I am a middle school teacher working in a school of about 420 students. The population dropped dramatically during COVID as we remained online for almost a full year which resulted in many suburban families returning to schools in their home district. Furthermore, we continue to gain more and more multilingual students which has shifted the demographics of our school’s landscape dramatically. As I develop this unit, I plan for my current seventh graders who will be eighth graders next year. A good quarter of my students are multilingual. I would say a much smaller percentage than usual (around 10%) are receiving special education services, however I expect the district to send us more students in both of those demographics. A large portion of my students have been in my school for three or more years and those who are in the new category tend to fall into the significantly below grade level category for reading. The reason this is important is because identity is at the core of the unit and the core of most middle schoolers’ own self-discovery journeys.
As I addressed in the introduction, there is value in understanding a whole person and valuing a person for who they are. Having grown up a closeted teenager, I am aware of the statistics on LGBTQ+ youth and suicide. The rate is much higher among those who belong to the community because of the social stigma that is associated with those who identify as such.1 Furthermore, we have seen declines in these numbers with things like the passage of LGBTQ hate crime laws.2 As an educator and as a gay man, the attacks on the Trans community is alarming. Knowing the connection between legal recognition and saving lives is what drives the work that I am doing in this unit. With awareness and exposure comes understanding and acceptance. This isn’t about recruitment, but about the possibility of changing minds. I am not a fool. There will be pushback on elements of this, but even one kid recognizes that they are seen, it is important.
When I arrived in my school, I recognized that the literature we were reading didn’t celebrate the lives of black and brown people. We read “Monster,” by Walter Dean Myers, that told the story of a black youth jailed for a crime in which he participated that resulted in a death, and the story of Emmett Till. The only works my students were reading and identifying with were about dead black boys or incarcerated ones. This wasn’t acceptable. The district has made more strides to do better in reaching students of color. We have classroom libraries celebrating the lives of people of color and have started to do the same with LGTBQ+ people. It is important that students understand intersectionality and that some of the individuals they read in school are people who identity somewhere outside the lines of straight, white, cisgender, and male. This unit is meant to be a bridge to continue the work that is needed in so many communities around the country with a specific focus on my own population.
