it's nice to have scored some rides home from my night classes, and avoid having to ride the bus. don't get me wrong, i like the bus as much as the next driving-avoidant person, but some days i clock in 2 or even 3 quality hours on public transportation. that's a lot of time sitting in relatively uncomfortable seats overloaded with personal belongings struggling with motion sickness, and trying to read while sitting next to someone...it's nice to have a break now and then.

tonight in class we discussed dealing with homosexuality/homophobia in schools and then we watched a really good video about how teachers deal with the subject, which gave me some good ideas. i'll readily admit that i come from a place of being incredibly tolerant of human diversity and unencumbered with religious beliefs that condemn homosexuality, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with being gay...so i tend to cringe when i hear kids flinging the word "faggot" far and wide, or saying "that's so gay". since i'm not homosexual myself (but still get offended because I have plenty of friends and colleagues who are and I tend to feel like sticking up for them), i never had any really good strategies for how to deal with this except to tell the kids to cut it out and trying to convince them that it's just as bad as calling someone "a nigger". but that's a reactive stance...and as most of us know, it's a lot better to be proactive, than reactive. since i get to write a paper on this topic and come up with strategies to deal with this, maybe i'll have some better methods to use the next time it happens...
as one of the teachers said in the video, you don't necessarily teach about homophobia because you have a personal stake in the issue, but because the kids already have some idea about it, and since we all have to live in this world together, we have to learn to get along whether we agree with each other or not. and in order to do that successfully we have to get past the point of fear and misunderstanding, and realize that people are people and we all have ways of "being" in this world.

word.


and i need to keep all this in mind because i live and work in some very different worlds...