Dilemma: What to tell children?
| May 8th, 2004While reading MD.com, I learned of an interesting dilemma reported in The San Jose Mercury News.
Terry Gruenwald just got married; should she mention her wedding to her 8th grade students? Well, like many newlyweds, she did. The students smiled. One asked if her husband knew she was a lesbian; another answered “She has a wife!”
Incidents like these have parents, teachers and administrators scrambling to develop guidelines for discussing gay marriage in schools. Rhetorical questions and their answers are provided by opponents of gay marriage:
Well, if Randy wants my answer, it’s this: I suspect that if students only hear about gay marriage when their favorite teacher has just returned from her honeymoon with her new bride, then the teachers involved such discussions will tend to support same sex marriage.
The only practical way to ensure that teachers who oppose gay marriage sometimes lead these discussions would be to introduce the issue into the curriculum. Otherwise, any discussions of marriage will only arise when students ask to hear about their teacher’s weddings, or spouses.
Yes, if the topic is discussed in school, it will sometimes happen that 8th graders like their lesbian teacher. Some won’t think it’s so awful that she married.
May 8th, 2004 at 9:30 am
This brings me back. When I was in high school (a decade or so ago), there was a heated debate in my city over whether gays should eevn be allowed to teach, period. The enlightened, progressive folks said that gays teaching was just fine, provided they “didn’t flaunt their sexuality.” Sounds good to me. My marketing teacher (male, straight) talked about his weekly visits to strip joints, which is a flaunting of sexuality if ever I heard one, but no one raised a fuss. On the other hand, a gay teacher announcing that he’ll be away for a week because his male partner is sick, is flaunting his homosexuality. Or something.
This comment was written by Brenda.Report this comment to the moderators
May 8th, 2004 at 11:38 am
In my university’s ed curriculum, we are specifically discouraged from indulging students in details our private lives - from marital status to parental status to religious affiliation, etc. - and given quite a few ways of heading off such questions. A possible solution? Yes - but a rather impersonal one in which we’re also expected to identify and relate to our students on a subjective level.
This comment was written by Lauren.Report this comment to the moderators
May 8th, 2004 at 11:23 pm
Marital status, parental status, religious affiliation . . . are you also supposed to avoid revealing what size and color you are? Working in a discipline in which teachers will now and then make pedagogical points using autobiography, or claim authority on a subject stemming from personal affiliation, I find that policy very novel.
This comment was written by Mr Ripley.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2004 at 7:39 am
I do like it when teachers avoid unnecessary references to the personal life. Entertaining students with tales of visiting strip clubs is ridiculous. However, I’ve had teachers make pedagogical points based on family life in engineering classes– and it’s been effective! On faculty member at U of Illinois always mentioned teaching his kid how to ride a bike in a vehicle dynamics class. (I guess he could have turned the kid into “a kid” instead of his kid. )
It is difficult to totally prevent teachers from bringing up personal experience in classes while encouraging them to draw from real life experience to guide students!
This comment was written by lucia.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2004 at 11:34 am
My high school was so small if teachers had children it was inevitable that their own children would be in their classes one day. There was no such thing as keeping things private. It’s just not a workable thing.
This comment was written by Amanda.I love it when people accuse homosexuals of “flaunting” themselves. Mostly I hear this from grumpy married men, and when they say it, I politely ask them to remove their wedding rings in my presence, as I do not like it when they “flaunt” their sexuality.
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May 9th, 2004 at 4:44 pm
I took a geography course in college that featured frequent slides of the professor’s son standing in front of various landforms. When I met the son (who is my age — and my fiance now), my first comment was “Wow, those slides aren’t nearly as old as they look!” (And some of them are of his younger brother, so they’re even more recent.)
Anyway, I think it’s okay for teachers to mention personal things if it’s relevant to the class or if it happens to come up during a discussion. I would find it weird and a little disturbing if a professor brought up personal stuff that wasn’t related to the topic at hand, whatever the personal stuff was.
This comment was written by Tiger Spot.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2004 at 6:50 am
I find that, since teachers are often friends with their students, it’s just as natural for them to tell them about bits of their personal lives as it would be to tell coworkers. There seems no reason to pretend that teachers don’t have home lives.
However, until very recently it was different if teachers in th UK were gay, since it was only in 2003 that Clause 28, which was usually read as banning the mentioning or “promotion” of homosexuality in schools, has been repealed.
Since then it’s presumably been a matter of the shyness etc. of individual teachers.
Personally, I would think that having a ban on disclosing one’s homosexuality to students is equivalent to saying that homosexuality itself is wrong. To both allow it, and ban the mentioning of it, is a confused position.
This comment was written by Andrew.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2004 at 9:19 am
I’ve come to the conclusion that one has to pick one’s fights when studentsa ask questions about my personal life. I was once asked about my son in a jr. high class, information I gladly gave. Then they asked me about my husband.
Since I don’t have a husband, I was stuck in a rather tough spot. The teacher was watching me very closely, as were the students. Would my disclosure that I had a child as an unmarried teen scar these kids for life? Would there be a lawsuit on my hands for “promoting” single parenthood?
I decided the answer was obviously not. Most of the students in my class lived in one-parent homes, and several of them were raised by grandparents. I told the truth and threw in a little lesson: that even those of us in what seems like the direst circumstances can be smart and successful - not to mention that I emphasized the kids stay in school, it will pay off no matter what.
The teacher was a bit rattled, but I managed to tell the truth with a positive slant. To be honest, I was rattled, too. Outsiders have to understand that public school teachers are viewed under a microscope in ways that no other professional role (except maybe politicians) is examined. Not to mention that we are expected to be the most moral of citizens, abiding by a code of standard, middle-of-the-road morality. Any deviation from that code is viewed as undesirable and deviant.
For all the talk about wanting teachers to “connect” with students, however that may be, we don’t want our teachers human. We want them perfect.
I could write a million words on this topic (and a hundred anecdotes), but I’ll spare everyone.
This comment was written by Lauren.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2004 at 9:38 am
I usually lurk here, but this post reminded me of an article I read in my Feminist Criticism class, “Pedagogy and Sexuality” by Joseph Litvak. In it he describes the dilemma of openly gay people who are expected to “teach straight”, and how this is ultimately an impossible thing to do. The question is then, how should you come out to your students? If I become a teacher, I’d like to be known as a lit professor, not The Dyke Professor. There has to be a happy medium somewhere between acting like an impersonal “transcendental ego” and TMI (I’ve had a few too many profs divulge way, way TMI. Not pleasant).
This comment was written by Anne.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2004 at 11:04 am
i totally have experienced TMI, too [in college]. not in terms of hetero/homo-sexuality (i don’t think? i can’t remember any examples of that, but something i may have felt ok about may have disturbed more conservative of my classmates)… but i had one professor who insisted on telling the class details of her and her mother’s sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s husband, bringing it up at times it was not at all relavent, and describing, for example, her mother being anally raped by this man.
in those situations, i think, you need a therapist, not a classroom full of students.
This comment was written by emilie.Report this comment to the moderators