Last week the Single Subject Credential candidates, including myself, had the rare opportunity to speak with some of the students of the GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) club at Carlsbad High School. Since my current cooperative teacher Mr. Dearie(second from the left in the photo) is one of the co-advisors to the club, along with Mrs. King(far left) I have had a great deal of time getting to know the experiences of the students in the club before this event.
The purpose of the discussion was for us up and coming teachers to get personal contact with the students that experience hate and discrimination on a daily basis. This I feel is very important for all new and veteran teachers, because just reading about LGBT discrimination in a book isn't as impactful as having to sit down with the kids themselves.
The room was set up in a way that six to eight teacher candidates were sitting with three students in the GSA club. Not all students classified themselves as LBGT, and one student in my group stated that she was of the Mormon faith. This is important to know because the club is an "alliance" between those who consider themselves LBGT and those who consider themselves straight. The alliance ensures that the club is about togetherness of all sexual orientations, and not just about LGBT students.
Before we actually got to have some one on one time with the students in our group Mr. Dearie did an overview of The GSA club and its main goal. Mr. Dearie made it clear that the issue isn't a political one and should never cross into that spectrum. The issue that the club tries to address is safety for the entire school population. He said that you can disagree with the political issues of the LBGT community, but as teachers we can't let those disagreements create an environment that threatens the safety of all the students at the school. I thought that it was a great idea that Mr. Dearie brought this up as I'm sure some of the candidates of the group thought that this discussion was going to be used to spread a leftist political agenda, but it's wasn't.
After the introduction, Mr. Dearie had us work on a worksheet that provided us with some of the basic statistics, and terms used within the LGBT community. To be honest I had a hard time filling out some of the terms that the worksheet described, and I've been to every GSA club meeting since I've been at Carlsbad. What this showed to me is that their is always something new to learn about the terms used in the LGBT community, which is a lot.
After the worksheet we were given about an hour and a half to talk with the LGBT students and some of the struggles that they have faced at school. One important thing that they brought up was how important it is for teachers to confront students that use LGBT slurs in the classroom. The students felt that most teachers just pretend that they don't hear such things in their classroom. However, pretending that you just didn't hear it just makes the use of the slur even more acceptable. This has reminded me that I need to be very active in not only listening for the use of derogatory terms but that I also need to be firm in addressing such issues in my classroom.
Overall it was a very informative experience and I was very proud of the students that were able to talk about their painful experiences, it took a lot of courage.