Keep That Barn Door Closed!

Today they teach puberty to the fifth graders at E's school.

The teachers are groovy, hip, feminist, so I am hoping it will be an improvement over what we got back in the early seventies.

Back in the day (of course you remember) the boys and girls were shuttled, separately, into the auditorium for a film. I suppose that the film shown to the boys was different than the film showed to the girls but am not certain. Teachers taped a sheet of paper over the windows to the auditorium so you couldn't peak. No Peaking!

I knew all about menstruation and where babies came from (thanks to my buddy D.P. who told me all about it one spring afternoon when I was five. "That can't be possible!!" was my startled reaction.) Still, the film was confusing. Moving through that old black and white, the girl and her lipsticked mother (or was it a nurse) hugged and then fumbled around with the menstruation apparatus of the day: a tangle of belts and buckles that secured a thick pad between the thighs. How would I manage such manipulations in the small girl's bathroom stall?

Then there was the "ovulation" animation; a sketchy drawing of the fallopian tubes with the wilting flowers on top. Was that INSIDE MY BODY!!! We watched as the tiny egg made its way into the flower and then down, down to the waiting V-shaped chamber below (way down below..). "There the egg waits in the ready for the millions of sperm swimming up to penetrated its delicate membrane," the announcer with that Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom Voice said with inflection.

That's why grandma always told you to "Keep those legs shut!" Wouldn't want any loose sperm getting inside unbeknown to me!. And then what???