Surely not everyone in the town shuns your son for an interest in musical theater. If that was the case there would be no musical theater group.
Have you ever watched the television show Glee? I read this in the Wikipedia article: Michele plays Rachel Berry, talented star of the glee club who is often bullied by the Cheerios and football players.[35] Monteith plays Finn Hudson, star quarterback of the school's football team who risks alienation by his friends to join the glee club.
My son and some of the older kids in my son's musical theater group watch this show because they see the humor in the stereotypes. What they see in that show is similar to what they see in our stereotypical small football obsessed town. Our public school doesn't do musical theater but the kids in band are bullied by the sports kids and adults ignore it.
When my son says he is shunned, he is exaggerating only a little. Adults that don't know him will ask him what sports he plays and when he says that he doesn't do sports, he does musical theater, he just gets a funny look and an "Oh" and that is the end of the conversation, but when they ask the sports kids the same questions, they are treated much differently. Sports kids hear him talking like a very articulate adult to me at a local restaurant and talk about him being "gay" when he is not.
I talked to a college age friend of my son's in the group and he said he found it easier to just not tell people that he does musical theater. He thinks that some people here think if you are a boy in musical theater you have to be gay and he is not and my son is not. My son has friends but they are all in this musical theater group or are former members of the group. He is sad that there is no one here that shares his academic interests, but he has found friends that share his interests online.
For us, online learning is very important and when I asked my son if he thought he needed teachers, he used the following analogy. I don't remember exactly what he said but it was something like if he were a character in a video game, his character would require developers or designers but he has been audodidactic since birth. He thinks I worry too much about this and says we don't have to worry about an "early release date" causing his character to not be the best it could be because he is a "work in progress" and he always will be. I have no doubt that he will be lifelong learner.
Because he has all this wonderful information available to him online, he found that he could learn what he needed to learn, without much help from me, and no help at all from teachers in public school who believed their job was to make him color in the lines and stifle his curiosity and fit in when he couldn't, forcing us to find an alternative education. By the way, my friend is a special ed teacher at our public school and she got so tired of fighting the teachers' attitudes and getting no support for trying to do the right thing for the kids that she found another job. It is sad. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.
My husband, a Vietnam vet, who knows a lot about being shunned
from personal experience, sees that we don't fit in here, but we can't move because of family responsibilities. He wondered if it might have something to do with the dancing in musical theater because our community is also very religious. I don't know, but when my son and I visit a church that my mother went to for years, they look at us like we don't belong there and only a few of them speak to us. When I talked my son into trying another church we listened to the preacher say that migraine headaches and chronic pain and high blood pressure are caused by holding a grudge and if we would just forgive whoever we are so mad at we will be cured.
