Family trees

I have, in the space of one week, gotten to use family trees to teach different things in all of my English classes. In the 5^th grade, we were doing the topic “male and female words”: things like brother & sister, mother & father, uncle & aunt. I was asking if they knew any other words that complemented each other, one male and one female. One student offered “boy & girl,” which I put on the chalkboard. Another said “doctor & nurse,” which I was very excited about because it meant I could incorporate a little interdisciplinary action and bring in Life Skills. I hit the class with a quick “Could a man be a nurse? Could a woman be a doctor?” And the student nodded her head. I refrained from shouting “Or did I just totally challenge your assumptions about gender?”

In the combined 6^th & 7^th grades, the topic was step-relations, which I of course took to basically sing the theme song to The Brady Bunch, filling in locally appropriate names. “Here’s the story/of a man named Tsepang/who was something something etc. etc.”