Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 214 Editor's Choice: 36
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It's feminism's fault we're in Iraq! Yeah, that's it!
[Read the article: What else we're reading]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Uh. Wow. Where to begin. Let's see...the annoying sound of her voice? The whining about the "small Democratic tent"? (Of course the Republicans are going to embrace a white, upper-middle-class woman who knows how to play housewife and mommy while keeping a staff to do all the work! They've got a whole brothel of them, in fact!) The self-centered, non-stop rambling? And when she started taking calls, she wasn't channeling her inner housewife; she was channeling Dr. Laura. And not with any particular skill, either.
I was debating whether to pull the plug on the streaming audio, but decided to soldier on to the end. Oh, was that worthwhile! I don't think I've heard anything like Flanagan's implosion at the end of that segment since the Gene Simmons-Terry Gross deathmatch on Fresh Air several years ago.
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Problem with video
[Read the article: Elevator Girl]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I get a popup message saying that the software required to view the film isn't available on the Quicktime server. What does one need to do?
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wrong question?
[Read the article: The drugging debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can think of a few instances where parents might need to take a baby on a long flight--relocating, or visiting family, for instance, but I'm just curious--how many people take overseas vacations and decide they shouldn't have to alter their pre-kid lifestyle to see the Louvre? That trend has been increasing in past years.
I think if you have to ask yourself whether you should sedate your kid for a trip, you should probably ask whether your kid is too young to be making this kind of trip in the first place and, given the circumstances, how important it is. Great-grandparents in Budapest who won't be around when the kid is old enough to sit quietly--OK, makes sense. But you can visit London some other time.
And, by the way, I'm someone who's extremely sympathetic to fellow travelers too young to clear their own Eustachian tubes.
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A former religious sex ed instructor speaks...
[Read the article: Thou revealest too much!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The short answer, from a former instructor in this curriculum: this woman should absolutely not be teaching adolescents about sex and should be removed from the classroom immediately.
The longer answer: I know what this instructor is talking about; I have taught in this program, and it's a very good program indeed, although it can be physically and mentally exhausting for teachers (which is why I'm not doing it right now). (The parents, in particular, are very grateful.) It's a curriculum that is taught in Unitarian-Universalist churches as well as many UCCs, and it stresses abstinence as the best protection against pregnancy and STDs, the importance of good relationships with partners and friends and the values that are important to those relationships, the reasons why teenage pregnancy is an extremely bad idea, and the message that the best sexual relationships--whatever one's orientation--are monogamous and committed.
Teachers have to spend a weekend in an intensive certification program where we learn to deliver different kinds of lessons and, most importantly, how to deal with off-the-wall questions. One of the most important things emphasized is that we must not allow our private sexual lives into classroom discussions and to keep everything absolutely theoretical. And that's not easy--some students, at least at first, will ask personal questions, and our usual answer is that these are not appropriate questions, that it's important to respect other people's privacy. That's what professionals--or, in our case, semi-professionals--do: keep a very firm boundary between our personal lives and our life in the classroom. And in teaching about sexuality, it's more important than ever.
Believe it or not, this did happen to our class, and I was starting to wonder whether it was the same person who was being described, except that the woman in question was in her forties. This woman was not a member of our church, but of another, smaller fellowship jointly partnering with ours to teach the classes, so we didn't know her personally. In breakout sessions during our training, she tended to be much more forthcoming with her sexual history than any of us--in fact, it was really inappropriate for us to discuss our sex lives at all. That she brought up hers so gratuitously rubbed me the wrong way, but I figured, hey, we're all adults here, and she probably knows better than to talk about her sex life in front of the kids.
But oh, how wrong we turned out to be. First class, during question box time, she started in talking about how she masturbated in the bathtub. I started to sense a serious level of discomfort, shifting around and so forth, on the part of the students, and quickly moved the discussion to a different topic. I talked to our director of religious education, who was overseeing the program, and, after a little investigating, this woman was immediately removed. If that seems draconian, it turned out that there were other problems of which we were unaware that I won't go into here that made her an extremely poor choice for a teacher.
The fact is that even if young adolescents are mature enough to come to terms with the fact that grownups around them have sex (and if the "Eeeeuwww! Yuk!" responses during our slide show was any indication, this is not the case with most of them) it's extremely unfair and inappropriate and even considered abusive to burden them with information about our sex lives. They don't need to know. That's all.
So, yes, the proper thing for the LW to do is to speak immediately to the oversight committee and get this woman out of the classroom. If the committee doesn't think there's anything wrong, the LW should contact her regional curriculum coordinator, who very likely trained the teachers at this church and can attest that the instructor in question is absolutely not behaving appropriately.