On Monday, I told the kids that the people on the bulletin board were LGBT because no one had yet guessed the answer. You could have heard a pin drop. And then, after a time, there were lots of questions. How is a Pope gay? Were there really gay people 2500 years ago? How do you know those people are gay? So I talked about the validity of primary sources, too, layering on the lessons.
I also mentioned that approximately 10 % of the population was LGBT. I had them do the math about how many people in our school that would be. That left them speechless for a while, too.
I did not sense any resistance, in fact, the kids seemed to really understand that the recent suicides were a tipping point for us all – that we were all responsible for ending the kind of behavior that led to those terrible suicides.
One student shared that a kid from his church recently shot himself in the head in his dorm room. The student didn't know why the student had committed suicide, but you could tell they were all thinking that being gay could be a possibility.
I ended the lesson by mentioning that the kids could wear purple on Wednesday to memorialize the students who took their lives because of gay bullying.
Ms. L
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