Our jobs can be HARD, my friends--and just so very predictably
disappointing sometimes, you know?
March, the month in which we celebrate reading and the intellectual
wings it gives us, has begun for me with this fall-to-earth episode:
A special education teacher walks up to my desk, a well-worn copy of Mad
Magazine in her
hand. "Have you SEEN this?" she asks. "Do you ever LOOK at this stuff
before you put it on the shelf?"
She is, she tells me, as people always do, not a prude, but shocked
nonetheless. I know she means it 'cause I can actually see physiological
symptoms; a pronounced flushing superimposed over a subtle righteous
mania.
She then slaps down the magazine on the circ desk, and Alfred E. has
just enough time to flash a demented 'what, me worry?' grin at me before
she cracks it open, flips through the pages and points at some naughty
stuff. I'm treated to bits and pieces of the offending material but pay
little attention as my mind has already begun flipping through its
library crisis manual to review the
validate-and-gently-engage-rational-reconsideration-protocol-section.
But yeah, I still see it: a scantily-clad, line-drawn male cartoon
character here, a middle-finger ad parody there.
And I know where it's all going. You probably do too: it's basically
gonna
be a bad week. And, emotionally, no matter how justified I feel in
having made the decision to purchase Mad, I'm suddenly feeling stone
cold busted. I've fallen, in a matter of seconds, from being a
respectable middle school librarian to being considered a reprehensible
smut-merchant. More than that, I'm sad because I've failed. A librarians
job is to please everyone. This particular special ed teacher does not
seem pleased.
Now: The Mad Magazine debate has been, without a doubt, done to death in
this professional forum. And , no doubt, I'll hear from LM_Netters who
fall
on both sides of the Mad debate. That's fair; I've wrestled with the
question often: Is Mad Magazine merely crass, vile, and prurient? Or
is it actually a really handy gateway that convinces reluctant-readers,
kids who have never found a piece of themselves represented in print,
that reading may not be a purely stodgy and
effete domain; that it may be more than just an instrument of torture
wielded by teachers; that is might just be okay, after all, to read?
And then there's the satire angle: for the most part, is Mad Magazine
CREATING or ENCOURAGING bad behavior, or are they using humor to point
up, mock, and, ultimately, CONDEMN the smorgasbord of bad behaviors that
we all witness daily?
Anyway, as goofy as it seems on the surface, the decision of whether or
not to stock
Mad has to be one of our profession's tougher calls...and it looks like
I'm gonna be stuck ruminating over it for quite a while.
I'd love to hear from you if you wanna join me for a chew.
Jeffrey Hastings,
School Library Media Specialist
H. W. Middle School,
Michigan
shankhead@gmail.com
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