channel and it gave me nightmares. It was an older video, like pre 90s and very vhs. Really don't think it was the book adaptation.
Who knows what that movie was, but it definitely wasn't Where the Red Fern Grows.
Sounds like to kill a mockingbird maybe
I only remember the two very vague movies from that year. Vague dog movie and vague the other one. I suppose I'll look around at old movies online and see what pops up.
Was the movie you watched to kill a mockingbird?
On God, was it Disney's A Little Princess? I hated that film and had to watch it all the time in daycare
Read that book as a kid. The sad part with the dogs was too much for my young brain and it was emotional overload. I couldn’t even find the words to explain to my parents why I was curled up with a book one second and inconsolably weeping the next.
That book goes hard.
Omg that exact moment is what stayed with me! I think it was the stomach, yeah, but I thought the bubbles came out of his mouth.
Dude, I was older than that(like, 16) when I read the great gatsby and still I was a bit traumatized when I remember the scene where the woman gets run over and they describe her boob being ripped off and. It’s engrained in my memory.
Teachers are weird like that.
Not your username 💀
At least my school waited till 9th grade to give us such classics as The Kite Runner and Watership Down.
Watership Down the movie is a famous abomination.... But the book isn't particularly dark or gruesome? It's not Redwall whimsy but it's fairly "fantasy / adventure".
The Kiterunner was way way heavier in my experience.
The Watership Down movie fucked up 7 year old me when my dad had the family watch it. I do remember how much better the book was in comparison, although that could be because I read it about 7 years later.
My dad knew it had traumatized me, then thought it would be funny to sing "Bright Eyes" at me in a posh restaurant when I asked what meat was in the game pie. I probably would have been okay if he hasn't told me I was eating Fiver.
Did I mention I was about eight?
Mum was pissed at him because I spent the whole evening sobbing and making everyone stare at them like then were terrible parents.
Oh my god, I remember the scene where they talked about how the Warren was destroyed.
I had nightmares of being trapped for years.
Did you read the original or some expurgated version that left out the brutal descriptions of Bigwig's deadly fight with General Woundwort, and they never visited Cowslip's warren?
You're kidding, right?
Blackavar? Hyzenthlay? The beanfield? General Woundwort? Marks? The entire working of Efrafa is a lot more detailed (because there's room to do it) and it's chilling. Adams didn't hold back on describing suffering and death, and societal responses to it.
The cartoon is more immediate and you see it, you don't read it, but it's not any more graphic and certainly not any more chilling.
I read Watership Down again about a year ago and I'd say it's just as gory as the movie. The sequel is 10x worse
"we're going to watch the teacher go up in space in the challenger shuttle live, kids!"
Yeah, I was in the first grade. All of the teachers cried, then the entire 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade classes started crying. We had recess for the rest of the day.
I think they sent us home early? Or b at least there was no more classes that day. I remember seeing it on TV then walking into my house vividly but not anything in between
"Isn't it crazy, some pilot accidently flew into the World Trade Center. Let's keep watching the news coverage"
Still traumatized Red Fern from the eighties
In second grade we read Bridge to Terebithia. I think I went to bed sobbing when I got to… well, that part.
(Goddamn it I’m tearing up twenty years later)
Bridge to Terabithia in second grade seems unreasonably cruel. My 6th grade class read it and the entire classroom was sobbing.
We had to watch Pay It Forward, and it fucked us up. Kid finally gets the courage to stand up for himself after helping so many people, then he gets fuckin stabbed to death.
We didn't read Bridge to Terabithia, though we did know about it, the author's son and his friend that died (inspiring the book) had been students at my school 15 years earlier.
However, possibly the first "chapter" book we read in school (the first I remember anyway) was Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, and looking back, a story about a girl dying of leukemia is pretty intense to give to early readers. Cancer, nuclear war, and death are heavy topics. I appreciate that my social studies teacher had us push ourselves like that.