Sex Ed in the News

I am excited to announce that I’m going to be taking over Sex Ed in the News here at the Center for Sex Education! Come back every Tuesday for an update!   As if we didn’t already know… Sex ed with gender roles and power dynamics taken into account make all the difference! Some more… Read more »

LGBQ stories and the military

There are times in our lives when we need a little explicit sexuality education and there are times in our lives when we need a little community education. They offer different kinds of learning, growing, and support. I learned this morning about a community storytelling event that’s happening on an Air Force base in Germany… Read more »

That thing…you know, THAT one!

Yesterday’s lesson was an STI game…bingo…or shall I say BINGO!! (Sing it with me now…B…I…N…G…O…and Bingo was his name-o!) Today’s lesson from Teaching Safer Sex is somewhat more staid, but no less important or impactful. Understanding STIs is apparently simple, and yet rampant misinformation plagues the popular conversation. From believing that anal sex carries little… Read more »

I win!

I’ll admit it, I’m a sucker for games. I’m blowing through the lessons in Game On! faster than any other manual, and I’ve decided I have to pace myself a little tiny bit. But…this game is from Teaching Safer Sex! So I’ve decided it doesn’t really count, even though it’s also included in Game On! … Read more »

Implicit to explicit

Sexuality education covers SO MANY different areas: law, biology, psychology, religion, history…I tend to say that if it’s something humans think about, it probably applies to sex too. As a subject matter to be taught and discussed, however, sexuality is often given a very short shift. Many of the schools I work in only give… Read more »

Lots of love

Someone recently mentioned an activity in Teaching Safer Sex to me that I hadn’t even heard of! Which means, clearly, I haven’t written about enough lessons from this awesome two-volume manual yet. So I’m going to dive deep this week, and maybe next, and maybe even the one after that if I get on a… Read more »

That thing…you know, THAT one!

We started off the week with two lessons on anatomy, so why not wrap it up with two Changes, Changes, Changes lessons on vocabulary? I love the alphabet game from yesterday, which you might have been able to tell. This lesson continues the word play by focusing in on the ways that we distract from… Read more »

More Anatomy!

This week I seem stuck on anatomy. It’s not my usual focus – I prefer the more social and emotional sex ed topics – so it’s probably good for me to focus on the more practical every now and then. Today’s lesson from Changes, Changes, Changes is about anatomy and vocabulary. These topics are inevitably… Read more »

Speaking about anatomy… hats…

Yesterday’s post was about anatomy – the kind with penises and testicles and ejaculation. So today’s lesson from Changes, Changes, Changes is about another kind of reproductive anatomy: the kind with ovaries and a uterus. This particular lesson just cracks me up. I haven’t actually run through it with a group of middle school students,… Read more »

Puberty, oh puberty

I’ve been reading through Changes, Changes, Changes recently, and so I want to focus on puberty education this week. When I work with young people, I am always interested to know what they know and what they don’t know. Some groups seem beyond their age, knowledge-wise. They come into the classroom full of information (and… Read more »

Namesake Lesson

This lesson is the one that gave the manual its title: Positive Images. When I first held this manual in my hands, I wasn’t quite sure what the title meant. The subtitle helped me out: Teaching about Contraception and Sexual Health. And then I could piece it together a little more: these lessons are all… Read more »

Crocodile dung

I love history, the kind of history that offers meaningful, engaging, contextualizing information about something relevant to my current life and culture. I hate the kind of history that has devolved into a list of facts and names that I can’t connect to. I’m glad that there are people out there who enjoy that kind… Read more »

Talking across a divide

Young people are often more able to talk about safe sex and sexual decisions with their friends than they are their partners. This makes sense for a lot of reasons. Friend groupings tend to segregate by sex from middle through late childhood, as conversations about sex and sexuality start to become more frequent within friend… Read more »

Risky Business

Happy Monday, everyone! This week I’m looking into Positive Images. This manual focuses on contraception, with a specific focus on how people judge contraception and the people who access it. The introduction of the third (and current) edition includes the following: “This edition of Positive Images continues the tradition of creating positive images of contraception and… Read more »

The things I know

My friends and family are trivia geeks of all flavors. From Star Trek to baseball, they do love the details. Trivial Pursuit was one of the most often games played in my house when I was young. I’ll admit to being a sex trivia geek. So a game called Sex Ed Trivia? Sign me up!… Read more »

The geeky kind of fun I love

Last weekend I was at a huge swing-dance-camping-party that I help host every year, and fell into a conversation with a young woman who wants to get pregnant sometime in the next year. She and her partner are starting small, with education and prenatal vitamins and will get more serious about conception in a few… Read more »

When privacy is a problem

Continuing with our Game On! week, today I’m talking about the fifth game in the manual: Private One: The What, Where, and How of Privacy. Privacy is such an important issue for all people. Learning the art of disclosure is often a life-long process. There are so many ways to go with this topic, I… Read more »

Let’s get our game on!

It’s a game week again! I’m almost half way through Game On!, which is both exciting and a little sad. It feels like it’s going to be a good week when I dive into this little manual, looking for something that will engage, educate, and enliven my sex ed classrooms! I have mostly focused on… Read more »

Amusement Park, here we come!

I frequently use an analogy when I talk with parents about how to manage their own emotions during their children’s adolescence: Your teens may be on an emotional and physical roller coaster. But that’s no reason for you to get on. Stay on the ground, your feet firmly planted, watch your teen ride, and be… Read more »

True v. False

I am a fan of crowdsourcing information, which is what this activity, from the Puberty Basics chapter in Changes, Changes, Changes, asks students to do. Or rather, what it can do, depending on how the teacher decides to implement it.         EXPERIENCING PUBERTY True or False Exercise   By the end of… Read more »