teacher removing reference books from student access

[Marsha Hauser <mhauser@EDGE-COLE.K12.IA.US>]

I've encountered a situation I haven't dealt with yet, and would like to
know if any of you have experienced this.

Several years ago I was asked to purchase materials on literary criticism
for our English Dept. I went with a Gale series with two volume sets
dealing with poetry, drama, short stories, novels and Shakespeare. The
titles were Poetry for Students, etc. Two teachers used them, thought they
were great and thanked me.

Those people are gone and this year we have a long time teacher teaching
English for the first time in I don't know how long. Let me say here that I
respect much of the work she does. In the fall she checked all but the
Shakespeare titles from the sets listed above. I thought she was using them
to prepare... great.

Several times during the year I noticed they were still gone, usually when
I wanted to use them. Yesterday the speech coach, who wanted to use them
with her kids, expressed her frustration with not having access to those
books, and my aide told me that the English teacher was keeping them in her
room so the kids WOULDN'T be able to use them. The books contain many of
the literary works that this teacher uses in two courses, and she thinks
they'll read those analyses rather than the originals. She's also concerned
that the kids will pull from the reference sources when asked to do their
own analyses.

I'm upset that a teacher essentially weeded something from the collection I
am responsible for, behind my back, but more important, these are valuable
resources that were bought for kids to use.

Shouldn't the references be used as models to show how analysis is done?
Couldn't she modify her assignments so that it wouldn't be feasible to copy
from the books? My reaction to her was that she would surely recognize
student responses that plagiarized those books. I pointed out to her that
the students could easily find similar resources on the web.

Have any of you run into a similar situation? It's my impression that works
on literary criticism are standard elements of a good collection. She and
my principal have suggested that I put the sets where the students won't
have access to them. I find that unacceptable.

I'm looking forward to your responses,

Marsha

Marsha Hauser
Media Specialist
Ed-Co Schools, Edgewood, Iowa
mhauser@edge-cole.k12.ia.us

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