Wednesday, March 14, 2007
The Question Box
Not sure what made me think of this, but I was recalling a health class I had in 7th or 8th grade. There was a week of “sex education” that we had to fill out a parental consent form to participate. I don’t remember much about the teacher, the students, or what they actually taught.
The thing that stands out the most in my mind was the Question Box. The teacher recognized that there were going to be some questions we had about sex, anatomy or whatever, that we were too embarrassed to ask. So we could write these questions down anonymously and deposit it into the Question Box. At the beginning of each class he would read a batch of questions aloud and answer them.
I remember submitting three questions on three separate pieces of paper, none of which were ever read aloud or addressed. I felt cheated. These are the questions I asked:
- Do animals menstruate? It’s a legitimate question, right? I watched tons of wildlife documentaries on TV and was genuinely curious if animals went through this bizarre monthly bleeding cycle.
- What is the difference between sex and making love? I’d heard both phrases and had some idea about their similarity, but also knew they were somewhat different. I wasn’t sure yet what those differences were. I’m all about proper semantics.
- What is the purpose of pubic hair? It’s such a strange place to put hair, y’know? It seemed really useless and weird, much like armpit hair. Everything evolves for a reason, and I wanted to know what the reason for pubic hair was.
Maybe the teacher felt that these were inappropriate questions, or thought someone was just trying to be funny. More likely I just stumped him and he didn’t have a single clue in the world, so he chose to ignore the questions. How disappointing. I would have hoped he would be curious himself. Even if he didn’t know, at least try to make an effort to find out, y’know? Make the question asker not feel invisible and invalid. Make some kind of attempt to recognize the validity of each question, even if just to say, “I’m sorry but I just don’t know. It’s beyond the scope of this class.” I like to think they were rather intelligent, thought-provoking questions, because everything else I was able to learn from the book.
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