Thank you Mrs. Mullins...

First off, I want to give a shout out to my newest follower, Jenn.  She is the first of my students to find me in the blogosphere. If you read Jen’s profile she says something about being an ordinary mom. I have to take issue with that since I don’t know too many moms who have gone through the fire academy and know how to deal with firefighters, climbing ladders, or how to run with 200 feet of hose. Welcome to the horror of it all Jenn.

Speaking of students, I had an interesting experience today. It was one of those things that has no choice but to make you review your own past and compare it to a current situation.  I should start by saying that I went a smarty smarty goody goody school back in the 80’s. You had to test into the school in the fourth grade and from that point on no one entered your class. Students left of course, but from the first day of fourth grade you were stuck with the same hundred students as a class. 

It was a bold educational system designed to meet educational requirements in combination with classical techniques and extremely challenging work.  They encouraged competition with each other and the drive for personal and group achievement. We were dominators in both academic and sport competitions.  One of my most memorable tests was in Civics. Our final exam for that class was to define the historical significance for every item/lyric of We Didn’t Start the Fire by Billy Joel.  Just my luck the song came out that year. I would challenge anyone reading to give it a shot and see what they recall or even know about.

My school was progressive in every area except one…Sexual Education. One week of each year between 5^th and 8^th Grades we had Mrs. Mullins. She resembled any heavy set polyester clad grandmother you know with a curly gray roller set and photo-gray glasses. Most of what she said was to scare us into not having sex. Things like “No heavy petting girls because he probably pet your dog on the way into the house…that would be disgusting and you could get an infection and die.” Another gem would be, “If you fool before you get married you could get one of a variety of venereal diseases, have your penis rot off…and die.” 

Why did I tell you all that? For this… Even though we were preached to about abstinence, we were still correctly taught about our changing bodies. We were never allowed to use slang and Mrs. Mullins took her anatomy/physiology lessons and question answering very seriously.  Fast forward a decade or so in education and you have the issue I encountered today…subbing in for a reproductive lecture that included two girls who didn’t know they had any anatomy between their legs other than a vagina . That’s correct ladies and gentlemen, they had no clue.  One girl, a mother of two no less, was so shocked that she stood up and exclaimed, “You mean I have a vulva?! All of this (insert circling hand motion) isn’t a vagina?!” Sadly this is not the first time this type of thing has happened.

As a post secondary instructor I have to ask, when did things get so screwed up in schools that two of our students, from two different schools, were never given the knowledge of their own body parts and how they work?  After a good laugh, and some further discussion, it was revealed that no one had a quality sexual education program at their schools. What they did have was usually performed by the PE coach in a locker room telling them not to let boys touch them or how boys should wear condoms. Not how to put a condom on, just that it should happen. 

I realize we live in a society that still discusses seeing a covered nipple on television several years ago, but are we so naively focused on teaching abstinence that we stopped educating our kids? I don’t want to get into the classic SexEd debate about where responsibility rests for the education to happen. The point is…it isn’t happening at all. 

Teen pregnancy is on the rise and worse it is being glamorized. Last year more than 20 high schools in the nation had to close down because of the number of students out with gonorrhea. We even had a local school close down a few years ago for the same reason. Herpes is at an all time high among 18-24 year olds. The worst news yet, condom use is at an all time low in that same age category.  HIV and AIDS were galvanizing topics one way of another not so long ago. Today what people marched for is considered a joke and no worse than the flu. 

I just want to send this out to the void…In today's society kids are exposed to messages of hyper-sexuality you probably never had to deal with. If you love your kids and you want to save their lives, stop preaching and make sure they get a thorough sexual education.You owe it to them. As for you Mrs. Mullins, before I got happily unmarried I fooled around A LOT (nearly mathematically impossible) and I never got so much as a crab, my penis hasn’t rotted off…and I didn’t die!