From: San Francisco Unified School District Board
To: District English Teachers
Background:
• We recently identified and published the 44 school names we deem necessary to change.
• Some object to initiating this measure when children and you aren’t in classrooms, but when, for example, Asian students attend (still use that term even if Zooming) our Middle School named after James Denman, who denied Chinese children public education, we trust you’ll wholeheartedly endorse our efforts.
• Some would question removing names from schools of Abraham Lincoln and others who we would concede did some good; in Lincoln’s case, the telling issue unearthed on Wiki, our main source through our process, involved his dealings with Native Americans.
• Diane Feinstein Elementary demands change because the California Senator, recently photographed hugging Lindsay Graham, allowed a Confederate flag to fly among seventeen other historic flags for one day after protestors tore it down when she was Mayor in 1984. Enough said.
• Mission High School and Presidio Middle School, though names of a San Francisco District and neighborhood in which a few of you might afford to live, needed to be replaced as symbols of oppression during the city’s settlement.
Changing Literary Titles:
We charge you, in the spirit of value-based education and correcting past inequities, to change the names of works of literature you use. We’ve identified, through Wiki and top 100 lists of literature we found online, the most inappropriate. Here are the appropriate new titles you are directed to use if you teach any of these:
Moby Genitalia: Novel by Herman Melville
Their Eyes Were Watching A Higher Power: Novel by Nora Zeale Hurston
Tofulet: Drama by William Shakespeare
Passing of a Salesperson: Drama by Arthur Miller
Height-Challenged Women: Novel by Louisa May Alcott
The Heart is a Lonely Gatherer: Novel by Carson McCullers
The Woman Nurturer: Novel by Maxine Hong Kingston
The Senior and the Sea: Novel by Ernest Hemingway
The Siblings Karamazov: Novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Of Mice and People: Novel by John Steinbeck
Raisins of Wrath: Climate Change Novel by John Steinbeck
To Catch and Release a Hummingbird: Novel by Harper Lee
MenstrualClothtime: Novel by E. L. Doctorow
Animal Collective: Satire by George Orwell
Tea Road: Novel by Erskine Caldwell
She Stands Proudly to Conquer: Drama by Oliver Goldsmith
The Queen of the Flies: Novel by William Golding
Humility and Tolerance: Novel by Jane Austen
Indigenous Child: Novel by Richard Wright
Trees Used to Grow in Brooklyn: Climate Change Novel by Betty Smith
Women in Love with Themselves and Each Other: Novel by D.H. Lawrence
Lolita, the Me-Too Victim: Novel by Vladimir Nabokov
Crime and Rehabilitation: Novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky
I Hear the Unfairly Incarcerated Bird Sing: Novel by Maya Angelou
The Just Like Us Gatsby: Novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Romeo and Julio: Drama by William Shakespeare
The Lion, the Empowered Woman, and the Clothing: Fantasy Novel by C.S. Lewis
Good Words for Owen Meany: Novel by John Irving
The Wolf of the Economic Exploitation Place: Non-fiction by Jordan Belfort
Dona Quixote: Novel by Miguel Cervantes
Like Water for Carob: Novel by Laura Esquivel
Say Something Nice to Me, Ultima: Novel by Rudolfo Anaya
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Person: Novel by James Joyce
Of Human Bondage and Other Choices: Novel by Somerset Maugham
One Flew Over the Mental Health Issues Nest: Novel by Ken Kesey