Cool In School

Tech strikes back against Plaid Avenger
The unorthodox textbook will receive a warning sticker and undergo other changes.

By Greg Esposito and Albert Raboteau
The Roanoke Times

The basic message of the Monroe Doctrine was, "Don't mess in our hemisphere, b------!"

And Portugal "got screwed pretty damn good" in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

Those are some of the lessons being taught by "Plaid Avenger's World," the new textbook in a geography course at Virginia Tech.

John Boyer, a popular instructor who wrote the book and teaches the course, said it's an experimental approach aimed at getting students to better learn the material. Chock-full of foul language, recipes for cocktails and more than a few cultural stereotypes, the book features a central character -- the Plaid Avenger -- who travels to different parts of the globe and explains culture and history in 21st-century college student vernacular.

The book made its debut in Boyer's Geography 1014: World Regions course this semester. Boyer said he doesn't like using textbooks in his classes because they're too dry and boring. With help from students, he wrote the book in three months last year.

Boyer, who resembles the avenger in both appearance and dress, said the book has received a positive response from the roughly 600 students in his course. No students or parents have complained to him. The only negative feedback he has heard is from "a few very squeaky wheels" among the faculty, he said.

Tech spokesman Larry Hincker said the administration did hear a complaint about the book from a faculty member a couple of weeks ago. Since the situation arose, some changes have been planned for the book, Boyer said.

A warning sticker will be added to the book noting that some of its language is explicit. A disclaimer, urging underage readers not to drink alcohol and all readers to respect diversity and to stand up for racial and sexual equality, is also expected to be applied.

The university's name appears on the book's title page, implying that the school was involved in the publishing, which is not the case, so that will be concealed with the sticker and removed in future printings.

Boyer said he planned to make some changes in the book for future editions that would make it more marketable.

Hincker said the university does not review the content of textbooks written by its faculty. If a professor assigns a book he or she wrote, the work must be reviewed but "the issue here is not content," Hincker said. "It's to ensure that a faculty member is not setting himself up as a publisher and then requiring students to purchase his book."

Boyer said he receives no royalties from sales of the book, which is published by the Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co. of Dubuque, Iowa. He said he intends to make some changes to the book so it could be peer-reviewed, which would enable him to get royalties from it in the future. Money from the current book's sales may go toward buying more pictures for the textbook or reducing the price of a future edition.

Boyer said the book's unconventional nature made it tough to get it through the publishing process. He said the book came out too recently to tell if it will be used in classes taught by people other than him. A message left at Kendall/Hunt was not immediately returned.

Boyer, who has bachelor's and master's degrees from Tech, has been teaching there since 1998. He received the Student's Choice Award for Faculty Member of the Year in 2005 and Tech's Sporn Award for the best teacher in an introductory subject in 2002. Sporn Award candidates are nominated by Tech students.

"He's the man," freshman Alex Horner said of Boyer while leaving the Geography 1014 course Thursday. "He's a great teacher. The textbook's written the way he speaks."

In explaining different cultures in the book, Boyer disregards political correctness. Describing how people of South America blended their culture with the Catholicism brought over from Europe, he refers to it as "freaky-freaky crap that doesn't look like Catholicism."

And the war crime known as the "Rape of Nanking," in which Japanese soldiers killed thousands of Chinese people in 1937 and 1938, "really sucked for China."

Those words accompany a photo of corpses tied to stakes.

Hincker described the description as "insensitive at best."

Elsewhere in the book, a photograph of an elderly Asian man is accompanied by the words, "Old China sez: "Me Chinese, me play joke."

The book has multiple photos of attractive women with captions that have sexual overtones. The chapter on South Asia has a shot of a woman on a cellphone captioned: "Yes Plaid Avenger, my back office is always open for you ..."

Sophomore Erin Olasz said Boyer tells students they can talk to him if they're offended by the course material. And she enjoys the class.

"I think the book's interesting," Olasz said. "It's actually a good read."

Boyer explained that the main character is similar to James Bond in his love of women and alcohol.

"I understand why that might be troublesome to some, but it is done in a lighthearted way," he said. "And after all, it is hosted by a cartoon character."

Tequila, wine, beer and various cocktail mixes are mentioned as the main character makes his way around different countries.

Hincker, who serves on the university's task force on alcohol abuse, said "anything to do with glorifying alcohol to underage students is a concern for me. I'm speaking for myself, but think I'm speaking for the administration because we are very concerned about alcohol abuse."

Asked if cocktail recipes are appropriate in a textbook largely directed at people younger than 21, Boyer said: "The drink recipes are entirely fictional. I made all of them up. They're not tested or tried, and I actually heartily encourage people not to try those things. They're there to make political points, or comedy points."

He said the "White Russian" and "Red Russian" recipes, for example, are a device to get students to remember the names of the factions in that nation's civil war.

It has been remarked that many of today's youths are more likely to be exposed to current events though the irreverent comedy shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than through traditional media. Asked if Stewart was an influence on his teaching style, Boyer said, "I would say I'm doing something similar to him, but I've been doing this [class] longer than he's been on TV, so he's doing something similar to me is the way I look at it."

Boyer scoffed at the notion that the stereotypes in the book might perpetuate racist or insensitive attitudes to other cultures. His object is to eliminate those types of attitudes by giving students a better understanding of different cultures and people, he said.

"We're internationally clueless as a country," he said. "I'm trying to build all of this stuff from the ground up."

Boyer, who was known by students for his unconventional teaching methods well before the book was published, said he has never gone out of his way to draw attention to himself, good or bad.

"I don't really give a lot of thought into trying to offend or trying to create excitement," he said. "I just do what I do. That creates excitement."

Hincker said he had only seen a few photocopies from the book, not the more than 400-page text itself.

He described Boyer as a junior faculty member who "might be a little edgy" and going "a little too far in some areas." But Hincker also said, "I think the important thing is there hasn't been a single complaint from a student. Students love this guy."

Bill Carstensen Jr., the head of Tech's geography department, said today's students "live on MTV and iPods. They don't live on reading the textbooks that I had in school."

Boyer, he said, "is trying to do something that pushes the envelope, but mainly he does it because it makes the whole process more educational for the students."