Book Offers Lessons, Even as Battles Go On : Education: 'Ordinary People,' targeted by censors, touches young lives at one La Palma high school.

By JODI WILGOREN

May 31, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

LA PALMA — Giggles. That’s what she gets for uttering the “f” word. Naturally.

Hands on the hips of her faded jeans, lipsticked smile starting to crack, Lucy Swindell is perched casually at the podium, calling the swim coach ‘ ‘a damn, picky bastard ,” making snide comments about the new girl’s butt. She saunters around, ticking off a string of forbidden phrases--words that rhyme with “class,” “spit,” “witch” and, of course, “luck.”

Now the teen-agers are laughing out loud, trying to swallow nervous snickers as this 51-year-old woman--their teacher, for gosh sake--forges ahead: “ It wasn’t exactly an orgy of pleasure for me, you dumb . . . “

Not exactly the vocabulary you expect from a high school English teacher, but Swindell is just reading aloud from the assigned text, Judith Guest’s novel “Ordinary People.” Chapter 3 to be precise.

Swindell has been teaching this book at La Palma’s John F. Kennedy High School in the Anaheim Union High School District for more than a decade. For just as long, people have been telling her--and teachers nationwide--not to.

“Ordinary People” is among the most frequently challenged books nationwide, says the Washington-based public-interest group People for the American Way. Last year, California led the nation with more censorship struggles than any other state--including one concerning “Ordinary People” in the Anaheim school district.

To delve beneath the political debate, The Times spent a month studying the book alongside Swindell’s students. A reporter watched classroom sessions, then read students’ personal reflections in daily journals, essays and poems exploring the characters’ feelings.

Published in 1976 and later made into a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, “Ordinary People” is a 263-page bestseller about 17-year-old Conrad Jarrett, who grew up pampered in suburban Chicago, then lost big brother Buck in a boating accident.

Racked with guilt over Buck’s death, the teen slits his wrist, leaving blood in the bathroom and himself in a psychiatric hospital. Despite problems communicating with his harried tax-attorney father and self-centered socialite mother, the boy survives. But it remains unclear whether the family will.

So what’s the big fuss?

Well, there’s the frank talk about suicide. Fights between parent and child, including some harsh back talk. Musings about masturbation and premarital intercourse between Conrad and his girlfriend. Plus, the teen-agers in the book talk like teen-agers, which means slang and swearwords.

Swindell says she teaches the book to help build cross-generational discussion of dysfunctional families and teen estrangement. That’s just what keeps it on the firing line. Critics dislike Guest’s portrayal of teen and family life and fear that reading about the Jarretts’ inability to communicate will stifle teen-parent dialogue rather than foster it.

“It has no place in a teen-ager’s hands in an English class,” argues Treva Brown of Anaheim, a single mother of four who led the local protest against the novel.

Brown lists 26 reasons why “Ordinary People” doesn’t belong on district- and state-approved reading lists. Language, sexuality and suicide are her top concerns, but she also contends that the story is “boring,” the author unimportant and the vocabulary too simple to merit a spot in the curriculum.

How dare the district allow books laced with words banned in its own discipline code?

“I raised (my) kid to be a fine young man who doesn’t curse, who doesn’t swear, who believes that sex before marriage is wrong,” Brown said. “I put him in the public school system, expecting them to go beyond what I had given him, and they give him this nonsense. It was a slap in my face and a slap in my son’s face.”

The Anaheim school board and the California Department of Education have both rejected Brown’s request to ban the book, and a recall movement against several Anaheim school board members failed last month. But the controversy continues, with Brown promising to revive the issue in next fall’s election.

Meanwhile, “Ordinary People” is still being taught.

Kennedy High was the first in the nation to be named for the slain President when it opened in 1964. At the home of the Irish, all is green and yellow: healthy lawns under bright sun; kelly cheerleading uniforms with butter trim; pale walls with bold letters: “Ask not what your country can do for you. . . . “

Inside Classroom No. 3 in the corner of the campus sits Swindell, who started her career in the 1960s. Now she coaches future teachers and advises half a dozen student clubs.

In a school with a student body that includes 24% Asian, 17% Latino, 5% black and 5% Filipino, one of Swindell’s five sophomore English classes includes immigrants from Burma, Taiwan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Korea, Mexico, Romania, India, Samoa and the Philippines. They sit in a horseshoe, surrounded by posters praising racial unity, world peace and environmentalism.

One front-row seat contains Sean Temple, a hockey lover whose writing shows sharp wit and intellect. Nearby sits Mike Caira, who flirts a lot with the girls behind him, then flirts with Swindell to get out of inevitable detentions. Then there’s Brian Castles, a bright boy whose dad also teaches English at Kennedy.

A gold “Sweet 16” ring adorns one girl’s hand. The hands of Kristin Jondle and Ronnie Ellision, a couple who do homework together, are usually intertwined.

Quiet Kristen Vetica seems unmoved by the novel, but her journal reveals something else.

To wake the students up one morning, Swindell asks each to name one of “Ordinary People’s” many themes. “I could use this novel for a whole year,” she says. “We could build a whole course on this, couldn’t we?”

In fact, Swindell’s yearlong syllabus includes the requisite Shakespeare, Julius Caesar; classic English-class tomes “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Lord of the Flies”; “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s futuristic tale of book-burning; Lorraine Hansbury’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun”; and “Ordinary People.”

Some books are there for lessons in literary structure, vocabulary, character development, metaphor and narrative style. “Ordinary People,” she says, provides life lessons.

They begin with the title.

“One of the things we’re going to determine in this novel is that there is no such thing as ordinary people,” explains the teacher. “We’re all ordinary, but we’re all extraordinary in one way.”

Swindell knows that relatively few teens will lose a sibling to tragedy, but that most have trouble talking to their parents. Only a handful ever step inside a psychiatric hospital, but all shudder before their first date and experience stress over extracurriculars. They’ve lied to their parents, kept secrets, worried about the changes in their bodies.

One morning, Swindell takes a poll: What are teens’ biggest problems?

Of 33 students in one class, 17 name drugs as their No. 1 worry. Eleven say sex. Parents: five. Violence: three. Depression: four. “Peer pressure?” Swindell suggests. They all nod.

Later, writing in the journals Swindell requires them to keep all year, the students list their personal troubles. Too young to drive; too poor to afford auto insurance. There are divorce survivors and veterans of switching schools--or switching countries.

One boy lives here; his parents work in Taiwan. A girl has an alcoholic stepfather. Another’s mother “works two jobs, and when she comes home she sleeps. We don’t have time for each other.”

A white student’s mother won’t allow her to date blacks. Another student’s father doesn’t allow dating at all.

“To have a reason to get up in the morning, it is necessary to possess a guiding principle. A belief of some kind. A bumper sticker, if you will. People in cars on busy freeways call to each other Boycott Grapes, comfort each other Honk if You Love Jesus, joke with each other Be Kind to Animals-Kiss a Beaver. They identify, they summarize, they antagonize with statements of faith.”

The students are lost in the opening passage, the opening pages. Guest confuses them by alternating narrators, switching between Conrad and his father from one chapter to the next. They hate Conrad’s stream-of-consciousness blabber. Many cultural references seem dated--they don’t get it.

If they don’t read the book, if they don’t like the book, how will Swindell make her points?

A week passes, and half the class hasn’t cracked a page; the assignment calendar says they should be through Chapter 15, but the students concede they are on Chapter 3, maybe 4. Swindell keeps reading aloud, devotes a class to silent reading.

Arms folded across his book bag, Sean is silent but not reading. Instead, he stares at the guy next to him selling Blow Pops, at the girls across the room rubbing lotion on their hands, at the threesome in the corner passing prom pictures.

Sean is an A student, but “Ordinary People” strikes him as, well, kind of ordinary.

“I guess it’s worth reading, but I don’t know if anybody in this class really wants to read” anything, he shrugs. “Most people are probably thinking it’s kind of lame.”

Indeed, in early journal entries, most students seem less than enchanted with the novel.

“The book seems very boring,” Brian Castles writes during the first week. “It doesn’t have any action, and all it does is tell about a boy’s life.”

Conrad is a very troubled boy, stuck in a complicated life.

He missed final exams getting shock therapy in the hospital, so now he’s stuck in junior classes--his friends are all seniors. He can’t stand his once-beloved swim team; it now reminds him of his dead brother. Worst of all, Conrad thinks his mother wishes he had died instead of Buck when the two brothers got caught in a storm while sailing.

In class, Swindell harps on the family relationships.

One morning, the students sit with magic markers and white paper, brainstorming in groups, making lists of “things that tear us apart as a family” and “what holds us together.” Another day, the groups prepare skits depicting a typical day in the life of various stereotypical families.

For the first major writing project in connection with the novel, each student interviews a relative, then writes an autobiographical family history.

“I want to learn more about your family,” Swindell explains. “I want you to learn more about your family.”

For many, it is the first time in awhile they have spoken to their parents about school--or about anything, really, beyond negotiating curfew or borrowing the car.

A boy who failed English in the fall is the first to turn in the essay; his mother calls Swindell, jubilant, saying: “My son actually talked to me about an assignment!” Another student writes 28 pages.

Now they are on Chapter 13, the painful scene in which Beth confronts Conrad about having hidden his quitting the swim team.

“I’m sure I would have told you,” Conrad says, “if I thought you gave a damn! . . . You never wanted to know anything I was doing, or anything I wasn’t doing; you just wanted me to leave you alone!”

The students grow quiet, reflecting perhaps on their own parental battles.

“I’m lucky to have a mom who listens to me,” one girl says. “But I never thought she did until I read this book.”

Kristin Jondle and Ronnie Ellison stride into class together, sometimes grab a smooch before the bell rings, then sit side-by-side in the back row. As the teacher talks, they hold hands across desks. She leans her head on his shoulder, fiddles with his fingers.

Their smiling eyes lock whenever Swindell talks about Conrad and his girlfriend, Jeanine, whenever the classroom discussion turns to dating and romance and sex.

“ Conrad’s head is on his arm, one hand curved around her breast. . . . His heart floats inside his chest. His skin feels branded everywhere that she has touched him. . . . ,” Swindell reads from Chapter 30 as the nervous laughter and snickers begin anew. “ Gently, he asks her, because now he is her protector against the world, “Did I hurt you?”

Kristin and Ronnie have been dating about a year, and have not been involved sexually. Since reading “Ordinary People,” they’ve been bugging Swindell and her boyfriend to join them on a double date. And the book has helped the young couple discuss sex in a new way, Kristin says.

“You need sex out in the open. Teen-agers these days are more explorative,” she writes in her journal. “Parents don’t want to talk about it, so books or magazines are teen-agers’ only source.”

Chatting later, she adds: “I’ve tried to talk to my mother about it, but she graduated in ’75 so she thinks totally differently!”

Her own feelings are a bit conflicted.

“Sometimes I want to, but other times I think it’s fine where it is right now,” Kristin says one sunny day in the campus courtyard. “Some girls that I know think ‘I’ve got to do it to be popular.’ Me? I take no BS from Ronnie.” She laughs. “I’ve seen a lot of movies and read a lot of books where girls who do it, the guy leaves and that is the last thing I want.”

In the book, sex brings Conrad and Jeanine closer. Afterward, the young lovers lie in bed, shyly sharing secrets: she tells of her parents’ divorce and a previous sexual encounter she regrets then, as she traces the scars on his wrist, he tells of his attempted suicide.

“Suicide,” a student calls out, “is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

They’ve finished the book, and psychologist Sharon Garrett is visiting class for the day, trying to debunk some common myths. Like the notion that if somebody says they want to commit suicide, they’re probably not serious. Or that once people try to kill themselves, they never get over suicidal feelings. Or that suicide is random, arising without warning.

“I tried so many different things. Starvation, a blade, and other stuff, too,” one student writes in her journal, recalling her own suicide attempts several years before. “I even tried to overdose on Tylenol. I guess I just wanted attention, and I couldn’t get any because of my attitude problem.

“To even think about it now I feel so stupid. I’m glad I didn’t kill myself.”

Conrad seems glad, too, until he reads in the newspaper that a friend from the psychiatric hospital has killed herself. Reeling with pain, the boy’s thoughts race back to the boat accident, his bloody suicide attempt, and his long hospital stay.

“He walks swiftly, without direction. To calm himself. To get away from dreams, because there are worse ones and he doesn’t want to remember them, doesn’t want to think at all, less intense, less intense, but how to do it?”

Kristen Vetica, a 15-year-old basketball star, gets glassy-eyed as Swindell reads the frightful passage. She’s thinking of her own friend, who shot himself to death as Kristen read the novel.

“There will always be somebody that was going to commit suicide, and there’s nothing that anybody can do about it,” she sighs. “If you don’t talk to anyone and tell what’s going on then no one’s ever going to know how you’re feeling inside.”

All of a sudden, the students have gotten into it. They carry to class anecdotes of family life, their own alienation, their curiosities about growing up.

Many who were bored and confused by the opening pages now gush about what they’ve learned. Once put off by the differences between ‘70s Midwestern suburbia and ‘90s Orange County, they now ooze with empathy for the protagonist.

“Finally a book we can relate to,” says one girl. “A book to help us understand we’re not alone.”

Even Brian Castles, who lamented the lack of action, is converted.

“I’ve learned that no matter what happens in my life, no matter how drastic, I will try to never blame myself for it if it wasn’t my fault,” Brian writes in his last journal entry of the “Ordinary People” unit. “I also learned that stress can trigger big emotions in your life, and that committing suicide makes no help whatsoever.”

Every day, Swindell wears an enamel red AIDS ribbon on her lapel. Last year, she marched in the Paris gay-pride parade. She’s not afraid to make a statement.

For her, the fuss over “Ordinary People”--and, by extension, her class--just offers a chance for another life lesson: Stand up, speak out, do what you think is right. She’s been teaching the novel for a decade, but now she’s on the stump, talking about censorship over breakfast at the Kiwanis Club, in her sermon at church, during her housewarming party.

“One reason I do it is because so many teachers do not. They’re embarrassed,” she explains. “I raised four boys.” She laughs. “I can’t get embarrassed.”

Still, things get sticky.

Mike Caira, a precocious student who gets good grades but doesn’t like to pay attention, asks permission one morning to use profanity for a classroom exercise about family.

“We need to,” the boy says. “Just a little bit, to get our point across.” Holding up the book, Mike reminds the teacher how Guest employs racy language to make her characters more real, her story come alive. “How come they can but we can’t?”

Now Swindell is giggling, like the class did that first day when she read the text aloud. ‘There’s a difference,” she says, shaking her head a firm “no” to Mike’s request, “between using it in a literary piece of work and using profanity to put people down.”

Nearly 20 years after it was published, author Guest is surprised that “Ordinary People” is still making headlines, especially for the language.

“The themes in the book are way more threatening than the language,” Guest said of the book that earned a prestigious award for “best first novel” of 1976.

“The process of (Conrad’s) recovery is also the story of his autonomy, learning that neither of his parents are perfect, and learning that he can’t keep living by these rules that he doesn’t believe in,” Guest explained. “That is the kind of material that some people think is subversive and threatening--you can cover that all by complaining about the language.”

What’s Your Opinion?

What do you think of the controversy concerning “Ordinary People”? If you would like to respond to this article or comment on the censorship struggles in public schools, you may give us your opinion, for possible publication, by phone or by fax.

BY PHONE: Times Link 808-8463

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Voices / From Students’ ‘Ordinary People’ Journals

In class, the students were often quiet. But each day in their journals, they responded to the novel, relating its many themes to their own lives.

What are the biggest problems teen-agers face? Why do people want to ban this book? Do you find the language in the book offensive? Is life fair? What is a dysfunctional family? What did you learn from the novel?

Here are some of the students’ reflections:

“Most teen-agers have something to do with drugs or sex, and the ones that don’t want to do or talk about either subject end up being laughed at or losing friendships because they choose to say no. . . . We are going through a period of time when a lot of pressure is put on us about just anything people can think of, and this pressure doesn’t always come from adults but from our own peers. It’s a very confusing time because you’re stuck in between being a kid and an adult, and you don’t know which way to go.”

“My number one problem is my parents. I’ve been a problem child for a long while. I’ve been trying to improve, though, I really have, but my parents must not see it . . . we don’t tell each other our problems, which lead to more. All we do is argue until someone is hurt. We never talk things out.”

“I hate other stories that always use the same formula. They don’t use the ‘normal language.’ They stop when the story reaches the bad side of society or human beings. I don’t think that is a good way to write the story. The world is not perfect. We do not need to cover up the bad side because we want to have a perfect world. Maybe the language is not necessary, but we cannot cancel all the bad language.”

“I do find this novel rather strange and stumbling. Too much profanity for my taste. And I don’t understand where they are or where they came from. But I guess I will have to read more and understand it.”

“Teen-agers don’t like to read fairy tales, they like to read the truth.”

“The book is confusing because what is ordinary people? I have never heard the words ordinary people before. What is an ordinary person? Is there really an ordinary person? I hope to answer this question when I read the novel . . . maybe!”

“I think all families are considered dysfunctional nowadays. No family is perfect. Because I know my family is dysfunctional. Actually, I don’t know a functional family. But I think they should change the rating so that a normal family with normal problems should be considered functional.”

“People go to parties, have fun, and sometimes get carried away with things like drinking so they get drunk and vulnerable and then they’re easy to take advantage of, then they have sex and, afterwards, when they’re all sobered up, they regret what they did and they’re too ashamed to tell someone about it, so they feel down and depressed, like they’ve been used for a good time and start taking drugs and others keep having one-night stands because that’s what they feel is all they can get--no relationship. So they get some kind of disease or even pregnant.”

“Sex becomes a big factor in your life at this age. You want to be able to brag about it to your friends and to rub it in.”

“When do they think we should hear about teen-age suicide? When we are adults it will be too late! And the same with teen-age sex. It’s very important that we talk about it before we do things we might regret, which many kids have. Also, most teen-agers are having or thinking about sex.”

“I learned that there is no such thing as an ‘ordinary’ family. Everyone experiences problems and deals with them in their own way. Every family has feelings of guilt, loneliness, depression. Almost everyone experiences lack of communication, selfishness, family problems. I also learned you can’t hold in everything. You have to communicate with others, because it will come back in your face or it will keep haunting you. Suicide is not something to joke about. You should take it like it’s really going to happen. It’s the safer assumption.”

“It seems to me that parents don’t understand teen-agers. It’s like they were born parents and never were teen-agers.”

“I don’t live with my mom because we don’t get along too well. With my friends, some act so stupid that I can’t stand to be around them. I was seeing a psychiatrist, but my mom was having financial problems so she took me out. So for now, I’m on my own.”

“One important element in keeping a family together is communication. Not only do families have to communicate, but they also have to get along and respect each other. If the members of a family don’t respect each other then, obviously, they would not get along, which would eventually lead to not communicating.”

“My family has problems. Me and my dad are both stubborn and there really is no communication. A dysfunctional family is a family that doesn’t talk at all and doesn’t like to be around each other. All they do is yell and fight and argue. They avoid each other and don’t eat together.”

“A good family is like the Brady Bunch. That is a perfect family. The Bundys are a dysfunctional family. My family is an in-between, nice and not nice. I am a Brady Bunch/Bundy family.”

“I feel I am a survivor. If something went wrong in my life, I do feel I would be able to handle it. If there was a death in my family, of course, I would be sad and not know what to do. But some way, I know, I would still be able to go on and be OK.”

“From this novel I learned that my own life isn’t as bad as I thought it was.”

Book Battles

People for the American Way, a liberal Washington-based public interest group, has tracked censorship struggles in the nation’s schools and libraries since 1982. In the 1992-93 school year, there were 395 incidents--the most since the survey began--and California saw more than any other state. The following is the group’s list of the primary targets, with the most frequently challenged books at the top:

* “Of Mice and Men,” John Steinbeck

* “The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Salinger

* “The Chocolate War,” Robert Cormier

* “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain

* “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” Alvin Schwartz

* “Go Ask Alice,” Anonymous

* “A Light in the Attic,” Shel Silverstein

* “Bridge to Terabithia,” Katherine Paterson

* “The Witches,” Roald Dahl

* “Forever,” Judy Blume

* “Ordinary People,” Judith Guest

Source: People for the American Way

Researched by JODI WILGOREN / Los Angeles Times

“Ordinary People”: Extraordinary Target

Objections to “Ordinary People” being taught in public schools date back more than a decade and stretch across the country. People for the American Way, a liberal Washington-based public interest group that tracks censorship struggles, lists 12 incidents where use of the book or the film of the same title was challenged. The most recent challenge was in the Anaheim Union High School District. A summary of the other incidents:

* Flemington, N.J., 1992-93

What: Parents and 23 local ministers ask for removal of film from 10th-grade English classes.

Result: Film remains in use.

* Greeley, Colo., 1991-92

What: Parents raise concern about book--along with “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Prince of Tides”--being used in grades 10, 11 and 12. Some request rating system for all books, others demand removal.

Result: School establishes a cover sheet for course syllabus explaining selection process for materials and how people can get reviews before reading a book. Alternative assignments are also allowed.

* Santa Rosa, Calif., 1989-90

What: Parents request removal of book from 11th-grade curriculum.

Result: Review committee retains book, while providing alternative assignment.

* Winfield, Mo., 1989-90

What: Parent requests removal of book from 11th-grade reading list.

Result: School board moves book from mandatory reading list to optional reading list.

* Hinsdale, Ill., 1988-89

What: Parents twice ask for book’s removal from high school curriculum.

Result: Students are offered alternative assignment; one parent pulls child from class for several days.

* Morrisvale, W.Va., 1987-88

What: Parent asks for removal of book--along with “Of Mice and Men,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Catcher in the Rye”-- from high school honors curriculum.

Result: School board creates alternative honors class that does not read these books.

* Connellsville, Pa., 1987-88

What: School board member asks that book be removed from required reading list for 10th-grade class.

Result: School board removes book.

* Spearfish, S.D., 1986-87

What: Parent asks for book’s removal from 11th-grade class, saying it is derogatory to religion.

Result: School board decides to allow the book, but creates alternative assignments. Teacher in the case chooses not to teach the book the following year.

* Nixa, Mo., 1986-87

What: Objection to book being used in 11th-grade class because of sexual references.

Result: Superintendent removes the book.

* Salem, N.Y., 1985-86

What: Parents seek book’s removal from 10th-grade optional summer reading list.

Result: School board retains book on reading list.

* Mt. Vernon, Ohio, 1982-83

What: Parental objection to showing of film in sophomore English class because of R rating.

Result: School board votes to require that students be warned before viewing film.