In am teaching the last unit in the new core curriculum this week: healthy choices around sex, alcohol, and drug use. You might think this an unusual unit for a science teacher to teach in a middle school, and you would be correct. It is a Health unit. However, the district eliminated all their Health teacher positions two years ago in a money-saving measure, and consolidated this unit under the science curriculum.
At the same time, the district hired a company from New York to provide a curriculum for use in suburban Florida. The Health portion of that curriculum looks like something that would be taught in teh New York City schools, where the vast majority of eighth graders are sexually aware if not sexually active; the terminology is explicit, the web sites are explicit, and the instruction is explicit. If a child did not know all there was to know about having, wanting, soliciting sex, preventing pregnancy, avoiding detection by parents, shirking responsibility (boys), demanding responsibility (girls, after the fact), they would after this class.
I taught this curriculum last year. We split the classes up, girls in one class taught by the lady teachers, and boys taught by me. I thought at the time maybe we were putting out a little too much info for the age group, but the curriculum specialist from the district, and my principle, both insisted that it was not a big deal, that this stuff was taught in the middle schools all the time.
I kept trying to imagine putting my own daughters in the class, and I just couldn't do it.
This year, it was decided not to split the classes. I would have to teach both boys and girls in teh same class. Okay, I think I can deal with this.
There was no lesson plan. The district did not have an approved lesson plan, the teachers are supposed to come up with their own. How am I supposed to know what is approved and what is not? I was given a list of websites that had "good model lesson plans," but when I went to the sites, I found the sites *very explicit*! Oh, boy!! I asked the curriculum specialist if she had been to any of the sites, "Well, no, I haven't had the time," she told me.
The permission letter that the district provided us had the URL address for the district's curriculum that we were to follow so that parents could look up the curriculum to decide if they wanted their children exposed to that kind of thing. The link did not work. When parents inundated me, and I forwarded their requests to the district, I was told the site was protected: "The curriculum cost a lot of money, the district doesn't want someone stealing it." ?!?!?!?!
So after reviewing the lack of support and competence of the district concerning the sex ed portion of the curriculum, after attempting to look up the supporting documentation for the (nonexistent) lesson plans, and after reviewing what information they DID present to me to teach to my students, I concluded that the information was not age appropriate for the classes I taught.
I have chosen not to participate.
During the Second World War, after the surrender of France to the Germans, the Nazi government only occupied about 40% of French territory, allowing the remaining area to be self-governed by a government out of Vichy. This government was completely autonomous, with absolutely no military or political ties to Nazi Germany, nor were there any German troops in the lands administered by the Vichy government. Even still, Vichy did the bidding of the Nazis simply on request, up to and including the rounding up and delivery of Jews to the German border all the way up to the end of the French Occupation in 1945. There were no German troops to enforce these requests, no German policemen to escort the shipments, simply the French doing the best job they could at delivering Jews to the death camps because they had been told to, including sanitizing the cattle cars between shipments, and running trains on time.
It never occurred to the French to just not participate.
Like I have decided to do today. I am not going to do this, because it is just wrong. Someone will look up in a few years, and ask "How did this get taught? It is obviously very wrong?!"
It starts here. Let someone else teach it, if it must be taught, Maybe the principle can teach it. I will not. I know what I *can* teach. I can teach that the latest research on brain development shows that the prefrontal lobe, or the area of the brain that controls right from wrong, judgment, and moral values, isn't fully formed in young adults until they are 25 years old. So giving 13 year olds information and then hoping they will develop the moral ability to handle that information appropriately is gross conceptual error.
And you would hope that institutional educational professionals would know better.
Crow has learned to follow my instincts, they have served me well through the years.
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