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Wednesday, April 26, 2006 12:00 AM

Thou revealest too much!

Our church group teaches the facts of life to 13-year-olds. One of us goes way over the line.

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  • Wednesday, April 26, 2006 10:03 AM

    A former religious sex ed instructor speaks...

    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.

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