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?