{"id":7841,"date":"2014-01-18T00:01:58","date_gmt":"2014-01-18T05:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/?p=7841"},"modified":"2025-06-17T13:28:26","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T17:28:26","slug":"gene-ambaum-on-intellectual-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/gene-ambaum-on-intellectual-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Gene Ambaum on Intellectual Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This month’s Intellectual Freedom post is brought to you by Gene Ambaum, half of the talented team that cracks you up regularly with the Unshelved\u00ae<\/a> comic strip.<\/em>Bill Barnes and I have been revamping our\u00a0How to Ban a Book <\/a> keynote, so I’ve been thinking a lot about censorship lately.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Every time I think about censorship I think about my daughter’s fourth grade English teacher. She’s the kind of censor I don’t like. She is a sincere, dedicated professional. She is a nice lady. She made me so angry during curriculum night two years ago that my wife had to shush me and hold me in my seat. What she said was, “Comics are candy. They’re for dessert, after your kids have finished reading real<\/i> books.”<\/p>\n

Yeah, I was mad.<\/p>\n

So I went up to her after everyone left (my wife went along to make sure I behaved), and I calmly made the case for comics. I talked about how they build vocabulary, provide the opportunity for active reading, and how all the research points to them being so much more than an occasional snack for reluctant and remedial readers. At some point she asked me who my daughter was. “Oh, no problem. She’s a great reader. She can read whatever she wants.” I calmly, through gritted, teeth explained that it’s the other way around. My daughter is a great reader because<\/i> she reads whatever she wants. That includes comics and picture books and YA novels that are way over her head. But by then her teacher wasn’t listening.<\/p>\n

I thought I had another chance to prove my point. She had invited me in to do a comics workshop for the class. One afternoon I bored them to tears with a little theory about word balloon placement and layout, I got booed when I tried to draw, and then I turned everyone loose to make comics. They all set to work immediately, and I wandered around talking to them about what they were writing and drawing.<\/p>\n

The kids were all heads-down, hard at work, giggling. The teacher followed me everywhere. “Tell them what to do.”<\/p>\n

“I did. I told them to make comics.”<\/p>\n

“But they don’t know what to do.”<\/p>\n

“Sure they do. They’re all doing it.”<\/p>\n

The kids were writing, and it was a clear reflection of their love for comics. I’m guessing she saw a mess she needed to clear up with real, high-quality books that fourth graders should be reading. And a parent who she wanted the heck out of her classroom.<\/p>\n

I’m sure she was as happy as I was when my daughter started fifth grade. (Her new teachers embraced comics, as had her previous teachers and the school librarian.) But it bugs me that she’s still out there quietly equating comics with empty calories and tooth decay. I wish she had a crazier look on her face, and that she was inviting like-minded loonies to comics bonfires, because then I’d find her more amusing. And everyone I know would back me in a fight against her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This month’s Intellectual Freedom post is brought to you by Gene Ambaum, half of the talented team that cracks you up regularly with the Unshelved\u00ae comic strip.Bill Barnes and I have been revamping our\u00a0How to Ban a Book keynote, so I’ve been thinking a lot about censorship lately. Every time I think about censorship I think about my daughter’s fourth grade English teacher. She’s the kind of censor I don’t like. She is a sincere, dedicated professional. She is a nice lady. She made me so angry during curriculum night two years ago that my wife had to shush me and hold me in my seat. What she said was, “Comics are candy. They’re for dessert, after your kids have finished reading real books.” Yeah, I was mad. So I went up to her after everyone left (my wife went along to make sure I behaved), and I calmly made…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[272,134,41,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogger-intellectual-freedom-committee","category-guest-blogger","category-intellectual-freedom","category-professional-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}