Why don't we talk about LGBT?

Well... Why don't we? In school we are taught a great amount about heterosexual relationships, but hardly anything about homosexuality or bisexuality. In fact I don't think we're taught anything on this subject. But why not? Surely there isn't nothing to teach?

Don't scientists have anything to say on this subject? Isn't this something we should be discussing in R.E. and Student Development? Aren't there any books we could be reading in English which involve relationships other than heterosexual? Doesn't this subject have a whole fascinating and important history?

The fact that this subject is not taught in schools is an interesting one. It gives the impression that it shouldn't be taught - an impression which walks hand in hand with the impression that it is WRONG; a fatal impression to give to people who are gay/bisexual/transgendered as it can be a big cause for low self-esteem and makes you feel insecure about yourself and what you are, and of course makes you a prime target for bullying.

As well as education we need role models. We need teachers who are gay/bisexual/transgendered and are open and unafraid of what they are. We need teachers who are comfortable with the subject of and not prejudiced against LGBT. We need to be told that IT IS NOT WRONG.

The English Teacher

I think that really I began thinking this way round about last September, maybe a little later than that. I've always thought that there are many things about school that are unfair, and wished I could do other things, but I never really understood quite what was wrong. Basically I just put up with it, like I'm sure many children in school do. I don't think we even realise anything is wrong - it's just the way school is. We just have to wait and count the years...

But last September I came back to school and discovered that I had been moved into another English class... Again. I had started in June and accidentally been put into the bottom set - it was called class one or something silly like that, and everyone believed I was being put into the top set. The bottom set kids were perfectly nice; they threw rubbers and rulers and screamed and asked me if I smoked. For most of the term I was stuck there, until about the last week before the summer holidays when it finally got sorted out and I was moved into a higher English class - though I'm not sure that was the top set either. I was happier in that class, and fully expected to return there the next term. But instead, I found myself sitting in a different classroom, meeting my third English teacher of the year.

He was called Mr. Stead. The rest of the class - apart from one girl who had been moved from the same class I had - had been his class since year 7, and they loved him. He was certainly the best English teacher I ever had. He showed us films like An Inconvenient Truth and took us to the library for whole lessons just to read and talk about books. He thought the curriculum was terrible. He was like a friend, really, not a teacher. But then again a friend is exactly what a teacher should be - someone you can talk to and laugh with and share your thoughts with. That's how proper teaching should be done.

I only had Mr. Stead as a teacher from September to Christmas. He said we were his best English class. None of us were sure if he was just saying that, whether he'd said it to all of his classes, but really I don't think it mattered. We all knew he was the best English teacher we were ever going to get.

I think it was on his last day that I really starting thinking. We messed around the whole lesson - putting make-up all over a boy's face, running about, laughing, talking - Mr. Stead gave the boy a note to take to his other classes - and Mr. Stead asked me if I was going to be a writer. Well of course I was. He told us that we had to fight against the curriculum to make it better for everyone. A few of us got very excited and I said, "We should protest!" We all started writing things on the board - PROTEST! big and bold in the centre; DOWN WITH CURRICULAR MONOTONY in smaller letters, lower down.

We can do it, if we work together. We can bring curricular monotony down.

What I Wish I Could Say About School

'I have a discovered a place where I can be a person as much as I want and learn however and whenever suits me. My opinions are valued and people always ask my views as well as the views of the students who are cleverer than me, or better at working. When I go to a lesson I go to learn and to contribute to the learning of those around me. If I do not feel like learning I go somewhere else and do whatever I need to do to enjoy myself. Sometimes I visit the library, which is open at all times and where I can sit and read for a whole day if I want to, with no-one disturbing me.

'We wear what we want to. This means that we are always - or mostly - comfortable with what we are wearing, and we can feel happy and proud of ourselves for doing what we want to do. In winter this is especially good, and in summer too, because it means that if we are cold, we can put on a sweater that will keep us warm, and if we are too hot we can take it off. I can be whoever I want to be in my own clothes - but mostly of course I choose to be myself.

'I know all the teachers by name. We don't call them miss and sir. We call them by their first names and they know all of ours, because in a small class you learn quickly, and this makes it easier to think of them as friends, who you can ask for help and suggest things to and argue with. I love my teachers. They don't just stick to one subject - of course I have an English teacher, and a music teacher, and a textiles teacher, but the English teacher plays the guitar and so do a lot of people in my class and one day they all brought their instruments in and started playing. All subjects link to one another in some way and the teachers are always willing to answer an interesting question.

'When it snows we are allowed to go outside and play. When it's warm and sunny, lessons are held outside and we go for walks as we're being taught, and the science teacher will ask us about trees or birds and the English and music teachers will make up songs together.

'We do not have a marking system. If we did there would be children who did badly, and ones who did well, and we would hate each other. We are always allowed to speak back because how else are we supposed to make conversation?'

The Dreaded Word: Homework

No matter how great you are at keeping calm, getting things done and not worrying, I can almost guarantee that you will at some point in your life become stressed by homework. Whether you are a student, a teacher, a parent - anyone who has to deal with homework, basically, is going to feel anxious about it at least once.

I personally am very good at organising my homework so that it does not build up and is complete and handed in on time, and I cope with stress extremely well most of the time. However, I think you cannot blame me for feeling a little bit stressed when I am sitting at a computer on a Tuesday night, using the hour I have between coming home from photography club and going out again to my knitting group to try to work out how to do the questions in my maths homework that has been set that day to be given in the day after. And somehow, please tell me if this is a false impression, but I regularly feel that I might be missing out on something when I get up at 7.00, spend the day at school then come home, do homework for the rest of the afternoon and evening, eat dinner, and go to bed. My weekends of course are often much the same, with extra homework to make up for the lack of school.

Homework of course is extremely important - six hours a day of work are obviously not enough, and I have nothing else to do in the evenings. I mean, why would anyone want to spend their time playing the piano, or even such a thing as the ukulele? And no-one does anything like knitting or crocheting or rag-rugging or beadwork, or any kind of sewing. I personally would much rather sit behind a desk for another couple of hours, or even in front of the computer making sure I improve my I.C.T. level for food technology.

I honestly think there are better things we could be doing.

SATs

What is it with SATs? We are approaching these again and all the teachers (and some students) are beginning to go crazy. But this time, no-one has reminded us that they are only a test of the school. Everyone kept saying that in year 6 (in their contradictory way: Don't worry, they're only a test of the school! Revise, revise, revise!) but this year, nobody has mentioned it. Which is stupid. They ARE a test of the school. But they are being used to work out which sets we should be in. How is this fair? 

I was talking to two friends today who totally agreed with me. My parents of course are on my side in this matter... My science teacher, thankfully, has not only told us to revise in science, but in English and maths as well. Not thankfully because I think this amount of revision is necessary - well of course not! They are supposed to be a test of the school as the school is, not as it is when all the kids have been half-killed by stress - but because all the teachers seem to want you to do extremely well in their particular subject, even though people are always saying that you can't be good at everything. Well of course the teachers don't want you to be good at everything: just in their subject. My dad keeps going on about this and I have agreed with him because I have partly understood what he was saying and because he has pretty correct ideas on the subject of what-is-wrong-with-school. Now I fully understand what he's getting at.

A girl at my new school recently moved to Wales; she had lived there before and moved here at the start of year 7, just after doing her SATs. She told us that that year the SATs had been abolished in Wales, so she wouldn't have to do them. Good for Wales...

 

Learning French in English

I am a good writer (sometimes) and do well in English, but when a teacher asks me to name something that should be included in descriptive writing, or tells me to use a simile, or scribbles 'Good complex sentence!' in the margin of my exercise book, I am simply at a loss for what it all means. I learned all these things once, when I hated grammar, and now I know what they are so well it is almost as if I have forgotten them - it is certain that I rarely think of them when writing.

It's like learning French. Instead of learning it like all the French kids must have learnt it - slowly, from birth, with others speaking it all around them - we learn it through lists of words and what-it-means-in-English and past participles and present, perfect, imperfect, future, conditional and imperative tenses, not to mention the present subjunctive. All of these, our teachers assure us, we have encountered in our own language of English. 

But have we?

Well of course we have, but not knowingly. These tenses are things we only begin to learn about when we start learning another language; we have never been taught about them in our own. And now the question arises: if we don't need to know what they are in English, do we really need to know in French?

And now the question arises: do we all really sit sifting through books for metaphors and alliteration, or do we just... read?

  

The Great Monotoniser

The other day I was talking to my mom about UNIFORM.  She was lucky enough to have never had to wear one, and she supports me thoroughly in my debate over the subject. School uniform is completely overrated. Hasn't anybody ever thought that if there was no uniform, so many fewer people would get told off for not wearing it?

As we were listing the good and bad points of school uniform (mostly bad. Good only for the sake of denying them) my mom brought up the 'good' reason that many pro-uniform debaters give - that it prevents children from feeling unequal to other children because they cannot afford 'fashionable' clothes. She does not agree with this opinion and neither do I. I said, "What about my old school?" At my old school, we had to wear blazers and ties and tuck in our shirts. There was constant pressure from the teachers to look respectable and wear our uniforms correctly; there was also a constant, bigger, pressure from fellow students to wear it wrongly. Shirts had to be untucked, ties short and loose, and top buttons undone. I once had a girl in a higher year come up to me and actually bend down to shove my socks all the way to my ankles, because it was how everyone else wore them.  

By wearing your own clothes you begin to develop your own sense of style. At my current school the uniform is fairly open to interpretation, and you can wear any kind of socks - blue, pink, spotty, stripy - and any kind of skirt as long as it's black. I have a black skirt which I love and wore all the time last year, when I was being home-schooled, and occasionally I wear it to school. Now I hardly ever wear it at home: it feels like I am wearing my uniform.

School uniform is not, never has been, and never can be 'the great equaliser'. All it does is create monotony. You're unique, they say... Now dress the same.