Sounds familiar to me. Didn’t have a name that made you think of Tacos, did he?
Don’t want to mention Mr Shreddedorangecheese by name?
I had one semester, in High School, & an utter incomprehensible sex ed in grade school.
1970s.
Wisconsin.
Did not have Health as a regular class. A couple of times boys and girls were separated to watch films on the body, that was it. In 7th grade we had a one week class in PE, again gender specific, for sex ed. Most embarrassing week of my life.
I went to school in the dark ages, when That Sort Of Thing was your parents’ job, though I suspect some basic biology must have been taught in General Science in the early secondary years (ages 11-13), even if I have no recollection of it. Assorted health and relationship “messages” undoubtedly came up as side topics in other formal subjects, though.
When it comes to sex education, it’s taken until quite recently for government in the UK to do much more than issue general guidelines, and otherwise leave it up to schools, allowing parents to withdraw their child from those lessons. Nowadays it is an element in the National Curriculum, and there’s currently a high old row about one teacher’s approach:
I went to a Catholic elementary school from 1960-68. The closest we came to “health” class was the day the girls went with the female teachers and the boys went with the priests and they gave us an extremely sanitized hour of sex education. I vaguely recall drawing cells in science class one year. And we didn’t have PE at all - our playground was the church parking lot - good times…
1962-63 school year was sixth grade for me. One semester we had Health and First Aid instead of study hall. A significant plus was passing the term with 90% (A- or higher) was accepted by my scoutmaster for earning the First Aid merit badge. It was both interesting and practical.
My health classes in eighth through tenth grades were under the tutelage of the varsity basketball coach - in central Indiana, with a rated, winning team for the first two times in school history. In the 8th grade, he did show up and teach out of the text book. The tests were weekly multiple choice questions from the book, which we could use to verify our answers. Some guys still didn’t make an A from him. In 9th grade, I swear we saw every movie the school library had in stock, and a few from the public library as well. He’d come in, start the movie, leave, and reappear about two minutes before the bell rang so he could dismiss us. In the eighth and ninth grades, we swapped off P.E. and health every six weeks, but in the tenth we had the health class all year. That year he did show up until December and again after March. He also had a student teacher, so we were required to actually do some work that year.
I don’t remember well one way or the other (I matriculated from 8th grade in 1963). We might have had a Health module here and there, but it would have been the same teacher as everything else, and nothing sticks out in my mind. In the primary grades I remember the teacher checking to see if our hands and nails were clean, which presumably was for health reasons, but I don’t remember any lessons about it. I think in those days “health” was a topic for adults, and children were supposed to do what they were told without understanding why.
We did have 1/2 a year of Health class in my sophomore (10th grade) year of high school. All I remember was that there was no sex education, which I was looking forward to.
We had a Health unit in 5th grade which covered the basics of menstruation. I remember my mom came in that day because she was curious, never having had formal academic instruction in the subject herself. Then there was more detail in 8th grade, and a LOT more detail in 10th grade, where we went into STDs, more substantive reproductive biology, contraception, etc.
My wise-guy boyfriend apparently raised his hand in class to answer the question “when does masturbation become a problem?” with “when it gets out of hand!”