(it wasn’t until I just read the comments that I realized I typed 5th, not 7th. I did not attend Caligula Middle School.) ((Also, later in the essay you will see I wrote “adolescent fantasies.” ))
When I was in 7th (the story has been edited to reflect that it was 7th grade, not 5th) grade a booklet was passed to me in class. It was made by a few students and constructed out of loose-leaf paper. It had a cover that said something like “for your eyes only,” or “top secret.” Something like that.
I opened it up and it was a sex survey of sorts, with questions that ran the range from pretty innocent to pretty dirty.
You were tasked to come up with a symbol that you would use alongside your answers in order to preserve your anonymity in case the book was lost or stolen. When you finished your answers and passed along the book (you’d only pass the booklet to the cool kids, not the nerds), you reported your symbol back to one of the booklet’s main organizers.
We were clever kids.
The questions started slow:
-who was your first crush?
-who was your first kiss?
-is there anyone right now you have a secret crush on?
Then they got a bit bolder:
-have you ever been felt up?
-is there anyone in class right now that you would let feel you up?
And bolder still:
-do you play with yourself?
-do you imagine anyone in our class when you do?
And then it opened the door for outright lies:
-have you had sex?
-how many times?
Reading through the booklet was more fun than answering. Even then I knew many of the guys and girls were lying. The idea, after the booklet was complete, was to have a party and we would reveal the names of the people and their answers.
But there never was a party.
One day, in class, the loudspeaker came on with an announcement from the principal’s office. Would the following students report to the office as soon as possible!
After about the 8th or 9th name, we “cool kids” figured out why no one had seen the booklet in a while. It was intercepted by a grown-up.
Long story short, there was a major inquisition and we all stood firm, we had NEVER SEEN THAT BOOK BEFORE IN OUR LIVES!! (They didn’t have the legend to tell them who was participating. They did have handwriting to analyze, but it seems they never went there.)
To the school’s credit, they knew it was just adolescent fantasy, and the incident blew over without any parents being contacted or any major fallout.
I hadn’t thought about this booklet in years, but it came back to me after I read the story about a school handing out an assignment to 10-year-old girls where they were to ask their dads about their erections and ejaculations.
Then it hit me. A booklet that we could have been expelled from school for creating is now a homework assignment handed out by the teachers.
Stop the world….
We wouldn’t even able to imagine that kind of stuff when I was in elementary school about 65 years ago
I honestly don’t know what is happening. I just don’t know how any of this is accommodated by decent people — or even people who think they don’t have an opinion. Because it’s just wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
when I was in 5th grade girls had cooties … didn’t want none of that!
but, by 6th grade I’d already had grown my first wood & the opposite sex was looking mighty appealing
didn’t see those surveys ’till Jr. High
& kids doing it is ok. they’re learning & expressing themselves within their peer group. teachers doing it w/ students is perverted
(I always hated the male teachers that hit on students … yeah, we all knew who they were)
The main point is not to get accurate answers. It’s to ensure an awareness of sexual thinking gets into a kid’s mind when there probably wasn’t any there before, to start a chain reaction and hope it bears fruit (from the pedophile’s point of view).
“you’d only pass the booklet to the cool kids, not the nerds”
So how did YOU get it, Fur? 🙂
Why didn’t you post your answers?
I guess I lived a sheltered life. TV was clean entertainment up intil pay TV. I was too busy playing sports to think about sex. Didn’t learn much in 6th grade. Our teacher was a Puritan, started each morning with a moment of silence – prayer.
I assure everyone—The low-lives that push this shit are very, very few, unfortunately they carry enough clout to make themselves look over-whelming.
They are of course the biggest degenerates with the smallest minds.
We called it a slam book.
Still waiting to see if FUR was felt up.
Fifth grade!?! When I was in the eighth grade, I was sitting, wide eyed, with a group of my friends discussing how “far” they went with their boyfriends. The teacher called me away from the group. I thought I was in trouble for something. Instead, she looked me in the eyes and said, “Indi, don’t you ever feel bad about not participating in a conversation like that.”
She’s not a teacher that I had a close relationship with; but, I remember that it felt good that she recognized that I was a good girl. It was very affirming and I never forgot it.
Fifth grade?
Ten yrs old!
We weren’t even thinking like that.
Maybe sneaking a quarter second peck on the cheek when we were being risque.
That little booklet would be preschool material nowadays.
Spent a lot of my growing up on a farm.
Had everything pretty much figured out already.
Sixth grade sex ed. Taught for the first time by our short, bald, male principal to the boys and by our mean, scary vice-principal to the girls. It was a week’s worth of half-hour afternoon sessions of film strips and mimeograph pages diagramming the male and female plumbing, defining hormones, etc. On Friday, we were supposed to ask whatever we wanted. Mary Katherine Sheehan mentioned at recess that she didn’t understand how the sperm in the boy got to the egg in the girl. Nobody would tell her but we all encouraged her to raise her hand and make Mrs. Gorman tel us all. She was too scared so the secret was never revealed to the girls in that inaugural sixth grade sex ed class in that little suburb in 1972.
But we knew. The rest of us had those little booklets from the doctor’s office that our mothers had given us. So we knew. And we knew that Mary Katherine’s parents had ‘done it’ EIGHT TIMES. And that was just GROSS.
I was in high school in the mid 1970’s and already back then there were three faculty members who were ‘grooming’ boys. If we students knew about it, then certainly so did the administration. As far as I know none of these perverts were fired or reprimanded.
Anyone else remember the VD films they showed us in HS health class in the late 60’s and early 70’s about how not to get gonorrhea or syphilis. And we all learned about the dangers of infectious spirochetes and what it could do to your sex organs. We thought it was a crude joke that the so called enlightened teachers were playing on us. The Navy didn’t do much better either, if they had it would’ve kept a lot of foolish sailors from getting the clap while on liberty in Olongapo City in the Philippines. Thank God for penicillin. Beside that the Y Drive In theater in N. Spokane was always showing this kind of crap anyways on weekends and other sleazy semi pornographic junk movies.
Your Name Hare- yep, a slam book. lol.
It was mostly kids talking shit about other people, though. Some kids wrote their initials and the kids that gave no fucks wrote their names outright. haha. Teachers got a hold of it. Looked through it (I’m sure to see if their names were on there and trashed) and they said whoever started the book would get suspended, etc. Right after the suspension threats started, there must have been 30 books in circulation as an F you! lol
After signing the 5th or 6th one, it got boring. I’d just wave it through saying, “I already signed it”. Who would know? It wasn’t neat and comments were randomly all over the page.
At least in my elementary days,in the classroom, when the teachers overheard kids talking about parties, and so and so drinks, does drugs, he’s got a girlfriend, she’s a slut, etc. [Yeah, we had a 4th grade alcoholic AND drug dealer. Seriously] The teachers back then would say, “Stop that right now. I don’t want to hear about ANY of this. That is personal business…”
I knew the names of the Nuns in private school. Because we were to call them “Sister Mary Agnes” or whoever.
Outside of private school, I never knew my teachers’ FIRST NAMES unless I saw it in one of the pamphlets the school handed out at the beginning of the year. NOW? Some teachers want you to know their first middle and last, who they’re married to, who they’re banging, where they got their mani-pedis, and how many times sand got into their bikinis at the beach. And those are the MEN.
If you can, home school. Organize a learning pod.
Public school was shit when I was young, I can’t imagine how bad it is today.
404 Link not found for the story about the dad thing.
makes me disinclined to believe it.
@jellybean April 10, 2022 at 11:30 pm
> The low-lives that push this shit are very, very few
The people that will solve the problem are, still, fewer.
5th grade? Only time I saw something remotely similar to this sex booklet was in Sixteen Candles and that was set in high school.
The party our football team had with the cheerleaders after winning the state title in ’83 is still the stuff of local legend – Dizz-nee could’ve taken notes from US!
@ Dan K
The link had two addresses mashed together. I’ve separated them and here is the non-IOTWr one.
https://haveitbd.com/10-year-old-school-girls-assigned-homework-to-ask-their-dads-about-erections-and-ejaculation/
When I was a senior in HS my mother asked if I had anything to do with the trouble “Ann” was in.
I had dated “Ann” a couple of times, she was a jock hunting cheerleader and not my type.
Well, “Ann”, was pregnant, had no Idea who the father was, fucked half the football team.
Mom asked if I needed any info, I was mortified.
Had been stealing Dad’s rubbers for a coupla years by then, I’m sure he knew.
“Ann”, never gave it up to me, second base at best and they were fried egg size.
Asked her a coupla years later about it, seems I was a “nice boy” and she didn’t go all the way with nice boys.
Slam books, don’t know, guess they didn’t give those to nice boys either.
Geoff, I fucked all over SE Asia, never got a thing, first round eye I fucked in Frisco, yep, the clap.
They should’ve taught one of my brother’s idiot friends never to pee into a Coke bottle at the drive in theater while watching a semi pornographic movie and getting a hard on and the bottle getting stuck on his dick. The doctors and nurses probably still laugh about that all these years later when he had to go to the ER and have the bottle removed from his pecker.
…so, is there a “PreTeen Penthouse” kids can write letters like this to? Asking for the demented pedo I’m married to.
I don’t know, “doctor,” but you’ve just come up with a multi-million dollar idea for the left.
there is a difference between Joy and pleasure, and our society has been taught to pursue pleasure as our reason for existence. I suggest it is otherwise.
geoff the aardvark
APRIL 11, 2022 AT 9:42 AM
They should’ve taught one of my
“The doctors and nurses probably still laugh about that all these years later when he had to go to the ER and have the bottle removed from his pecker.”
…I was never a Dr or nurse, but I used to bring patients to them and yes, you remember the weird ones.
The ones I remember best is the kid that had it swell up in a metal wand when he was home alone with an apparently sexy oldschool vacuum cleaner, and one in an actual adult where a young man cosplaying as Superman knocked himself out with his enthusiasm and inability to judge distances that is commemorated to this day with my handle and avitar.
I put both those out there in detail here before, so I won’t *heh* “flesh them out” any further now.
It’s just that the point is that you DO remember the RUN, but not the PERSON, so don’t be shy if you get something stuck in something, none of your providers will remember/relate your name or face, and there’s probably been someone did something stupider than you out there anyway that they’ve ALSO seen.
By 7th Grade I had been having sex with my Dad for about 10 years …
Huh … me too!
I led a sheltered life and tried to look stuff up in medical books in library. You could find no books about anything sexual then (60’s rural) My point is kids will try to discover stuff ANYWAY and there’s an abundance of sources out there we didn’t have! Does not have any place in schools except maybe Anatomy class.
at least for grade school, 4th or 5th grades.
We got our menstruating filmstrip in 6th grade and the boys had some sort of growing up filmstrip, I do not know what was in THAT!
In second grade we had a science book with male female drawings without genitalia where someone had drawn on the male figure. I was showing it to a neighbor in the classroom and I got reprimanded by teacher, and I think she thought I’d drawn it 🙁
All I have to say is that I never went blind.
aleon
APRIL 11, 2022 AT 1:56 PM
“All I have to say is that I never went blind.”
…yet.
I remember in 7th grade they sent flyers out to the parents asking how they felt about sex ed being taught in science class.
When my mom asked me about it I told my mom that I found it somewhat embarrassing but I’d fill them in the best I could.
Or grow hair on your palms.
Going to catholic school, during the elementary years, the closest thing to sex that the boys had was the naked tribe people in National Geographic. We didn’t know whether to laugh at the plate stuck in their bottom lip or their tits tucked in their sash.
A lot of Chicago suburban kids get herded off around fifth grade to a kical health museum where they learn the facts. I was a chaperone on the field trip my kid went on. In the front of the room they had various plastic models of things, and one was of the uterus with fallopian tubes attached. At the end of the event, one kid goes up, grabs this thing, turns it upside down, puts it on his head, and announces “I’m a Ferengi! “