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The editor of Teaching Tolerance writes on critics' objections to the magazine's treatment of gay and lesbian issues

The editor of Teaching Tolerance writes on music education.

I was putting my 6-year-old son to bed recently when he excitedly announced that he was going to be in the school play. “Peter Pan,” he said.

Children can learn a thing or two from pets. They learn responsibility through feeding and caring for their furry friends. They learn about loss when their pets die and they partake in their first funeral rites.

I wiggle in my desk chair, softly swiveling it ever so gently back and forth, and fidget with my pen. I am a student in my own classroom. At the front of the room stands a teacher in my place. To outside observers the girl dressed in flip flops and jeans pointing at things projected to the white board could not possibly be in charge—if anything they might mistake her as an unruly student who escaped from the confines of her desk.

I am a good driver. You’d never know it, given the theatrics of the backseat drivers in my vehicle, whose sudden gasps and quick grasps for the dashboard denote a lack of confidence in my skills. This drama is alternately amusing, annoying and unnecessary. I'm proud to say that, for the most part, my instinctive go-to practice of "when in doubt, step on the gas" has never let me down.

A common misperception in many early childhood environments is the idea that, as one teacher told me, “There’s no diversity in my classroom.” She, and many others, think that a focus on diversity is unnecessary in an apparently homogeneous classroom.

There are some new labels kids have created for one another since I was in school. When I grew up, there were no skaters or noobs. No one was goth or emo. In my day, kids who wore collared shirts and madras were preppy. Kids who smoked cigarettes and listened to Led Zeppelin were burnouts. Jocks were still jocks, although the jocks of my youth were all-inclusive. Today, they separate themselves by sport.

When I was studying to be a teacher, I had to write a philosophy of education. This essay was to explain what I believed about kids and the role teachers and education played in their lives. I wrote that all kids could learn, that they all deserved equal access to inspired teaching and that my role was to meet them wherever they were and serve them in the way that best met their needs.Although I still believe those things are true, I've come to realize that my teaching is driven more by a different philosophy than the one I wrote about.

Three girls take part in a common kindergarten classroom interaction—planning what they’ll play during morning recess. Recess is a time when children participate in unrestricted free play with their peers. The games to be played–and the players—are constantly on the minds of the 5- and 6-year-olds, especially during cleanup. One of the girls in the group offers the following suggestion, “How about only people wearing skirts are cats?”