News: So You Don't Sound like a Dumbass

A sex ed teacher at the Wolcott School in Thornton, IL is in the doghouse this week for some unorthodox teaching methods. Parents of a class of 13-14 year olds are pissed off, horrified, repulsed, etc. that twenty-seven year old teacher Scott Groff had their children read aloud from a four-page handout of commonly asked questions pulled from the British website dedicated to AIDS/HIV prevention, advert.org. The questions were taken from the general inquiry section and include things like "Does my vagina look the way it's supposed to?", "Which STDs are transmitted through oral sex?" and "How do you french kiss?".
Maybe it was the thought of the words "oral sex" and "G-spot" coming out of their fourteen year olds' mouths that got to the parents, or the fact that Mr. Groff decided to not use questions from the specified teen section of the site. Either way, parents are calling for the suspension or firing of Groff.
If Thornton parents had put their hysteria to the side for a second, they would have seen that the more 'adult' questions were answered frankly and straight-forwardly, with an emphasis on safety, respect and communication between sexual partners by the writers at advert.org. The teen questions, most of which were related to dating and uncertainty over first times, are rather naive in a world where 4 in 10 girls become pregnant by age 20, 3 million teens a year contract an STD and half of the new HIV infections are occuring in people under 25.
Groff might have overstepped his bounds as an educator in creating an uncomfortable environment for his students, but I think he should be applauded for thinking that a 'comprehensive sexual education curriculum' should actually be comprehensive. A strictly scientific approach to sex leaves out the emotional aspect of it, something that I think can be blamed for the casual attitude we are seeing in Jr. High and High School kids towards sex. As we all know, a little knowledge is a very dangerous thing.

Chicago Tribune sec1, March 10, 2007
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