A definition of sorts

Disnepomorphisizm (n) roots- Disney, Anthropormorphize: To imply sanitized intentions, a predictable plot, and maudlin sentiment to a group of animals whose true base instincts- eating, fucking, killing and sleeping- are much closer to actual human behavior than we would like to admit.

On Middle School Dances

MIDDLE SCHOOL DANCES

I can remember the first time I walked into a high school as an adult. It was for a tutoring gig, and I- fresh into the big city- found it all very surreal. The endless hallways lined with rust colored lockers, cracking waxed tile, stone steps up stairwells, each one sagging in the center as result of decades of being pressed into service for the greater good of public education. What really drove it home though, what transported me fully, was the cafeteria smell. The cafeteria food is a source of endless bittersweet humor while in school, and a great party line as an adult, but only because it is all so long gone. When it is immediately present though, that smell- it drops you right back into a pair of converse sneakers and an inferiority complex. I was 15 years old again, for only a moment, but a totally and completely. The actual cafeteria smell is, I’m sure, the scent of government-issued reconstituted cheese. I can immediately picture it in a grainy, semi-solid blanket clinging futilely on to some semblance of French Bread, and it has little to do with actual cheese. Perhaps the organism it was rendered from had a passing acquaintance with a dairy cow, I’m not sure, but it comes powdered in foil packets, and needs a measure of water added and stirred to get it to at least a cheese-like slurry. I know that smell.

I am sitting now in a wicker chair at the admission portal of a middle school dance at the school I work at. I tell you all this smell-memory connection stuff simply to express this point: If a kid comes in to this middle school dance engulfed in a haze of Drakkar Noir, Ralph Lauren’s Polo or Farenheight cologne, I will lose my shit completely.


For you who have forgotten, or perhaps more accurately, blocked it out, let me set the stage of the middle school dance. There are balloons, both hung from shiny tendrils and loose on the dance floor. There is a fog machine, spewing ethereal swathes of cool, moist carbon dioxide at ankle level. This is meant to be romantic. There is a disco ball and associated donut-shaped globules of evenly spaced light rotating around the room and covering the walls. Shreiking teenage girls who thrash their heads and their hair wildly while they hear their favorite pop song are also present. It is, in a word, atmospheric.

I am the chaperone tonight. My job is to monitor, be present, and yet not be present- this is their time, after all, and I represent Authority. I have to find the middle ground, make myself only semi-scarce, close enough to call out wanton behavior, but far away from their private mental sphere to allow them to make their first groping* steps towards romantic independence.

It is early yet, and this is a small private school in the suburbs. Social events are few and far between for both parents and children, and so kids show up fairly early, well before the sun has gone down. The younger set show up first, and by ‘show up’ I mean ‘come from another classroom’ – many have not even left school for the day.

I’m milling around, trying to act adult, and this is difficult because I am only semi-welcome. The kids realize I am doing them a favor, chaperoning a dance on a Friday night, and they are trying to be sensitive, but I know they don’t want me privy to their conversations, their gossip, their private world. I do understand- I remember the days of being constantly monitored. The difference is, I understand what it is to not be constantly monitored, to have people assume all is well and you are a capable adult, that you can manage by yourself. My live-in girlfriend of two years left me abruptly two weeks ago, and it is still raw and painful. I’m finding myself wishing people wouldn’t assume that I am OK, that I can manage by my self, futilely wishing that someone would come and check in on me.

Nonetheless, I have a job to do, and so I am keeping tabs on the early stages of the dance. It’s mostly the 6th graders at the moment, and they are mostly bantering around balloons, treating them somewhere between volleyballs and footballs. The sixth graders are too young to really feel properly self-conscious, and so, between volleyball sessions, are on the dance floor doing the Spastic Colon or some such dance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be callous or condescending- I did the Spastic Colon for years, and still do when my roommates are out of town and I suspect my neighbors are all at their day jobs. It’s just amusing to watch.

It is, in fact, pretty tame. The presence of the 6th graders has relaxed the 7th and 8th graders, the ones with hesitant designs on Finding Love, and there are so few of them that they really can’t afford to get too embarrassed, lest they seem too adult in front of the younger ones. It is nothing like the seemingly enormous dances of my own middle school years, filled with false opportunities to engage in potential groping, including, of course, the dreaded “Snowball.”

The Snowball was a middle school standard, wherein the DJ** would line up a couple of slow songs and command the most popular couple to start dancing. Each time the DJ said “Snowball”- I distinctly remember an unctuous baritone, redolent of calling Dr. Love on on a late night radio Advice/R&B program- the couple was supposed to split, girl grabbing a different guy, guy grabbing a different girl, doubling the number of dancing couples, growing exponentially each time until, theoretically, everyone at the dance was locked in that “6-inch minimum of space” that is the junior high embrace. I don’t know why, given my motley crew of friends (brought together only for the reason that no one else would have us) thought a 13-year old girl would choose to have a change of heart and dance with a card-carrying member of the Spastic Colon Varsity Dance Team, but we waited at the edge of the boy side of the crowd, thinking that our immediate visibility would somehow override normal female sensibility, that they would choose us for the convenience of proximity over social suicide. Thinking back, I believe the DJ must have had the sensitivity to not let it go so long as to over –snowball, but as the pickins grew slimmer and slimmer, we last remaining few played out the scenario in our heads, wherein the inevitable last snowball came up and Mary the walking acne commercial takes one look at you, spits on the floor, and turns on her heel toward the punch bowl. The searing hot red ears that follow, along with every single pore on your face opening simultaneously is what is known as Building Character.

……………………………….


The kid DJ-ing the Dance comes up and starts talking to me. He’s explaining how he’s going to public school next year, how he visited the school already, made lots of friends, and how many of them were, in his words, “Totally Hot.”

I’m not quite sure how to respond to this. 13 is a little young to sit down and chew the fat about attractive women. I can’t see this happening at Public School- the line is too well demarcated. If a boy/girl were to call another girl/boy (or girl/girl boy/boy- let’s not be exclusive here) ‘hot’, he/they/she would probably understand that the student that they speak of would probably be another student of mine, and they understand that this is creepy. Perhaps there was distance in this kid’s mind, this other city allowing him to talk as if we were having a sausage party. It threw me. Things are a little too casual at small schools.

…………………………….

I’m listening to the middle school version of the Macarena happen . The lyrics are such:


Right foot 2 stomps

Left foot 2 stomps.

How low can you go

How low can you go,

Can you bring it to the top?

Can you bring it real slow?


Sliiiide………. to the left!
Sliiiide………. to the right!

Reverse! Reverse!

Ev-REE-ba-DEE clap your HANDS!

They are all dancing in sync, albeit with some fumbling. This is the dancing equivalent of painting by numbers, but it works, the kids are all participating and forming their own sense of community, and mostly having fun. Part of me is a little worried that they won’t have the same opportunities that I had to Build Character, but I’m understanding now why parents choose to send their kids to private school, and why I was sent when the public school system became unbearable for me. Watching growing pains happen to your own kids- and I’m speculating, as I don’t yet have my own, but being a teacher is the closest thing- might just be the only thing more painful than going through them yourself.
………………………………..

It is the last slow dance of the evening. By now, there are a few established couplings, and the kids are doing a fair job of monitoring themselves, in terms of hanky-panky. They are well away from the ‘6-inch’ rule- a good foot apart by guesstimation- holding their arms in the stiff-elbowed way that only touching someone else’s hips and shoulders in a possibly suggestive way for the first time can elicit.

I can’t say I much like teaching middle school. My memories of it are too disturbing. Still though, I think sometimes that the effective teachers are the ones who can see through the eyes of youth, and the very best can take them on and off like goggles- they can glean the perspective, and then, as is needed, pull them up on their forehead and offer a different path, that critical guidance that the kids really need but will never ask for. I’m having a difficult time with the second part, but the first- the empathy- is coming in spades. And believe me, I wish it were just sympathy because then I could remove the goggles, but no, I watch them and all the awkwardness and flinching and the sense of going through life with a flock of tiny hummingbirds all named Hormone flying around thier heads is too ‘there’, too actual, too present. My palms are flushing, I’m swatting imaginary bugs, I feel the eyes of 137 people staring at me, carefully evaluating How I Eat My Potato Chip. I try to breathe, let it go away, understand that I really don’t have the type of job that is written about in the NewYorker. I tell myself that no one is watching how I consume snack food. I manage to talk myself down, and it’s a little depressing, because I’m back to feeling small, hoping someone will come and check on me, see how I’m doing, tell me all the feelings I’m having about my own failed relationships are part and parcel of growing up. But I’m supposed to be grown up. It’s ugly, this emotional pendulum, but it does provide something, watching from afar, this peeping-tom version of empathy. I understand that the kids don’t dislike me, that they are actually grateful that I gave some of my time to allow their dance to happen. Come Monday, though- and Monday always comes on a Monday, no matter how much I want it to take a fucking day off- when they roll their eyes at me, when their arms are folded across their chest so tightly that I feel they might displace their internal organs, when they glower and try to act like adults, with misplaced words and mean spirited actions, I can remember this moment, watching them slow dance and fumble and posture and be consumed by the odd sensation of being suddenly adrift without a life raft, cast into the unfamiliar ocean of adult sexuality; perhaps then I can empathize, excuse their breaches of etiquette, and remember what it was like to be 13. Only from afar, though- God knows I couldn’t do it again.

Disembowling with Chidren! Part 4

THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL DISSECTIONS

We start this morning. It has not been a good morning.

First off, I made the Civilian Alarm Clock Gaff, which was to set it 12 hours askew, fudging the AM/PM function so that it won’t go off when you need it to, but will inevitably go off after work, when you are taking a nap after a trying day, predicated by the fact that you showed up late because your alarm clock didn’t go off.

I get up in a panic and pack Howard gingerly into my messenger bag and light off for work. In case you haven’t gathered, I didn’t have the heart to slice him open. I figure I’ve got the website handy, with all sorts of gruesome views of disemboweled sharks*, and we’ll just wing it. It isn’t until I reach the train station that I realize I’ve remembered my pickled shark, but I’ve forgotten my wallet, and so I have to turn back and grab it. Things aren’t shaping up well, to say the least.

The train ride was also filled with mild aggravations. It usually is pleasant enough as not too many people are habitually heading toward Podunk Ville Oaks where my school resides, but the handful of folks in the train car were doing their best to aggravate for many. One fellow was loudly gibbering on his cell phone, stating loudly how he was too self conscious to wear these shoes with those dress pants, but if he was so self conscious, why was he informing a car full of strangers about his dress preferences? Another kid, maybe 18 at most, swaggered in wearing pants hanging just below his left nut, no shirt, and a visor on what the kids call a ‘gangsta lean.’ It’s the posers that stick out the most. A real ‘gangsta’ wouldn’t bother trying to look thuggish at 8:00 AM on the train to Podunk Ville. What would be the point? Who, exactly, is he trying to impress? I usually try to be sympathetic to growing pains- god knows I’ve still got a few to go through that I missed growing up, hence all the juvenile behavior, but well, this kid can probably vote, and that spooks me. Even more he can probably drive a car, which generates actual fear. At any rate, I don’t need to see his nipples so early on a Monday morning. Of course, who am I to be critical? My best friend at the moment is a shrink-wrapped dead shark, looking all the world like a kielbasa sausage. I need to get out more.

The beginning of the day was similarly irritating. There was an email from the 1st grade teacher, bitching to administration as to why her science lab was cancelled last week when I was out sick, why no one had informed her, blah blah blah. She’s got a point actually, but frankly you could get this lady’s panties in a knot by sneaking into her room and rotating her coffee mug a quarter turn clockwise. I thought of defending myself, but the fact that she nearly had an aneurism when I again left writing on her dry erase board (why not just…. erase it? Am I being unreasonable here?), I figured I’d better let it lie. I was late anyway, and had to set up the dissections.

My first concern is Howard. I know, it should be the children, but like I said, I’ve become attached, and so I want to stash him somewhere where he does not have to witness his brethren being desecrated in such a primitive fashion. I briefly consider setting him up on the wall outside my classroom, but it’s a sunny locale, and I haven’t brought any sunscreen with me. Dogfish do prefer shallower waters, but can be found at depths of up to 650 feet, and I figure with the added factor of him being acclimated to diffused sunlight, Howard may not have the complexion to deal with direct rays. The fact that I actually looked this up is beginning to worry me. Do I need to get out more?

I elect to stow him in a cardboard box. I figure the sound will be muffled, and since sound travels up to three times more efficiently in water than in air leads me to deduce that Howard may have a difficult time discerning the noises of hairless monkeys gleefully disemboweling his kin. He may ask later what all the fuss was, and currently I don’t know what I’ll say, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

A knock on the door. Oh, God, they are here.

They file in, already paired with lab partners, and not for the first time I’m noting how lucky I am to work with professionals so dedicated to their work. The kids are organized, science folders at the ready, diagrams in place, familiar with the anatomy, probably more so than I. It’s the fifth grade teacher who has primed them so well, and I am indebted to her.

The actual dissections go…….splendidly. The kids are excited yet dutiful, following instructions when needed and, given the go ahead, delving into the sharks and squids like bib-adorned pro football players tearing into sirloin steaks. One kid opens up the stomach and finds it full of krill, the very organism he did his report on for Marine Week. Another discovers the female gonads, something she is familiar with after the Sex Ed class. Even the other teachers, the very same who were squeamish about even having the organisms reside in their classrooms, shrink-wrapped and boxed nonetheless, were up to their knuckles in entrails, pointing out this and that. Did you know that the lens from the eye of a shark looks like an alien planet? It’s all cream and magenta swirls, the kind of marble that was the prize of the collection, back when these sorts of things were still in vogue. I had no idea. Plus, as an added bonus, they bounce.

It may sound barbaric; this gleeful tearing into guts and such, but it really is exciting to see the kids so fascinated by the whole event. Enthusiasm is difficult to culture in a system termed in the media as the ‘Abattoir of Education’. The fact that school can be a crushingly depressing cross to bear for a lot of kids has not escaped me, least of all for myself. This small occasion, though, brings me satisfaction and hope. Most gratifying is the fact that the teachers are into it- their normal ‘teacher voice’ is betraying a childlike wonder at the opportunity to see the mechanics of the natural world, and if I’ve got them hooked- pointedly with their heir help and hard work- I feel as if I’ve done my job correctly. I know ‘correctly’ may sound sterile and uninspired, but pairing scientific accuracy with the kind of enthusiasm I saw today, well, I’m going to sleep soundly tonight, knowing I had a part in a job well done. At least until 6:20 PM, when my alarm goes off.


*Of course, Howard was in the other room as I was strolling through the websites. I didn’t want him to get wind of what I was up to.

Disemboweling with Children! Part 3

EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF THE SHARK

Howard. I will call him Howard.

I refer, of course, to the expired and pickled dogfish shark I’ve been carrying around with me all weekend. We’ve certainly spent a lot of time together these last few days, and I think at this point he needs a name.

I brought him home because we- the fifth graders and myself- need to dissect Howard and others of his ilk come Monday morning, and I haven’t the faintest idea of how to go about this, as I’ve never seen the insides of a shark before. I mean, I suppose it has all the normal entrails and accoutrements found in most vertebrates- stomach, liver, gall bladder, duodenum, etc- but unless you know exactly what you are looking for, they all appear to be rather indistinct blobs of grossiness. I thought I’d practice on Howard this weekend.

Friday after work, I’d shoved Howard into the saddlebag of my bike, along with a spare squid, and immediately forgot about him. It was an insanely hot day of the blast furnace variety, and I had worked up a sweat and a parched throat by the time I boarded the train. I knew I had a bottle of water in the saddlebag- although I can’t for the life of me figure out how I managed to forget about the rest of the contents- and reached only to find that I was gripping on the face and skull of a shrink-wrapped ichthyoid. Although ichthyoid means fish. Maybe. I probably just made that up, but no matter, suffice to say it wasn’t pleasant. Howard gave me quite a start.

Earlier, I had texted my friends in some Tom Sawyer-esque attempt to try and get them to dice up this shark with me. They did sound interested, with the exception of Abel, who thought he was getting spam text, although I can’t imagine what sort of company would send a mass message that read “ anybody feel like dissecting a shark tonight?” I wouldn’t reply, either.

And so I brought the shark with me over to the warehouse, the social hub of the peculiar artistic community that I mill around in from time to time. I’ve trotted Howard out several times over the weekend, and by default- the fact that he has been riding shotgun in the saddlebag along with my laptop, books, and toothbrush- he has gotten quite a tour. We went swimming up at the lake, and yes I was tempted to let him ‘free’ strictly for the absurdity of the gesture, but there are small children up there. We drove around the city in a 1961 Chevy Nova painted primer gray and blue and attempted to look cool. I’ve had to stash Howard in lofts and on top of refrigerators to make sure the dogs don’t get at him while we weren’t looking. We even went to see The Mumblers play at the The Guilded Chicken, although Howard had to listen from outside as it was $10 a head to get in, and I didn’t think he’d appreciate the music enough to rationalize spending that kind of money. He’s more of an R&B sort of shark.

I’ve tried to summon both the wherewithal and the moral support to cut him open, but it just hasn’t materialized. I got a few fellows at the BBQ last night interested*, but this being the west coast, they opted to partake in smoking illicit foreign substances before they committed to gutting the shark, and I thought better of it. They were nice guys, but it just felt a little tawdry and violating to let them consider the entrails of Howard as a party trick. Plus it was a BBQ, and that would just be plain inconsiderate to all the people trying to enjoy themselves.

And so, it is Sunday morning, and Howard and I are at the Whole Foods Market, picking up ginger ale, vegetarian ‘chick’n’ patties and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, and I realize I’ve become quite attached to my shark. I'm wondering if he'll be fooled by the fake chicken, being a carnivore. Now that I’ve named him, it’s going to make it that much more difficult later in the afternoon when I have to slice him up. That and the fact that it’s a fucking disgusting thing to have to do anyway.


*Although everyone is pretty interested when you tell them you have a shrink-wrapped dead shark in the other room. If you ever have trouble starting conversation at dinner parties and the like, I highly suggest bringing your own. You may not get invited to any more of them, but people will definitely talk to you.

Disembowling with Children! Part 2

EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF THE CLAM

First off, these clams are huge. They weigh about the same as a softball, and are only slightly smaller. They are covered in a fine grit, which I later find to be the pulverized remains of the clams on the bottom of the bag- apparently they don’t do so well with UPS.

I’ve decided I’m going to acclimate the kids to the animals beforehand, as it’s likely to be the first time many of them have carved into a whole animal, save at the dinner table.

They smell. You know the smell. I’m passing them out to the third graders on those familiar trays, lined with that unknown rubbery substance. They are already in hysterics at how yucky they are, and frankly, so am I. I make a note on my hand in dry erase marker- the poor man’s blackberry- that says simply “trash.” I have to make sure there is a trash can available when we actually break these guys open, so that when, inevitably, one of the kids decides he needs to retch, it’ll be ready. I’m sincerely hoping that I don’t retch. You know how open to suggestion 8 year olds are.

And so the general freak-out continued, to the point where I had to call them out on bad behavior, something I am not wont to do, as I generally find it amusing. In fact, to illustrate this, I need to make an aside here, and talk about Australians.

I’ve never visited Australia. I’ve never seen a live Kangaroo, save at the zoo, or snorkled the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve never even received a postcard of the Opera House in Sydney, but I did spend a summer with Australians, and so I feel more qualified to comment than your average American, who equates the continent only with Foster beer ( which I’m told they consider to be piss in a can) and a few various sound bites from various public figures associated with crocodiles ( “That’s not a knife!”).

I learned some things about Australians that summer. I learned they call haemorrhoids “piles”, I learned how to properly throw a rugby bladder* (not a ball) correctly, and I learned that if you cup your hands into an ad hoc megaphone and shout “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!” they are genetically compelled to respond with a fevered “Oy! Oy! Oy!” I also learned above all that despite their inclination to leave a trail of debris and carnage behind them while on vacation, they are a damn clever bunch.

Let us examine the ping-pong ball lab for proof. The idea was to test friction of different surfaces by rolling a ping-pong ball across them and timing them until they stopped. We visited several locations- the gym, the carpet in the music building, asphalt, waxed floor, etc. Apparantly this wasn’t exiting enough for the Australian kid, though, as by the end of the lab, when we were back in the classroom, he had constructed…well it’s hard to explain, really, unless you are familiar with Mousetrap. It was a game circa the late seventies, or at least it existed then, but may be older, in which you roll a marble down a a complex edifice of channels, slides, spirals and gizmos to the end result, which was to knock away the support beam of a little plastic cage, causing it to fall on your mouse. He had constructed such a mechanism, insomuch as he could with impromptu materials- the ping pong ball rolled down the edge of his desk, across the spine of one textbook, dropped onto the chair, rolled over to the floor and dislodged a pencil holding up a textbook, all carefully timed to squash an approaching spider. I know that in typical American education lore, my role was to flip out and chastise him for wanton behavior, but I just marveled at his ingenuity, and watched, fascinated. This is why I lack clear classroom management skills, but how could you not let such creativity flourish?

It is this same kid who is now holding the clam and alternately bring it closer and farther away from the face of a little girl going

“WhOOoooooooWhOOooooooWhOO”ooooooo!” – if this were an old Batman episode, there would be a spinning spiral as a backdrop, the type that is supposed to indicate vertigo. And it gives me vertigo, via flashback- I’m suddenly transported back to Ms. Mercuro’s 9th grade biology class.

I was not a great student. In fact I got D’s in both high school biology and chemistry, which may make call into question the qualifications of today’s educators, and that is reasonable. I wasn’t dumb, though; I just didn’t like the teacher. She was young and physically attractive, and it was her first year teaching at an all-boys Catholic High School in Detroit. Perhaps it was first-year teacher jitters on her part, but she started the first class by striding into the classroom and stating

“I know what you all are thinking, so CUT IT OUT.”

This did not endear us towards her.

She made similar blunders throughout the year. She gave Shelby a detention for chewing gum, even though he clearly was chewing on a pen cap hanging doggedly out of his mouth. She regaled us with tales of her sorority, noting how they gave a girl they didn’t like named Shannon the ever-so-droll nickname of “Shannon-head”, and tried to engage us in tales of her wild-and-willy party days when they used to bite wintergreen lifesavers in the dark and watch the sparks. Even at age 14, I was gaining a solid notion that some adults were freaking idiots. We couldn’t speak out much- this was a Catholic High School, and some of the priests were disciplinarians redolent of the glory days of the Inquisition, and so we took out our frustrations on her rather blameless rabbit by feeding it the erasers off the tops of our pencils. It acquired a taste for them, and the day she found it lying on the ground breathing in thin painful sheets because it had chewed off all the erasers off a box of pencils she kept in her back office, we could barely suppress our snickers. Did I mention that kids were cruel?

Perhaps her attitude was what made me act out during the fetal pig dissection. Sure, I learned about the internal anatomy of a piglet. I removed the intestines as instructed and placed them in the bag’o’ intestines set up on the lab table, I found the vas deferens, I poked around with the spleen and the liver and the heart, but the dissection lasted three days, and so I was getting hungry for some additional stimulation. To whit, the other useful tidbit of knowledge I gleaned from the dissection was that if you pressed the cold snout of a fetal pig to the back of the neck of one of your unsuspecting classmates, he will jump approximately 9 feet into the air and make a sound like a gazelle about to be impaled by a pack of lions. I should have stopped at one student, but this discovery was too precious to limit to only one test subject- this was science class after all, and to properly test a theory, you need a large data set. Soon enough, the whole class was desperately skittering around the classroom holding their fetal pigs like loaded sausages, trying to eek out the one kid who hadn’t cottoned on to where the intermittent strangled yelps were coming from. I received a detention for this, wherein I had to clean the tarantula cage with the tarantula notably still in it.

And so I’m watching the Australian kid attempting to ruffle this little girl, and she is indeed flipping out a little bit, but I am just watching distractedly, knowing full well I need to stop him. I imagine I’m experiencing parents must deal with all the time while they watch their own kid that is

a) clearly behaving out of bounds and
b) doing something they did as well, or similar, and find it extraordinarily amusing and clever.

You have to call the kid on it, but I always feel I’m being a bit false, lying almost. Who’d of thought being deceitful was a necessary skill in dealing with our most vulnerable citizens?

*Some of the first sports balls were essentially just an inflated pig’s bladder, which was then covered with leather in later years for shape retention. I find this fact remarkably apropos to the nature of this modest histoire.

This is only a test

Please wait while we fuck with all the doodle whackies..........



The blog is not malfunctioning, just routine maintenance....thank you for your patience....

Disemboweling with Children! Part 1

I don’t do dissections.

I can’t really say how I’ve managed to teach biology for 7 years without doing one, but I have. Anatomy really isn’t part of freshman biology anymore, at least not by Illinois standards, and isn’t even part of a university degree in biology for the most part- at least not molecular bio, which is what most of it is these days anyway. A hundred scripts for corny high school humor flicks have it wrong- there are no more opportunities for ‘marked’ frogs to make a desperate bid for freedom by jumping out of second story school windows in droves.


I don’t want to be misleading. I’m not trying to say dissections aren’t done -plenty of teachers do them. Just not me.

Until now.

I have to, per my job description, do the dissections for Marine Week, notably clams for the third grade, squid for the forth, and sharks for the fifth grade. It has not escaped me, the irony of the prospect of being up to my arse in salty, slimy fishy creatures so soon after finishing Sex Ed. This promises to be a comedy of errors, not the least of the reasons being that I don’t do so well with the little kids. And the fact that they are, well, little kids.

They probably wouldn’t agree. I get along with them quite well, and they seem to really enjoy science lab, but possibly for all the wrong reasons.

The problem is, I don’t quite get the younger set. I’ve blocked out most of my elementary school days . This is called ‘selective memory loss’.

High school for me was marginally tolerable, for the most part. I didn’t really like it a good deal of the time, and anyone who ever reminisces on this era being ‘the greatest time of their lives’ is immediately suspect. I can’t say it was all bad- sure there were bullies and I got into fights, but at least by this age I fought back, and there were plays and band and opportunities to behave badly.

Elementary school was different. As I’d prefer not to think about this much, one salient detail will do the trick into explaining why I was a bit of a social outcast. At age six, I wet my pants atop the jungle gym surrounded by a crowd of jeering 1st graders.

Kids can be cruel. Reputations stick. Enough said.

The end result is, I don’t really know how to talk to them, especially from an adult perspective. I’ve cottoned on to some elementary school teacher techniques, but I am far from expert, and tend to mislay the emphasis. By emphasis, I mean that sing-song ‘Hello Boys and Girls and Good Morning To You!” – the painfully obvious stress that indicates that this is a cue to respond “Good Morning Mr. Bean!” This is the prescribed elementary routine.

And so, I’ve learned you have to be really obvious when presenting stuff, and use the contrived,

“Isn’t this AMAZING Boys and Girls?!?”

I just can’t seem to get the emphasis right. Take the owl pellets, for instance.

I found them while hiking. For those of you who have never had the privilege of pulling one apart, owl pellets are regurgitated lumps of animal parts that the owl cannot digest, mostly the hair, teeth and bones of rodents. They look conspicuously like turds, but in fact if you pull them apart, you can tell what the owl was eating, and even reconstruct skeletons. It’s pretty neat, actually.

So I brought them in, intending to show the little kids. I had my “I’m so Excited!” contrivance program on, but I jumped the gun- some circuit blew and so the emphasis came too early.

“So, Boys and Girls, did you know I went Hiking?!? And I found….these….

“HIKING!?!”, they wailed,

“He went HIKING!” Exalted they.

“I can’t believe you went HIKING!!” they extorted, giddy with excitement over the notion of actually walking somewhere.

To their credit, they are little human beings, and the synapse closed for some; after their initial exuberant response, a wavering of the eyes passed among them, wondering, perhaps, if they had been duped by The Voice. I can only imagine that this has happened before.

In addition to my Premature Voice problem, I can’t seem to grasp the notion that you really need to walk them through activities, lest they get themselves into trouble. I’m used to high school- you tell them what to do, and they get it done, or not. Consequences on them, at that age. It is occurring to me, though, that even the most prudent students will fly off the deep end, if not given explicit instructions to not flip out. Let us take, for example, the stream tables.

They are, in theory, a wonderful tool to observe erosion, river formation, deltas, all that good stuff. They are essentially a miniaturized version of all the various canals, reservoirs, castles and armaments you built at the beach when you were young. The trick here is that they are miniaturized- you can’t use sand, as the particles are too large, and so you need diatomaceous earth. This earth is finely pulverized, gritty grains of expired algae- the same stuff that gives your toothpaste its abrasiveness.

It works great in the tables, like miniaturized sand, and you can really spend hours playing with the stuff. What I failed to recognize is that, like sand at the beach, if you add small children to the equation, the stuff gets everywhere.

And by everywhere, I mean all over the children. 20 minutes into the exercise, they were howling, running cups of water back and forth from buckets, dropping it onto tables from heights of 6 feet or more- and these kids aren’t 6 feet tall, so you can imagine that this took some ingenuity- and slapping the surfaces of the diatomaceous earth, splashing it on themselves, the ground, their clothes.

Did I mention this is a private school?

Did I happen to let on that the kids wear uniforms?

Could you imagine how uber-wealthy parents feel about dirty school uniforms that they have to pay the maid overtime to wash and press?

Suffice to say, we had to stop the exercise, but the damage was done. The water dries, the powdery white earth will wash out of cloths, but when I lined them up with their backs to the playground wall to have a look at them they were coated- streaks of white on their cheeks, their sweaters, their hair, their skirts and their pants, looking nothing less than a line-up of 8-year old coke-habit-having third graders who had found a pile of blow 8 feet high and dove right in.

And now they trust me to give them knives?

I can’t say I feel like this is a good idea.

Nevertheless, let the disembowelment begin.

SexEd Part 7: Day 3

Day 3:

I’m not sure what happened. I got the email from the 5th grade teacher, saying today’s session would be short, half an hour, could we do it in your room again? I read it, understood it, but I don’t know, I somehow managed to forget it was happening. This is what they call ‘denial’.

So when she showed up with all the boys in tow, I was a little taken aback. Fortunately, this lady had a plan. They were to sit down with scraps of paper, and on each one write down something they learned. When they were finished, after a 15-minute time limit, and we would go from group to group and they would read one of their scraps of paper. If they mentioned something no one else came up with, they got a point. If they didn’t, everybody would have to tear up their scraps and move to the next group. It was like a game, you see. The 5th grade teacher would leave, and do the same activity with the girls. Notably, Larry hadn’t shown up yet.

So, needless to say, the first 15 minutes went great. They wrote, I checked my email and graded papers. They did ask if they could write own things they learned about girl puberty and I said this was fine. So far, so good. Time for the game.

They really wanted to give the groups names, and I said sure, that sounds like a fine idea.


It was not a fine idea.


They were as follows:

Team 1: The PLA, standing for The Puberty Learner’s Association. I thought this was cute.

Team 2: Somewhat inexplicably, The Pizza Men. I dunno, I guess 5th graders like pizza.

Team 3: The Puberty Association Underdogs. They like to copy each other.

Team 4: Dr. Puberty. Again, cute.

It was all fine and good, but Team 3 was in mired in some sort of intense debate. I asked what was up. They asked if they could use the word ‘Penis’ in their title.

Ahem.

It seems obvious that I should have said no. I’m not quite sure what was going on in my head, but it something to the tune of, ‘well , sure, I mean we have to say the word all the time anyway, and let’s just be honest and open, and if that was what they wanted to use, how could it hurt?’

This is how Team 3 came to be called “The Penis Bandits.”


And Team 5? Once they heard this, they, of course, had to trump this and called themselves “P.P.P” which stood for, you guessed it…

Penis Penis Penis.

I brought this upon myself.


On to the game.

Now, humans are a competitive breed, even the youngest of us. Brother of 20-30 Times a Day’s group has employed a strategy that is called a ‘squirrel’ in debate circles- that of an obscure argument, or in this case, a fact. They’re basically going with the girl puberty stuff, like “girls have a vagina” and it’s working for them. They are racking up the points.

And they all are doing well. Despite the fact that I’m praying no other teachers are hearing the cries of “Penis Bandits ROCK!” emanating from my classroom, I’m rather impressed with how much stuff they remember- they even get the scrotum notion correct.

In college, when we found ourselves milling around the living room, beers cracked and our bellies laid out for fresh air, my roommate would don the occasion a ‘sausage party.’ It’s a crass title, to be sure, but women do the same thing. They drink wine and call it Girls’ Night, but it really just amounts to being free to saying whatever you want and need to without the social pressure of being genderifically correct.

It occurs to me that this, in essence, is what just happened- I’ve kind of walked them through their first sausage party. In a profession where men are an oddity- especially elementary school- we are suspect because of this. What kind of man- save a pervert or a pedophile- would want to do what is, even with today’s politically correct ostensibly gender neutral society, still often considered women’s work? But it’s fun, really, and when all the changes come to play in what I remember to be a difficult- and at its worst, miserable- time of life, I hope they remember the weird guy who let them call their team the Penis Bandits, and that it wasn’t actually too mortifying of an experience. And mostly I hope that all the lumps of puberty, when the come barreling down, at least don’t come as a surprise. I am feeling kind of protective of my charges, and dare I say it, a little…..paternal?

What are these changes that are happening to me?

An Ode to Mom

Lest we forget, amongst all this talk of reproductive organs and blunt- perhaps flirting with crass- talk of Sex Ed and what have you, it’s the reason we are all here today. And so, I am home dying cloth for my mother the quilter, as she’s been encouraging me to do for probably a decade. Sorry about the delay, ma. Better late than never? Love ya.

SexEd Part 6: Day 2

It’s the day the boys are supposed to learn about the girls. I’m blessedly not required for the first half of class- I have 7th grade to teach- and so the fifth grade teacher and Larry are taking care of the first part. I’m supposed to leave the transparencies on the overhead projector, and just for fun I leave the penis diagram cast on the screen so the kids will have something to talk about when they get there.

I spy in a few times, as I’m right next door, and the fifth grade teacher has really got them going. She’s throwing a ball around the room, and if they catch it, they get to answer a question. It’s brilliant, this Tom Sawyer approach, and the kids are all ape-shit about wanting to answer a question and get the ball. How come this doesn’t work in my high school classes?

I duck out, finish class, and join them. They’ve moved away from the pituitary gland and all the relatively benign stuff, and are full on taking about the Parts, and their names. This woman has not an ounce of shame, and more power to her, because she’s got them saying everything.

“Say ‘cervix’ ,” she’ll command.

“Cervix,” they’ll reply.

She does defer to us on all things male, and at one point, sort of alludes to the scrotum being the same thing as the testicles. I interject- we should be anatomically accurate here- and explain that it’s the sac that holds the testicles. I may even have made some comparison about marbles and the bag they come in, which may have been a good analogy circa 1909, but sort of fails here. Still, though, I’m getting the hang of what fifth graders will understand, and bring up something that will cross the age gap- shrinkage.

It works- we naturally roll into a discussion of why the testicles need to be kept at a lower temperature, and how the scrotum modulates that by alternately bring them closer and farther away from the body- the heat source- hence the shrinkage in cold water. Even typing this, I realize I’m becoming the embarrassingly honest male version of the Sex Ed teacher. It should feel a little creepy, but in fact, feels fine. They are actually understanding this stuff, and don’t seem too scarred by the discussion

We’re on a roll, and the fifth grade teacher deftly switches to female anatomy by way of the Transparency, rather abruptly for my taste. One minute were just getting comfortable with saying ‘ejaculation’, and the next, there it is, on the screen in black line anatomical correctness, the female organs, hovering above us like the disembodied head of a praying mantis, ovaries on what look like alien eyestalks, and conspicuous labels with words like ‘fallopian tubes’, ‘cervix’, and the dreaded ‘Vagina’.

“Who can say Vagina?” She asks, “Teddy, say ‘Vagina’.”

“Vagina!” extorts Teddy.

“You can say that really well!” she compliments.

“It’s like saying Spaghetti!” offers Teddy.

She goes on for a bit, and asks me if I have an overhead pen. I’m scrambling through my desk drawer- the one you were only allowed in if you were the teacher’s pet, although that I think holds true more for women than men, because mine is essentially a school supply junkyard. I finally dig up a black marker and hand it to her, and there is just a touch of derision in her face, as if the marker were encased in a rubber chicken. For some reason rooted back in my elementary school days, I really want to please this lady, and so I’m scrambling around for a different color. All I can find is red. Her face lights up.

“Perfect!” she says, and immediately starts coloring in an ad hoc menstrual lining on the uterus.

“This is the menstrual lining. Everyone say ‘menstruating’”, she commands.

“Menstruating”, they chorus.

She goes on for a bit, ad libbing her speech as well, and I’m just watching, wide-eyed and a little disconnected, although I’m shaken a bit out of my own private thoughts when she starts talking about boobs.

“Just like you have a penis that grows, girls have breasts that grow.”

I thought that was going to be the show-stopper, but no. She actually throws down The Line.

“You may start feeling different about girls during puberty, and perhaps you are noticing their boobs more now, and that’s OK.”

I spy out the two kids who I thought may just barely be in the early throes of puberty, to see if they had the same response as I did to this statement. Sure enough, they were wearing that universal male expression of trying very hard to look as if they are not looking at boobs. I felt immediately vindicated and, a beat later, a little mortified that I shared this impulse with 10 year-olds. What can I say? Boys will be boys, even when we’re supposed to be men.

SexEd Part 5: Day 1

10:37 AM, Day 1 of Sex Ed.

And so it's the day of Sex Ed, the day where we show The Video, and it's really a train wreck. At the very first meeting, ole Larry the gym teacher- whom I now love like a brother, such is our shared trauma- asked if our upper school classes would be taken care of.

"Oh yes!", they promised.

"Not even an issue.", said they, assuaging our fears.

"Consider it done.", they pledged.



They didn't do it.



The kids are arriving at 2:00. They will be late. We will struggle with the projector. We will show the video with the line drawings of the penises and the erections and all the little globs of sperm traveling up the urethra. It will go until 2:30.

At this point Larry will leave, as he has a golf match. Well, he coaches the golf team, so it's more legitimate than it sounds, but still, I wish I played golf so I had the excuse. They didn't take care of his duties like they promised, and so I will be left with a bunch of 5th graders, alone, with something I only just found about today: the Transparencies.

I don't know what the Transparencies are or what they show. On some level I really wish they had mentioned the Transparencies earlier, but on another, I guess it's just as well that I don't know. I just know it's something awful, though, and I will be left alone to have to make sense out of them.

Just like a real brother, I want to f**king kill Larry right now.

I get to show up late tomorrow- they 'forgot' to get me a sub, and so I must teach me life science class- but I'm guessing all the most embarrassing stuff will happen today. All I really wanted was Larry’s presence- just to look on approvingly as I give all the speeches. Alas, it may not be so.

2:00 PM: The Talk.

They arrive. They are seated. The fifth grade teacher outlines the game plan to me. She is earnest, she is trying to exhibit full confidence in Larry and I, and she’s faking it pretty well, but I do detect a hint of concern, one that may not be unwarranted. I’m trying to act casual, but I’m not sure how well I’m faking it. She hands me the Transparencies in a plain beige folder. I don’t look at them.

Class begins.

I start giving the introductory speech, hey, here we all are, let’s get right into it shall we? Larry looks on approvingly. This is his role much of the time.

Now, I remember puberty talks being awkward and hesitant, and I’ve got this idea in my head that it really shouldn’t be that way, we should say what we have to say, be forthright, say it all out loud, break the ice, the tension, tear down that forth wall right away. This is what leads me to say,

“OK, well were going to have to say it sooner or later, so here we go.”

“PENIS PENIS PENIS.”

As you may have foreseen, it really worked. That is to say, we sure broke the ice. To say the kids were amused would be an understatement. They started HOWLING, slapping their hands on the desk, rolling over into fits of laughter, now shouting PENIS PENIS PENIS at the top of their lungs.

Larry looks at me and stage whispers,

“Wow. Things went downhill really quickly, huh?”

He is not looking on approvingly, as I really need him to do right now.

Despite all this, once the kids settle down, it has the intended effect, as least for me. We show the video, we talk about what we need to talk about, we bring up wet dreams and the importance of washing your junk. We talk about why wet dreams aren’t like wetting the bed- I seem to recall some vagueness about the topic myself at their age, and weirdly enough, it isn’t that weird. We are actually doing OK.

Possibly it isn’t entirely as freakish as I thought it would be because most of these kids haven’t hit puberty yet. It’s still just factual- they aren’t, on the by and large, experiencing any of the peculiar hormonal episodes that usually accompany these sorts of talks. In fact, they are rather unembarrassingly asking some questions that they must have gleaned from somewhere else.

“Mr. Bean,” starts one kid- notable the younger brother of the 20-30 erections a day kid,
“My brother says girls’ attitudes change when they hit puberty and they get mean.”

At my core, I really don’t know how to answer this, and Larry deftly swoops in.

“Well,” he starts, “Girls are going through a lot of emotional changes, like you guys, but they’re probably a bit different in the way they react to them. We, as males, have to be sensitive to that.”

Go Larry. I did not expect him to pull that out at all.

We carry on, do OK as far as I can tell, and it isn’t until we’re finished, watching some educational video to pass the rest of the time, when I realize I totally forgot the Transparencies. They are just sitting on my desk like an IRS audit. They have to be opened, I know, I just don’t want to do it now. Well, we do have two more days of this. It’ll happen sometime.

SexEd Part 4: The In-Service

We- all the teachers- are sitting in the computing lab. We have just finished some sort of training that I’m not entirely sure about, and we are bantering back and forth. The conversation turns toward all the school events happening soon. Sex Ed is brought up. I am suddenly receiving all sorts of interest, even though I’m not saying anything. I don’t have to- everyone knows I was roped into it. This is called ‘hazing’.

Dave, the middle/high school director that had to do this last year, is having great fun at my expense, although he has the right, as he gave the ‘talk’ last year. He steadfastly refused to do it this time around, and he’s dropping bits of dialogue from last year’s meeting, much to the amusement of my colleagues.

Kid: “ So …I woke up with all this sticky stuff all over my pyjamas. What is up with that?”

Dave: “Umm, it’s called a wet dream. It’s perfectly normal.”

Kid: “ So what’s it called, you know, when your penis fills with blood?”

Dave: “It’s, umm, called an erection. It is perfectly normal.”

Kid: “MAN, I get like 20 or 30 of those a day!”

Dave: “Um. Yes. Uh, that may not be perfectly normal. But you may not be perfectly normal, and that is perfectly normal. Next question.”

I know they chose the wrong person to do this.

SexEd Part 3: The Parent Meeting

I was asked, as a part and parcel of the whole Sex Ed thing, to attend a parent meeting. I think the idea was that they could check out the curriculum, view the video, and be generally assured that we aren’t totally incompetent. I represent the boy’s half- I’m supposed to be calm and reassuring, the sort of educator that can say ‘erection’ as naturally as ‘radial tires’.


So, yes, we showed the film to the parents. In it kids are talking about increased sebum production, odor, hygiene, and all sort of topics during their class presentations. At other times, they cut to kid-parent conversations, having perfectly natural unembarrassed dialogues about periods, the efficacy of winged maxi-pads, etc. If you haven’t guessed yet, the video was sponsored by an unnamed feminine hygiene product company.


We are pausing the movie at points telling them that this is what we intend to focus on, they’re in fifth grade blah blah blah, hygiene hygiene hygiene. We are avoiding direct allusions to sex, babies, anything they might deem awkward. We are describing how we will give every kid a ‘puberty’ kit, pads and deodorant for the girls, plain old deodorant for the boys. I’m gleaning that hygiene is clearly a focal point of 5th grade Sex Ed.

Here’s the problem: Frankly, I stink. Mind you, this is at around seven o’clock in the evening, and I’ve been at school for nearly 11 hours, but it’s the damn California hippie no aluminum deodorant that has me humming- it has no harmful chemicals, inorganic ingredients, uses locally grown hops to stave off competing bacteria, etc, but the fact is the shit really doesn’t work that well. It’s fine for about 6 hours or so, but I’ve been ripening for a good 11 at this point and the whole time I’m clamping my armpits shut like someone taped my upper arms to my torso. I can’t imagine I’d inspire a whole lot of confidence in the parents smelling like a used sock on the locker room floor. I hope this doesn’t foreshadow some dire circumstances.

SexEd Part 2: The video

OK, they sucked. They sucked BAAD. Really, they were exactly as I remembered them to be, and frankly, given the mid-eighties feather hair-dos with they kind of heat insulation usually reserved for ear-muffs, they probably are exactly as I remembered them. This just got a lot more daunting.

I mean, I guess the whole thing about deodorant really is important- the current7th grade certainly has a few reliably pungent members, so much so that you can tell who taught them last by the almost physically tangible ‘7th Grade Funk’ that remains after they leave a room. But really, the focus on hygiene just seems like a filler, a way to avoid saying the words “wet dream” in front of a bunch of snickering 10 year olds.T he whole film was soooooo ham-fisted and predictable.

Even the name was predictable, if a little confusing. I don’t know who thought of “Always Changing About You”, as a title, but it sounded exactly correct title for a film of this ilk- a vague allusion towards content while still being grammatically perplexing. Is the Change always around you, or are you “all about Changing?” I prefer something more descriptive and less vague, like “You’re Changing, and That Sometimes Feels Kinda Fucked-Up, but Don’t Worry, It’s Supposed To.” Or something like that. I can’t even finish watching the video.

…………………………………………………….

I finished watching the video. Good lord, it even has some of that “Saved By the Bell” type of soundtrack. And it does, in fact, have a line drawing showing a cross section of the human penis and vagina, ovaries, testicle, all the business. It even shows a stop action drawing- and by this I mean cheap animation- of an erection and ejaculation, little teardrop shaped globs of sperm moving up the urethra with the animation quality of a flipbook, and splashing in all directions upon egress from the penis, like broken sprinkler head. I’m going to giggle, I know it.

SexEd Part 1: Roped in.

I have been informed today that I am going to teach Sex Ed to the fifth graders.

I shouldn’t say I was informed- technically, I was asked to do it, and technically I could’ve had said no.

Technically.

But the reality is, I’m still new at the school, less than 60 days in, and taking over a job from someone who was well liked. It’s an awkward situation, and I’m finding I really have to bust ass to get accepted into the fold here.

You remember Sex Ed. It was that time where things were implied, where the class was divided into boys and girls. The girls went with the popular elementary teacher, the nurturing one, the one that is embarrassingly honest and forthright about her feelings, the one kids would go to if they had real problems, because she was an emotional rock they could tether too. The boys went with the gym coach, the same one that called you ‘girlies’ went you were running too slow during gym laps. I don’t really know what happened with the girls, but the boys were sat on a cold gym floor and shown slides of line drawings of genitalia, of penises and vaginas, of the internal plumbing of ovaries and vas deferens and all the odd canals- all of this alluding to, but never saying, that somehow babies and sex and some sort of illicit adult activity was involved.

They called me down to the organizational meeting where the fifth grade teacher, the elementary Asst. Principal, the kindergarten/P.E. teacher, and- duh- the gym coach were all seated. I can’t say I know much about the gym coach- he seems nicer than I remember my own coaches to have been, but that isn’t saying much. He is a little red-faced and paunchy, which is an odd characteristic that all gym teachers seem to share. I don’t know why physical education jobs are given to people who couldn’t run a mile if chased by a tank, but there you go. Its true, things really don’t change.

Before I can explain how this meeting felt, I need to make a relevant point; being a school teacher is weird enough as is. Every time you bring the fact up at a social gathering, people will start recalling their own school days, and the pictures they paint are clearly in soft-focus. A hazy memory is implied, and it’s difficult to listen to, as you are still, for all intensive purposes, in high school, and the distance and nostalgia they attribute to these visceral images is not one you get to enjoy. We, as teachers, all full well remember what it was ‘like’ in high school, because we just got to leave a few hours ago, and have to go back in just a few more hours.

This meeting, though, was different. I DID feel that odd nostalgia- although ‘nostalgia’ implies a pleasant sensation, whereas I just had a flood of awkward emotion, sweaty palms and other unmentionable physical reactions to the subject matter- and it made it peculiar to sit in a room with a closed door discussing the education of sex for small children. I am embarrassed to admit that I spent a good part of the meeting breaking out into 12-year old snickers. I couldn’t help it. The fifth grade teacher, a middle-aged mother who clearly loves children, was putting forth most of the ideas, being rather blunt and unembarrassed, as someone who spends every minute of every day with kids is wont to do. She’s coaching me as to how I should talk to the boys, suggesting I say things like,

“Well, you may start feeling different about girls as well, and perhaps you are noticing their boobs more now, and that’s OK.”

Man, It was difficult enough to suppress a huge 12-years old guffaw at this point, but she had to choose to day to be wearing a rather low- cut blouse, and it felt as if someone had filled my eyeballs half-up with liquid mercury, such was the gravity of my line of sight swinging directly to her cleavage. I was sitting directly across from her, so I just had to muscle through it, but it wasn’t easy, and I’m not entirely sure I succeeded, but at least I didn’t linger long enough to warrant comment or blushing. Not that I could embarrass this woman. I meant me blushing.

I really wonder if they chose the right person to do this.


I’ll admit, I did entertain a small hope that they would rethink their decision to ask me to do this and pass it along to the gym teacher- present at the meeting, of course- but there was some measure of just dumb fart-joke, penis penis penis vagina residual juvenile humor that I have not yet been able to expunge from my personality. I figured I’d give it a shot. I can’t believe I have to talk to 10-year olds about wet dreams.


And so I am about to check out the DVD’s given to me, the ones I must show on the metaphorical cold gym floor. I hope they don’t suck.

An Introduction

As a teacher, I agonized over where to place the relevant apostrophe in the title. Points off for bad grammar, you know.

But as much as I hope for this to be a forum- and I'm still figuring out how to do this, so bear with me- realism must come into play.

The fact is, if you are even reading this, you are doing it alone. No one shares computers concurrently. Laptops are the new TV remote, upgraded and personalized. And so, I stuck with the singular. You can shut it off anytime you like. I understand that. I hope you read this anyway.

But still, the idea holds water- I 'm hoping teachers, students, former teachers and former students- everyone really- can glean something from this, this odd glimpse into the world of the professional educator. And I hope you say something- education is a messy business, and only moved by those willing to be labeled 'outspoken' . Please, comment, argue, foster discussion, whatever you like, really. No more babbling, though. Let's just do this.