you’ve got mail.

I find myself fascinated by the viewpoint of those of you who are not internet people.

 

I am a child of the 80s. I remember back in third grade, we got the computer program with the turtle. It was called Logo. I am amazed that I remembered this, but not surprised at all that a Google search just confirmed I remember it correctly.

 

I had a 1200 baud modem to connect to AOL so I could chat with strangers. That was before high school.

 

The fascinating thing is not that you are more wary than I am with regard to putting private information on the internet. The fascinating part is that you often assume that people like me are not wary. My mom knows I have a blog, although I’m not sure whether she reads it. Shortly after I’d mentioned it, she asked me how I could put all that information out there. What if someone tracked me down?

 

I think the conversation that followed was baffling for both of us. See, I don’t care if someone tracks me down. Big Brother is watching. So are strangers. So, potentially, are ex-boyfriends, ex-friends, and new employers. And it’s not that I am unaware of this. It’s that the information I choose to make public is the information I would provide to quite literally anyone who asked. Sure, I’ll tell people what city I live in. I’ll even tell people what school I go to*. There isn’t a job in the world for which I would be willing to hide my politics, so I don’t have any reason to worry about what employers might find.

 

There is no reason to believe that someone who runs across me on the internet is any more likely to be dangerous than my next-door neighbor, than the guy at the gas station I buy coffee from a few times a week, than my classmates, than my professor. If someone wants to find you or find out about you, they can do it whether you put information on the internet or not, and Big Brother is already tapping your phones and reading your mail, so no worries on that score. No reason to hide what’s already being spied upon.

 

That’s what I told my mom when she asked how I could put all that information out there.

 

And Mom, who’d been so concerned about dangerous strangers, she told me that my world is frightening.

 

* I’m so bold, I end sentences with prepositions. Two in a row, even.

YONKERS, N.Y. – A teacher has been barred from classes after having his seventh-grade students draw male genitalia on the blackboard during health class, a school spokeswoman said Friday. The teacher, whose name was not made public, was assigned to administrative duties and Superintendent Bernard Pierorazio will ask trustees to fire him, said
Yonkers school spokeswoman Jerilynne Fierstein.

“There was no way we were going to let him be in front of children,” she said. Fierstein said the state’s seventh-grade curriculum calls for lessons in human anatomy and sexuality, but “as a teacher you have to be sensitive and you have to look at the age-appropriateness of any activity that you ask a child to do. And this was just not appropriate.”Fierstein said the administration learned of the drawings, which occurred in a class of boys and girls at the Pearls Hawthorne school, when a parent complained.  

Trustees will consider the teacher’s firing at a March 21 meeting, she said. Pierorazio issued a statement saying, “I will not tolerate insensitive, inappropriate behavior by any staff member toward our students. Every student’s physical and emotional well-being is paramount in our decision making, therefore immediate action was taken.”

Source: Associated Press/AP Online

Um. What? I had to read this at least five times before I finally believed that there isn’t some crucial sentence I’m missing. You know, like a sentence saying, “Students sobbed as the teacher made little Bobby stand in front of the class naked as a model for the drawings.” But nope. No such sentence.

Insensitive and inappropriate behavior, huh? Because it wasn’t age-appropriate, or at least that’s the implication. This begs the question: At what age is it appropriate to be expected to draw parts of the human body? Admittedly, I am the sort of person who draws stick figures who imply without benefit of flesh or facial expressions that they are somehow ailing, so I’m relatively certain that my ability to draw male genitalia would not have been ranked in even the 25^th percentile in seventh grade. However, seventh grade certainly strikes me as a reasonable time to begin learning anatomy. My seventh-grade health textbook had pictures of male genitalia.*

How is it reasonable to show a child a picture in a book, but having them reproduce it themselves is enough that it might get a teacher fired? Please don’t misunderstand. There is certainly the potential that this teacher had abnormal motives or went about this in such a way that it was distressing for the students. That said, there is also the potential that the teacher was just trying to teach in a way that would make the students more involved. We don’t know which it was, but the news article implies that the mere fact of a student drawing a part of the human body on the board is so grievously problematic that it rates firing.

That’s crazy. Just out-and-out insane. Not necessarily surprising in today’s climate, where our administration yanks funding away from schools who try any sex ed program that doesn’t involve “keep your legs crossed or you’ll get knocked up and get the clap and you’ll be a dirty ho, too,” but still insane. So it’s a penis. So what? Half the population has one, and much of the other half will at some point in life come into contact with one. It’s not some omen of doom. It’s a part of the male human body.

At some point in art class, we had to recreate masterpieces. (Mine was a Picasso painting, on the grounds that it already looked like those people were in the last stages of some disintegrating illness so I couldn’t possibly go too far wrong. I was mistaken.) Should my art teacher have banned any of the famous nudes? If so, why? What harm is it doing a seventh-grader to draw male genitalia? They might become familiar with how it all looks. Maybe even how it all works, depending on how detailed these drawings were supposed to be. Is that a terrible thing?

You know what this article really makes me wonder, though? I wonder why there isn’t any mention of drawing female genitalia.

* Line drawings, to be sure, because apparently our little seventh-grade heads would become crazed with lust or madness if we saw anything like a photograph of genitalia. As the line drawings always depicted limp penises, even just before the confusing illustration of intercourse, this led to massive confusion at a later point in life for me. That’s all water under the bridge now, though.