K: 10/31/02

Work Diary, 10/31/02

During my teaching years, I spent miserable day after miserable day
surrounded by junior high kids. Junior high is an unfortunate mix of
pre- and post-pubescence, childish evilness, and bad breath. Mother
Nature being what it is, most of the girls came to school resembling
well-dressed street walkers, while most of the boys were still flopping
around in their too-big feet and sunken chests.

One of the more ridiculous assignments given to the students of my
school was "Parenting Week." The assignment was the brainchild of the
Home Economics teacher, a very sweet woman who often made the kids fix
breakfast for the staff. I later learned that "Parenting Week," or
assignments like it, was performed by schools across the nation. If
anything, that should be reason enough to limit public access to the
worldwide web.

The gist of the assignment was simple: Each student was given an egg,
uncooked, and told to name it, decorate it, and tote it around for an
entire week. These little egg-babies were meant to represent the real
thing, and should be treated accordingly. The girls took up motherhood
with gusto - some even had twins - giving their egg-babies names like
Anastasia and knitting them darling little outfits in pinks and
yellows. The boys, naturally, used names like Bluto and Thor and stored
extra egg-baby clones in their lockers for the inevitable accidents.
Once started, "Parenting Week" became a daycare hell of "GIVE ME BACK
LITTLE AMBER OR I'M TELLING!" and "Johnny Spunkmeyer is using a
hardboiled egg so it won't break and I'M TELLING!" Parenting,
apparently, involves a great deal of kidnapping and backstabbing.

I found it both amusing and incredible that real parents went along
with "Parenting Week." They even signed consent forms, effectively
becoming informers who were ready to rat out their own children if the
egg-babies were neglected, broken, or mistakenly cooked for
breakfast.

A few students, all girls, were given the option of using rubber,
lifelike dolls that looked pale and sickly (probably from years of
abuse). The dolls contained a computer chip and a voice box, and were
programmed to start crying at different intervals during the day. Their
cries sounded like a kitten trapped under a hot radiator; I personally
could not stand the sound and made more than one indignant new mother
leave my classroom so she could store the awful thing in her locker. I
didn't care if it suffocated or was crushed under a stack of textbooks
- studying "The Diary of Anne Frank" was just a bit too morose with
that mewling racket in the background.

I'm still not sure what the students were meant to learn from
"Parenting Week." Having children is not some big mystery; people have
been doing it for millennia. And unless you believe time is money, the
logistics of child rearing are as instinctual as running from a swarm
of bees or avoiding hissing snakes. Some people are better at it, of
course, though that's a subjective comment and I, for one, am glad that
childhoods often get screwed up. Can you imagine a world full of
authors who write nothing but books about the halcyon days of their
youth?

Perhaps "Parenting Week" was meant to scare the students. Once they
realized how much a child interferes with, say, doing one's hair or
playing video games, they'd think twice about risking it, right?

Not likely. The students who participated in "Parenting Week" were at
least fourteen years old; many of them were either sexually active or
had had some sexual experience. On a pro rata basis, incidents of
teenage pregnancy have been declining in the United States since the
1950s. Granted, some of that decline is due to legalized abortion, but
I bet none of it is due to students juggling backpacks, cell phones,
and egg-babies for a week.

Instead, I believe American teenagers are shedding, decade by decade,
the last vestiges of the Puritan ethic. Certainly, that ethic will
never disappear completely; some would even argue that that's a good
thing. But modern day teenagers have been allowed to know more about
their bodies - and consequences - than ever before. With only slight
embarrassment, any boy or girl can go to the store and buy condoms. And
with absolutely no embarrassment, my female students would often come
up to me and say, "Mr. Banks, I'm on the rag. Can I go lay down?" Not
"grandma's visiting" or "I have the curse," but "I'm on the rag."

You know what? I'm happy for them.