My first appearance in a newspaper: as a fetus
The Washington Post
October 12, 1983, Wednesday, Final Edition
Alexandria a Model In Sex Education;
Family Life and Values Stressed in Year’s Study
BYLINE: By Alison Muscatine, Washington Post Staff Writer
SECTION: Metro; C1
LENGTH: 2517 words
One morning last week a pregnant woman, Chris Guendelsberger, lay on her back on a linoleum floor in Room 140 at Francis C. Hammond Junior High School in Alexandria, as ninth-grade students trooped by listening through a stethoscope to the sounds of her 5-month-old fetus.
“Why do you eat pickles when you’re pregnant?” asked a curious ninth-grade boy. A 14-year-old girl wondered aloud, “Can you have a miscarriage after four and a half months?”
Such questions are common in Room 140, classroom for the newly required Family Life course for Alexandria’s 900 ninth graders. A year-long study of human sexuality from birth to death, the course already is viewed as a model of dramatic new approaches being used to teach sex education and family life in America’s public schools.
“We talk seriously and openly about ourselves as sexual beings,” said Jean Hunter, director of the Alexandria program and a Family Life teacher. “It’s got to be one of the biggest gifts you can give an adolescent.”Nationwide, more and more public and private school students are receiving information about sex-related topics, including the once taboo subjects of abortion, birth control, homosexuality, masturbation and child abuse.
Roughly 75 percent of those students graduating from high school in 1982 had some form of sex education, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a family-planning research group. And 36 percent of the high schools surveyed nationally offer a separate course on sex education or family life, although few are required or are as comprehensive as the one offered in Alexandria.
The vociferous opposition to sex education spawned by fundamentalist and New Right groups in the 1970s and early 1980s, which included high-pitched controversies in Fairfax and Montgomery counties, now has been submerged by quiet, grass-roots alliances of parents, educators, clergy and lay people who believe courses in human sexuality have a place in the schools.
Although some Maryland and Northern Virginia school systems continue to have outspoken critics of sex education, the waning of opposition nationally stems partly from a new philosophy among educators about the content of sex education courses.
Today’s teachers actively discourage sexual activity among teen-agers and emphasize self-esteem, self-awareness, family responsibilities and the need for rational decision-making. Known as “values clarification,” this approach contrasts sharply with the “value-free” teaching of a decade ago, which concentrated on putting sex and sexuality in a positive light. Today’s courses typically are called Family Life or Human Development, reflecting a broader conceptual orientation than in previous eras.
Most of the momentum for sex education courses has come at the local level. Only two states—Maryland and New Jersey—and the District explicitly require their schools to teach sex education, and the District is unique in requiring that student receive information on abortion and contraception.
“You can’t have a successful family life or sex education program without getting the whole community involved,” said Arlene Moore, an assistant superintendent in Alexandria. “We planned it slowly. And when we started the course there were no surprises. That was the key.”
Roughly 75 percent of the nation’s adults favor teaching sex education in the schools, according to recent opinion polls. Sex educators attribute this widespread support in part to a recognition among adults that today’s adolescents, bombarded with the commercialization of sex in the media, are utterly confused about society’s sexual mores.
“They’re in-between generations,” said Mary Lee Tatum, a nationally recognized expert on sex education and Family Life teacher in Falls Church, where a comprehensive human sexuality course was pioneered 12 years ago. “A lot of kids are confused by the lack of parameters. By sexual mores on television. You never get herpes on ‘Dallas.’ People fall in and out of bed, but no one ever gets herpes. It’s a very unrealistic portrayal of sexual behavior.”
Despite their superficial precociousness—as exemplified by some young girls’ sophisticated hairdos and makeup—today’s teen-agers are no better informed than previous generations, according to Alexandria’s Family Life teachers. But many are more tempted by sex as a substitute for missing parental affections that result from split families, overworked parents and financial problems in the homes.
“Most of the adolescents are touch deprived,” Tatum said. “They never are hugged, literally.”
While most adults polled in the past few years insist parents should retain the primary responsibility for teaching their children about sex, many are uncomfortable talking about sexual issues with their children.
“In a variety of subtle ways, most parents instruct their children that sexuality is not a topic to be discussed,” said Douglas Kirby, director of research at the Center for Population Options. “Most parents do not tell their children anything about sexuality—not even the basics.”
Alexandria’s Family Life course began five years ago with widespread community input. It stresses homework, testing and development of academic skills. And the focus is not on sex but on sexuality, which is presented in the context of a human being’s entire life.
“The parents wanted not simply genital sexuality … but the human sexuality and emphasis on parenting,” Hunter explained. “We start with the family unit and Erik Erikson’s stages of life. We tell them the most important sex organ is the brain.”
Alexandria’s Family Life teachers are recruited from different disciplines—at Hammond the bulk are English and science teachers—and must go through 104 hours of graduate-level course work before they can teach the course.
“I got into it because of my own recollection of my abysmal experience in those adolescent years and afterwards,” said Julie Haidemenos, an English and reading teacher who teaches two Family Life classes each day at Hammond. “Originally, I signed up for myself, but after the first semester of training I knew it would be fun to teach.”
The teachers’ training begins with breaking down their own inhibitions about sex and sexuality, principally through open discussions of sexual issues. One exercise involves learning all the slang terminology for sexual functions and organs, to prepare for the student lexicon and also to break down adult barriers.
“You give the adults permission to be uptight about sex,” said Tatum, who trains most of the teachers in Northern Virginia. “You tell them there is a historical reason we’re all in this mess. Then we talk about the nature of sexuality, and we laugh at ourselves and take ourselves less seriously.”
Robert White, a football coach at Hammond who teaches Family Life, took the course because he wanted to improve his communication skills with his 8-year-old daughter. He accomplished that but also found he learned new things about himself.
“I was a very private person,” White said. “I found out a little about who I really was, in terms of my sexual aspects. From then on I lost a lot of my inhibitions.”
Even with special training, sex education experts agree that personal qualities are key to choosing the best Family Life teachers.
“One of the biggest fears of parents is, ‘Who is going to teach this course?’ ” said Julie Taylor of Education, Training, and Research Associates, a group that trains Family Life teachers in California. “When the fear of teaching the course is based on personal beliefs or one’s own sexuality, we’re less likely to be successful with the training. No one who doesn’t want to teach the course should be forced to teach it.”
Typically, sex educators say, good Family Life teachers needs to have an understanding of human development, communications skills and psychology. They should have a strong sense of moral values as well and should be compassionate.
These characteristics are crucial because of adolescents’ delicate feelings about sex and sexuality. One false move by a teacher, or the failure to present information clearly, can have dire consequences to students who are 14 or 15 years old.
One woman teacher at Hammond was mortified to realize a male student mistook her friendly gesture for a sexual advance and moved his seat from the front to the back of the class. And in one of White’s classes, he was alarmed to discover in a girl’s class journal that she had completely misunderstood how and when a woman can get pregnant.
In Alexandria, the Family Life teachers share a belief that personal experiences are out-of-bounds for classroom discussions and that the teacher must present only objective information on topics, such as abortion, homosexuality and masturbation.
“I will be telling them in one of my next few classes that most people masturbate,” said G.A. Hagan, another Hammond football coach and Family Life teacher. “Inevitably, someone will ask me about myself, and I have to think through ahead of time how I will handle that question.”
Most of the teachers ask students to write on index cards the questions they are embarrassed to ask out loud in class. Last week, one of Haidemenos’ students wrote: “Have you ever had sex before and did it hurt?” The next day in class Haidemenos reviewed the general question of whether sex is painful but was careful not to bring her own experiences into the discussion.
In a few instances, students volunteer information that is highly personal. Several teachers say students with babies have talked about their pregnancies. In one class, during a discussion of circumcision, a foreign student talked openly about his own painful circumcision at age 9.
At the outset of the course, however, the teachers try to set strict boundaries on privacy, while at the same time trying to convey to students that all of their questions will be taken seriously.
“When I enter the room I assume they know nothing,” Hunter said. “I tell them there is this conspiracy of silence about human sexuality. It’s sort of giving them permission to be ignorant.”
In these first weeks of the course, Alexandria’s teachers are finding that, apart from sporadic displays of macho and giggles, most of the students are beginning to admit their naivete in front of their peers.
For example, there is a vocal preoccupation among the students about the actual sizes of reproductive organs, teachers say. “How long is the vagina?” a boy blurted out during discussion of the female reproductive system in one of Hunter’s classes last week.
And there seems to be a universally held belief, in the beginning, that women cannot get pregnant the first time they have sex.
One key to breaking down the student’s barriers is the teacher’s own treatment of the subject matter. During discussions of the reproductive systems Hunter matter-of-factly told her class: “Now, while I’m walking around the class teaching, my vagina is contracted, not expanded. During intercourse, or if she is having a baby, a woman’s vagina expands, just like a penis does during intercourse.”
Although that statement provoked no outward signs of embarrassment among the students, partly because of the teacher’s demeanor, some students become embarrassed at times.
A few weeks ago, Christine Gutierrez, who teaches reading and Family Life at Hammond, could not get any student to volunteer to write “testes” on a diagram on the blackboard.
Yet the graphic discussions of human reproduction and sexual functions are the easiest subjects to teach, teachers say. “You have them in the palm of your hand,” Gutierrez said. “They really want to know this stuff.”
The challenge comes in presenting material on old age and death, which is scary to teen-agers, and on controversial topics, such as abortion, where personal viewpoints must be concealed.
“The one thing that bothered me most during training was the value questions,” Gutierrez said. “In a public school, what do I do? Do I skirt my opinion about abortion? It’s been very hard because I don’t want to be value free.”
While teachers tread carefully in these areas, they are emphatic in their opposition to teen-age sexual activity. This message is reiterated throughout the course.
“The greatest thing I see with this group is peer pressure,” White said. “What I say to them over and over again is that it’s okay to say no, that it’s okay to be your own person.”
During the section on adolescence, teachers will devote a large segment of time to discussions of emotional manipulation, and the ways that boys and girls use each other in response to peer pressure.
Here the role of the teacher is complicated. Sex education experts say women teachers have an advantage over men in that most students feel more comfortable with a “mother” figure while they are discussing delicate subjects. But the women teachers have to be careful not to arouse boys inadvertently with an innocent pat on the back or to inspire hostility in them during discussions of rape.
Male teachers, on the other hand, have to overcome natural suspicions that girls have toward older men. A recent study by the National Family Life Network shows that men are significantly less successful than women in teaching girls to develop self-esteem.
“You don’t kid around in any, way, shape or form with them,” said Hagan. He and White are the only men among the six Family Life teachers at Hammond. “I’ve noticed that when the girls ask questions, they want the answer, but they’re also looking to see how I as a man will respond.”
Despite Alexandria’s example of the shifting attitudes about teaching adolescents the facts of life, most school systems still incorporate sex education units into existing courses, such as health, physical education, home economics or biology. And about 65 percent of the family life courses are taught in one- to four-week units, according to Margaret Terry Orr of the Alan Guttmacher Institute.
In these respects, the Washington metropolitan area, apart from Alexandria and Falls Church, is typical of the rest of the country. In Arlington County, for example, family life is taught as an elective three-week unit in ninth grade health and physical education classes.
In Prince George’s County, a four-week Family Life and Human Development unit is included in elective health courses. Only about 10 percent of the county’s high school students take the course.
Montgomery County, in the wake of debate about the place for sex education, now offers a six-week unit in the eighth grade. A one-semester elective is offered only in seven of the 21 high schools.
What has made Alexandria’s program successful, educators say, is its commitment to training teachers for the course, a crucial factor in giving teachers the confidence needed to teach the subject matter..
“I can tell you that if someone had said to me two years ago that I would be teaching this stuff,” said Hammond football coach Hagan, “I would have said, ‘Who, me? I’d stumble over the words if I had to say them in front of a class.’ “
