re: #108 Joo-LiZ

Do you actually not know what it’s from?

Fahrenheit 451, the temperature at which books burn, Ray Bradbury book on the dangers of censorship.

I think he know where it’s from, he just doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean as the title of the documentary.

In my student teaching semester I gave a final test on Fahrenheit 451. It was an open-book test. I threw in two ‘relax’ questions at the beginning of the test.

1. What is the name of the author of Fahrenheit 451?

2. At what temperature do books burn?

Both pieces of information are readily available on the cover of the paperback of this novel, which we had been reading in class for six weeks.

Over half the class could not manage to answer both of these questions correctly.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t go right into teaching out of college. At twenty-two, this might have killed me. At thirty, I drank a bottle of chardonnay, and wondered what I had gotten myself into.