Gendered Classrooms

[ysabetwordsmith]

 This was me.  I did this damn near every time someone tried to line us up by gender.  If I wasn't doing that, I was standing with the boys.  It drove many teachers so batshit that they quit doing gender lines rather than argue with me.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Oh Lord yes!

This confused me like crazy when I first went to school!

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I always knew what I was. Other people found me confusing.

Okay, I was often baffled by how little they knew, but that was ... well, everything, so gender didn't really stand out exceptionally much against a backdrop of using gasoline after the oil crisis and throwing a tantrum every time I said "genocidal maniac" instead of "bold explorer."

Re: Well ...

[cmcmck]

I always knew too- but it seems 'they' didn't.

It's never surprised me that I cut and ran from school at fifteen (which was still legal back then).

Re: Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Age varies even now. Most places allow dropping out fairly early if you can pass a GED.

More insidiously, junior high and high school staff often try to make kids withdraw in ways that don't register as "dropout" and thus don't appear in statistics. The actual statistics are that dropout rates are skyrocketing, but like unemployment, people find ways to make it "not really count." >_<

Kids who want out can find ways to do it, but not all of those are clean ones.

[gingicat]

I’m surprised at myself that I never questioned it.

[arlie]

I have two clear memories of upsetting the apple cart:

- ostentatiously volunteering when some in-school authority figure asked for some boys to volunteer to move chairs

- being asked what "effeminate" meant, not knowing the answer, and concluding from its roots that it was a synonymn of "feminine", and giving a value-judgement free (but otherwise correct) answer consistent with that. Then watching the teacher squirm while she attempted to point out, to a female student, the totally negative value-loading of the word. (FWIW, I also missed that it applies only to males; the teacher could have got herself off the hook if she'd started from that point - but perhaps she feared, correctly, that I'd then ask what to call a female who one wished to insult by claiming that they violate gender norms.)

[delphae80.livejournal.com]

My mom used to tell her students make two lines, with no restrictions. Mostly they lined up by gender by themselves, but there were kids who chose different lines on their own.

Yay!

[ysabetwordsmith]

That's awesome. :D Neatly solves the problem.

My mom would do things like "If your first name has an even number of letters, get in this line; odd numbers, the other line." She taught math. ;)

[technoshaman]

*realises just how 180-out he's become*

I was FAR too much of a goody two shoes to do that shit when I was that age. I did know, pretty early on, I was Different, but I had no idea how, and I honestly thought that if I played the game well enough I could win, or at least do decently for myself.

The one thing I _wasn't_ *taught* was discrimination, based on gender, race, or much of anything else. When I drew the class tomboy's name for the $holiday party, I got her a football. She *adored* it. When Ruchi Kumar, a kid from the Indian subcontinent, showed up ... *BLINK* oh shit. I _just realised_, after knowing that name for 45 years. "Kumar" means _boy_. I hope she lived up to that, just like her redheaded classmate did. Anyway, when Ruchi showed up, in what was normal dress for where she'd come from, our principal said, "this is a person, treat her with respect." We took him at face value. No big deal.

... such that when, 15 years later, my friends started coming out as being various kinds of _different_, my _heart_ told my brain, which was struggling to make the rules make sense, to go off in the corner and make some better rules.

I am much happier, and have a much better cadre of friends and `ohana, for saying fuck the rules, your friends are to be loved, and your gods should be your friends, not to be _feared_... so when gender "weirdness" started surfacing, I was like, okay fine, and then later, I love you too.

I remember once we had a bit of time left to line up once, and Ms. Springfield (another redhead) came in and started having us line up by what colour we were wearing, but not the usual red, green, blue business... "Mauve" and "chartreuse" were two I remember vividly. There was much flipping through the dictionaries excitedly.

I think that was the other big thing, other than respect for one's fellows, I took away from there that wasn't just "book learnin'." The idea that learning should be _fun_. And indeed that _teaching_ should be fun. (It was only later that I learnt that rules can be negotiated... but then that's more of a grownup idea anyway... just that, being Jewish-adjacent, given Tradition, they learn such things _early_...)