Tag: safety

Queer Teacher

I never felt comfortable being queer and a teacher. From student teaching in Illinois to my first years in Florida to working at SLA – while vastly different in their levels of acceptance, none of them felt completely safe. None of them got to see all of who I was.

As much as I’m sure this was informed by growing up in a largely intolerant small, rural school, it wasn’t all that. It wasn’t all baggage. It was also knowing I needed to check when moving from one place to another to find out if I was part of a protected class in my new location. When I first got hired to work in Sarasota, my mom wrote an email with many exclamation marks saying she’d checked and that the county had banned discriminatory employment practices based on sexual orientation.

While I’d had no intention of walking into my principal’s office to say, “Here are the scope and sequence guidelines you asked for, and I’m gay,” it was good to know I couldn’t be summarily dismissed if she found out I’d been dating a guy.

Pause and think about that. By writing this post and outing myself here, I am eliminating the possibility of teaching in 28 states should some industrious principal start to google. Can you say the same about talking publicly about whom you date or marry? If so and you live on the LGBTQ spectrum, it’s not likely we will ever talk about it online. My sexual orientation isn’t listed in my Twitter profile or a part of my about.me listing. It’s not there because I don’t want possible intolerance to get in the way of a free exchange of ideas in the spaces I love. The thing is, though, if you’re straight, it’s only a free exchange of ideas for you, because I give up a part of who I am to connect with you.

I resent that in the same way I resent having to out myself to people when they assume I’m straight and ask if I have a girlfriend. Sometimes, the answer is simply “no” and I let the pitch fly by because I don’t want to have the conversation that starts with, “Oh, you don’t seem gay.” I reply “no” in those moments when my response would be, “You don’t seem like a heteronormative cliché, so we’ve both learned something today.”

In the vein of learning, I would love to have learned who among my teachers growing up identified as LGBTQ. More than that, it would have meant the world to me to hear a teacher say aloud that he or she was an ally, was accepting, wanted to be there for me if I needed to talk. Your safe space stickers on your doors or ally triangles were nice, and I needed to hear you say it out loud. I needed to hear you say something positive about people who were gay so that I, at the very least, knew you knew we existed.

I tried to do this in my classrooms. From talking about Ryan White so that kids knew HIV/AIDS weren’t synonymous with being queer, to choosing books that had gay characters who weren’t merely tokens or getting their heads bashed in for coming out – I tried to build an inclusive space.

I didn’t come out, though. I’m sorry for that. To any former students who could have benefited from me saying it explicitly, I am sorry I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry I let my resentment toward other people’s assumptions and my fear of repercussions keep me from being the role model I wanted to be. Hopefully, this post can still be some small help.

That’s why I’m writing this now, because straight people need help. So, let’s review some things straight people can do to be better people (cause most of you sure have the straight thing down).

Assume someone in the room is LGBTQ. This is different than assuming not everyone is straight.

Use inclusive language. Instead of asking a student if they are going to a social function with what someone of what you perceive to be of the opposite gender, ask if they’re planning on going with anyone or going at all.

Mention LGBTQ people in positive ways. Part of what took me so long to get right with being queer was having Matthew Shepherd as my main touchstone of what it meant to be gay. Think about the lesson implicit in a story about a person whose life came to mean something to people only after he’d been tied to a fence post, beaten, and left to freeze to death.

Call on your unions to champion equity. As I said, 28 states still allow for the dismissal of teachers based on sexuality. If their membership called for it, the teachers unions could at least make this part of the conversation in election cycles.

Out yourself. Give yourself a week of outing yourself as straight when you meet new people or in conversations with people you’ve known for a while but haven’t told you’re straight. If we have to do it, you should at least learn how awkward and annoying it feels.

Know that knowing one LGBTQ person isn’t knowing all or even many. I write this as one queer man, not on behalf of all. In the same way I don’t make assumptions about all members of group X when I meet them, don’t take meeting me or anyone else as having learned what there is to know about someone different from you.

Some people who have known me for a while might have read this post and be surprised or even hurt that we haven’t had this conversation before or that I didn’t explicitly come out to you. I suppose you’re going to have to work through that.

132/365 What are Our Schools’ Sidewalks and are They Safe?

Hallway from mingchuno via flickr.com

I’ve been reading Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It’s slow going, and the tome invites some pauses through it’s heft, let alone its content.

Early in the book, Jacobs focuses her examination not on blocks or parks or buildings, but on sidewalks as the keys to urban environments. Most specifically, Jacobs’ argument in the chapter centers on sidewalks a mechanisms for safety.

It is not police patrols that make the difference, she says, but the patrols of those who inhabit the space.

This, as most things do, got me thinking about education.

If, as Jacobs argues, it is the use of streets and their sidewalks that keeps these spaces safe, where are our best sidewalks in education?

The choisest answer would be the hallways of our schools. This, base don my own empirical evidence is not so. The bullying of my childhood, the fear of those who would torment me was greatest in the hallways and other similar spaces.

If anything, our classrooms are the most closely monitored educational spaces in schools. They are where our eyes are surveying for “appropriate behavior” and the like. Thse spaces are not the sidewalks of schools. They are the homes. They are the living rooms, kitchens, and dining rooms of schools. The safety of our classrooms is the safety we afford our families and those guests we welcome into our private spaces.

By all accounts, our hallways should be the sidewalks of our school communities. They are where we catch up, where we transact, where we get our news. Most importantly and most upsettingly, they are where we decide not to enforce the standards of our community.

In visiting schools across the country, I listen to the words of the hallways and watch the physical interactions. No matter the professed attitudes of respect, the lessons on character in the classrooms, the hallways bely the true stories of the cultures of our learning spaces. They are where we can look to measure what is expected and professed against what it allowed.

I do not mean to argue that we should monitor our hallways with draconian measures or install greater numbers of cameras. I would prefer the absence of guardians to such measures.

No, what we must do in our hallways, to keep the sidewalks of our schools safe, is simple. We must be present. Physically. Mentally. Morally.

For many schools, this is nothing new. The policy for teachers has been to stand outside their doors during passing periods for quite some time.

The extent to which I’m arguing presence, though, is new. It is not enough to stand outside classroom doors. Instead, we must be present like the neighbors Jacobs describes, interact with those passing through, and create the social capital of community.

To do less is to be another version of Big Brother. To do only a little more is to create spaces of safety and community.

Things I Know 181 of 365: Students need guidance, not oversight

When we want to develop meaning-making we run counter-clockwise to our instincts as teachers. We are explainers and our instincts tell us to make things simple and unambiguous. We must fight this.

– Grant Wiggins

Lady next to me at the coffee shop has concerns about a school that has 1-to-1 laptop program and no Emperor Palpatine-like oversight software.

“What if they get into trouble?” she asks.

“We help them get out of that. More importantly, we work to help them avoid it,” I answer.

I go on to explain the deep and complex discussions to be had around appropriate use policies and brainstorming problem situations into which students can get themselves.

She likes the idea of this, but remains concerned.

“It just feels like they’ll still get into trouble.”

They do.

I could chalk it up to them being kids, but that’s not quite why.

They’re people, you see, and prone to mistakes.

Walking this morning, I saw a man riding a bike in the wrong lane of a 2-lane street, talking on his cell phone. Time to review his appropriate use policies.

Last night, a woman backing out of a parking spot ran into and tipped over what I was told was a fairly expensive Dukati motorcycle. In a fair fight, the woman’s Prius would have lost by most measures. In this moment, it was too soon for the joke. She was reviewing her appropriate use policy in her mind.

Running along the path, I find a man who has decided to block traffic to stretch out his hamstrings. I checked the tiny pocket in my running shorts for an extra copy of the appropriate use policy.

I understand the coffee shop woman’s concern. Computers and the Interwebs offer tremendous potential for trouble. The best we can do is draw up a set of guidelines, review it with students and keep the dialogue open. It’s not the most we can do, but it is the best.

To impose draconian measures of Big Brotherly monitoring robs students of the chance to build internal structures and systems for monitoring and safety.

We will always be there to help, but like the parents of the man on the bike, we won’t be running alongside forever.

Things I Know 143 of 365: I failed Tuesday

Do or do not. There is no try.

– Master Yoda

I failed Tuesday.

Standing in front of a few hundred people, I failed.

As the setup to what I wanted as a teacher from “21st Century School Design” I had turned to what I knew – students.

Namely, I want school design to imagine places that inspire students to wonder and create.

To set the tone, I’d prepared the brief video below from my student Thea. She created it as her product for the Building History project.

I gave it a great introduction – explaining the project and the fact Thea chose to create a product I could have been absolutely no help on.

The last words before clicking play were probably something like, “It’s pretty amazing.”

Nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing. The sound accompanying the video was playing. Something was happening. If you watch the video, though, I think you’ll agree the sound wasn’t the most impressive bit.

I stopped the music.

“You’ve just seen me fail.”

Laughter from the audience.

“I knew I was going to fail at some point up here, I’m glad it happened so early.”

I meant it.

Walking up on the stage, I knew I’d packed music, photos, links and more into my presentation and that any of it could have failed. I’d created the possibility of failure as well as a space in my head where I would be fine with that failure.

The failure was actually more to the point of what I wanted to illustrate. I want school design to create spaces where both teachers and students are willing to try new things without the fear of failure.

Thea had been told to choose whatever medium she thought best for presenting her project. Both Diana and I told each of the students we wouldn’t be mandating a specific tool and wanted the students to have free reign.

We worked as diligently as we knew how to create a space where students knew we’d help them back up if something new they tried kicked them on their butts.

I left the high possibility of failure in Tuesday’s presentation because I worry teachers aren’t given that same space to play and learn.

It’s all well and good for the students to be lifelong learners, but it’s nothing we’d necessarily want for ourselves.

Even in the instances where teachers are ready to play with ideas and try new things, they often haven’t had the spaces prepared for them by colleagues and administrators that would give the experience the chance to progress from failure to learning.

If we’re programming students to play school and not simply play, its because we’ve done the same for generations of teachers.

If you want classroom where students are challenged to be critical thinkers, problem solvers and wizards of the ingenious, then we must create schools where teachers are trusted and expected to do the same.

Patrick Larkin wrote the other day that he wants his faculty to be willing to relinquish more control as they head toward a 1:1 laptop program. While I think Larkin is on the right track, many of the other principals and district leaders I’ve heard say this never take the question any deeper.

If they want teachers to relinquish control and stop fearing failure, are they also willing to relinquish control and remove some of the stressors leading to their teachers’ fears?

I made a conscious decision as I took the stage Tuesday that I would be fine with whatever failures came my way.

I was able to make that decision because I’ve had a string of principals who supported my instinct to play and a family who was offering their support long before that.

If we want our teachers to give students room to play, we must give our teachers that same room.