Sunday, July 29, 2012

Making it "relevant"

Gary Younge had a column in The Guardian last week noting the rise of specifically "gay-friendly" high schools in the US.  Such schooling is not exactly welcomed by conservatives, but some gay advocates think it's a bad idea too, for basically letting normal schools off the hook for not dealing with bullying more effectively. 

I hadn't heard things had gone quite this far before:
  "Kids are definitely coming out earlier, and middle school is definitely the worst time for bullying, whether you're straight or gay," says Savin-Williams. There are several summer camps around the country, that cater to transgender children as young as eight.
But the paragraph I found most ready for parody was this:
....Chad Weiden, who led efforts to set up a gay-friendly school in Chicago, says that part of the skill in teaching is making sometimes abstract issues accessible to students. "It's all about making it relevant to kids. If you're doing probability in math, you could illustrate it by looking at GLBT suicides or stop-and-frisk or unemployment. A good curriculum would also deal with issues of sexual orientation when covering things like evolution, biodiversity, anthropology, history and literature. That should be true of any school, not just one that considers itself gay-friendly."
Gosh.  What a cheery class Chad must run.

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