Essential guidance on proactively navigating the challenges of gender-diverse student bodies.
A comprehensive look at gender-diverse youth in the classroom.
As the transgender student population continues to become more widely visible, navigation tools have become critical for educators and parents alike, notes Key, a veteran gender diversity educator. While written with parents of trans+ children in mind, the book is primarily directed at teachers, administrators, and school staff who directly impact students’ lives on a daily basis. Key shows readers what is involved when a child considers a gender transition process, and he confronts the challenges of gender inclusion, which may be a new topic for some readers. Particularly striking are the stories from parents of trans+ students who are managing the stages of their own apprehension alongside those of their child. Key incorporates learning points on gender vernacular and fighting community stigmatization. Personal anecdotes and timely discussions from school educators complement instructive illustrations and Q&A sections that answer sensitive questions regarding sports participation, bathroom choices, and changing areas. In an encouraging, consistently positive manner, Key addresses the overt political and/or cultural resistance that proliferates within heated debates and public forum discussions, and he asserts that accurate information is the best way to educate and collaborate. He stresses the importance of delivering practical, real-world discussion tools and assistance to parents and educators of trans+ children, who often find themselves without resources, advice, answers, or support to fortify what can often be an overwhelmingly complex experience. Key’s checklists of suggestions successfully bridge the gap between trans+ kids, adults, and school educators with strategically supportive approaches and behaviors. Authoritative yet written in pleasant, straightforward language, this book is an invaluable resource for understanding what it clearly means (and doesn’t mean) to be transgender while ensuring that every student has access to an optimal learning environment free from discrimination.
Essential guidance on proactively navigating the challenges of gender-diverse student bodies.Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780190886547
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
Still, American moms of the post-Kennedy era will recognize—and even admire—themselves here.
A memoir of a woman in progress, this volume describes the 20 years spent raising two sons to be sensitive, responsible, independent—and, hopefully, to pick up their socks.
"Do you mistake me for June Cleaver?'' says Blakely (Wake Me When It's Over, 1989) with heavy irony to a member of the adolescent male pack that moved in and out of her house chomping on Oreos as her sons were growing up. Not a chance. In these reflections, Blakely often mirrors the experiences of middle-class women who were reinventing themselves and their roles during the feminist wave of the 1970s and '80s. Married, working first simply to bring in money and then to build a career (as a writer and lecturer), divorced, strategizing as a single mother (never kite checks on the grocer, advised a more experienced friend), Blakely early on refuses to accept the burden that mothers are solely responsible for the behavior of their children. "Even if I had managed to prevent my sons' exposure to sexist or violent images at home, I could not have prevented encounters [in]...locker rooms...movies...newsstands that displayed women as cheesecake every day,'' she says. Among the best chapters is the dramatic recounting of Blakely's own mother's metaphorical shock treatments at the hands of the psychiatric establishment as she sought help for her manic-depressive son, Blakely's brother. Also thought-provoking are telling discussions of the economic and societal obstacles facing single (or would-be-single) mothers and surprisingly empathetic observations about the surge of physical power in the adolescent male. Yet Blakely frequently refers to her sons as "jocks,'' to many, a term as derogatory as "airheads'' would be for daughters. Parallel to that, she seems to regard sports as a male prerogative—a serious lapse of the feminist consciousness she eloquently espouses.
Still, American moms of the post-Kennedy era will recognize—and even admire—themselves here.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56512-052-3
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A multivocal treatment well suited to the complex and dappled life of one of America's premier modern poets. Members of Bishop's wide circle of friends from literature and the arts (among them John Ashbery, Robert Giroux, Helen Muchnic, Anne Stevenson, Ned Rorem, and James Laughlin) recall with eloquence the poet's intelligence, her reserve, her anxiety, and her peculiar intensity through the stages and stories of her accomplished and troubled life. Born to a mentally ill mother and a father who died when she was eight months old, Bishop (19111979) spent her early years living with family members in Worcester, Boston, and Great Village, Mass. Recollections by her childhood friends reveal a very intelligent but odd personality—shy, and often embarrassed or pained by common experiences. Several contributors comment, however, on the order, discipline, and companionship she found at the Walnut Hill School between 1927 and '30; there she began to write plays, short stories, book reviews, and poetry for the school's magazine. From her Vassar days, Bishop is remembered for her strong mind, arch wit, sometimes taciturn demeanor, and her talent for writing. With Mary McCarthy and others, she launched the alternative literary magazine Con Spirito, which created a sensation on campus and brought her to the notice of the Ivy League literati of the time, eventually yielding an introduction to poet Marianne Moore. After graduating from college, Bishop traveled to New York, Europe, Key West, and Rio de Janeiro, and through several lesbian love relationships, the most sustained of which with Lota de Macedo Soares. Friends recall these adult years as difficult, sometimes drunken, but also rewarding for Bishop as a person and a poet. After her lover's death in 1967, Bishop's life took shape around a series of teaching appointments at the University of Washington, Harvard, and finally New York University. Although a few of Fountain's (English dept. chairman at Miss Porter's School) and Brazeau's (Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, 1983) transitions push too hard, the portrait of the poet this oral biography creates is, finally, absorbing and at times beautiful and graced with artfulness.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87023-936-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
