Wednesday, August 31, 2011

A history of teaching


Before I began classroom teaching, I was a diversity educator.  I went into schools and talked about not being straight. Even then, I was worried that looking too dykey would work against me, because not all dykes are so readable. I could talk about discrimination, visibility and the importance of inclusivity.  My personal experience was central and kids love a different teacher, a different topic, especially when it’s a bit taboo.

Fast forward to teaching my own kids. In many ways it was better.  My own class, my own school.  After about six months the kids forgot I didn’t really look like a girl and they knew me as their teacher.  My gender was not confounding, but to me, my silence around it was.  They knew, I knew.  It was not spoken of.  To them, I had a partner, but beyond that the silence was deafening.  A lie of omission.  This is nothing new – the coming out, the not coming out.  I was out to staff and some students.  It’s a glass closet, and what is also visible is your shame.  I look butch, but I’m not willing to speak it.

So I left full time teaching and now I teach teachers.  As with my old students, the teachers I work with know me as a professional and we work well together.  The fodder for this blog is their students.  They see me on random occasions, and they have no idea who I am or what I am doing there.  So they take me on face value.  

Monday, August 29, 2011

Options


I thought about growing my hair.  And then I thought about wearing pastels.  I tried scarves, because they’re kind of girly.  But I felt ridiculous and the metrosexuals keep ruining good unisex clothes through appropriation.  I keep going, as I am, waiting for the inevitable.

Why go back to school at all, especially when you fit in even less the second time around?  I like it, I’m good at it.  But it’s like the outside world.  Not my world – I’ve managed to cloister myself, and am surrounded by queers and leftys and live in a place where I look mainstream in comparison to others.  But that’s not where I work.  I work in the mainstream.  In the suburbs.  In tough schools where gender and nationality are the defining features.  There’s no time for mamby pambey gender analysis.  This is survival, and that is done through extreme performance of all that is expected.  And part of that performance is weeding out those who don’t fit in.  I’m a visitor, and I’m suspect looking.  And that’s worth throwing down a challenge to.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

How it is


Schools are their own microcosm, a petri dish of hormones and half-baked people.  I mean that with affection.  The order alluded to in the rest of society is clear here.  There is a hierarchy.  There are people with clear levels of explicit authority.  Regardless of the lip service, it’s not a democracy.  Students must stay in line, or face the consequences.  Same goes for staff.

Personally, I like the order and structure.  The bells, the timetable, the clear expectation (whether they are met or not) and the general orderliness.  It’s neat, reliable.  And more than a little stifling.

I am teacher and I work across a few schools. I walk into new classes daily and sit up the back, trying to be invisible. But I’m not. I am so visible, in all the wrong ways, for teenagers at least.  They can’t work out why I’m there.  But more importantly, they can’t work out what gender I am.  So, being teenagers, they ask.  Loudly.

Clearly, I am not invisible.