On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 1:14 PM, PGage <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree that the Chik-Fil-A wars were silly (I had actually never heard of > Chik-Fil-A before that, so for me it was just a lot of free advertising for > them), but it is not true that nobody bothered to report about the suidice > and other negative consequences of homophobic bullying. I read a couple of > stories about the chicken wars, but I read dozens of stories during that > time period about the effect of bullying, and participated in lots of > substantive debates and discussions with a wide range of people for whom the > chicken wars put the issue on their radar for the first time. I am in > negotiaion with at least one school to get an anti-bullying program in place > this fall, and several others are at least talking about it for the first > time (these are private, very conservative Christian schools).
Having taught at two conservative Christian schools (and attended two others as a student), I genuinely wish you luck with that one. The problem is kids don't teach each other to hate. It comes from the adults, and we don't have an anti-bullying program for adults... if only we did. When I was in 4th through 6th grade I attended a Catholic school, though I was a Lutheran at the time. And about once every month or so in religion class, teachers (and occasionally priests, but never the nuns -- the nuns were cool) would either try to convert me or get me to feel foolish because I believed something marginally different than everyone else in the room. My favorite day was when they tried to tell me the pope was the head of the Church, and they smugly asked me who was the head of the Lutheran church. I thought about it for a second and replied, "Jesus Christ." It was then when I learned if you are smarter than the mob, you win. One time as a teacher, a group of students approached me about another student whom I only saw in the computer lab a few times a week and didn't know all that well. The students said he was depressed and wouldn't tell them why. I couldn't get anything out of him either, so I sent him to talk to the head of our youth ministry. One of the other teachers on campus pointed out this was a big mistake. What she knew and I didn't was the kid was having massive gender identity issues, and the head of the youth ministry was the biggest homophobe on campus. My heart snapped. When the kid came into my classroom after talking to the head of youth ministry, his face was white as a sheet and he couldn't speak above a whisper. I knew I couldn't talk to him about it or he'd lose it, so instead a lesson I'd planned about why some people prefer Macs to PCs became about how everybody in the room had his/her own preferences, none of them right or wrong, merely different. All the kids started telling funny stories expressing how different they were, and eventually I think the kid in question started to grasp that he was not so isolated. Problem with initiating an anti-bullying campaign on a conservative school campus is the adults do not understand how condemning someone else's belief (aka loving the sinner but hating the sin) is the most pervasive form of bullying on the campus. But, again, I wish you luck. You ought to talk to the nuns from my days in Catholic school, though, because they did got right. -- Kevin M. (RPCV) -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
