This gay kid in my class was putting something on his lips, and the teacher said, “You don’t need to put on lip gloss in class!” If a girl put on lip gloss in class, he wouldn’t say that. Then the boys in class felt like they could laugh at that kid. If the teacher could make comments, they felt like they could, too. (Cushman, 2003)

A lot of the quotes in the Cushman articles boggled my mind, because they made me think to myself, “How could a teacher ever dream of saying something like that?!”

When I think of how would I feel saying something so blatantly biased to one of my students who I have grown so close with, I cannot even bear it. Making these sorts of comments just normalizes it in the classroom, therefore making it okay for other students or other teachers to do so. As teachers, we need to normalize a community of love and respect, not a community of bias and hate. The fact that the student who spoke this quote knows that the teacher would not have said that if he were a girl shows the bias this teacher has towards gays, specifically gay males. If the teacher sets an example of making fun of a student, the other students are likely to follow that example. Because since the teacher did it, it must be okay, right?

Promoting an environment free of bias is what we need to strive to do in the classroom. Kindness is contagious – if the teachers are kind, hopefully it will rub off on the students, too.