If I can be honest, I didn’t get around to adding what I needed to on the website this week until this morning. Most of what I needed to do was scour The Bluest Eye for passages that we think sparked the book challenges we address on our website. That took more work than I was expecting, but I was at least able to mark everything I found with a red ink pen. So I just relocated all the passages I wanted to add to the website this morning.

I made sure to add a trigger warning on the page where I put down the passages. I figured their sexually explicit content calls for some caution.

I’m actually looking forward to seeing everyone’s websites here soon. I think it is going to be really cool to take a peek at what everyone has created so far. I think it’ll be great for me and Rosanna to get some feedback from our peers on our website. I want to make sure it is one hundred percent ready for when we present it to the COPLAC system.

Rosanna and I have had a lot of difficulty with being able to meet in person lately. She texted earlier last week saying that she had to cancel meeting with me on Wednesday since she had a doctor appointment scheduled. So she asked to meet on Friday. But I had an appointment scheduled then too and I couldn’t miss it since I had it scheduled for three weeks. As a result, we’ve been emailing and texting each other back and forth to communicate what we plan to do with the website and what we need from each other. It has worked so far, but I do hope we can meet in person and collaborate more this week. I’m not exaggerating when I say our schedules conflict completely.

In the meantime, I’ve been listening to a very interesting audiobook while I commute back and forth from school. It’s called Educated: A Memoir and was written by Tara Westover, an American author born to a survivalist and radical Mormon father who strongly opposed public education. (I take great care to say “radical” since his views are pretty extreme and not representative of all Mormons.) So she was virtually forbidden from attending school.  Most of her childhood was spent working in her father’s junkyard or stewing herbs from her mother, a self-taught herbalist and widwife. At some point she decided to follow one of her brothers’ footsteps and pursue a higher education to escape her dangerous living conditions and abusive environment. She taught herself algebra and trigonometry from textbooks so she could prepare herself for taking the ACT, the first exam she had ever taken in her life. She ended up graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University and winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned her MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University in 2010. She was awarded a PhD in history from Cambridge in 2014.

I can’t even begin to fully detail how remarkable her journey to her educational credentials were. So far, I just got past the part of the book where she asks her art history professor what the Holocaust was and the backlash she got from asking that question. Her early life, to me, is an extreme case of censorship and shows what that level of censorship can lead to – a life of conformity to your family’s values or a life where a person struggles to assimilate into the very world your family abhors. I just find it fascinating and think everyone needs to read that book.

That is all I have for now. I’m finding it more difficult to write lengthy blog posts as we have less and less work to get done. We’re almost to the finish line and it’s bittersweet for me.

Tara Westover