Reminiscing about sex ed always brings a smile to my face. Our first dose of it was in the fifth grade, so we must have been 9 or 10. We were separated from the girls and shown a movie, which must have been totally uninformative, since I don’t remember anything at all about it. Then our teacher (conveniently, there were two female teachers and two male teachers in the 5th grade, so the boys went with the two male teachers) gave us a brief but inspiring exhortation not to “get a girl in trouble”. Now, this was the 1970s, before kids started having sex in kindergarten, so we had no freaking idea what he was talking about. Get a girl in trouble? How, by giving her cigarettes or something? And this has to do with sex, how?
Then he passed out slips of paper on which we were to write any questions we had for him, to be answered in the presence of the class. I was going to ask how you know the difference between urination and ejaculation, but when I noticed that nobody else was putting a slip in the shoebox, I chickened out. I never did find out the difference
I’m only bitter about one thing: they always talked about wet dreams in sex ed, but I’m still waiting for mine.
As soon as the ladies were gone, the teacher got kinda anxious and his eyes darted around a lot. We all got in a circle and he sorta half-whispered to us.
He said, “Okay, listen guys. These ladies these days are catching up to us, even in math and science. You are our future and you’ve got to figure out how to repress them like we used to. If you don’t, they’ll rule over you by the time you are grown up and you won’t be able to leave the house without expressed written consent from a woman…”
This went on for awhile, then the ladies returned and we got back to business, only this time we had our new agenda. Excellent…
hmm…my first sex ed. class was in a Montessori school. Basically telling us how babies are made and born. The boys were not separated from the group. Later, in 5th-6th, my science teacher(this was not the Montessori school anymore) gave us classes once a week about health, self esteem, and sex ed. The boys were not send to another room. I remember once, a woman came by to explain menstruation. She was a sales representative of some company of female hygiene products. The girls received a package with a booklet about menstruation, sanitary pads, and tampoons. The boys only received a package of Kleenex. The woman said it was to clean themselves after they sweated.
Fast foward 5 years, to 11th grade at a public high school. We didn’t have a sex ed. class. If you took a course called Human Ecology, one semester would be totally devoted to human reproduction. If you took Biology, only a third of a semester was separated for that instruction. I was in Biology. Again, the boys were not separated. The course of sex ed. included:
1 hour talking about the male reproductive system
Almost a month talking about the female reproductive system, complete with about a week discussing all the aspects of menstrual cycle.
2 hours telling us about the different contraceptives.
3 hours preaching decision making. At this point I just slept through the class.
1 hour saying the different parts of the intercourse. (Arousal, Climax/orgasm, and calming down)
That was all. No mention of homosexuality. No mention of anything else.
But there is more. If your took a course called responsible maternity/paternity, part of it included talking about reproduction (duh!). I had to take it, and again boys were included in the discussion. In fact, since there were only 2 guys in the group, each time the teacher(female) talked about feminine things, she would look the guys in the eyes. We had to do oral reports about STDs and contraceptives. And carry a robotic baby, even the guys had to do that.
Ohh… Ouchy… Oh yeah, that had me crossing my legs and flinching. Almost the same response I get when one of my sisters mentions “Stainless-steal tampon applicators” Oh ouch.
I should add that along with reading Penthouse Forum, I also learned quite a bit from reading my mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves which had several chapters that were very - ahem - “educational.” (Now that I think about it, it’s probably largely responsible for my preference for intelligent, unshaved women who eschew makeup.)
I can remember wondering frequently if it annoyed the feminist authors no end that teenage boys were using their health encyclopedia as wank material.
(Wishing they had a devilish smilie.)
OK - seriously now. I was being trite above, but I did learn quite a bit from that book, even if I was reading it one handed. And I think my mom was happier that I read that than fictional accounts of “real life” perversions penned by ghost writers for a skin mag.
(My dad could care less. The sum total of his advice to me is: “It’s OK to wank,” “stay away from skinny women,” “bathe and shave daily,” and “feed 'em lotsa rum and fruit juice.”)
I think the real problem with public school sex education is that they try and make it as non-stimulating as possible. No wonder it’s so ineffective, and the diagrams are so incomprehensible! The ones in OBO were quite explicit.
At the age of 14, I could name all the parts of the female external gentalia, and three years later, when I finally encountered the real thing, I could actually identify them. (She didn’t even know the names!)
I don’t remember the first sex-ed I ever had, though I know that through a good part of elementary school it was always discussed in increased detail every year (i.e. grade one - where your bathing suit goes is the no-touch zone, etc.). I remember grade six especially, cuz that was the year I got my period, and I guess I was paying more attention to the sex ed portion of class than I used to. We had a good teacher who was quite honest and up front about everything. The videos were a bit cheesy, but she always went over them and explained the real side them. We talked about contraceptives and STDs as well as anatomy, pregnancy, menstruation and so on (though I don’t remember any mention of homosexuality, I wouldn’t be surprised if she DID mention it). At the end of each class we were all required to write out a question (anonymously) for her to answer the next time. If you didn’t have a quesion, you could just write that down, instead, but EVERYONE handed in a paper, so on one would be embarassed.
In highschool I had another very open, very upfront teacher who discussed EVERY detail of EVERYTHING, right down to how painful it can be to have sex the first time. I don’t think she missed a single thing. I even remember seeing diagrams of some of the basic positions (mind you, I had her twice - grade 8 and 11, so these diagrams were likely in the later year!). She had, in her classroom, pill packages, spermicide (which she was not afraid to use as hand lotion, male and female condoms, diaphragms, that clear plastic model of a uterus, in which she showed the application of each item. We laughed and joked a lot about her and that class, but quite honestly, it was pretty good sex ed.
Geez, mnemosyne, where did you go to school? I’m from South Carolina, and we weren’t allowed to even mention any form of birth control in our sex ed classes–the pages were even ripped from our book. I know I’m from the backwards south, with our powered headache medicines, but I thought this kind of lesson plan was fairly consistent throughout the country. Unless you’re not American, in which case, I guess you have an excuse.
ThisYearsGirl, I happened to be in S.C. during my 8th grade year. Condoms were passed around and the teacher sprayed the foam all over her hands. We also discussed all of the slang terms for everything. The sex-ed teacher was pregnant, and her husband was a doctor, so she new what she was talking about. Pretty much everything was discussed.
I attended Catholic school from 5th through 12th grade.
We had Co-ed classes taught mostly by the guidance councelor (a nun). The classes consisted of telling how men made sperm and how women made eggs and then discussing how the baby forms. Each year we went into more and more detail about how the baby developed. I wasn’t untill 11th grade that we were told how to get a sperm cell to an egg cell.
But now thanks to False_God I will know how to teach my children (if I ever have them) about sex.
NO WAY!!! In 95, I was a freshman and the teacher wasn’t allowed to answer a question a girl had about condoms. Small wonder twenty-five girls in my graduating class are already pregnant and/or have a child.
Jeeze, where was that? I was at Lang Middle School in Mt. Pleasant, near Charleston. I live in Ohio, I was visiting my dad for a year. The SC class was actually a little more graphic than the classes I had up here. In ths class in S.C. the urban ledgend came true, a girl asked if it was sweet because of the sugar content. I don’t remeber the teacher’s answer, but it was funny. The teachers there weren’t repressed or anything. In the computer class a kid was having a problem with his computer (the computers there were WAAAAAAAY behind what we had in Ohio, they didn’t have ANY T1s or much of a network at all). Oh yeah, back to the story. The kid said “I can’t make my thingee come up!” and the teacher made the obvious joke.
In sixth grade (1984), we had a few videos and lectures, in which we learned about everything except sex. We learned about changing voices, acne, armpit and pubic hair (I was already a pizza-faced baritone with hairy nads by third grade, so this was a big help :rolleyes: ), not to mention penis and testicle growth and wet dreams. They explained that a baby is produced when a sperm and egg join together, then went into great detail about how the fetus develops. But they never explained the one crucial detail: How did the sperm get to the egg in the first place?
Fortunately, my parents had EYAWTKAS… BWATA (which I later came to doubt the reliability of, but at least it explained the basic mechanics), Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Making Love, and extremely detailed book from the 70’s by Patricia Raley (I think). Penthouse and Cinemax filled in the rest of the details.
Then in tenth grade we had a Biology teacher who was obsessed with teaching about HIV and AIDS. We spent so much of the school year on it that our scores on the Biology Achievement tests were about 100 points lower than the other classes’.
I’m from (well, not “from”–but I lived in) Greenville, home of Bob Jones University. Maybe that was it then, but I don’t recall them ever having a huge amount of political power.
Awhile ago, Wildest Bill did a thread (which I can’t seem to find and link to–sorry) bitching about a group who wanted to teach about birth control in sex ed classes, so I guess I always assumed the abstinence only thing was a universal lesson plan. Maybe that’s why all the talk of condoms and spermicide in this thread blows my mind.
I was in Québec for grades 1-3, and 7-11, and in Lahr, Germany for grade 4-6, on a Canadian military base. I’m a pseudo-brat (daughter of DND-hired civilian teacher). And my family was never afraid to discuss any of this kind of stuff anyways.
