Reflections of a Puberty Teacher
What’s a Puberty Teacher To Do?
So much of what I do is really fun and/or funny. Yes, it’s important and serious and intense as well, but so often sex education is just taken way too seriously. It’s about our relationships and our bodies, and those things are super messy. And if we can’t laugh at the messiness then why would anyone want to teach and why would anyone want to learn about any of this stuff? I had a few laugh out loud experiences this year - some in the classroom and some while prepping for lessons. Here are some that I took the time to jot down!
Well, hello circumcised and uncircumcised penises (penes?)
There I am, at the local FedX store a couple days before I’m to teach anatomy and reproduction at a local private school. I slip my thumb drive into the console, hit copy, and out prints a poster-sized image of male anatomy. Did you catch that it was poster-sized? To add insult to injury, it doesn’t just pop out quickly facedown, on a horizontal tray, where no one can really see it. It prints, line by line, vertically, facing outward into the entire store. I couldn’t stop the thing mid-way because I needed the prints, but it was also so huge that I couldn’t block the print with my body. I looked around, and luckily no young children were in the store, so nobody gave me a talking to. I apologized to the staff and they said no worries, that the other day an artist was printing nudes for a studio class they were teaching. Well, who knew that the local print shop was such a hotbed for lessons on human anatomy.
Someone’s going to get quite a surprise today!
I’m in the school’s supply room, making an activity for the students in my seventh grade sex ed class, so they can compare and contrast the similarities and differences among sex, insemination and IVF. To accomplish this, I have each of the twelve steps of the fertilization process listed out on small slips of paper, color coded by type of fertilization (white=sex, yellow=insemination, green=IVF). The students will have to put the pieces of paper in the correct order, starting with egg and sperm cells and ending with a pregnancy. While cutting out the pieces of paper, my sleeve kept accidentally brushing them off the counter. Some landed on the floor where I could easily spot and retrieve them, but others fluttered onto the shelves below. Some of these slips, I never found. I kept imagining a teacher later in the day (long after I was gone), innocently reaching onto the shelf for some sticky notes, and along with the intended supplies, receiving what looked like a fortune from a fortune cookie. I kept imagining them excited to read what their fortune brought, only to read “at puberty the testicles produce sperm” or “the egg and sperm can join together in the fallopian tube.”
Tossing about The Big P
Can we talk about sexual pleasure with students; if so, at what age? If at an appropriate age, how? Well, here was a perfect example. I gave a chat to a group of 5th graders about how sexual intercourse works to create a pregnancy, but I didn’t mention reasons other than making a baby, as to why someone would want to have sex. “A student raised their hand, and asked…If a tampon and the penis goes into the same place, does putting a tampon in feel the same as having sex?” What a brave kiddo to ask what so many probably also wanted to know. And what a great opportunity it could have been, to talk about why people have sex (ahem…it can feel good) and how this is very different than using a tampon.
The Epididymis Cinches the Deal
There is no better place to begin a game of Jeopardy with a group of seventh graders, than with the word epididymis. Let me explain. To determine which of the three teams in my 7th grade sex ed class went first, the students had to spell epididymis. Whichever group got more letters correct got to pick the first category and $ amount (e.g. periods for $300, internal male reproductive system for $100); and if there was a tie, it went to the team that could explain the function of said body part. I think we made Alex Trebek proud.