SOUTH SHIELDS, England – School officials at Mortimer Community College in England learned their lesson after a teacher failed to review a reading assignment for 11-year-olds that detailed Lorena Bobbitt’s decision to “cut of her husband’s d*** …”
Administrators at Mortimer Community College in South Shields sent letters of apology to parents of the young students who were assigned to read an excerpt from Bill Bryson’s 1996 travel book Notes from a Small Island, the Daily Mail reports.
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The assigned passage “referred to the famous 1993 case of U.S. couple John and Lorena Bobbitt, saying how the wife ‘cuts off her husband’s d*** and flings it out the window in a fit of pique,’” the news site reports.
“One parent described the homework assignment as ‘disgusting,’ claiming the passage was packed with ‘filthy innuendos’ – but the school said the homework had been given out by mistake.”
The assignment was given out by a teacher before she had actually read through the material herself, Headmistress Claire Mullane told the Daily Mail.
Students were supposed to be assigned a specific paragraph from the 11-page excerpt of Bryson’s book, but instead were given the whole thing, including the Bobbitt references.
According to the Daily Mail, one passage read:
Consider how much news space in Britain is devoted to marginal American figures like Oliver North, Lorena Bobbitt, and OJ. Simpson – a man who played a sport that most Britons don’t understand and then made commercials for rental cars and that was it – and compare that with all the news reported in any year from Scandinavia, Austria, Switzerland, Greece, Portugal and Spain. It’s crazy really. If there’s a political crisis in Italy or a nuclear spill in Karlsruhe, it gets maybe eight inches on an inside page. But if some woman in S***kicker, West Virginia, cuts off her husband’s d*** and flings it out the window in a fit of pique, it’s second lead on the 9 O’clock News and The Sunday Times is mobilizing the ‘Insight’ team. You figure it.
“We in no way condone that sort of approach, however it was in error,” Mullane said. “Once we were aware of what had happened, we acted on it immediately and spoke to the class in question and apologized to them.
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“Myself and the member of the staff have now written to parents of the pupils concerned and they should have received those letters at the weekend.”
The apologies, however, were clearly not enough for some parents.
“I was disgusted that she came home with this. I appreciate the school apologized, but, in my eyes, the damage is done because the kids have read it now,” one mother told the Daily Mail. “The headteacher said the extract should not have been included in the 11 pages given out.
“The whole thing is filled with filthy innuendos. How the government can say this is acceptable to use in school is beyond me.”
Some who commented on the Daily Mail story seemed to agree.
“I love Bill Bryson books but some parts of the book are not suitable for children,” RWT posed. “I know they have access to the internet, etc, and could probably teach us a few words, but I don’t think it appropriate that a teacher hands this out.”
Others didn’t think it was a big deal.
“Any bright and educated child should be encouraged to read the newspaper, and learn about how the emotive choice of language is used to try to influence attitudes, and which newspapers do it the most,” Sus, of Gloucester, wrote. “A child in year seven would more than likely be reading accounts of incidents like this in the news already.”
For anyone who doesn’t remember, authorities recovered John Bobbitt’s severed penis and doctors were able to successfully reattach it. He went on to become a porn star. Lorena Bobbitt, who claimed abuse by her husband drove her to chop off his manhood with an 8-inch knife, was acquitted of her crime by reason of temporary insanity.
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