Ah! Steven Brust. I just started reading the Taltos things, and now I remember. Thanks!

Really? Seems like it would depend on how it's taught. Did they assume that the teacher would just say "And so, children, Shylock had to be punished for being Jewish."? I ask because the year I taught English, I taught that play for the play and "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the novel, and worked a lot with the parallels of trials of the assumed bad guys. MoV was always much trickier though, and I'm still not sure I got it right.

Pretty much, it was assumed (based a whole lot of previous experience with this teacher) that she wouldn't have the perspective to be able to teach it in a way that wouldn't be offensive to a significant portion of the class. She'd demonstrated on numerous occaisions that she just didn't get that people could approach issues from perspectives other than Catholic, and she was the sort of teacher who claimed that any interpretation of the text other than the one in the teachers manual was wrong. (I've never read Merchant of Venice, and only know the vaguest outline of the plot, so I can't really comment on specifics.)

That makes sense. Teaching sensitive materials is an art form, and it sounds like that particular teacher didn't have the finesse to handle it. Better for her to teach the bland rather than mis-teach the controversial.

FWIW, my best friend, a Jewish English teacher herself, started teaching Merchant in the way that was described upthread a few years back. She did it as part of a large unit on outsiders in society. She also did it, she tells me, because she wanted to overcome her own issues with the text. She ended up having a really positive experience that first time and now teaches it every year.

But again, it's all in the approach. When I teach Huck Finn, we spend more than a week preparing for it before they even touch the books. Discussion of the derogatory language and depiction of Jim, discussion of historical context, discussion of satire -- all of these have to happen before I will open that Pandora's Box. I personally believe that Finn is the first piece of American lit that really deals with the absurdity of racism, but it would be frighteningly easy to teach it without that context and end up alienating every African American kid in class.

Sethra Lavode must be the new Steven Brust Vlad Taltos novel.

It isn't a new Vlad novel, but rather the third part of the Viscount of Adrilankha (the first being The Paths of the Dead, and the second was The Lord of Castle Black). Viscount is kind of a bridge between the Khaavren "Phoenix Guards" novels and the Vlad novels.

I highly recommend them, especially if you already read Brust.

ETA: Sethra was originally titled "The Enchantress of Dzur Mountain", which is a much more fitting title, I think, but the publisher thought people would have too much trouble with the "dzur" part of the title. How many people would be coming to the third book of a novel and be too weirded out to buy the novel? One of those "you can't underestimate the ability of publishers to underestimate the reader" things, I guess. Twenty years of Steven peppering his novels with hungarian phrases and references, and readers will be chased off by "dzur". Gah!

t /rant

she was the sort of teacher who claimed that any interpretation of the text other than the one in the teachers manual was wrong.

Gah. Shudder. Too bad they let her teach anything. (Of course, I had a strict Creationist as my Biology teacher, so maybe learning to identify bias is the valuable lesson here).

I never got parentally censored in reading, although I know some of my more mind-candy choices (movie novelizations, etc) dismayed my parents. They were both teachers, and we had rooms of books, and anything on them was fair game, and also able to be discussed at any time. I DID get in constant trouble for reading in a poor position, reading at the table, or reading in dim light.

I DID get in constant trouble for reading in a poor position, reading at the table, or reading in dim light.

...reading under the covers at night with a flashlight...

I got in trouble for reading at night without the flashlight.

What can I say, I ate lots of carrots.

I learned to angle my book just right so that I could read by the night light.

I could never read at night with the flashlight, because I hate having anything over my head.

I had a 25-watt night light (a life-size goose). I still got in trouble for "reading in the dark."

The fact that I wore big ol' glasses until the laser surgery has no relation to this habit.