NOTE: I AM NOT THE AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE. FOLLOWING IS A SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLE. YOU CAN FIND THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE USING GOOGLE.

Main points of: Using The Hunger Games in the classroom

There are a bunch of study-guide type books for teachers complete with a variety of questions and various activities involving the use of The Hunger Games book or the entire trilogy.

As a former teacher One thing that came immediately to my mind was whether or not the book (or books) would even be allowed in the classroom considering how strong the movement is in this country to ban books that, basically, cause people to think. So I checked Google to see what I could find.

Here are some of the results:

'The entire Hunger Games Trilogy (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire & Mockingjay), were number three on the American Library Associations banned books list in 2011 having been challenged for insensitivity, offensive language, violence and for being anti-family, anti-ethnic and occult/satanic. '

Anti-family? I think that Katniss, her mother and Prim show a very strong family unit. Their father is dead, unfortunately. A lot of things seem to be involving broken family units but broken due to accidents and politics leading to people 'disappearing.' Violence is in the books, with no doubt, but it's also on the 'real' news all the time what with the school shootings and other shootings, for example. I've studied the occult for many years and these books are not occult in nature. They are based on a grim reality of every-day life under a distatorship. There's no time left in their lives for anything but hard work and hopeful survival.

'The novel has been banned throughout the United States mostly from schools making the top ten banned books of all time. The Hunger Games is set in a future dystopia where an overpowered government controls everything for the people. '

It's not surprising that politics has led to the book being banned so much. A certain group of people don't want others to think about how much of our lives are controlled by politics and that we have many politicians who are corrupt and do not care about helping others which, basically, is what any government should be about. It shouldn't be about lining your own pockets or consistently telling lies. It should be in the spirit of parts of the Bible about doing good for others.

There's a lot of things like this that you can look up. The banning of the book/series does not surprise me at all.

There are a couple of reasons that this book and almost any other could end up not being banned but not being used and this relates to how many schools are no longer giving students actual textbooks of any kind. I know for the last five years I taught I was banned from giving out Biology textbooks and other times there were no books to cover the subjects I was teaching like computer literacy.

People complain about the reading comprehension scores in many schools being so low and that doesn't surprise me at all when you don't even give students the books to read in the classroom. Are the books expensive? Yes. But what is the expense in graduating students whose desire to actually read is low and who can't really comprehend what it is that they are reading?

There is also a related problem and that it copying material to use in the classroom. There are many study guides with various types of questions that can be used in the classroom but the school might have established a limit on the number of copies any one teacher can make. Fortunately teachers could use at least some materials by writing things on the blackboard and just discussing the answers to questions rather than having students have to write them down on a handout.

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