1. I made my first machinima! One of the assignments for my film studies class was a two minute film, and I made mine in Sims. It's a music video for Green Day's See You Tonight.
2. I forgot a very important detail of Rainbow Week regarding the whiteboard and the terms workshop. Y'know how I mentioned that the board was left up for the rest of the week for anyone walking by to see? Little did we know, there was a meeting on Wednesday night in our cafeteria for residents of a nearby neighbourhood to discuss a new land development project planned in their area. This meant that those residents came in and saw our whiteboard. My art teacher said he walked by it on his way out of the school and there were a lot of confused 40-somethings squinting at the terminology.
One such parents who saw the whiteboard was so enraged by it that she wrote an angry letter to our town newspaper.
She fumed on about the gender identity side, claiming it was "scary that [she couldn't] just be a girl!" (News Flash: You can, and there is nothing wrong with that. We had listed some examples of non-binary genders across the bottom of the white board. It was a list of non-binary identities, which is why 'girl' wasn't on it.) She then made an astoundingly athletic logical leap to say that suddenly our whiteboard presentation (or "lies," as she called it) were going to be taught to eight-year-olds in elementary school.
She was even angrier about the sexual and romantic orientation board, where we briefly touched on the importance of consent in relationships. She proceeded to get angry that eight-year-olds were now going to learn about consent, because we put it on our high school white board. Yep. (Aside from that stupid leap, why the fuck shouldn't we teach consent to eight-year-olds? We should be teaching consent in kindergarten! It's not just a sexual thing. Wanna give someone a hug? Ask first. Consent. Bam.)
In the end, her letter came from misplaced anger at Ontario;s new sex education curriculum, which is most likely where the whole "eight-year-olds" logic leap came from (she probably has an eight-year-old child, that poor child). She whined about how the new curriculum 'devalues family' and how we need to "throw out this gender identity nonsense and teach our next generation about procreation, family of a mother and father, the value of children" (end quote, she literally didn't even put 'and' in there). She complained of the new curriculum's rule to use partner instead of mother and father and concluded her letter with a haughty, pretentious, "Get upset about this, everyone!"
This actually triggered a series of letters to the editor, most of which were in support of our school and what we were doing as a council. One such letter's headline was, "Make gender board even larger next year."
I saved every letter from the newspaper. I'm tickled pink that our board generated this kind of conversation on a local forum.
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