A post is going around with a list of five ways to end cissexism, among other great lists.  The first suggestion on that list is not to refer to strangers as “sir” or “ma’am.”

And yet a lot of us do this in our classrooms.  We call the students “boys and girls,” some of us have students line up boy-girl or have the genders compete to see which half of the class will do one thing or another first by who is quietest and sitting straightest.

I’m just as guilty — for a while, I called my first graders “ladies and gentlemen.”  I never specified which did what, just that ladies and gentlemen are polite to one another, push their chairs in when they get up so no one trips, and don’t use mean words.  Later on, I changed it to “friends.”

If this is something you want to tackle — it isn’t a priority for everyone — what would you do?  What in your language could change?  I had a teacher once who called us “fungi and germs” — not the most pleasant title, but it always got a laugh out of us.  What about changing these titles according to your lesson focus?  Maybe your students are “hurricanes and tornadoes,” or “primes and composites,” or “verbs and adjectives.”

And what about lining up, for those of us with students young enough to do so? Well, rather than using gender, any other variable can be called on to help get your students up and going in that orderly fashion.  You could call by favorite ____ (food, color, subject, animal?) and give your students something new to talk about with each other at lunch.  You could call them to line up by whoever feels a certain way about a certain classroom topic — how they felt about a story, whether they liked learning about the reptiles or the birds better, etc.  Even predictions can be a good tool — “Line up if you think Magee will untie the knot.  Line up if you think he won’t be able to untie the knot.” — just make sure if you’re doing predictions with a definite result that you change the order, or just like multiple choice questions, students might start figuring out the right answer by where you place it.

So what about you?  Is this something you’ve thought about, or might think about in the future, in your class?  What are you doing with your students in regard to depolarizing gender in the classroom?