Room 2209

I love Disney.   Honestly, at this point, it’s probably a bit irrational.   My husband doesn’t understand it.   My kids don’t understand it.   But Disney movies in the 90s were the companion to an only child, i.e. me.   So anytime I can go back to my happy place I will.   Therefore, I use a lot of Disney in my teaching. When I do my big unit on gender stereotypes, I reference Mulan a lot.   One year, I had almost an entire student group tell me that they hadn’t seen the movie.   I dreamed that night about all the lessons I could plan around the movie.   Besides viewing it as literature, I had the students identify any point in the movie that supported the idea that gender norms/ stereotypes can be beneficial, and any point in the movie that supported the idea that gender norms/ stereotypes are not beneficial.   I had them transfer those into a graphic organizer that also had a bubble outline for a persuasive essay.   They then had to choose a side and write a draft using the

I'm not going to get on my high horse about what happened to Cracked.com.  That isn't what this post is about.  It is, however, a post about one of their articles that I've been teaching for a while. The 6 weeks before STAAR become STAAR prep.  Therefore, all of the units that we work on become debatable thematic units.  The first one I usually tackle is gender stereotypes.  For some reason,  it is super engaging (more than I thought it would be) and the kids enjoy tackling an issue that is very much applicable to them.  However, they don't understand that gender norms are a fluid thing.  The things that we have come to associate with a particular gender aren't the things that have always been associated with that gender. Back on track... ... I start my unit off with an article from Cracked called  5 Gender Stereotypes That Used to be the Exact Opposite  as an introduction to the above idea.  It does have bad words in it (I print out an edited version for m