Sexist Homework
As a teacher who fights every day against gender stereotypes and sexism, it offends me to the core of my being to hear stories like this one about kids who try to subvert gender norms and are punished because of it:
Based on the image alone, Bowler tweeted that it looked like his daughter’s class was asked to sort activities and products like “Barbies” and “Erector sets” into gender columns. She crowded all the answers into a column labeled “Both,” and the teacher wrote at the bottom, “We talked about how each square needs to be filled in.”
“My wife brought [the worksheet] to my attention Friday night when we were looking through her schoolwork folder,” Bowler told HuffPost via email, adding that his daughter hadn’t complained about the assignment herself.
The article goes on to speculate that the assignment might have been used to call attention to gender stereotypes to foster discussion about how our society tries to fit people into little boxes.
Unfortunately, according to Steve Bowler, the dad of the girl who had to do this assignment for homework, found this wasn’t the case. He tweeted: “So, anticlimactic update: teacher tried to use the gender bias in the book/story as subject of the sorting worksheet. Old teacher, bad idea.”
It’s honestly teachers like this that give those of us working through a social justice lens a bad name. People have this image of teachers as old, stodgy conservatives who refuse to change their thinking as time goes on, and also refuse to look at situations outside of “right” or “wrong.”
While I can see the validity of asking young students to categorize things, I don’t know why it had to be categorizing “boy things” and “girl things,” even if it did go along with the story they were reading. Such assignments, without follow up questions like, “Do you believe it is right to categorize things this way?” or “What problems does this cause in our society?” only serve to solidify gender stereotypes rather than question them. The younger the student, the more explicitly you have to ask these questions; it’s not enough to imply that these stereotypes are problematic because you risk teaching acceptance rather than critical questioning.
It seems, even if this assignment could have paved the way for interesting class discussion – even (and especially) among younger students – that this was not even the goal of the teacher, which is unfortunate. Fortunately, though, it seems like the parents had an all-star moment where they not only taught their daughter that these stereotypes are unjust, but also that it’s OK to fail an assignment in the name of social justice.
Image Credit: Huffington Post