Homophobia In Schools

My past wasn’t pretty in the sense of good decisions. I got in fights a lot as a kid as a way to defend my brother or friends, as well as it being my way of showing masculinity. These fights I recall getting stopped all the time really quickly on the school grounds, but times when homophobic slurs would be yelled across to another student in earshot of a teacher wouldn’t be stopped at all. Gerald Walton states in his paper, Bullying and Homophobia in Canadian Schools, “Methods employed to augment school safety are limited in scope to confronting acts of physical violence through enforcement of zero tolerance policies. Such policies, designed to prevent weapons-related violence, do not consider the cultural and societal antecedents of violence in schools.” (Walton p29) This perfectly describes how I feel in this moment about these events in my life. Every student should be protected from any kind of abuse whether it is physical, emotional, and psychological. As a teacher I want to be the example against this idea, as this simply shouldn’t be something that happens from a teacher’s mindset. During the time I was in high school, I wasn’t masculine as I have stated earlier. This created the opportunity for some people to call me gay, faggot, etc. Bullying will always …show more content…
For example someone offering money to eat dog poop. The quote from The myth of the culture of poverty by Paul Gorski, “There is no such thing as a culture of poverty. Differences in values and behaviors among poor people are just as great as those between poor and wealthy people.” (Gorski p33) completely describes the frustration I had when I was put into these positions. They believed that I did not have any value or self-respect because I was poorer than they were, but in actuality I had just as much if not more than they