©2010-2019 Nypon
The summer 2016 issue of Teaching Tolerance honestly brings up a lot of interesting issues in our schools. The first one that caught my attention though was ‘Educators and parents agree: It’s Time to Move Beyond the Abstinence-Only Model’. Honestly, I’ve had this question for a lot of years of why we don’t expand our sex education for students. Realistically, we know that there are many teens that are having sex, so why not also teach them how to have safe sex as well? Also agreeing with what the article said, while no sex until marriage does help instate that you won’t get pregnant and won’t have the chance of getting STI’s, it hasn’t lowered teen pregnancy, like they were hoping, and teens are still having sex. So what is wrong with teaching safe sex practices to everyone, including members in the LGBT community? I mean, I specifically remember back in 5th grade during a portion of our sex education, boys and girls were separated into different classrooms because “we were learning about the female anatomy while men would learn about their own”. Why can’t we learn about BOTH so that there are no misconceptions? This is why so many boys don’t understand the female body, and get grossed out talking about periods. It’s why girls make fun of boys when they get a sudden erection in the middle of class; we don’t understand why all of these things happen. It is so important to have comprehensive sex education, for the LGBT community, and just all students in general. If we need to be learning this type of information, we should be given all of the information.
While also speaking about sex education in elementary schools, what they described in this portion of the article would be a fantastic idea. Especially about consent. Maybe starting the talk about consent in a positive way will help every student understand and apply it as they get older. It could help children speak out if they have been sexually abused. It doesn’t have to be about how girls and boys have sex, it can be small things such as consent, bullying, gender norms, and other things of that nature. Start small and make sex not so taboo in our society.
The other article I read was ‘Being There for Nonbinary Youth: Sometimes the “T” in LGBT gets Overlooked’ shows how important having allies in school are. But it did honestly appall me that 75% of transgender students felt unsafe in school, and how their grades or dropout rate correlated with that. I recently read a book called Becoming Nicole that talked about a girl’s problems when she was facing society’s issues with gender neutral bathrooms or people who are transgender using the bathroom they identify as. Personally, the only problem I have with anyone in the bathrooms is that we can make awkward eye contact with each other through the cracks of the stalls. America, fix that. But regardless, students no matter how they identify, should always feel safe in school. Transgender youth deserve to feel like there is always someone out there to help them and to guide them into being the best person they can be. Regardless of your beliefs, how can you as an educator let a student fall behind just because of how they identify? That just blows my mind.
Sometimes as teachers, it seems like we do so much but not enough at the same time. I wonder how we can fix that.