Students Today Aren't Ready for Sex (Education)

Kids in Portland Schools participate in a program called S.T.A.R.S.

When P was in middle school S.T.A.R.S. stood for "Students Today Aren't Ready for Sex". Cool hipster volunteers came to the school to talk about, well. . . you know. . . to go over all those things that us lazy parents count on other people, namely teachers or FOX TV, to explain.

At the end of the lessons, the sixth graders were given pencils that had the full program name printed on them: Students Today Aren't Ready for Sex. The first thing the students did, of course, was to sharpen them all the way down so they just said "Sex". Proving the point pretty well, I'd say.

In high school, S.T.A.R.S. now stands for "Students Talking About Responsible Sexuality". In my dreams, the "talking" part would stay at school but MY kids have to bring it all home.

Yesterday P came home and said: "We talked about the male and female reporductive systems in Health. I was the only girl in the class today, so they focused mostly on the boys. We talked for like 15 minutes about how guys are supposed to give themselves self-exams."

Then, because he's big on fairness, K says "Did they talk about your vagina too?" (Trust me, those are words no mother needs to hear coming from her 13 year old son. About her daughter's va-hee-na.)

"No, we didn't get there. The bell rang."

Figures. Here is another story told by P.:

"So today in S.T.A.R.S. we did a role playing game. . ."

Let me interject here to tell you that to P, a "role playing game" is Dungeons and Dragons, so that's what she was thinking when. . .

"The teacher told us to pick a character so we could practice making responsible sexual decisions. . ."

Now, since P is usally the Dungeon Master in D&D, she didn't have her own "player character" in mind. So she borrowed K's favorite player: a 300 pound, 100 year old 3ft tall dwarf named Bud.



"We rolled dice to see what kinds of decisions our characters had to make. Well, unfortunately Bud made some bad sexual choices. He got a 17-year-old girl pregnant having unprotected sex. And he got Chlamydia."

K was pretty upset that she let that happen to Bud. P was pretty upset that the game didn't allow players to roll hit points or cast spells.

I know people have good stories about embarssing questions, ackward moments and responsible or irresponsible sexual choices. Dungeons and Dragon stories are okay too. Lets hear what you've got.

WTF? (contains adult language. . .)

My friend DK posted a status update on Facebook about her son going to the Principal's office for saying the F-word. People shared lots of great stories about kids in trouble for swearing. I told the one about the time P said "shit" (twice) into a microphone to a room full of 300 people including my future boss and the Mayor of Portland.


Here is P with Mayor Potter on another occasion when she managed NOT to shout out obscenities.

And here is one (more) of my stories about swearing.

When V was in preschool he had a little problem with the potty mouth--that is, he swore like a sailor.

I was stumped as to what to do about it when we saw the Simpsons episode where Homer builds a dog house and Ned Flanders catches him swearing. I believe I've mentioned before that the only parenting techniques my kids buy into are ones they've seen on the Simpsons. Homer bets his neighbor that if he can stop swearing, Ned will shave his mustache. So Marge makes Homer a "Swear Jar" and charges him a quarter a curse. Highlights here: http://tinyurl.com/ow4aqg

P thought this seemed like a good idea but we were stumped by the question "what constitutes a swear word?" We happened to be listening to lots of Spearhead at the time and one of our favorite songs was "Love is Da Shit That Makes Life Bloom". Hello Mother of Mixed Messages!

We had a good discussion about artistic license and decided that we needed to establish some kind of a guide for what was a swear word. While we were at it the kids thought it would be helpful to add some alternatives and also point out any exceptions.

Then began one of my favorite listening sessions. The kids were about 4,6 and 8. V was the expert so the other two kept asking him, "Okay, whats another swear word" and he'd rattle off another word he knew he wasn't supposed to say. I helped them set up a chart on the computer but left it up to them to fill it out. I answered questions like "Mom how do you spell Bastard?", "Is a Bitch a boy or a girl dog?" "Is it okay to say Shit when you are pooping?"

I've done a pretty poor job of recreating it here (the original was much longer and had wonderful misspellings):



But you get the idea. And by the way, after they went through the exercise, they pretty much stopped swearing. I got the most quarters from Charlie who sometimes would swear just so they would catch him at it. I think we collected enough to buy a carton of Ben and Jerry's before it became just a favorite relic.

Lets hear your great swear stories--I'm hereby exercising my artistic license to encourage you all to swear in these posts!

This might be boring -- but that's okay!

My mom has a saying, a bored person is a boring person and when I was growing up, boy did I take that seriously. I spent a lot of time afraid that I might be bored -- which would lead to something even worse: I might be boring. I was pretty desperate to keep myself entertained or entertaining at all times. It turned out to be a good thing in the end because I was easily entertained, always a cheap date and didn't require much upkeep, but the attitude did leave me a little twitchy in the duller moments of my childhood.

I passed this same attitude along to my children for a number of years. It seemed like a pretty good plan. Then, when I was a preschool teacher, I had the good fortune of taking a seminar from a wonderful woman named Bev Bos. I won't go into too much detail here about Bev, but trust me, she's one of the most inspirational speakers you will ever have the pleasure to hear. She is the teacher and director of Roseville Community School in Roseville CA and lucky for us, she also lectures all over the country talking about early childhood education.

One of the things she talked about that has really stuck with me is that boredom is a developmental phase all kids must experience. Kids need to learn how to be bored. Boredom is not bad, its an opportunity to find something else to do! She gave us a wonderful phrase to take back to our preschools (and homes) to use the next time a child came up to say "I'm bored".

"You're bored? That's GREAT! Now you get to decide what to do next!"

The first time I said that to my kids (instead of a bored person is a boring person) they looked at me like I was crazy. Then they waited for my customary list of ideas. I didn't give them any.

"What should I do?"
"I don't know."

It took a while for the kids to realize they were going to be largely on their own to work through this "developmental phase". Well, not so much on their own. They did have each other.

The following is a short list of things the kids have come up with on their own while they were "deciding what to do next". Lucky for me, they often took pictures while I sat back and ate bon bons.

Send me examples of what your kids get up to when they are bored (or you get up to, for that matter)

Superheroes:



Home Office:

United States of Pillows (only made it through the west coast)

Starburst wrapper hat:

Jump over stuff on your bike:

And of course, jump over brother on your bike:

Angry Letter #1

"Penelope I'm very upset with your muchereti [maturity] level, I exspect more. . .so get your own darn chair.
This picture of you is showing how upset with you [sic]"