Think writing a suicide note is an appropriate class assignment? One New York teacher apparently thought it was.
An English assignment given to students at York Preparatory School in Manhattan asked them to write their own suicide note. The assignment has enraged parents and students alike, with parents calling the essay prompt inappropriate.
According to The New York Post, the morbid assignment was assigned to a class at the Upper West Side private school last month. It was designed to put students into the situation of May Boatwright, the main character who committed suicide in the best-selling book ‘The Secret Life of Bees.’
Students were prompted by the questions: “How would you justify ending your life? What reasons would you give?”
They were then asked to channel Boatwright and write a good-bye note from the perspective of the fictitious character, justifying why they had committed suicide and how they wanted to be remembered.
The assignment was troubling to some students, and many parents fired back at the school, saying it was “inappropriate.”
“We were pretty stunned at the scope of the assignment,” one father of a ninth-grader told The New York Post. “We thought this was such an outrageous assignment for a 14-year-old to get. We pay a lot of money to send our kids to the school.”
Tuition for high school students at the private school is projected at more than $41,000 in the coming year.
The sensitivity of the essay topic and its increasing frequency acted as a catalyst to the English assignment’s controversy. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control released a study revealing that the attempted suicide rate among high school students has risen from 6.3 percent in 2009 to 7.8 percent in 2011.
But writing assignments surrounding the act of suicide are not uncommon. Students were asked to complete similar assignments last year at a middle school in France and a high school in England.
“I don’t see why this is inappropriate at all,” Simon Critchley, a philosophy professor at The New School in Greenwich Village, told The Post.
According to The Post, the professor has recently taught a suicide note-writing workshop to adults.
“If it is, then suicide is a taboo, and I simply think we have to think rationally about our taboos,” he told the paper. “I think it might even help students acquire a more mature and reflective approach to a hugely important topic.”
The English teacher who assigned the controversial assignment, Jessica Barrish, taught at public schools for three years and declined to comment on the assignment.
