Sex & Consequences Marathon

This week I gave my first presentation of "Sex & Its Consequences," our high school program. Normally this is a 2 day presentation, but this week we were cramming all the information into 1 day sessions and presenting it for each of the 8 class periods on Wednesday and Thursday. We were at a rural school with around 85 students in each grade, so we were supposed to present to the entire high school during these 2 days.

My boss and I took turns presenting so the other could stare off into space for a couple of hours at a time.This school is located an hour from our office, so we left at 7am and both stayed until school was over at 3:15. My respect for teachers has increased yet again. I cannot imagine having kids staring at me all day every day. Even though I’m in a cubicle I feel like I have some privacy when I put on my headphones and tune out the rest of the office. I can take 15 minute brain-vacations and cruise the Internet or gossip with a co-worker whenever I feel like it. But Wednesday and Thursday were like running a marathon. I was either nervous as hell as I sat and worried about the next presentation or filled with adrenaline as I actually gave the presentation.

Oh, I forgot to mention. In addition to being my first time presenting, I had to deal with some extra audience members. The pastor of the local church sat in on the first 4 sessions. Then his youth pastor sat in on the rest. We thought they’d be gone on Thursday, and they were…but they sent a parent who leads a youth group to keep an eye on us until the youth pastor could come back.

This was very unnerving. The head pastor literally frowned the entire morning. It’s hard enough to get kids to interact when talking about something like sex, but when their pastor is sitting in the back of the room, its impossible. No one volunteered answers or wanted to do the role-plays. Even us presenters were off our game, we were not entertaining at all, because we were nervous and worried about the men sitting back there taking pages of notes.

I did have a pretty great moment at the end of Wednesday. One of the boys started telling me about abstinence pledges and how this guy tricked him into signing one so he could get a water bottle. Before I could respond, another girl spoke up and said someone had her sign one when she was 8 and had no idea what was going on. I asked the class “Do you think these pledges are effective when you sign a paper and never talk about it again?” They responded “no, of course not.” So I asked “What if you sign it with a group of friends or a youth group and keep supporting each other, could they be more effective then?” “Yes” they replied.

I’d never talked about abstinence pledges during a presentation before, so I was totally improvising when I said “See, so abstinence pledges are just like condoms, they’re only effective when used properly!” At this point I just stopped making eye contact with the youth pastor sitting in the back of the room and hoped he hadn’t heard me.

The hard thing about doing prevention work is that we don’t know if any of the information is really affecting the kids. I did have two moments where I saw something get through. In discussing birth control, I listed all the ways it can be less effective and one girl said “You have to take it at the same time everyday?? I don’t do that!” During another session I had 2 young men playing comedian in the front row. I mentioned that many people have no symptoms of STIs and he turned away from his friend and said “Wait, did you just say you can have an STD and no symptoms?” He looked genuinely concerned and he settled down and genuinely participated for the rest of the session, asking really good questions. Anytime I see that I give kids information that they didn’t have before, I feel like I’m on a cloud.

If nothing else, I know that if I survived this week, I can give the presentation to anyone.