Well, while I don't disagree about this particular letter or the answer, if you think about reading books in school (especially for younger kids) it does come out to kind of a lot.
When I was in sixth grade, we did three Holocaust narratives + a social studies unit on the Holocaust in a row, and for the record, that was too many. It worked out to about 4-5 months of an hour a day reading and talking about WWII atrocities, and while that's absolutely an important thing to teach and learn about, after about two months of it the 11-year-olds were pretty much deadened to it and either making jokes or tuning it out (including our fairly high proportion of Jewish students) because it was just too much (it might have been okay if we'd had deeply inspiring teachers who were experts and knew how to keep us engaged, but we didn't, we had well-meaning but ordinary ones.) We would have done much better with one atrocity book a semester for several years than five months straight.
If LW's son is that age or younger and the class really has been discussing "atrocities" for three months straight - like, idk, a novel on lynching and a novel on Emmett Till and a novel on surviving the middle passage - it might be on the verge of too much all in a row.
I suspect they are actually reading books that do things like talk about segregation or maybe hint that racism isn't over or maybe just have only black characters centered, though. And that maybe they are reading them as storytime picture books (there have been some really good picture books about racial issues lately) rather than spending weeks as the main reading book. Or the kid is closer to high school age, if he's ready to argue with his parents over it, and at 16-17 things are a little different.
no subject
When I was in sixth grade, we did three Holocaust narratives + a social studies unit on the Holocaust in a row, and for the record, that was too many. It worked out to about 4-5 months of an hour a day reading and talking about WWII atrocities, and while that's absolutely an important thing to teach and learn about, after about two months of it the 11-year-olds were pretty much deadened to it and either making jokes or tuning it out (including our fairly high proportion of Jewish students) because it was just too much (it might have been okay if we'd had deeply inspiring teachers who were experts and knew how to keep us engaged, but we didn't, we had well-meaning but ordinary ones.) We would have done much better with one atrocity book a semester for several years than five months straight.
If LW's son is that age or younger and the class really has been discussing "atrocities" for three months straight - like, idk, a novel on lynching and a novel on Emmett Till and a novel on surviving the middle passage - it might be on the verge of too much all in a row.
I suspect they are actually reading books that do things like talk about segregation or maybe hint that racism isn't over or maybe just have only black characters centered, though. And that maybe they are reading them as storytime picture books (there have been some really good picture books about racial issues lately) rather than spending weeks as the main reading book. Or the kid is closer to high school age, if he's ready to argue with his parents over it, and at 16-17 things are a little different.