"Blindness"

I understand why The National Federation of the Blind stated “The female actor is portrayed as physically, mentally and morally superior to the others because she still has her sight. Blind people in this film are portrayed as incompetent, filthy, vicious, and depraved. They are unable to do even the simplest things like dressing, bathing, and finding the bathroom. The truth is that blind people regularly do all of the same things that sighted people do.” These statements were really powerful to me because after seeing the trailer for this movie I felt the same way. Today they can make movies just about anything. I feel its wrong for our society to point out a disability and mock it in the way it looks like they do in this movie. “Blindness” points the finger at the blind community portraying them as incompetent of doing anything because they do not have their vision. In the trailer these “blind” actors acted as if they were animals crawling all over the floor losing their minds.
However, I do understand why someone would argue this point. This movie took people who have had their sight their whole life, and then randomly one day they lost it. I believe any of us would feel like they lost their mind if they went randomly blind one day. I believe that a movie premise like this would make a lot of money for box offices because it has a strange story line. All the controversy give people the drive to go see it and see for themselves what it is all about. Even I feel after personally giving negative reviews of the movie, I kind of want to go see it to see the full movie. It is sad though that they are taking a disability and portraying it negatively on the big screen.

GLBT Safe Schools session, October 8, 2008

Today I attended the GLBT Safe Schools session on the topic: "Issues of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in Schools." I have been to three of these sessions before put on by different leaders. However, I particularly enjoyed this one because of the panel present. At the beginning of the session we had a man discuss all the labeling of LGBT. He asked if anyone had any questions about these terms before we got started with the panel of speakers. Only a few questions were asked and then we got right into the panelists. Each panelist brought something different to the discussion. One was a former teacher in New York where she had many students in her classroom that came from lesiban/gay parents. Another was a lesbien women who works for MSU resource center and leads discussion group on issues of identity and sexual orientation. The third was a man who talked about having a lesbien daughter along with a granddaughter who has two moms and her struggle in school. Finally, the last panelist was an MSU student who said he was homosexual in the education school studying music.

Although all the panelists brought a lot of useful and thought proking information to us tonight, I feel like I got the most from the first panelist who used to teach in NY schools. I came to this session because I want to make sure that if I have a situation in my classroom where a student of mine comes from a family where they have two mommys or two daddy's or are even struggling with sexual orientation themselves, I would know how to handle it. This teacher shared with us that in our classroom we have to make sure that we always have to be careful how we advertise Mother's Day or Father's Day and how we should call it "A female who is important in our lives" or "A male who is important in our lives" just to make sure that every student would have something to write about. I also enjoyed how she talked about how every teacher's primary responsibiliy are their students and no matter what you believe in you have to make sure that child feels safe and comfortable learning in your classroom. She told us that teachers make a bigger deal over what could happen if we address it rather than thinking about all the little small things that a child will have to go through if we don't address it. We need to put our students first. She concluded with saying that teaching is powerful. That really made me think about the impact I will make on many students in the next few years as I start my student teaching and into my carreer. I need to be ready for anything.