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An Ames elementary school principal expressed a desire for teachers to use the phrase “boys and girls” less in school and rather be more inclusive in a recent email sent to staff. A person called Lisa Clayberg, who serves as principal at Meeker Elementary, sent the staff bulletin on Aug. 30.

She wrote:

“Personally, I am working on eliminating the phrase ‘you guys’ from my speech as it is a gendered term. It’s a long-standing habit of mine and requires me to be very aware. I would love for you to point out to me when you notice me saying it.”

Then Clayberg expressed this concern…

“As I’ve been walking through the wings, I’m hearing a lot of ‘boys and girls’ as phrasing that is happening to address the classroom, lining up for different things and as restroom passes.”

Clayberg then recommends an article for “some different ideas of inclusive phrases to use.”

The article she shared claims that a study completed in a preschool setting in 2010 by Penn State researchers revealed kids in a “gendered-language group” were less likely to play with children of the opposite sex and more likely to invoke gender stereotypes relative to the “gender-neutral language group.”

Rather than “boys and girls” or “ladies and gentlemen” or “you guys,” the article suggests:

Readers
Scientists
Citizens
Mathematicians
Little Einsteins
Possums
Cool Cats and Kittens
Scholars
Y’all
All y’all
Crew
Earthlings
Folks
People
Peeps
Peepadoodles
Everyone
Friends
Mateys
Mates
Friends
Campers
Pals
Team
Epic Humans
Awesome Humans

It then suggests avoiding words that end in -man or -woman. It suggests saying “parent” instead of mother or father, “astronaut” instead of spaceman, “postal worker” instead of postman, “member of Congress” instead of Congresswoman and “server” instead of waitress.

3 COMMENTS

  1. By insisting teachers replace the troubling descriptors “boys” and “girls” with better terms like “possums” we are able to move more quickly toward the solution to the problem we didn’t bother to describe. Truly visionary leaders simply do not wait for problems to become known before they propose insightful solutions!

    Unfortunately this is the sort of brilliance we are seeing from graduates of Iowa State University’s School of Education. A recent FOIA produced the graduate school’s curriculum for their certificate in “Social Justice” which is loaded with this indoctrinating nonsense. More on that later.

    But the school is out of control with influential professors like Swowell and Dyches serving the naive students kool-aide every day, and requiring they internalize it in order to graduate. A very bad use of our tax dollars.

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