The linked article is eight pages long, but if High School Sexual Education is important to you, or if you just have a general interest in human sexuality from a sociological or academic perspective, you will enjoy all eight pages.
If you are generally not interested in such matters, but are a parent of teenagers (or soon to be teenager), I would love to hear your thoughts.
The high school mentioned in the article is not the high school I went to, but the teacher mentioned in the article taught at my high school while I was there.
At my high school he taught English Class, Religion Class, and the one semester Freshman Sexual Education Class.
His Sex Ed class may have been the most valuable experience of my entire high school education- and I say that as someone who enjoyed high school both academically and socially. I had MANY valuable experiences in high school and STILL they don’t measure up to this in terms of significant long term benefit.
Not only did I end up very well informed on the mechanics of sex, but I give GREAT CREDIT to this class that I have always been a good boyfriend in all of my romantic relationships. Communication was always a major emphasis as was dispelling personal shame and building healthy self-esteem. In all, I am a better person for having had this teacher.
The article focuses on a class that is available to Seniors as an elective but mentions that the same teacher teaches a Freshman year mandatory six session mini-course. The class I had with him, years ago at a different high school, was a one semester class for Freshmen. I’m sure the class I had was more in depth than his current “mini-course” for Freshman, though it seems the class he now teaches Seniors as an elective is more in-depth than the course I experienced.
Parents of teenagers:
If you read the entire article and decide you would NOT want your child to have a class like this in high school, I would be interested in hearing why not.
Or, if you read the article and would love for your child to have a class like this . . . well, I’ll certainly enjoy opening this Thread to read any praise anyone might have for a man who I still count to this day as the greatest teacher I ever had. LINK TO THE ARTICLE
It’s a bit more in-depth than the Health class I took almost 20 years, but New York state has included sex education like this as part of its required curriculum for a long time.
I think it is a good idea, get good detailed accurate information without the embarrassment of having the Talk with a parent. I do not see how education will make someone more inclined to run out and fuck, it will however let them know that there are options, and no guy has yet died from blue balls so you do not have to be pressured into anything.
Well, I’m a Unitarian Universalist and trained in how to teach the Our Whole Lives curriculum, so I pretty obviously agree with everything the Friends school is doing. I think it’s fantastic, and I really appreciate the two major points they make:
everything else we teach our kids, we say “you will need this in the future”, but for some reason, we think teaching sex ed means kids are going to run out and start screwing as soon as the bell rings.
the main place kids currently get sex ed is from porn. There is no choice between “sex ed” and “no sex ed”. It’s between “accurate, well thought out sex ed led by qualified teachers” or “random porn on the Internet”.
I read the article, then read through the comments, many of which (as is usual for the internet) indicated that the reader didn’t comprehend everything they read. I thought that Vernacchio’s class sounds like something that just about every teenager needs, as I remember being the “go to” person for sex ed type stuff among a lot of my peers*, including the lunchtime drawing diagrams on the napkin type stuff. Though well-informed via my own research (an ability to think critically while reading stuff in books and the internet helped on this one), I couldn’t give good answers for everything. That said, I didn’t actually lose my virginity until toward the end of high school for a number of reasons, including not being emotionally ready for sex until I was at least 16 or 17.
A lot of folks forget that sex education is, like any other area of education, there to build knowledge for later use. Some kids are going to be ready or interested in sex earlier than others, but that doesn’t mean that comprehensive education about sex and emotions and relationship dynamics will suddenly encourage students to get into relationships and sexual situations they aren’t ready for. IME, being better informed often means delaying behavior for a lot of folks, and for those who don’t wait, they know about how to make safer decisions regarding their bodies, relationships and sexual behavior.
*ETA: I went to private schools until college. The place I went to for K-8 didn’t do sex ed until high school, while the place I went to high school did sex ed in 8th grade. This was probably true for a lot of my peers, who began attending the school at 9th grade or later.
I was privileged to experience an extraordinary class with an exemplary educator, a man dedicated to nurturing the minds of young people and preparing them to be healthy informed adults. You feel I am unfortunate to have had this experience?
I described myself as having enjoyed high school both academically and socially, I said I had many valuable experiences in high school. This is a depressing commentary? It’s too bad about my school?
Are my other experiences devalued because I have held up one particular class as being exceptional? I had many dedicated, knowledgeable, talented teachers. The teacher I have written about here operated on such a level of excellence as to stand out even among the excellence of his peers. Did you read this article and think that this teacher was incompetent? Misguided? Devoid of caring for his students?
The man I knew is an exemplary teacher, a man of excellence that makes him praiseworthy even as compared to excellent colleagues.
What is depressing, what it too bad about students learning from a man such as this?
Or did the content of the linked article lead you to categorize the man as deficient or harmful? If so, please, inform me what you read that would lead you to this conclusion (because you surely wouldn’t post such disparaging remarks if not duly informed).
Wow. Really? Really?