Teaching What They’re Afraid Of

To ban a book is to fear what students might understand

A high school aged daughter asked her mother about miscarriage.

That’s what stayed with me most. Not the emails. Not the meetings. Not even the accusation that I was trying to turn students against their faith. It was that conversation at someone’s dinner table—born from a chapter in a novel, carried by a tenth grader who had read something true, and couldn’t let it go. The question sat between them all evening. They talked about loss. About memory. About what it means to carry something and build a future memory and then not carry it anymore. They cried together and honored sacrifice and womanhood.

It started, as these things do, in silence. A novel study during the fall semester. I’d taught In the Time of the Butterflies before—Julia Alvarez’s story of the Mirabal sisters resisting dictatorship in the Cold War era Dominican Republic. I didn’t pick it to stir controversy. I picked it because it’s beautiful. The kind of beauty that lives under the skin; the kind that doesn’t ask for your approval. The kind that lingers long after an assignment is submitted.

Students feel that. You can always tell when a story lands. The room holds still. People take longer to pack their bags. The questions hang in the air a few seconds longer than usual. That’s how you know.

What I didn’t realize, then, was that the story was already circling the drain of a larger conflict.

The year before, during the height of COVID tension, I’d stood alongside other educators at a school board meeting. None of us liked the mandates, but we understood our role. We were public educators and the law was passed. Our job was to uphold it in order to get kids back in the building. We weren’t trying to make waves. We were trying to keep the doors open and navigate an impossible environment.

But the room was already politicized. Tension lived just beneath the surface. During one board meeting, a parent took the microphone and said that forcing children to wear masks had led to suicide. He argued that because I supported complying with state and federal law, I must also support that outcome. He said it plainly. Into a microphone. With my name behind it. Compassion had left the room. Nuance wasn’t invited.

The fallout spread quickly—threads, screenshots, half-heard versions of what was said. The nickname came later in another parent comment at another board meeting. I don’t know who started it, but it stuck: “the suicide guy.” Something about that moment made it clear—this wasn’t about safety anymore. It was about sides.

Soon, things escalated. Crosses were shaken at us by children at meetings. Words like “demonic,” “communist,” and “groomer” were tossed around. We were followed into our classrooms and dark parking lots. At times it felt surreal. At other times, it felt like the seams of the place might actually split. Somehow, we never made national news. Maybe because it had become so ordinary.

Eventually, the fire faded. But the embers stayed warm under the surface. A year later, when I brought back Butterflies, that tension found a new surface. A small group of parents, emboldened by having been given sunlight by power and still riding the adrenaline of grievance, decided the novel was the problem. They claimed it was inappropriate. That it was anti-Christian. That it crossed lines. Most of them didn’t speak to me directly. They didn’t need to. The momentum lived online. Whisper campaigns, reposted screenshots, phone calls made after hours.

Eighteen families pulled students from my classes. I gave them alternate work—same standards, same skills, different text. That’s the benefit of a classroom built around process instead of product. But it still landed hard. I still had four sections of students who stayed, who read with more hunger now that it was taboo. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worn down.

A few parents had the courage to meet with me in person. They had read secondhand outrage and expected something explosive. I walked them through the book. Not defensively—just plainly. Like you’d pour someone a cup of tea and sit across from them. Some reported a salacious scene I would have blushed at, but couldn’t seem to verify in the book. They swore it was there. One told me she didn’t want her daughter reading a book where the characters weren’t Christian; I didn’t have the energy to explain that the sisters were Catholic. That Catholicism is, in fact, a form of Christianity so I let it go.

Some arguments aren’t worth their weight.

During those weeks, I started writing reminders to myself. Three lines. Same sticky note posted near my desk:

• Charity is the antidote to contention.

• No amount of darkness can withstand any amount of light.

• Seek beauty in the face of ugliness.

I didn’t know if I was trying to center myself or keep from disappearing. Probably both. One morning, I opened a contact form on the publisher’s website for Julia Alvarez, the author. I told her what was happening. That the book was being challenged. That I was tired. But more so, just a note of gratitude for a beautiful book. That I just needed to send something beautiful into the world on an especially ugly morning. I never expected a reply.

Weeks later, she wrote back. A letter, and a short editorial she’d written previously about people sexualizing her story in ways that felt completely detached from truth. She said she didn’t even recognize her characters in the accusations. Reading her words reminded me: once beauty enters the world, it belongs to more than just the author. It lives beyond reach—but also beyond destruction. Stories, once they land, are hard to un-land.

Later, when my administrator asked what I wanted him to say at cottage-meeting he as attending in hopes to diffuse the situation, I told him, half-joking, “Just have them Google me.” It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t my best moment. But it was honest. I wasn’t hiding. I never had been. But those calling for my removal had never bothered to look beyond the walls of our school. They didn’t see the award-winning teacher. They didn’t see the international keynote speaker, the author, the former missionary. They didn’t see the father in the process of sending his own son out into the world a christian mission. They only saw what they were told to see. And that’s what made it dangerous.

I didn’t attend the next board meeting where they were calling for me to be fired and have my credential revoked. That night belonged to my family. But I heard afterward: the ones who spoke weren’t the ones calling for bans. They were the parents of my students and those from the years before. The ones who knew what the book had opened up. They defended the novel. They defended the work. They defended the quiet dignity of truth.

That’s the thing no one tells you about censorship: it doesn’t stop the ripple. It just tries to make people forget the splash. There’s a quote from Alvarez I return to often: I write to understand things. That’s what teaching is, too. You bring in a story, not to deliver answers or steer interpretation, but to create a kind of quiet space. A place where students can sit with something honest, maybe even uncomfortable, maybe for the first time, and begin to make sense of it for themselves. Not everyone wants that. Not everyone is ready. But the stories still land.

Book bans aren’t about books. They’re about memory. About who gets to shape it. About what’s allowed to be remembered and what gets erased. About what’s too tender, too complicated, too human.

And that’s what lingers for me—not the noise, not the accusations, not the exhaustion. What lingers is the stillness. The way a room goes quiet when something real arrives. There’s something sacred in that. The way a moment helps a student shape their own understanding. The way fiction, when it’s doing its job, doesn’t inform—it transforms.

That’s what they’re afraid of. Not the story. The freedom. The way empathy opens people. And the way, once opened, they don’t close back up the same.

That’s what makes teaching, at its best, a kind of rebellion. Not loud. Not grand. Just steady. Just human. A hand passing a story across a desk and saying, see what this might open for you.

Even when someone wishes it didn’t.
Especially then.

NOTE: This article was referenced in an episode of What Teachers Have to Say podcast called “Who Protects the Teacher?” Check it out here.