Keeping Therapists in Business for Years to Come

Our school does not have a health class per se at the Middle School. Things that are typically found in a Middle school health class show up in other areas of the curriculum such as biology class.

Every day we have a forty-five minute period called Advisory. This time gets used for a wide variety of things such as team building, independent reading, and the eighth-grade Christmas party. This winter, we have been having an in-depth unit on dating, the human body and –yes- sex. Because we wanted the kids to feel as comfortable as possible, we separated our students into a room full of boys and a room full of girls for this unit.

I’ve never taught this subject material and it has been thirty years since I sat in the back of Mr. Talsma’s eighth-grade classroom in Kalamazoo Michigan watching a low-budget black and white documentary that left me with more questions than answers. (Just for the record, Mr. Talsma was seventy, a retired colonel, and had really bushy eyebrows.)

This past week, we watched a great documentary from the BBC. It was very well done and had information that I wish I had when I was thirteen.
There was one section of the movie though that went into a little bit more detail about the female body than we thought the boys need to know, so we had plans to fast-forward over that section in the boys’ classroom. Likewise, we had a small section of the movie that dealt with the male anatomy that had more information than the girls needed to know at this time.

The teacher who was in with the girls was planning on fast-forwarding over that section. She knew where that clip started. She even knew how much she was supposed to skip ahead. But somehow she got distracted. She looked up from her seat in the back of the room, realized the section had started to play, and made a mad dash for the DVD player in the front of the classroom. She was frazzled and apologetic. She was also too late.

A few minutes later thirty-five very giggly girls poured out of room 420. In the middle of the crowd was Justina who is overly demonstrative and very funny to begin with. She dramatically stopped in the middle of the flow of girls, threw the back of hand against her forehead, pretended to look faint, and cried out “Scarred! Scarred for life!”

That’s right Justina, boys are gross and icky. The further you stay away from them, the better off you’ll be.

-Jack

We had the boys write down their questions at the end of the documentary and submit them. The other two male teachers and I formed a three-person panel. I really, really wish that I could share with you some of the questions the boys asked, but I am afraid that this would fall outside of the scope of what this blog is set up to handle.

The questions would have made a retired colonel blush.