Florida Principal Forced To Resign After Parents Decry Michelangelo’s David As Pornography
In my advanced AP French class, I used to teach a unit on beauty— in which we viewed and analyzed many art works generally considered beautiful. In this context, Michelangelo’s David was of course canonically “incontournable” and, accordingly, I devoted a full lesson to him.
One of my objectives for David Day was to get the class to see that the sculptor had deliberately distorted proportions in order to emphasize David’s intelligence (head too big) and his “handiness” with a slingshot (hands too big). So, quite innocently, I asked kids to look for elements of David’s anatomy that were “disproportionnés.”
Unfortunately, what they noticed, giggling, was NOT the hands and head, but rather the classically “discrete” penis, which they didn’t know the French word for, but which they were happy to point at and pronounce “trop petit.” I was embarrassed—not because of the statue’s genitalia, but because I, an experienced teacher, had carelessly not foreseen this reaction.
The kids were totally cool, though. After I rather awkwardly explained what I had actually intended, one of the them tried to comfort me by saying (in pretty good French) that it was OK, Monsieur, and that I shouldn’t be upset because, after all, they were “adolescents, et nous pensons comme ça.”
They were also super kids, who had both good brains and common sense. In Florida I might have been fired.
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