Thinking Points #3

1."One way that a normalizing curriculum or text works is by selecting students with a "selective tradition".
In this quote Carlson talks about how every curriculum is selected carefully. Not every tradition is brought up in curriculum and usually it has a reason. The traditions and cultures they bring up in lessons has to be productive and mainly something everyone agrees with. Things like homosexuality is not part of the curriculum because it is not seen the same from everyone, even though it is an everyday part of life. Keeping things like this out of curriculum, makes it seem wrong, which is not true at all. I think adding this stuff into curriculum would help people see it from a different perspective and it might actually make some children more comfortable. If a child has two mommys, or two daddys, they might not have to explain it to another child if the other child had already learned something about it.

2. "Some young people, particularly in big cities, are beginning to being their "out" identities to high school, affirming who they are and asserting their rights."
Carlson talks about how it is getting more popular for young gays to speak out about their sexuality. She talks about how some schools set up gay and lesbian clubs where they can speak outloud about their feelings and their sexuality. This reminded me kind of, of the club that Professor Bogad runs where people can just go and talk about how they feel, and it can be about anything. I think that these kids that set up these kinds of things in school are really smart. It gives them a place to go and talk, since school doesn't seem to give them a place to do this comfortably.

3. "5. a recent study of gay men in four cities, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles and Pittsburg, concluded that one third of all currently uninfected twenty year old gay and bisexual men will become HIV positive by the time they are thirty, and that the majority of twenty year old men in the sample with contract AIDS."
Carlson states this quote in her notes at the end of her piece. I was shocked when I read this. I have heard before that gay men are the majoirty of people who contract aids but I never knew how many actually did. I think that statistics like this are the reason that homesexuality is frowned upon in schools.

In conclusion, Carlson's piece wasn't as exciting to read as the other pieces we read in class but it was interesting. She didn't use stories, she used more of facts and ideas about how she feels and thinks. I liked that she talked about how the school curriculum is very specified and I thought to myself that it must be specified to the christian, whiteness ideas since that is what the power is made up of. This is another reason why we don't study homosexuality in school because it is "against" the christian belief.