I had several classes during different years, but what I recall from the first, in middle school during the mid 90s, was our teacher, Bunny Morris. She was memorizable because her son was nationally renowned pop artist Burton Morris.
She was fine. I recall that she started her class with the statement that “we are all sexual beings”, which sounded cheesey to me at the time but in hindsight seems like a very lucid mission statement for introducing preteens to sexual education.
I don’t remember the specifics, but I have great sexual health as an adult, so I suppose she did her job. It definitely wasn’t the shamey kind.
My sex ed was pretty thorough I feel. It was part of our health units in school from grades 5-9. In the earlier grades, the class would be split into boys and girls, but as I got older the entire class was part of the lesson.
Most sex ed classes involved: -Showing diagrams of female and male reproductive organs (we had to label each one which I hated doing) -Students being able to ask questions about sex or puberty -Learning about consent -STI and safe sex -Birth control methods
There was also a LGBT/gender portion that was added to the curriculum later on. It covered things like: -Differences between gender and sex -Sexual vs romantic attraction (also covered ace/Aro people I believe)
- What makes a person binary trans people or non binary -Defining different sexualities (gay, lesbians, bi, etc) -Differences between gender identity and gender expression
Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with how all this was taught to me.
Goddamn your school sounds awesome. Do you mind if I ask what era this was? I’m assuming more recent?
It was from like 2014-2019 I think? I’m really bad with years lol
Holy crap! That’s awesome. I had NO classes. Wish I had. At some point I checked out a book from the library and learned more than most of my classmates.
Over flowery words from my mother, as soon as I started asking.
I am at that stage as parent.
I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It’s a case of “here’s the medical term for $ReproductiveOrgan” so they know how to use it in formal discussion, “… but here’s what you may hear it reterred to as, and why” and many laughs are had.
Is it the best way? Probably not, but it’s a good giggle.
I can’t recall if it was on the second or third year of high school, but it was a single Biology class. The teacher was comfortable with it, but she was very clearly biased towards abstinence and insisted the only way to be 100% sure was to just not have sex.
Despite that, she still talked about basics of sex and genitalia, a few common STDs, and basic preventive measures, both for pregnancy and STDs - even if they weren’t particularly effective. Both coitus interruptus and sodomy (we had a loooot of fun repeating that word for a week or so) were mentioned as ways to avoid pregnancy, but condoms and IUDs were the real recommendations.
As a class, we weren’t too rowdy, though there was a kid or two that made a few too many jokes - and the teacher cut them off fairly quickly. I also recall she handled pamphlets with each of the methods talked during class and their approximate efficacy.
This was in 2005-ish and I’m Brazilian.
Also of note this was the second time, the first attempt happened in middle school (and in a different school altogether) and we had to do a presentation on STDs and the like. The teacher decided to cancel at the last minute because we were clearly too embarrassed to actually talk about the subject in front of our classmates.
The school took us on a field trip to the hospital where they told us that if we have sex we will get aids and die.
A nurse told us a horror story of a teenage mother who died and they showed us some fetuses in jars.
This was in central FL in the 90s
North Florida.
We had some short, no nonsense discussion of what sex was, the fact that stis were a thing, and that was about it. And then some health class in my high school made extremely graphic displays of what your genitals would look like if you got stis (and they weren’t treated for years) that were left up all year for some reason
Maryland early 2000s. We had a real health teacher. It was pretty clinical and factual for the most part. The only thing that really stood out was the teacher telling us that peeing killed any sperm left in the urethra and a kid asking if he could “piss in his woman and not wear a condom.” This poor old teacher has to say “Do not piss in your woman.”
Almost 100% via public school.
My first sex-ed class was in fourth grade, then another in fifth and sixth grade. In junior high and high school I was required to take general health courses that covered aspects of sex.
My religious parents didn’t teach me shit and I wish they had.
Religious school taught me nothing, but religious parents gave a surprisingly detailed and good explanation of sex, including mention of gay people. Then they got me a private tutor for biology so I would know the material to pass the exam.
“Abstinence is ideal, but you’re teenagers so we all know you’re going at it like rabbits so wear a condom. Now here’s a slideshow of late stage STDs to show you what happens if you don’t.”
It was perfectly OK and uneventful enough that I’ll never understand why anyone would feel the need to discuss it.
I’m from the UK and in my 40s. I got shown a video about genitalia at primary school when I was about 10. Then we got taught it several times until we left school, often about masturbation or safe sex. All from a pretty serious educational kind of perspective, not demonising it or anything. Largely saying that masturbation is normal and that you should have sex safely. I remember some weird video where they talked about masturbating by twisting your penis rather than the usual motion.
My friend Lionel in grade school telling us that every time you thrust when you have sex that that’s how many children you’ll have.
According to Lionel I should have had a few million children by now.
This guy fucks
I think of all the education that I missed, but then my homework was never quite like this…
I brought my pencil… Gimme something to write on
I remember in the 5th grade we were reproductive taught anatomy with black and white line drawings of adult genitalia and it literally didn’t occur to me that it had anything to do with my body or anyone else’s. The hairy spread beavers or the cross sections with lines referring to some squiggle as the vas deferens… It was about as meaningful as being in geography class trying to memorize the names of every island in the arctic.
In Highschool I took health and it was the diagrams of the different junk, pictures and videos about STDs, saying most birth control doesn’t actually work very well (e.g. Condoms have a 36% success rates at prevent STDs or pregnancy) so it’s best to sign a card swearing you’ll be abstinent until marriage. Only one person signed the card since we were, thankfully, given a choice. No talking about being gay, since it’s a red state. They spent more time on a bunch of different drugs than sex.
Before high school there wasn’t really “sex” ed, just showing videos about puberty and ways to check for cancer/lumps. But I went to a Catholic school before highschool. There also might have been stuff about how Masturbation is bad in the Catholics “sex ed”.
