No, I never had an assignment like that. And I actually took a child care course in high school. (I was a very sheltered fourteen and still at the “little kids are cute and I love babysitting” stage of adolescent girlhood. Sharing a classroom with actual teen mothers was a bit of a shock, although it is fair to say that I learned some things from that course that I probably would not have learned any other way, very few of them having to do with child care.)
We did the egg thing, circa 1983 maybe, but it was specifically in a child care class and not part of health or sex ed.
The child care class was one of the home ec electives, all females had to take at least one of them. :rolleyes:
I remember the STD slideshow. All the 11th grade boys had to go to the auditorium one morning and watch a public health dept slideshow of diseased penises and the occasional anus. The public health lady also lectured. And our teachers walked around making sure nobody was “sleeping” (ie no closed eyes). This was the one time my 20/200 vision came in really handy; I took my glasses off and all I could see were colorfull blobs on the screen.
The girls went that afternoon (right after lunch) and in addition to looking at diseased vaginas and female anuses they also penis slides and “childbirth gone wrong” slides.
I did the egg thing. It was part of a mandatory class. Most people had to carry the thing around for a month. A couple of friends and I said, “fuck that noise” so we scheduled to take the class during summer school and we only had to carry the egg around for a week.
I went to high school in the late 70s. Not only did we not do any of this, nobody then, as far as I can recall, had even HEARD of anything like this!
I went to an all-girl Catholic high school. We had to do the pretend marriage thing (it was part of our 12th grade religion class, which was required), and I also did a pretend baby thing (it was part of a child development class, which was an elective).
The funny thing about the pretend wedding thing is that we all got to be brides – it wasn’t like one of a pair was forced to pretend she was a man – so we all basically planned our gay weddings in our Catholic religion class. I “married” my best friend and we had a blast planning the wedding. My egg baby was not hers, though. :o
I put compulsory, but, technically, you could have written a 20-page report instead. Nobody ever did that.
Anyways, it was a part of the health class curriculum. We didn’t do the mariage thing–the point of the baby was to show you how hard it would be to be a single parent. The doll was an advanced device that had real crying schedules built in, including how you had to care for the baby when they happened, whether using the bottle, pascifier, feeding, or changing the diaper. (IT didn’t use real food–just magnets.) The school also offered a baby sitting service, with the assumption that, in real life, if you were still going to school, you had to have found someone to take care of your baby.
Incidentally, I was late to school the day after I got my baby, and brought it in to the daycare. The teacher was not in the room, and I needed to get to class, so I used the teacher’s device that shuts the baby off. (You didn’t think the school was actually taking care of 50 fake babies, did you?) The thing is, I suspect the teacher also used it, and thus, when she turned it back on for me at the end of the day, the baby did not come back on. So, for the rest of the time I had the baby, I had to do absolutely no work. I tried explaining to the teacher what I did, but she claimed she had the turn off device with her, and thus it would have impossible. Since she wouldn’t accept that she left it on her desk, I just accepted my 100% grade for only half the work at most.
Oh, and I’m 25. This was in the year 2000. In the year two thouSAND.
Is this done outside the US?
I’ve never encountered it in NZ or Oz, or the UK, but it might just have been the schools I went to.
Otara
Egg baby. We were all single parents, boys and girls, and it was compulsory. Completely useless, unless my theoretical progeny is fine being left in a locker all weekend. I wish we’d had the money for the pretend babies that cry and need to be rocked to sleep– those are actually pretty effective, from what I’ve observed. Then again, everyone in my grade was pretty realistic and no one got pregnant for at least five years after graduating (well, no one got pregnant and actually had a baby).
It must have been an elective at my high school, because I remember people with eggs n little baskets, but I never had one. At my school there were a fair number of assholes who deliberately tried to steal or harm the egg-babies.
Is that even possible? Don’t you need four years of a science to graduate according to the state? Or is it only 2? I also remember that in my high school, we had 80 minute block scheduling so electives and academics couldn’t really be interchanged.
In university, not high school - I took as a audit a class in teaching health ed [mainly because I was bored, and a friend needed to take it for his degree so I was there as amoral support]
They made the classes do it to get an idea of what their students would go through. I see that catalog now also has crack babies, fetal alcohol babies and shaken baby dolls. The marriage segment was pretty boring, get assigned a spouse, and then draw a gender based card for your possible profession and income [I got female, and part time minimum wage, so I seem to recall minimum wage in early 90s was $5.25? and hubby was blue collar trade, $12.00 full time.] We had to make a budget, and there was the deck of disasters and the whole deal. We budgeted for health insurance, birth control and as I remember $25 a week into savings for problems. We accelerated and did 5 minutes to a day of normal time so each 45 minute class was 9 days. Took us 3 weeks to simulate the entire project.
I think the simulations can be a good training tool, but as part of a better organized class. Sometimes it almost seems like the kids just do not understand what the teachers are trying to get through and they treat it like a giant joke.
33 years old - I did both in Home Ec. I can’t remember off-hand who my “wife” was but I remember the project. We had to go “grocery shopping” to learn a budget and our “child” was a plant. Ours survived, as did our marriage! All week.
Our school budget was much too low for that sort of thing.
Funny you should mention it though, I saw an episode of Everybody Hates Chris that dealt with this same subject just a few days ago.
This idea wasn’t yet invented when I was in high school - class of 1969. In any case, my class was so big that if they did it with flour Queens wouldn’t be able to have bread for a week afterwards.
My daughter did the egg thing.
Class of 2005, and no, we did not do this. I had to take a semester of health, but that was it. My last home ec class was in 6th grade.
We watched a really gross anti-smoking video, but the funniest video was the testicular self-exam video (this class was both guys and girls). It was made in the '70s and featured a teenage boy stepping out of the shower totally naked with no censoring whatsoever of the twig and berries. The other girls and I were fairly shocked. He then demonstrated how to examine his balls, and in the next scene we saw him entering the living room where his aging father was seated on the couch reading the newspaper. He then uttered the following line, with no preamble whatsoever:
“Dad, I found a lump on my nut.”
The whole class dissolved into gales of laughter.
Nope, never had anything like that. “Sex ed” consisted of a one hour lecture that I don’t remember.
My immediate thought: Bake the flour into bread and eat it. Then when the teacher berates you for failing the assignment look wide eyed and say “But isn’t that what you are supposed to do with babies?”
The girls in our health class were shown a breast self-exam video by the school nurse. Apparently the school did show a testicular self-exam video to boys in the past, but our health teacher (who also “taught” boys gym) didn’t want to deal with all of the sniggering and “that’s gay” comments so he stopped after he started teaching health. In his defence he was slightly less worse at teaching health than gym.
That’s sorta what my debate team captain did last year. After the simulation was over, she baked her “child” into cookies for the class. 