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Teaching: Avoiding Bias. Your Classroom: Optional Equity Training. Diversity Matters. And those are training titles to be truly grateful for — it is often the best it gets at this time of year. It’s the beginning of the semester at colleges and universities across the country, which also means a whole new class of teaching […]
Throughout middle and high school, I was an enthusiastic participant of the National History Day program in Minnesota. For those who may not be familiar with the program, History Day is a project-based learning program (à la Science Fair) where students get to choose a historical topic to investigate. After conducting extensive research, students […]
Happy Back to School season, everyone! I’m going into 19th grade this year, but each September, I always spend some time thinking about the years I was a teacher and all the excitement and anticipation that surrounded the first day of school from the other side of the classroom. While I would be setting up […]
As an International student coming from mainland China, the experiences of being a Point Scholar, a PhD student, and a teacher here in the US allow me to develop unique perspectives of thinking intersectionally across cultures. I began doing feminist and tongzhi (Chinese appropriation of the revolutionary term “comrade” to refer to persons with same-sex […]
Recently I began facilitating a mindful meditation practice at the Gender Identity Center (GIC) of Colorado. The practice is open to all, but it is tailored to trans and non-binary folx. As a mental skills and performance excellence consultant, I often describe the ability to attain a mindful state as the goal, and meditation as […]
On Friday mornings, I wake up at 6:45 and pack a bag of condoms, Planned Parenthood info sheets, and slips of paper in a glass jar. As a volunteer sex-ed teacher at Hope 360, a Providence high school, I begin each class by inviting students to write questions on these pieces of paper. I am […]
When most people think of Title IX – the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination in public schools – they think of how it allowed women to take strides towards equality in sports. At one point in time I fell into this camp of people who simply equated Title IX with sports. Growing up as […]
For my community service project this year, I chose to compile sexual health resources that were specifically made with LGBTQ youth in mind. It felt like something that would be relatively easy to complete in my free time between my course load, job, activism work, and other on-campus commitments, as well as something that would […]
The many letters of “LGBTQ+” have a complex, often tense relationship: supposedly all under the same umbrella, but still somehow divided. Knowing one’s place and respecting these divisions can often be just as important as solidarity. These tensions often bubble over into the media, such as the now infamous debates (with varied opinions) over slurs […]
I meant to write this blog post about being trans while teaching. It will be about that, but as I write this during the first week of the new semester, I can’t help but reflect on my educational and trans journeys as a whole. I have never felt as comfortable with my gender in an […]