pushing back against and testing limits with kiddo's school projects
- 3 minutes read - 428 wordsSince kiddo was really little, her aunt has been sending her “notable women,” “notable people of color,” “notable Indigenous people,” and “notable queer people” books, which has been good for just setting a background level of what we want our kid to be aware of as she grows up. When she came home with a “famous American” project, she was pretty clear up front that she was not going to choose a dude, and she turned to her little collection of books to come up with the three names that she needed to turn in to her teacher for approval before she could start the project.
After she started throwing around a few names, though, I double checked the project description, and we realized that this is a “walking poster,” where she’s going to stick her face in to portray whichever “famous American” she chooses. This turned into a brief chat about how if that was the case, she shouldn’t really pick a person of color so that we didn’t wind up in a blackface or whitewashing situation. This kind of sucked, since kiddo had come out swinging with a broad perspective on “famous Americans” and the very format of of the project got in the way of her doing so. I just finished writing an email to her teacher asking if in future years, the project might involve a more traditional project, so that students can choose people who don’t look like them. We’ll see how that goes.
Speaking of seeing how things go, once kiddo and I talked about the unfortunately unfortunate implications of picking a person of color, she turned to her “notable queer people” book, and that’s where she got her three names from. I honestly don’t remember what the current laws on the books are about queer content in Kentucky public schools, but I’m wondering what—if any—response she’s going to get about picking transwomen and lesbians as her famous Americans.
I’m not great about pushing back against schools when something rubs me the wrong way (exhibit A here is ClassDojo, which I’m just preemptively too exhausted to put up an extended fight about, even though I’d have a professional advantage in doing so), and I don’t claim to be any kind of hero for making a bare minimum of effort here (most of credit goes to kiddo and to her aunt). I expect that I’ll need to get better about this in the years to come, though, so I hope I learn enough from this time around to do better in the future.
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