It started with a Facebook conversation last winter.

Someone posted a New Yorker article from December 2018 questioning the novel To Kill a Mockingbird and the character Atticus Finch’s place in literary and cultural history. It sparked quite a conversation about this fictional character who I have so enjoyed exploring with my 9th graders for the last 16 years.

[Quick recap: Mockingbird is narrated by Scout Finch, who recounts her early childhood as she and her brother Jem are faced with the dark realities of race in 1930s Alabama when their lawyer father, Atticus, chooses to defend a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman.]

The social media conversation wandered into the why and how behind our teaching of To Kill a Mockingbird, and I casually commented that “TKAM is much more about Jem’s coming of age rather than Scout’s… I feel like Jem is really the main character even though Scout is the narrator.”

A reply from a fellow English teacher opened my eyes to a new perspective:

“That’s exactly the problem!” She wrote, “Even when we teach books with girls as narrators they are still focused on the lives and experiences of boys!”

Ten years ago, I would have probably brushed off this comment…or worse, leapt to argument: So what if Jem (a boy) is the main character? What’s the big deal?

Now, as I have grown to see how narrow a view of the world my district’s high school English reading lists represent, I can see why it is a problem that the only approved major work of literature in the 9th grade curriculum with a female narrator, let alone a female author, still centers much of its story on the experiences of boys and men.

I’m not quite ready (or able, given my district’s required readings) to throw Mockingbird aside for this reason. However, the conversation sparked by that New Yorker article has fundamentally shifted how I consider the approved works of literature and what I choose to curate for my students.

Further, through resources such as Disrupt Texts and others, which encourage teachers to reconsider the long-held notions or assumptions about the literature we teach, my new focus of the coming year is rethink how and why I teach the works of literature I teach. This coming year, I’m also lucky enough to be in a position in my career where I can ask tough questions, challenge the works I’m expected to teach, and work to expand the literary experience that my students enjoy.

The reason is simple: Literature is one of the most important tools we have for understanding ourselves, others, and society. It is how we learn to build empathy. It is how we learn that people are complex and fallible, and how we learn to appreciate them anyway. It would be irresponsible for me to not consider the significance of race, gender, and class in the works I teach. Importantly as well, it would be irresponsible for me to fail to challenge the monolithic nature of our curriculum: its maleness, its whiteness, and its exclusion of far too many voices that are important and also matter.

Now more than ever, it is critical that I rethink what I’ve always done.