|
|
|
The views expressed on this page are
solely
those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of County
News Online
|
 |
The Atlantic
The Questions Sex-Ed Students Always Ask
For 45 years, Deborah Roffman has let students’ curiosities guide her lessons on sexuality and relationships.
Sarah Carr
January 13, 2020
About 25 years ago, a public school in the Baltimore suburbs invited
Deborah Roffman to teach a class on puberty to fifth graders. Roffman,
who was known as the “Sex Lady” at the private Park School of
Baltimore, where she had been teaching for two decades, was flattered.
But she was troubled by the restrictions that the public school’s vice
principal had given her: She couldn’t use the words fertilization,
intercourse, or sex. And she couldn’t answer any student questions
related to those subjects. That wasn’t going to work for the Sex Lady.
Eventually, Roffman reached a compromise with the public school:
Students would get parental permission to attend her talk, and Roffman
could answer any question they asked, even if it meant using the S-word.
Roffman’s title of human-sexuality educator has not changed since she
arrived at the Park School in 1975, but the dimensions of her role
there have steadily grown. So, too, has her outside work in consulting
and teacher training: Over the years, she has advised at nearly 400
schools, most of them private.
Initially, Roffman taught elective classes in sexuality to the juniors
and seniors at Park, but within two years, she had expanded to seventh
and eighth graders. In the 1980s, she added fourth and fifth graders to
her roster. She also meets annually with the parents of students as
young as kindergartners, to coach them on how to talk with their
children about sexuality, and she leads summer training for the Park’s
elementary-school teachers on incorporating sexuality instruction into
their classrooms. “There is this knowledge that we keep in a box about
sexuality, waiting until kids are ‘old enough,’” Roffman told me. “My
job is to change that.”
During her 45 years of teaching, Roffman has witnessed the evolution of
the nation’s attitude toward sex education and, as her experience at
the public school shows, how uneven that education can be.
Perhaps more than any other subject, sex education highlights the
country’s fierce loyalty to local control of schools. Twenty-nine
states require public schools to stress abstinence if they teach about
sex, according to the latest count by the Guttmacher Institute, a think
tank based in Washington, D.C., and New York that promotes reproductive
rights. Some of the more outrageous abstinence lessons employ troubling
metaphors, such as comparing sexually active, unmarried women to an old
piece of tape: useless and unable to bond. Only 17 states require sex
education to be medically accurate.
Most research has found that sex education for adolescents in the
United States has declined in the past 20 years. Like art and music,
the subject is typically not included on state standardized exams and,
as the saying goes, “what gets tested gets taught.” In the case of sex
education, waning fear about the spread of HIV and AIDS among
heterosexual youths has contributed to the decline in instruction, says
John Santelli, a professor at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public
Health.
But some bright spots do exist, says Jennifer Driver, the vice
president of policy and strategic partnerships at the Sexuality
Information and Education Council of the United States. For example, in
some parts of Mississippi and Texas, there has been a shift away from
"abstinence only" to "abstinence plus" curricula, with the latter
permitting at least some information about contraception.
Roffman remembers her own sex education while growing up in Baltimore
as being limited to a short film in fifth grade about periods and
puberty. She began working in sex ed in 1971—when access to birth
control was rapidly expanding amid the sexual revolution—helping
Planned Parenthood train health-care professionals who were setting up
family-planning clinics in the region, and doing broader community
outreach.
Four years later, she followed her Planned Parenthood supervisor to the
progressive Park School, where students often address teachers by their
first name and current tuition runs about $30,000 a year. When she
arrived that spring, she heard that the senior-class adviser had
recently rushed into the upper-school principal’s office, exclaiming
that something had to be done before the seniors’ graduation, because
“we forgot to talk to them about sex.”
During the next several years, Roffman not only made sure the school
remembered to talk to students about sex but steadily built up the
curriculum. At Park, students learn about standard fare like birth
control and sexually transmitted diseases but also delve into issues
such as the history of abortion rights, changing conceptions of gender
roles, and how to build respectful, intimate relationships.
Students start by learning about the reproductive systems, the
importance of open communication, and the fundamentals of puberty in
their first classes with Roffman, in the fourth and fifth grades. In
seventh grade, they take a deep-dive course on human sexuality,
covering everything from pornography to the use of sex in advertising
to gender identity and sexual orientation. They see her again for a
shorter, related course in eighth grade. During the 2016 presidential
campaign, Roffman’s seventh graders spent most of a semester
researching the candidates’ differing views on sex, gender, and
reproduction. “In the process of doing that, I got to teach about every
topic I wanted to teach about,” she said.
In high school, students take a required sexuality-studies seminar. The
specific content varies year to year, but it’s always based on what
Roffman calls the “eight characteristics of a sexually healthy adult,”
which include staying healthy, enjoying pleasure, and relating to
others in caring, nonexploitative ways.
The through line of her approach, at any age, is letting students’
queries guide her instruction. So she asks her students to submit
anonymous questions at the start of the semester, and makes sure that
she answers them as the course progresses.
Regardless of whether they grew up in the ’80s or the aughts, kids of
certain ages always ask versions of the same questions, Roffman has
found. For instance, middle-school students, she said, want to know if
their bodies and behaviors are “normal.” Many older students ask her at
what age it’s normal to start masturbating.
High schoolers routinely ask about romantic communication,
relationships, and the right time for intimacy: “Who makes the first
move?” “How do you know if you or the other person is ready for the
‘next level’?” “How can you let someone down easy when you want to
break up?”
But some contemporary questions, Roffman said, are very different from
those she heard earlier in her career. Sometimes the questions change
when the news does. (More than 30 years ago, Roffman started reading
two newspapers a day to keep up with the rapid pace of news about HIV
and AIDS; she’s maintained the habit since.)
She said she received a flood of questions about sexual harassment
after the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas, in the early 1990s. The same decade ended with a spike
in student interest in oral sex and behaviors that had previously been
considered more taboo, such as anal sex.
Sometimes changing student questions signal broader cultural shifts,
like the recent surge in student queries about gender identities.
“There would have been questions 20 years ago about sexual orientation,
but not about gender diversity,” Roffman said. But one recent
eighth-grade cohort submitted questions like “How many genders are
there?” “What does ‘gender roles’ mean?” “What is the plus sign for in
LGBTQIA+?” and “Why is ‘gay’ called ‘gay’?” She finds a way to answer
them all.
Roffman’s students appreciate her blunt and holistic approach. As a
sixth grader at a charter school several years ago, Maeve Thistel took
a brief unit in sex education. The teacher seemed uncomfortable and
nervous, she remembers. The condoms the teacher brought for a
demonstration were expired, and split when she took them out of the
package. Thistel came away from the class with the impression that sex
was both “icky and disturbing.”
Thistel, now a college freshman, transferred to Park for high school,
where she found that Roffman presented some of the same material quite
differently: Her very first step in the lesson on condoms was to point
out that all of them have an expiration date that should be noted and
heeded.
Under Roffman’s guidance, sexuality at Park has come to be treated as
something closer to social studies, science, or other core subjects.
Sex ed is “just another part of the curriculum, not carved out as its
own special thing,” says David Sachs, a 1988 graduate who studied with
Roffman and whose son, Sebastian, is now in 11th grade at the school
and has her as a teacher as well.
Like all Park students, Sebastian Sachs had to complete an eighth-grade
project wherein he examined the root cause of a social-justice issue.
His team picked sexual assault and, with Roffman as their adviser,
focused on consent education and how to introduce it in the youngest
grades. Sachs and his teammates created a curriculum for preschoolers
that, among other things, encourages them to ask permission before
hugging a classmate, borrowing a pencil, or swooping in for a high five.
In Roffman’s ideal world, the school would implement lessons like
these, and other age-appropriate sex and relationship education, from
the earliest grades. Several of her co-workers agree. “Fourth grade
might be too late for us” to begin this kind of education, says
Alejandro Hurtado, Park’s Spanish teacher for the lower grades. Last
summer, Hurtado participated in a voluntary two-week workshop led by
Roffman that aimed to create a sexuality-education curriculum for
Park’s elementary-age kids. “It will be subtly woven in,” he says,
noting that he plans to talk more explicitly about traditional gender
roles and expectations in some Latino cultures as part of his own class.
In her teacher training, Roffman encourages colleagues to be
scientifically accurate and use age-appropriate language when answering
even the youngest children’s questions. Four-year-olds are beginning to
understand place and geography, so they will frequently ask where they
came from. “The proper answer is that there’s a place inside a female
body called the uterus, and that’s where they grew,” Roffman said.
Sarah Shelton, a Park third-grade teacher who also participated in the
summer workshop, says Roffman inspired her to not dodge students’
questions about bodies and sex. In the past she’s deflected sex-related
inquiries, such as when a student asked about birth control last year.
“I told her, ‘Great question. Ask your parents,’” Shelton recalls. “If
that were to occur again, I would say something like ‘When reproduction
happens in the body, there is medication that you can take to stop it
so you can have sexual intercourse without creating a baby.’”
Sarah Huss, the director of human development and parent education at
the private Campbell Hall school in Los Angeles, says Roffman helped
her rethink her school’s sexuality education. Huss reached out to
Roffman after reading her book Talk to Me First: Everything You Need to
Know to Become Your Kids’ “Go-To” Person About Sex. The ensuing
dialogue prompted Campbell Hall to begin sexuality education in third
grade and to significantly shore up its middle-school programming.
Prior to meeting Roffman, “I had taught sex education as ‘Don’t get
hurt, don’t get pregnant, don’t get a disease,’” Huss says. “That
wasn’t a hopeful message for the kids.”
Huss admires her colleague’s patient tenacity. “She’s walking into
schools where there is so much emotional baggage around a subject,”
Huss says. “To suggest doing it differently, you have to confront years
and years and years of thinking that talking with young kids about sex
is dangerous.”
After decades of striving for change both within and beyond Park’s
walls, Roffman is optimistic about the future of sexuality education at
progressive private schools like Campbell Hall and Park. “I’ve always
believed that independent schools have the responsibility to give back
to the larger educational community,” she told me. “It’s up to us to
demonstrate that, yes, this can be done well and successfully.”
By contrast, “I see very limited movement in the public sector,” she
said. And in a country where only a minority of states require
medically accurate sex-education classes, her dream of seamlessly
integrating the subject from kindergarten up may be a long way off. But
Roffman has lived through one sexual revolution, and she holds out hope
for a second, in education.
|
|
|
|
