Un-Sex-Ed

I've heard talk of the "pearl-clutchers" who object to the sex-ed portion of the new Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum, but I've never met any. My suspicion is that, apart from a handful of people belonging to fringe religious groups (such as the small group that gathered to protest at Queen's Park on last Tuesday), no one really objects to this update. Why? Maybe because contrary to what many of the media stories on the new curriculum would have us believe, this is an extremely tame sex-ed program. In fact it's not about sex at all.

As I tweeted on the day the curriculum was released:

New K-8 #onted #sexed curriculum not particularly "sex-positive": word "orgasm" occurs 0 times--same # of times as in '98 and 2010 docs.
— StepfordTO (@stepfordTO) February 23, 2015

OTOH mentions of STIs in all docs too many to count. #ONsexed (not a bad thing but...balance?) #onted
— StepfordTO (@stepfordTO) February 23, 2015

It's not just orgasms that are MIA; pleasure in general gets short shrift, though at least the concept is mentioned—eight times in the 2015 release, up from five in the 2010 version. And, yes, there are those "shocking" references to wet dreams, vaginal lubrication and masturbation in Grade 6, but since these topics are mentioned (once each) in the optional teacher prompts, the likelihood of them making their way into actual classroom teaching or discussion is slim. By contrast, teaching about abstinence or delaying sexual activity (eleven mentions) is not optional: it is clearly a part of the curriculum that is expected to be taught—in fact, it is listed as one of the "key topics" for Grades 7 and 8. STIs are another key topic for these grades. There is a lot of information about STIs in this curriculum, as of course there should be, but as I said in my tweet, the balance between "scary" and "fun" topics may strike some as skewed.

Or rather it would be askew if this were a sex-ed curriculum: that is, a curriculum about sex and sexuality. It is not. The Human Development and Sexual Health portion of the Health and Physical Education curriculum is in fact a harm-prevention program whose aim is to educate kids about the possible dangers they may encounter as they grow into sexual beings. That is precisely how the government has framed the new curriculum in their parent guides and news conferences, and most of its "controversial" parts can be explained in light of this aim. Education minister Liz Sandals has pointed out, for instance, that young kids need to know the proper names of body parts so they can communicate with family members and police if they are being abused. Older kids need to be aware of anal and oral sex in the context of STIs, since rates of teen pregnancy in Ontario have dropped while STI rates have risen—the reason being, according to Sandals, that teens are engaging in pregnancy-avoidant sexual behaviour, unaware that alternative acts carry other risks. The new lessons about online behaviour and sexting are safety-focussed in obvious ways, as are the anti-bullying sections, the LGBTQ sections, and the new additions about consent.

All of these new emphases are welcome, and they all make sense given the government's explicit goal of keeping kids safe and healthy. One would be hard pressed to object to a program that furthers such a goal. Which is why, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, so few people oppose the new curriculum. Progressive parents and educators, and organizations such as Planned Parenthood support it, but so too do well-known conservative pundits and columnists, such as Margaret Wente and Michael Coren. (See also this thoughtful post by a Baptist pastor from Eganville, Ontario. )

I'm happy that there is wide support for this curriculum and that it will finally be implemented in September of 2015. Kids need sexual harm-prevention education. But they also need sex education. As I said in my post on the 2010 version of the curriculum,

We live in a culture in which there exists, for adults and kids alike, a parallel, free and nearly universally available alternative to sex ed: namely, pornography. A progressive sex education must be at least as interesting as its pornographic rival.

The pornographic rival has not gone away. And progressive sex education for Ontario kids is still lacking.

Teachers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (plus the Sexy!) Part 3b

(This is the final section of the third installment of a post on teachers. See Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and the first part of of Part 3 here.)

The Sexy, Part B

It was near the end of September, not long after the discussion about the Vietnam War, that I began to linger in Mr. S's classroom after dismissal. At first our conversations were trivial and impersonal—discussions of assignments or continuations of classroom debates—but they soon evolved into more relaxed, personal exchanges about all manner of topic. I took these conversations seriously, occasionally even prepping for them! They had become the highlights of my week and I consistently skipped math class so that I wouldn't have to forego them. At some point, Mr. S expressed concern about my math grades but after I reassured him that I was doing well, he stopped worrying and accepted my decision to skip. I can't imagine a teacher doing that today, but it was a different era, one whose spirit was more conducive to respecting kids' inclinations and choices. Even then it was a Zeitgeist on its way out, but Mr S, with his irreverence for convention and rules, seemed to embody it perfectly.

In our after-class chats we talked a lot about books, with him recommending and lending, and me acting like an eager sponge. In the first few weeks alone, he introduced me to Susan Sontag's I, Etcetera Joan Didion's Play it as It Lays and The White Album, Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, Proust (whom he adored but recommended I hold off reading until I was over thirty), and poetry by Rimbaud, Verlaine and Éluard. One day he brought in his copy of Violette LeDuc's classic of lesbian lit,  La Batarde; I'd asked to borrow it after reading about Simone De Beauvoir's interest in Leduc. As I flipped through it, I jokingly said I was going to show it to my parents and ask them what they thought of his taste in literature. He grabbed the book out of my hand, tore out the page where he'd written his name and handed it back to me. This gesture (which I assured him was unnecessary) was a springboard to talk about homophobia, a new-ish term at the time, whose meaning he explained to me. This in turn led to a discussion of "projection"—a concept that interested him. People who fear homosexual urges in themselves, he explained, will often project that fear onto another, thus relieving them of the burden of confronting the true source of their fear.

Books were not the only conduits to such discussions. Music and movies played a similar role. Mr. S would recommend movies that were playing at the local rep cinemas, alerting me to foreign films that he thought might interest me, especially classics of the French New Wave. (He shared my Francophilia, though in his case it was more understandable—his mother was Swiss French.) But he surprised me by praising certain popular movies as well. I remember him pronouncing Saturday Night Fever a "well-made movie." At the time, I was firmly in the "disco sucks" camp; such praise coming from him was a significant challenge to my adolescent snobbery.

Other topics I remember discussing included: the legalization of marijuana—I was in favour, he did not disagree; the jock-ish culture of high school; Canadian and American politics; and suburbia, against which I chafed but which he defended as a quiet place where people understandably chose to raise kids. "How can you defend it?" I asked. "It's soul-destroying." He shrugged. "Living here is part of why you are who you are." But the next day he brought in his copy of Cheever's Bullet Park for me to read: "My favourite suburban novel," he said.

What surprises me when I look back on those chats is not their breadth and occasional depth, but that they occurred at all. My own participation is not particularly surprising: the student "crush" is a familiar trope in both popular and literary culture, though I would argue that the trivializing term (often applied to unsanctioned attractions, especially those of the young) does not do justice to the potent mix of sexual and intellectual attraction I felt towards Mr. S. More difficult to understand from my perspective is Mr. S's motivation. I wondered then and I wonder now why he was willing to forgo so much of his prep time to engage in an ongoing conversation with a student. The more I think of it, though, the more I realize that what is important is not that he didn't feel anything inappropriate—though I believe he did not—but that if he did, I didn't know. He did not let it show. There was no physical contact between us, with one minor exception. On a spring day when I was the last to leave his classroom, he followed me out, and as I moved through the doorway, he took hold of my braid and let it run through his fingers. It was in all likelihood an innocent, affectionate gesture—which didn't stop me from wandering around for the rest of the day in a thrilled daze, thinking to myself, he touched my hair, he touched my hair!

But the point is, regardless of what he may have felt, and what I clearly did feel, nothing (beyond hair-touching) happened. Or rather what happened was entirely positive, from a pedagogic perspective: feelings rippling beneath the surface of our interaction acted as a catalyst for engaged teaching and learning. It's no accident that I produced better work and learned more in Mr. S's class than I had in the previous three years of high school English.

As I mentioned in Part A of this post, Eros has been recognized as an inducement to learning since antiquity. In the Platonic model, however, love or desire for a person is only the beginning of a process which, if all goes well, ends with the learner transferring her affection to Beauty or Knowledge itself. Human love, of the sort a student might feel towards a teacher, is merely a means to a "higher" end. (See the Ladder of Love.) It's a nice idea, but I don't think one has to view this progression as inevitable or necessary, in order to appreciate the role that Eros can play in learning. A love that remains focussed on a person or that is mixed with desire is a feeling that can produce intense and pleasurable learning. What is there to object to in that? (I'm not saying this is the only way to motivate students!) Love between student and teacher cannot be acted on under most normal circumstances; but it needn't be denied or suppressed either. As long as there are teachers like Mr. S, there will be students who love them. I say let the kids love and learn.

Teachers: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (plus the Sexy!), Part 3

(This is the third installment of a three-part post; read part 1 here and part 2 here.)


The Sexy, Part A [that's right, a part divided into further parts . . . ]

I confess that the writing of this segment of my three-part post on teachers has been a bit of a struggle. Like all of you, I'm aware that we're not supposed to mention teachers and love, or teachers and sex, in the same sentence—not supposed to do so outside the context of porn, that is. (Google "sexy teacher," and see what comes up.) Which goes to show how deeply conflicted we are as a society, not only about teachers as human beings, but also about human beings (including teachers and adolescents) as sexual beings. All I'll say here, as a preface to my story about the "sexy" teacher in my life, is that there is a rich history and philosophy going back to ancient Greece concerning the role of Eros in teaching. Eros as a concept (derived form the god of the same name) is much more broad and powerful than sex. It is conceived (by Plato, for instance) as a primal force and motivator, which incorporates but is not reducible to love, desire, passion. Its role as a spur to learning has been recognized in both ancient and modern educational philosophy, but it remains unacknowledged and controversial in our culture. And yet . . .

There he was on the first day of class, the epitome of English-teacher cool, in black shirt and tight pants, book in hand, leaning back in his chair with one knee bent, foot against the edge of the desk. A cynosure. I hovered by the entrance of the classroom affecting an attitude of bored indifference, but I was secretly excited. Mr. S's reputation, and that of the unusual course he'd designed, preceded him. Pretending not to notice him, I picked up a piece of chalk and wrote in a corner of the blackboard, "Make the rich pay!" Just as I finished writing, Mr. S stood up. With a flick of his longish, dirty-blond hair, he surveyed the space and the kids occupying it. He glanced briefly at what I'd written on the board and reached for the blackboard eraser; as I took my seat at the back of the class, he shot me a ghost of a smirk that seemed to say "really?" then put the eraser down, leaving the Marxist-Leninist party slogan on the board. "This course is World Literature in Translation," he said in a voice that silenced the room. "I'd like to start by reading a poem by Sappho."

The material in the course was rich and eccentric by today's standards. We began with the Classics: Aristotle's Poetics; plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles; poetry by Sappho, Horace and Catullus; excerpts from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Then we jumped to pre-modern and modern lit (I don't remember studying anything in between), reading short stories by De Maupassant, Chekov, Kafka; plays by Ibsen, and Jean Anouilh; essays by Camus and Simone de Beauvoir.

Mr. S expected us to read these texts carefully and write serious responses in the form of essays or reviews; but the selections also served as conduits to some of the most exciting discussions I'd ever had in a classroom setting—discussions about philosophy, psychology, art, feminism, politics. Mr. S moderated these discussions expertly, encouraging open, flexible discussion amongst the students, but he was also willing to express his own opinion as the need arose. He almost never lost his cool, which is probably why I recall one occasion early in the school year when he did. I can't remember the literary context, but we were talking about about war, specifically the Vietnam war. A boy commented that "if the US had won the war, we wouldn't have had to deal with the problem of 'boat people' in North America. Mr S said, "The problem of the boat people. Hmm. Are we all a 'problem' then? Aren't we  all immigrants in this country?" "No, sir," the boy said. "Oh, I see," Mr S said." So way back before the English and French arrived, there were the native peoples—and the Johnsons. Just your family skating around on the glaciers with the Inuit, right?" "No," the boy said.

An awkward silence followed this exchange, but I remember being secretly thrilled. For the first time in my life, I'd witnessed a teacher challenging the unthinking, petty racism that I saw and heard daily in high school. My half-Jewish, WASP-resenting, self-hating white soul was stirred. I was in love.

Next: The Sexy, Part B