Sexual Orientation in The Classroom

My most pointed memory and reaction to GLBT issues in the high school classroom actually happened shortly after I went to college.  I hated English in high school, and many of my English teachers.  But my junior year I had a teacher I really liked.  She not only told us she was going to treat us like adults, but actually did.  She also gave us eye opening, higher level reading.  Farewell to Arms was way beyond anything I had read before, and I loved it.  At the time I didn't realize she was gay.  I never really put much though to it, and it wouldn't have mattered if I had known.  Fast forward back to college.  Taking the train, talking to old classmates I found out she had left under pressure.  One student's mother really didn't like the teacher and had berated her over some offensive language in one of the books in the list for summer reading.  Then a student came out and said that the teacher had flirted/propositioned her.  The teacher was suspended and the witch hunt really began.  I feel like it was an attack on the teacher's way of life and how she did treat us more like adults than children.  in the end the school found out that the claims made against the teacher were false, and tried to bring the teacher back.  She told them to pound sand and went off on her own way.  The reason this sticks out in my mind is that I don't remember having many if any GLBT conversation in high school.  There was some type of diversity club, but nothing was ever discussed outside of that.  So now my only memory of how GLBT is treated at my old school is it's either not discussed or a negative. That's not how I want my classroom and school to be.  We may not agree with the students' way of life, but we should still be accepting.        

Intelligence

It seems like there are two opposing forces in the world of intelligence today.  One side is interested in the output from the person, how they react to the world, and can they function in it.  And the other side is looking for each individual process in the brain.  Even though there is an overlap of the two there are also many differences.  In Gardner's article he omits intelligences that seen as socially important as others.  but these individual intelligences that aren't as important might build to others that are.  I think the best way to truly discover the different intelligences is from the ground up.  Find as many isolated intelligences as possible, then build them to see how they effect each other.  The only problem is this means you need to isolate each part of the brain, or shut off all others.  Only by systematically going through the brain can you really discover each individual intelligence and where it is located in the brain.  But outside observations and even observations that scan the brain aren't sufficient because they don't allow for enough of a control.  There are too many factors that can be overlooked, and even if you see part of the brain light up, there might be a secondary point that is also important, but isn't as busy.  So I feel like until this is done there will be more debate than consensus on what defines intelligence and how it can be used to rack and stack students in the classroom.  Because that is what measuring intelligence is about.  It's about projecting which students should be challenged in what areas then  let off in others.