A reminder that political discussion belongs in the politics forum, but is off-limits here. There is a very similar thread in the politics forum for anyone who wants to opine on DeSantis’ motives.
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Sometimes it does but many times whoever has the minority point of view will be vilified. Again within the context of a high school civics or history class ok but as a discussion point in general education I disagree.
the problem with the deliberately vague DeSantis laws are that “discussion” is not defined. So, you have a certain subsection of parents who are lying in wait to sue a district or specific teacher for having a photo of their same sex partner on their desk, or having a novel in the classroom library with a gay character or mere mention of a gay character. For saying “how are your moms doing this week, Student?” For allowing crayon pictures of a family with same sex parents tohang in the classroom ("teacher, Ami’s picture is weird, why isn’t there a Dad? " “Ssshhhhh, we can’t talk about Ami’s family”)
Students with two dads, or two moms will do exactly what with writing assignments about their family? Make something else up? Are those two parents allowed to both be at conferences, lest someone see a same sex couple?
A 17 yr old who knows they are gay, has always known, but is closeted because of fear of their parents’ disapproval or downright violence — no visit to the school counselor or mental health clinic. just hide, hide, hide. Because “discussion” is too vague for any teacher or district to risk, in these times.
My in laws are retiring, and DH told them Florida is certainly a choice for them if they want it – but we would not visit them there.
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My comments are meant for classroom/academic instruction within the K-12 public education system. I would also note that many, many laws are vague on both sides of this issue and lots of others.
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It’s interesting to see what people think happens in schools as I just returned from mine for the day.
Sure, there’s lots of talk about retiring from my peers - all due to politics today as it reflects schools, parents going to school boards complaining about what is or isn’t taught or available, etc. In our news recently they mentioned that a decade ago PA graduated about 15,000 new teachers. Now we’re graduating roughly 5000. Needless to say, there’s a teacher shortage to try to replace all those who are going to retire, from math to anatomy to English and more. The kids, themselves, haven’t changed (well, the names have, but not the “kids.”)
In our school religion is taught as history in history, but teachers can talk about it to an extent if a student brings it up. We don’t have religion classes per se. Teachers can talk about pretty much anything if a student brings it up. Today is 4/20. Some of you can guess what students were talking about today in one of my classes. Teachers can add their two cents even if nothing will be on a quiz.
In the same way we can discuss current events or anything, including sexual orientation. But it’s not in every lesson or happening on every day, or even many days/lessons. Health classes will deal with more of it for teaching. English and history will both deal with it more as teaching too. As a topic both religion and sexual orientation can come up in statistics. Doesn’t mean we’re teaching students to become gay or Catholic. It means studies were done and we’re looking at them. Discussions are totally different.
Most of my discussions today were regarding the Rock Cycle… 
I wouldn’t set foot in a FL school and if parents or school boards are going to continue to make things an issue here, then they’d better be prepared to step in as teachers as they drive everyone else away, including many great teachers with a lot of experience.
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Students have access to everything on their phone, so why do we even need classrooms any longer? Let them learn math/English/history on their phone, right?
The best thing about school is learning to socialize - get along with everyone - while gaining information about life whether that’s quadratic equations, history (including how religion affected so much of it), or differences among people. It’s the whole package, not just learning to read, write, and count, esp at the high school level.
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Things like these laws always make me ask, what specifically is the problem that they are trying to solve, and is this a reasonable approach.
For example, if you can’t talk about gender identity, how do you have a discussion about the women’s suffrage movement? That was based completely around rights for a specific gender, and was a very important movement in American history. The law, to me, appears to be way too vague to be useful in a meaningful way.
Can you read Romeo and Juliet? Obviously about a heterosexual relationship, so the way the law is written that can’t be discussed. I can’t imagine how you would teach any sort of literature if you can’t talk about romantic relationships at all, so many great works of literature and poetry are about romantic love, or about tragedies surrounding it, or so on.
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Do you have any evidence of instruction on gender identity or sexuality in K-12 schools?
The funny thing is that this Bible phrase can be taken to imply that humans were originally created “male and female” (with dual or ambiguous gender) and that’s what it means to be “in the image of God.” There’s a whole scholarly tradition based on this theory… I learned about it in Talmud class.
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I had similar thoughts when I saw the news. One cannot touch upon the works of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Plato, or Sappho while dancing around the topic of sexuality, read the works of Shakespeare without coming across cross-dressing individuals (e.g. Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night), study the reign of Hatshepsut without discussing her adoption of masculine trappings and gender-bending royal ideology, analyze the Holocaust without mentioning the purges of queer people, study the structure of Byzantine, Ottoman, and Chinese administration without incorporating a discussion of the prominent use of eunuchs who transcended the masculine/feminine dichotomy, etc. (For more info on the last topic, I recommend Kathryn Ringrose’s fascinating The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of Gender in Byzantium.)
How many topics must we avoid lest we “delve into gender and sexuality beyond the science,” to quote a post above?
Whether such instruction is strictly prohibited by law or not, curriculum restrictions like this will have a chilling effect, resulting in a widespread (albeit understandable) reluctance to touch any topics considered at all controversial.
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Which is the goal. Pretend such people don’t exist by refusing to acknowledge any of them.
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“Straight” is a sexual orientation - and cis-gender is a gender identity!
Consequently, if instructions can’t touch on families with two dads, or people who have a different gender identity than their birth-sex - then it also cannot touch on families with mom+dad parents, and people whose gender matches their sex.
So out goes any literature, any art,… - because one could promptly file suit against school districts, that any instructions involving straight and cis-gender people to be in violation of the new law.
Other than math books (assuming that any text problems only use rabbits for living beings), the Florida school libraries will be even more empty?
And of course, no teaching the bible. After all, it’s full of cis-gender people and endless enumerations of generations of straight couples (but not necessarily monogamous - but, that’s “fine”!)
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I’m sure that this will all get resolved at some point in the court system.
Not sure what you are asking?
I think the legislation is aimed at keeping those topics out of the classroom. What proof are you looking to see?
Regardless of religious statements made by any politician, support for the FL parental rights bill is not rooted in religious belief. Plenty of people that adhere to no religion are supportive of this type of legislation.
Also, the imagined what-if scenarios are a little dramatic. To me, the intent of the law seems straightforward. Don’t include instructional statements like “there are more than two gender identities”, just as the statement “there are only two gender identities” should also be excluded. Don’t talk about it.
A kid is going to learn more, and learn better about these issues when they have a friend they can learn from, and parents to guide them. School instruction is unnecessary. The very people that are saying the parent should be making decisions about gender-conforming care instead of the government are, in this case, making an argument that the government (school) is better suited to be teaching about these issues than the parents.
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I agree with the separation of church and state. Which means the state will not favor or implement a religion on those in public schools. However, you can not teach history without teaching ABOUT religion. I have a neighbor who complained that they were teaching her child to be a “bride of ISIS” when she had to learn about Islam in a history class that covered the influence of Islam in Africa.
A 17 year old is highly unlikely to be learning Latin poetry, literary analysis, constitutional law, or the AIDS crisis from their friends and parents.
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It amazes me that people talk about these things that obviously haven’t been in a classroom since they left college.
I’m with kids all day, every day (K-5 school). They absolutely talk about these things. They mention their families, they ask questions about what is happening on the news, they show concern about current events and who it affects and they come to you when they want to feel safe and reassured.
Our school has made social-emotional learning a priority due to the effects of Covid and kids missing valuable time to form relationships, learn to appropriately socialize with peers, and practice emotional regulation. We talk about what we did on the weekend. We talk about goals that we’ve set. We talk about things that were fun or sad. None of that is done in a vacuum and students often discuss their families, sometimes extended families, and often that includes people and or activities that either DeSantis, or those that want to use this ban to erase all discussion about sexual orientation, gender identity or race, would use as fodder to get a teacher fired or go to the news with a rant about public education. Not a day goes by where a kid doesn’t bring up an issue and I think “Thank God we’re not in Florida” because I’d seriously have to end the discussion.
For DeSantis to want to place gun violence blame on “mental health issues” yet cut off at the knees any attempt to form community within classrooms, support kids where they are, and most importantly, have kids be accepted for who they are, is a yet another attack on both marginalized communities.
And for anyone that is wondering why we aren’t sticking to reading, writing, and math, it’s because students learn better when they know they are safe. Our reading and math scores are some of the best in the country.
People trying to rationalize their support of the precursor of this bill stated over and over again that any talk of sexual content was not appropriate for the youngest students. We all knew what they were getting at and saw the writing on the wall that this wasn’t about age and sexuality but about a topic that they don’t agree with. This is a way to wipe out any way teachers/schools can support our students/families that don’t adhere to the norms the DeSasntis administration has deemed acceptable.
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I’m saying it’s a solution without a problem. There’s no evidence this is happening. There’s no proposals out that that it should happen. So it’s this giant debate over what??
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The intent of the law pre-supposes there was a problem to begin with, and the effects of the problem are clear. Do you believe that to be the case? Why or why not?
Also, the law is very, very vague - which means it’s a bad law (or a good one if the real intent was to stifle discussion).
So, I think to go further with this, can we have an example of an inappropriate discussion in a class that this law is supposed to prevent, that has actually happened and where? Because then maybe we could suggest a better crafting of the language so that normal age appropriate discussions of any type of person is not banned (like maybe a female teacher mentioning her wife - which should be appropriate for any classroom).
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