{"id":1391,"date":"2016-12-14T13:20:07","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T18:20:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?p=1391"},"modified":"2016-12-14T13:20:07","modified_gmt":"2016-12-14T18:20:07","slug":"rethinking-sex-ed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?p=1391","title":{"rendered":"Rethinking Sex Ed"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Gillian Skiba
\n<\/strong>The Lancer
\nSouth Lake HS
\n1st Place
\nDivision 4, News Writing
\nEnvironment, Health or Science<\/p>\n

The information that students receive in the heath and sex education class is extremely important and relevant to their lives. The question is, are they getting enough infor-mation about what actually matters?<\/p>\n

Students across the country are required to take health class in order to graduate. The curriculum consists of nutrition and fitness, mental\/emotional health, alcohol, tobacco and drugs, the reproductive system and other topics related to the health and well-being of the human body.<\/p>\n

Recently, the way the curriculum for this class is taught and organized has been questioned. Are teachers spending enough time in certain areas? Is valuable time being wasted on commonly know information that they don\u2019t need or could easily get from a parent?<\/p>\n

For some students, health class is where they will get all of their information on topics like the reproductive system. This is such an important subject, and having qualified teachers fully ex-plain everything is crucial.<\/p>\n

Health Teacher Melissa Dominick under-stands the importance of this topic. However, she usually finds her-self saving it to be the last unit she covers.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would prefer to do reproduction earlier in the year, but you need the beginning of the year to build relationships with the students for them to feel comfortable talking about the topic,\u201d explains Dominick.<\/p>\n

While Dominick believes that strong relationships are required to discuss this topic, waiting until the end of the semester may mean running out of time for the unit.<\/p>\n

Other factors contribute to deciding on the scope and sequence of each topic. Dominick has to schedule around breaks and days off from school as well as snow and cold days. She also has different presenters come in to speak to the students about different topics, and she must plan the visits around their schedules.<\/p>\n

At South Lake High School, the health class lasts twenty weeks. Last semester, Dominick started the class with mental-emotional health and spent about a month on it. Then she moved on to nutrition for about a month and a half. The alcohol, tobacco and drugs unit followed and lasted about a month. The last unit covered was reproduction, on which about two and a half weeks were spent when you factor out the breaks.<\/p>\n

With so much of the course being taken up by other topics, students find that they might not get enough
\ninformation in the areas that are, in their eyes, more important.<\/p>\n

\u201cContraception is important for males and females to know about, and it\u2019s relevant to teens,\u201d says Tyler Perlick \u201818.<\/p>\n

Although Dominick has made sure to stress abstinence and how it is the only 100% guaranteed method of birth control, there are teenagers who have already chosen to engage in intercourse. Understanding the risks and how they can protect themselves is critical. Ignorance to the risks can result in carelessness and later a development of life threatening STIs or unplanned pregnancy.<\/p>\n

Leah Payne \u201818 agrees with Per-lick on the subject. \u201cMany kids have already begun to have sex and they need to know ways to protect them-selves.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another subject some students think should be further discussed is alcohol, tobacco and drugs.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is so much out there and it is popular around our age group,\u201d Per-lick explains. Perlick is referring to the different kinds of drugs that students can find access to.<\/p>\n

Teens use drugs for all sorts of reasons whether it\u2019s to look cool or to escape reality, but the risks aren\u2019t
\nusually the first thing they think of. For this reason, hearing of the dangers in their health class can be im-perative in protecting some students and preventing life-long addictions.<\/p>\n

Some consider the amount of time spent discussing good nutrition to be a waste of time. Many kids have already been taught that vegetables and fruits are good for you and too much sugar is bad. And now that students have tran-sitioned from children to young adults, it is harder to
\ninfluence them to eat things that they don\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t tell someone how to change their diet when they\u2019ve gone 14-15 years of maintaining the same eating habits, especial-ly when they\u2019re teens. It just won\u2019t sink in,\u201d says Perlick.<\/p>\n

Dominick agrees that trying to enforce these good eating habits in students\u2019 lives can be challenging.<\/p>\n

\u201cNutrition is one of the hardest things to change for kids because I don\u2019t have a lot of control over the kinds of meals they have access to, whether that\u2019s based on their economic situation or bad snacking habits,\u201d says Dominick.<\/p>\n

Dominick stresses the importance of the nutrition unit and the emotional health unit, however she does agree that expanding the substances and reproductive units may have abetter chance at impacting students.<\/p>\n

If given a chance, both Perlick and Payne say that they would change the way the class is run by giving more focus to the reproductive system, contraception, STIs and alcohol, tobacco and drugs and decrease the time spent on nutrition.<\/p>\n

Perlick says that many of his friends who have en-gaged in sexual intercourse have only used one form of birth control, if any at all, because they didn\u2019t know of all the different forms of contraception.<\/p>\n

In a small study done by The Lancer, a group of ten freshmen who have taken or are taking health class were asked about different types of contraception. Six out of the ten students said they did not know or have not heard of forms of contraception other than a condom or birth control pills.<\/p>\n

In order for this generation of students to under-stand the risks of having sex, the conversation about contraception and protection needs to start now. From preventing unwanted pregnancy to stopping the spread of STIs, having open discussion about sex and what it means is very important. Students need to know that sex is a major decision that should not be taken lightly.<\/p>\n

And for those who choose to engage in sex, it\u2019s important that they have ad-equate knowledge of contraception and STI prevention.<\/p>\n

This knowledge could greatly impact someone\u2019s future. And it is for this reason that health classes across the country should rethink the way that sex ed is taught and seriously evaluate if their students are prepared for the real world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Gillian Skiba The Lancer South Lake HS 1st Place Division 4, News Writing Environment, Health or Science<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[65,4],"tags":[135,23],"class_list":["post-1391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-environmentalhealthorscience-nw","category-nw","tag-2015-16","tag-division4","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"featured_image_src":null,"featured_image_src_square":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Jaimie Bozack","author_link":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/?author=7"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6K0n6-mr","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acutabove.mipamsu.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}