S.C. teacher’s racism lesson was shut down by book ban. But she’s still talking about it

When teacher Mary Wood stepped back into the classroom this semester, she didn’t just have the usual back-to-school jitters.

This wasn’t the veteran teacher’s first time starting a new English class, but it was the first since her lesson plan for last year put her in the center of a very public spat about how race is taught in South Carolina classrooms.

It was a discussion that she at times welcomed and at others worried how it was affecting her standing both professionally and in her community at large.

“Starting school was weird,” Wood said in an interview at her Chapin, South Carolina, home.