Basically I've just been thinking about LGBT stuff at school. Seems to be a forbidden topic in my eighth grade. If someone says 'gay', even in a completely innocent way, a teacher often tells them not to 'use that kind of language' because it's 'inappropriate'. I can't help but be bothered by this. I asked my homeroom teacher about it once and she said it's apparently because a lot of people are against homosexuality because of their religion and we're not supposed to offend anyone's religion. (For the same reason, we're not allowed to learn about evolution.) And for this reason, I wasn't allowed to do a project on gay rights in language class. The assignment was to research a controversial topic and do a presentation on it. But apparently that's too controversial for school. Isn't that the point of the project!? Ugh... My character ed teacher is another story. She completely ignores these rules. She even let me do a poster promoting the legalization of gay marriage for a 'change you want to see in the world' project, which was hung up in the hallway. (Shortly after, gay marriage became legal where I live. ^.^) She talked about bullying and had us watch a video on it which featured a girl who was bullied at her school for her sexuality. She ended up transferring because it got so bad. While we were watching the video, one girl in my class said, "Well she deserves it! It's wrong!" and a huge argument broke out in the classroom. Nearly everyone was yelling at each other. Most people were yelling at the girl, but a couple students agreed with her. The girl got in trouble for saying that. A completely different reaction than other teachers would normally have. Then she told the class that, "You can disagree with other people's opinions, but don't use them as an excuse to be a bully." I almost cried tears of joy. It's rather odd how different teachers deal with these things so differently. So what do you guys think of this? If you're in school, how do teachers deal with these things?
I think I was raised in a much more open environment than you, no offence intended, because teachers don't mind when homosexuality is brought up as long as its relevant to the discussion. It does make some teachers and students uncomfortable to talk about, like you can feel the classroom get thicker when gay marriage is discussed, although many teachers have emphasized that bullying someone for their sexuality is despicable. I'm glad you've got a teacher who's so supportive, she sounds like an awesome person!
When I was in middle school, about 5ish years ago, it was only ever mentioned once in biology class, by a teacher who said it's an unusual case and it wasn't something that should be discussed. But homosexuality was recently made a criminal offence where I live, which prompted some of us in class to have discussions about it with some of the more open minded teachers, where it was relevant to our work in English and things. High school teachers tend to be much more open minded it seems but even then, we were told not to write anything about sexuality in our answers or anything. It was just something we could discuss but it shouldn't be written about. The headmistress of our school, however, is another case... a little less than two years ago she and some rich students went abroad for a trip, and she actually went for an anti gay marriage meeting-thing, and she gave us an assembly about it and everything. None of us could say anything to her. It was just not nice, at all.
Some rights are more important than others. Non-discrimination and freedom of speech for instance. Any school that uses 'freedom of religion' to ostracise minorities and or condone criminal behaviour is totally wrong in my opinion. Any school which doesn't teach evolution for religious reasons doesn't deserve the name 'school', but should be renamed 'religious institution' and not get any money or even get classified as a school.
I go to a catholic school that is owned by nuns, but they just live there and leave anything related to education to the headmasters.The headmasters don't really care about what we do as long as parents don't complain. For journalism class, me and my friends always made bullying-related news. For our last project, which was a 80 minutes long tv news program, we covered the gay pride parade on my city (actually showing a bus with gay men yelling 'caring bears' while jumping), the trevor project, September's children, and we showed the Rise Against song 'Make it stop'. The teacher loved it and we got an A. But then again, my journalism class has only three people on it- me and my two best friends:lol: No one other than the teacher saw our project, so there was no way someone could get offended. In my city, most schools don't really mind treating lgtb related thopics, but are just afraid of the parents of students getting mad.
If I was in a school like that, my rebellious side woulda came out. When I was in 9th grade I had a project (2 projects actually for 2 different classes) where I had to pick something that I wanted legalized and come up with a speech to convince people of its legalization. For both of those, I chose gay marriage (because I wanted to aaaand, to be honest, it was easier to memorize the same speech XD). So, if a teacher would have told me that was "too controversial", one of 2 things would have happened, 1), I woulda just not done the project (which is a REALLY big thing for me because I'm really picky about my grades DX), or 2), I woulda did the project on gay rights regardless and then just see what happens from there and try to make my argument that she/he cant give me a zero jus because her/him doesn't like my topic. It's good to see how the other teacher handled it though, it's good to have allies. And I like how that teacher mentioned that you can have varying view points, but you can't be a bully
My study of Twelfth Night this term is going to contain an analysis of homosexuality in the play and the possible influences of Shakespeare's own sexuality. My school often teaches stuff like that, and the teachers tend to be quite liberal, although remain quite (explicitly) politically neutral. My school is really liberal, and we're really diverse in terms of race, and almost everyone's accepting about sexuality. Being LGBT is nothing important at my school, for staff, in the art groups, and the academic part. It's just accepted and everyone moves on.