The Round House

After, reading the book “The Round House,” by Louise Erdrich. I thought that it was a great book that was very suspenseful and kept you on the edge of your seat throughout each chapter of the book. However, the idea of teaching this book to my classroom would be very difficult and hard to teach the themes and the main plot to my students. But also, I feel it would be hard to get my principal and school district to back up this book as well. Not only due from the amount of cussing that goes on within this book such as Erdrich writes, “Oh fuck you, said Zack. Cappy laughed. Why don’t you let him stay on till he gets really big? They’ll call you Three Balls. Like Old Man Niswi, I said. He really had three. It’s true. My grandma knows, said Zach,” which most of their friendship interactions have a lot of cussing and talking about sexually reactions and encounters. However, another issue would be the strip tease that Sonja gives to both Joe and Mooshum for Mooshum’s birthday gift. The scene gets wild and almost leaves Mooshum having a heartache from Sonja getting naked and making his heart work-hard. Also, the graphic scene of Sonja showing Joe her cut-up boob that was messed up from her pimp or boss that she worked for at the strip club. Yet, another example of why I wouldn’t teach this book is because of the excess drinking from Mooshum, and the underage drinking that might influence other students in that type of behavior. Lastly, the main reason why I would have trouble teaching this book would be the rape that happens to Joe’s mother Geraldine. Not only does she give the description on what happened that night, as she was attacked and brutally raped and almost killed by getting burned alive. But the trauma and the depression that she goes through is almost hard to teach to my students, as I feel it would difficult to teach based on the graphic images and ideas that would affect students who had a family member that was brutally attacked, or something happened to them personally. This leads me to believe that I would recommend the book to read on their own, but to teach as a class I probably wouldn’t take on this book out of fear that their parents wouldn’t be happy and the school board as well.