Diversity

When I first read the topic questions for this blog, I thought to myself, “Well, this is going to be hard, I haven’t dealt with very much diversity at all.” When I was thinking this, all I was thinking about in terms of diversity was the difference between races and color of people. A very large majority of the people that I went to school with, from elementary school until high school, were white. Finally, the more and more I thought about it, I realized that I have been surrounded by different kinds of diversity throughout my life that I never even realized. The first kind of diversity that I thought of was an obvious one – gender. I went to a regular public high school with just as many boys as there were girls; so needless to say, there was plenty of diversity in that aspect. Then I thought about it more in depth than I had before and thought about how other kinds of diversity have existed in my life before. For example, I have a friend from back home that is gay, which obviously has to do with sexual orientation. I never really thought of him as a form of diversity in my life because I was just so used to him being around and it seemed so normal for me to be around him that diversity was never in my mind. I never thought until now about how different sexual orientations and even different genders do make people so diverse and different from each other. Even things that sometimes are, or sometimes aren’t, important to certain people can be diversity, such as heritages or ancestors. One of my best friends is one quarter Japanese and to me, she is just the same as I am. She doesn’t look very Japanese so I don’t think of her as Japanese when I see her. Another large diversity that I never considered to be diversity is the socio-economic standings of different people and different families. People all around the world have a large array of incomes and come from a variety of different classes.

I think that teaching diversity as a subject in school is a very good idea. I believe that all children should learn very early in life that diversity does exist in our world, and not only that, but they also need to learn the different types of diversity and what each kind of diversity means or represents.

I believe that teaching diverse students in the same classroom is very effective to help all of the children learn first hand about diversity and about the different kinds of people that live in this world. I believe that as a whole, diversity is different people that come from all walks of life and have different background and different moral beliefs. If diverse children are all taught in the same classroom, it will give all the children the chance to interact with different children that all have different stories to tell and maybe different traditions to share. I think that diversity should be a very important subject in education today.