EWC 4U1 Yallup

     To me, in the classroom, unless you are personally attacking someone, you should have as much freedom with what you write as possible. I think that as students age they should get more rights and freedoms with their writing as well. Say, for example, a grade twelve student, I believe that a grade twelve student should be able to write about whatever they would like because I think they have earned the right to be able to write with freedom due to how much schooling they have been through and how much censorship that they have had to deal with during it all. I think as students age, they should earn more and more respect from their teachers and they should be able to have more “adult” conversations and be able to write about more “adult” topics. Writing is about expression and how are people supposed to express if they are so restricted?

These brief articles make you think about where you draw the line between punishing inappropriate content in students' work and censorship. What thoughts or writing can you reasonably censor or punish a student for? The situation described in the first article is, frankly, ridiculous. Aside from the fact that "shoot the neighbour's dinosaur" sounds like the sort of thing an eleven-year-old might dream up and not to be taken seriously, why does a fictional story involving a firearm and the untimely death of a prehistoric animal merit arrest, search and suspension? Teachers shouldn't jump with paranoia when a shocking and scandalous word like "gun" shows up in a student's vocabulary, seeing as the English novels we read for class involve death, torture and weaponry galore. Exhibit A: 1984. Exhibit B: To Kill A Mockingbird . Etc., etc., etc. Or was it was the dinosaur that so appalled school officials? *coughs* The situation in the second arti...