Here's the deal: this semester I'm teaching a Canadian course called "Planning 10". This is the same course as "Guidance" or "CAPP" or "Personal Planning"... it varies in name from place to place, country to country. The course covers lots of useful life stuff, such as healthy living, education & careers, finances, etc. In the healthy living unit, sex ed was one of the things I was supposed to teach, but I wasn't sure if I should actually do it as it's a bit of a taboo subject in China. I decided to go ahead with it b/c I think kids need to know about it. I totally thought the kids would be really shy and nervous to talk about it, but from the time I walked into the classroom and wrote "SEX" on the board in big letters, they were hooked!! They got kind of giggly but settled down well. We did a lot of brainstorming as a class, which is normally a risky thing to do as these kids are so shy and afraid of giving wrong answers that class discussions usually don't fly. However, on this topic almost everyone had things to contribute!!
The height of excitement was at the end of the week when I pulled out "Mr. Banana" and did the condom demo. The guys sitting at the back of the classroom put up their hands and asked if they could move their chairs up closer for a better view! Never have I seen students SO interested in learning anything before! Of course I was a little nervous doing this too, and really hoped nobody would be walking by the classroom and looking thru the windows in the hallway!
Of course I told the kids that it's best to wait until you're married to have sex, but I think it's very naive to assume that ALL the kids would actually adhere to this advice, and given all the nasty STD's out there (which the students studied in detail), I thought it would be best that they know how to better protect themselves.
Overall, a very successful set of lessons... don't think they'll ever forget it, nor will I!
1 comment:
Wow! What an experience to teach sex ed in any class room, let alone a Chinese classroom!
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