Sex Education

Sex Education

What is the first thing you think about when you think of elementary school rites of

passage? For me it is and always will be sex education. Only for me it was not such a time

of wonder; it was more like a time of trying to keep my stomach from turning inside out. I

remember it like it was yesterday, even though it was more like seven years ago.

It was late April, headed into the summer of my fifth grade year. My teacher was

Mr. Atkinson, a funny little man with a good background in American history and,

conveniently, a fifth-grade sense of humor. Our class was located in a small portable,

which was the trademark of overcrowded public schools in the area. Without air

conditioning in the spring it was like a furnace in there, and that did nothing to help my

situation.

District policy in regards to sex education led to this learning phenomenon each

spring, when the male teachers would take aside the fifth grade boys and the female

teachers would do the same with the girls. I remember being rounded up like cattle and

herded into the portable, which was doubly crowded as it bore the brunt of the fifth grade

male population in the school. There was excitement, fear, wonder, apprehension, and a

hundred other emotions swirling around the group of kids, and all of them were obvious

to anyone watching.

As we entered the small building, a mass of fidgety kids pinching through a small

doorway in the corner of the room, it was like no other time I had been in there. The room

seemed different somehow. Not worse, anyway, but there was a definite change between

then and the last time I had been in there. Thinking back on it now, it was most likely the

energy of all that curiosity, because when the s...

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...k about I'm told he carried me to the

nurse's office, where I regained consciousness on a small bed with a paper-covered pillow,

which crinkled as I moved my head. The nurse comforted me and told me that I would be

fine, and that my mom was on her way to get me and take me home. Feeling reassured, I

sat up and waited.

Ten minutes later my mom was hugging me tightly and worrying over my

condition like almost any mother would. I went home that night and ate dinner, which was

of my choice that evening, and then went to bed. I had no idea the teasing that would

begin the next day.

All throughout recess wisecracks flew at me from all directions, and I did my best

to bounce them off me with my own schoolyard wit. The teasing subsided a week or so

later, and I, as a fifth grade boy, made up my mind not to harass people about things that

they couldn't prevent.