Lexington C.A.R.E.S.With regard the guest commentary by Article 8 Alliance director Brian Camenker, I would like to speak as a Lexington resident who teaches middle school in another town.
As an educator, I know it's important for students to feel validated by seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum materials. For years, history curriculums were mostly white and Eurocentric, but the move to multiculturalism changed the faces in our textbooks. As an Arlington educator, I've always been instructed to teach tolerance of and acceptance for others in any classroom. This includes people of color, people of various religious practices and political views, inter-religious and inter-racial families, and persons who identify as gay. In my eighth grade classroom, we read literature that encompasses Latino, Black, Asian, African and European cultures - including materials about poverty and economically disadvantaged people, about the holocaust and both persecutors and people who are persecuted, and about segregation, lynching and institutionalized racism.
While we live in a heterosexist society, my students understand that homosexuality exists - and no matter how homophobic the middle school mentality is, I hope that by the time they leave eighth grade my students do not fear gays, Jews, blacks, Muslims, or other people whose cultures they may not understand. A teacher's charge is to care for all the children in the classroom, not just those children who live in intact, two parent, heterosexual households with their biological parents.
Brian Camenker asserts "[a]ll David Parker asks is to be notified when adults discuss homosexual relationships or transgenderism with his 6-year-old son, and to be able to opt his son out of such discussions." Although parents have a right to excuse their child(ren) from certain planned lessons, if they with to totally insulate their child from the opinions of others - perhaps they should homeschool. Discussions of family constellations take place each day children bring their own situations to school. Further, evolution and creationism are presented as theories and both nuns and Nazis are presented as human beings. Parents who stay involved in the child(ren)'s lives - asking what they've learned and what they think - have endless opportunities to instill their own values. All children deserve to feel safe and loved while in school, and demonizing any portion of society in the classroom undermines that objective. Home provides the child's values set; school provides a view of today's diverse society.
Lexington schools, keep up the good work.
Cynthia Winfield
Tower Road