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Entry tags:
Yum, controversy.
The following story contains someone using an offensive racial term. I've decided to leave it, not to asterisk it out. Not because I approve of using the word-- I don't-- but because I think it detracts from the offensiveness of its use when people allude to it by euphemisms. If you say something bad, and another person reports what you said, they ought to say it out just as you did, instead of doing you the favor of prettying it up.
But, for those of y'all who are bothered by seeing that particular offensive racial term, here's a cut.
Here's an article about a teacher who recently completed her male-to-female transition and chose to come back to work in the same school district, facing opposition from parents (but not the school board).
The main objection from the parents was that it was confusing for the children to have a teacher who changed from a man to a woman, and that it brought up subjects they weren't ready to raise (it was a K-6 school).
A little side story on this-- my mother teaches 5 year olds, in a small town in Oklahoma. (The town I grew up in, where she still lives, is not known for its racial diversity; while there's a significant non-white population in the county, it's mostly spread out in the rural areas and thus attends the more rural schools as opposed to the city schools. The high school, last time I checked, was 93% white and most of the rest was Native American.)
Anyways, one year her class contained exactly one black student. Now, as most of us will remember from school, there's usually a coloring exercise with communal crayons, and some other kid always gets the crayon you want. Well, this happened to a particular little boy, and after waiting for some time for the other child to finish with the crayon, he complained to my mother, "That nigger has the crayon I need and won't give it to me."
My mother, God love her, looked stunned for a moment and then said "What did you just say?"
"I said that nigger has my crayon!"
So, the boy in question was marched down to the office, asked to repeat what he said to the principal, and was very sternly told not to use that word again. He then said, to the shock of both my mother and the principal, "Well, what am I supposed to call him?"
After the obvious answer (you call him by his name), it turned out that this poor little boy had never been taught any non-offensive word to use. (To be fair, he knew plenty of other words for people with different skin and eyes and hair than him, just none of them were polite!)
So, back to the story-- parents are concerned that it'll upset their children to be in a class taught by a transgendered person. I think there have been some decent arguments brought up, and I'll go over them:
1. Kindergarteners are way too young to deal with a teacher who used to be a man and is a woman now. I respectfully submit that kindergarteners are in their first year of school, and as the teacher in question has been substituting (I almost put subbing, whew, what an image) as a woman for over a year, they couldn't possibly have known her as "Mr."-- and the same, one would think, goes for the first graders.
2. It's upsetting to the kids to have a teacher who dresses like a woman, but who is very masculine in her features and voice. So, teaching is a beauty contest now? I've had, God bless them, some pretty doggy teachers in my time. I've had fat teachers and skinny teachers, old teachers and young teachers. Teaching ability is not related to physical attractiveness, it's something inside you that you cultivate. From student reports, this teacher IS good at what she does.
3. It's inappropriate for a teacher to have parts of their life that aren't suitable to the emotional or intellectual level of the students they're teaching. In other words, because kids aren't all uniformly able to cope with the possible upset of a transgendered teacher, no one should ever hire a transgendered teacher. Well, it's an interesting argument, but what about the following other events:
--pregnancy followed by the birth of a baby
--pregnancy that goes long enough to be visible, but ends in miscarriage
--marriage to a person of another race
--an accident that leaves the teacher visibly disabled
--death
It's not fair to kids to have worries and concerns and curiosity about what, exactly, happened to their teacher-- but it's life. Teachers are not going to stop having children, or marrying, and while it would be nice if they were never in accidents or killed, there's just no real way to prevent that. Sure, it's scary-confusing when you're a kid and you get embarrassed because you can't figure out if that teacher in the halls is a man or a woman-- but it's just as scary-confusing to see a grownup person with a hook for a hand, or using a wheelchair, or anything else you've never yet experienced in your life.
One of my teachers in middle school was overweight, to the point of having trouble getting up and down stairs, and it was discovered while I was in high school that she had diabetes-- because she was sitting at her desk one day, and the students were working on something, and her blood sugar was too high and she passed out in her chair. Is it fair to the students when a teacher has serious medical problems? No, but it's life. (None of the kids panicked, one of them ran downstairs and got the principal to call 911.)
So, if you don't accept the argument that the teacher's too ugly, or that any of the younger kids are going to know who she was three or four years ago, that leaves only two possible points of discussion. First is the argument that a transgendered teacher may behave inappropriately or encourage/permit discussion inappropriate to the classroom. However, since this teacher has a long history of teaching, and obviously she's never permitted such a thing before, why would she do so now? Second is the argument that for parents who truly, really believe that it is wrong to be transgendered, if they raise their children with the same values, the children will not be willing to listen to or respect their teacher.
This is where my story above about the 5 year old comes in. You can teach your children anything you want-- you can teach them that women shouldn't be cops, or that black people aren't as smart as white people and don't make good doctors. But if they choose to live out those values by refusing to pull over for a woman cop, there will be consequences. If they choose to refuse treatment by the only available doctor because the doctor is black, there will be consequences. You do have a remedy if you don't wish your child to be taught by the only available teacher in their grade, simply because that teacher is black, or pregnant, or a man-- you can pull your child out and homeschool them. But you aren't allowed to insist that teacher be fired because they don't fit *your* standards as a person.
Or, there's another alternative-- you can use the presence of a teacher who does something you thoroughly disapprove of, in order to teach your child the following lesson: that we may, in our lives, have to work with, live with, and deal with people who look funny, smell funny, act weird, or do things we would never, ever do. We don't always have the luxury of running away, or speaking out as to how disgusting the person is. We may even find that we like the person despite whatever strange thing they have or do, and have to deal with that! But deciding when to live and let live is one of the things we do in learning to be a grownup.
Course, some people never learn...
But, for those of y'all who are bothered by seeing that particular offensive racial term, here's a cut.
Here's an article about a teacher who recently completed her male-to-female transition and chose to come back to work in the same school district, facing opposition from parents (but not the school board).
The main objection from the parents was that it was confusing for the children to have a teacher who changed from a man to a woman, and that it brought up subjects they weren't ready to raise (it was a K-6 school).
A little side story on this-- my mother teaches 5 year olds, in a small town in Oklahoma. (The town I grew up in, where she still lives, is not known for its racial diversity; while there's a significant non-white population in the county, it's mostly spread out in the rural areas and thus attends the more rural schools as opposed to the city schools. The high school, last time I checked, was 93% white and most of the rest was Native American.)
Anyways, one year her class contained exactly one black student. Now, as most of us will remember from school, there's usually a coloring exercise with communal crayons, and some other kid always gets the crayon you want. Well, this happened to a particular little boy, and after waiting for some time for the other child to finish with the crayon, he complained to my mother, "That nigger has the crayon I need and won't give it to me."
My mother, God love her, looked stunned for a moment and then said "What did you just say?"
"I said that nigger has my crayon!"
So, the boy in question was marched down to the office, asked to repeat what he said to the principal, and was very sternly told not to use that word again. He then said, to the shock of both my mother and the principal, "Well, what am I supposed to call him?"
After the obvious answer (you call him by his name), it turned out that this poor little boy had never been taught any non-offensive word to use. (To be fair, he knew plenty of other words for people with different skin and eyes and hair than him, just none of them were polite!)
So, back to the story-- parents are concerned that it'll upset their children to be in a class taught by a transgendered person. I think there have been some decent arguments brought up, and I'll go over them:
1. Kindergarteners are way too young to deal with a teacher who used to be a man and is a woman now. I respectfully submit that kindergarteners are in their first year of school, and as the teacher in question has been substituting (I almost put subbing, whew, what an image) as a woman for over a year, they couldn't possibly have known her as "Mr."-- and the same, one would think, goes for the first graders.
2. It's upsetting to the kids to have a teacher who dresses like a woman, but who is very masculine in her features and voice. So, teaching is a beauty contest now? I've had, God bless them, some pretty doggy teachers in my time. I've had fat teachers and skinny teachers, old teachers and young teachers. Teaching ability is not related to physical attractiveness, it's something inside you that you cultivate. From student reports, this teacher IS good at what she does.
3. It's inappropriate for a teacher to have parts of their life that aren't suitable to the emotional or intellectual level of the students they're teaching. In other words, because kids aren't all uniformly able to cope with the possible upset of a transgendered teacher, no one should ever hire a transgendered teacher. Well, it's an interesting argument, but what about the following other events:
--pregnancy followed by the birth of a baby
--pregnancy that goes long enough to be visible, but ends in miscarriage
--marriage to a person of another race
--an accident that leaves the teacher visibly disabled
--death
It's not fair to kids to have worries and concerns and curiosity about what, exactly, happened to their teacher-- but it's life. Teachers are not going to stop having children, or marrying, and while it would be nice if they were never in accidents or killed, there's just no real way to prevent that. Sure, it's scary-confusing when you're a kid and you get embarrassed because you can't figure out if that teacher in the halls is a man or a woman-- but it's just as scary-confusing to see a grownup person with a hook for a hand, or using a wheelchair, or anything else you've never yet experienced in your life.
One of my teachers in middle school was overweight, to the point of having trouble getting up and down stairs, and it was discovered while I was in high school that she had diabetes-- because she was sitting at her desk one day, and the students were working on something, and her blood sugar was too high and she passed out in her chair. Is it fair to the students when a teacher has serious medical problems? No, but it's life. (None of the kids panicked, one of them ran downstairs and got the principal to call 911.)
So, if you don't accept the argument that the teacher's too ugly, or that any of the younger kids are going to know who she was three or four years ago, that leaves only two possible points of discussion. First is the argument that a transgendered teacher may behave inappropriately or encourage/permit discussion inappropriate to the classroom. However, since this teacher has a long history of teaching, and obviously she's never permitted such a thing before, why would she do so now? Second is the argument that for parents who truly, really believe that it is wrong to be transgendered, if they raise their children with the same values, the children will not be willing to listen to or respect their teacher.
This is where my story above about the 5 year old comes in. You can teach your children anything you want-- you can teach them that women shouldn't be cops, or that black people aren't as smart as white people and don't make good doctors. But if they choose to live out those values by refusing to pull over for a woman cop, there will be consequences. If they choose to refuse treatment by the only available doctor because the doctor is black, there will be consequences. You do have a remedy if you don't wish your child to be taught by the only available teacher in their grade, simply because that teacher is black, or pregnant, or a man-- you can pull your child out and homeschool them. But you aren't allowed to insist that teacher be fired because they don't fit *your* standards as a person.
Or, there's another alternative-- you can use the presence of a teacher who does something you thoroughly disapprove of, in order to teach your child the following lesson: that we may, in our lives, have to work with, live with, and deal with people who look funny, smell funny, act weird, or do things we would never, ever do. We don't always have the luxury of running away, or speaking out as to how disgusting the person is. We may even find that we like the person despite whatever strange thing they have or do, and have to deal with that! But deciding when to live and let live is one of the things we do in learning to be a grownup.
Course, some people never learn...