Learning About Germs By Spreading Real Germs

A couple of weeks ago, we talked about a ... demonstration ... in a Montgomery County sex-ed class that backfired. An outside speaker in the classroom had students pass around a piece of gum in class and take turns chewing it. This was supposed to teach them something about how dirty sex is.

This morning, the story is front-page in the Washington Post:

It was a novel class exercise: Ask a room full of Montgomery County high school students to take turns chewing the same piece of gum.

To demonstrate how sexually transmitted diseases are spread, a visiting speaker invited students to share gum in health classes at four county high schools in December and last month. School officials said a total of about 100 students participated in the lessons, although some declined to chew the gum.

Education and health officials say the gum exercise was unsanitary and should not have happened. The speaker and the clinic, a pregnancy counseling center with a religious orientation, are no longer welcome in Montgomery schools, school officials said.

"It was fine for me, because my best friend and me did it first," said Julia Bellefleur, 15, a Damascus High School sophomore who participated in the exercise. "But it was kind of gross for everyone else. I was just glad I did it first."

At Damascus, about 15 students shared a stick of gum, students said. Students Get Lesson to Chew On: Gum Sharing Disgusts Montgomery Parents, Officials

We have a running joke in my family that has many forms. The most basic version is to mention to tell someone that there is an edible statue of some food, made entirely of food. It's a kind of difficult joke, but my daughter especially gets it in any form. The joke is about things that are supposed to be symbols for other things, but turn out to be things themselves. It's best if they turn out to be the same thing they are supposed to stand for. Like, imagine pretending to insult people. You would say rude things to them, but you'd only be pretending. And guess what -- you'll still get slapped. Because pretending to be rude is exactly the same as actually being rude. There are a gazillion variations on this stupid joke.

We have several like that. I'm just telling you, you wouldn't want to be a member of my family.

So here we have the clever people from this "pregnancy counseling center with a religious orientation" (and why is The Post being so coy about that part of it?) conducting an exercise in class, on the danger of spreading germs, where they are

actually

spreading

germs.

Let's say it ain't the smartest thing I ever heard of.

Administrators and school board members learned of the demonstration early last month, after a parent complained to the principal of Poolesville High School, and swiftly revoked the group's permission to speak in schools. One or more speakers from Rockville Pregnancy Center had visited Damascus, Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill high schools and possibly others. Clinic speakers had been approved to visit schools since 1998; students said the speaker told them she had taught the same lessons many times.

School officials said no complaints had previously reached a principal or school board members.

"This basically is an unacceptable and unsanitary practice. It should never occur," said Judith Covich, director of school health services at the county health department. "The risk is about the same as sharing a glass, sharing the same straw." The practice carried a low risk of spreading the cold or flu, she said.

Uh, actually, the risk is the same as having sex serially with everyone in your class. The demonstration is identical with the phenomenon it is supposed to demonstrate.

Get it?

(It is pretty funny that the school district is playing down the health risks. Imagine if they issued a statement saying that "the practice [of having sex with everyone in your high school class] carried a low risk of spreading" [STDs].) (Because, is the risk really that different? Isn't that the whole point of this exercise?)

Officials of the Rockville nonprofit group could not be reached yesterday for comment. On its Web site, http://www.rcpc.org/index.html, Rockville Pregnancy Center describes itself as a nonprofit, licensed medical clinic and pregnancy counseling organization. One part of the site quotes extensively from the Bible and offers a test "to see if you're going to Heaven."

School officials sent letters last month to all students exposed to the lesson and encouraged parents to call the health department with any concerns.

Sylvia Bellefleur, mother of Julia, said her main reaction upon reading the letter was disbelief that her daughter and her classmates went along.

"I was surprised that she would do it," the elder Bellefleur said. "Nobody could pay me enough to do it."

Yeah, it's amazing sometimes to discover how dumb our kids really are.

That's why we have sex-ed in the first place, sorry to say.

Seems like, for some reason, when we tell kids not to do something, they do it anyway.

But you wonder how they got them to chew the gum.

In a Jan. 12 memo to school board members, Deputy Superintendent Frieda K. Lacey said she would order "an immediate review of all outside speakers" for lessons on human sexuality and disease prevention, two of the most contentious topics taught in the county schools. She termed the gum exercise "repulsive" and said the employees who approved the group to speak in schools this academic year are "no longer employed" by the school system. "Every effort will be taken to prevent this from happening again," Lacey wrote.

Students said the speaker put them at ease about the "gum game," as it is now known among school administrators: It seemed relevant enough to the lessons, and the presenter said many students had done it. Classroom teachers were present during most or all of the lessons. Brian Edwards, schools spokesman, said he could not say whether those teachers were disciplined; such procedures are confidential.

We first heard about this from a good teacher, a no-nonsense health teacher. How in the world does something like this happen?

It isn't just a screw-up, something where we can say, oh, look at the evangelical fake-pregnancy-counseling center doing stupid stuff in the classroom. It's more than that.

Yeah, the Christian pregnancy center is a fake, it's a front for an anti-abortion group, they don't really give "advice," it's not a place you'd seriously go if you were pregnant and needed to know what to do. But that's not the point.

First, a lesson from this is that kids'll do anything. Every one of them in all of those classes knew this was a gross thing to do, that they could catch something chewing that gum. But it sounds like a bunch of them did it anyway.

... would you jump off a cliff if somebody ...

Well, yes, dad, I would, it turns out.

But there's another level of lesson here. Not only are kids reckless, but grown-ups are, too. We see that there are grown-ups who will endanger children in order to promote their own grown-up ideological views. These folks from the Rockville Pregnancy Center had been doing this for years, spreading germs through high-school classrooms. Of course they knew what could happen, but it didn't matter to them. Because they are fighting nobly to oppose the baby-killers. A few kids get sick, big deal, if maybe somewhere one of God's babies is saved.

And there's another level of lesson. The teachers. How could you stand there and watch this happen? In "health" class, no less. The only thing I can figure is that it happened year after year, and nobody complained, so they just threw their good sense out the window. You wonder how people can allow this sort of thing to happen? Look around you. That's all I'm saying: look around you. When do you make a stand to stop something you know is bad?

Yet another level. The school district says they never heard about this until now. Um, is that weird? These people are coming in from the religious anti-abortion clinic, talking to classes, year after year after year, and the school district doesn't know what they're saying? Yeah, we do trust these people to keep our children safe when they're at school.

The last level of lesson. Parents. How many of our kids came home and said, Dad, Mom, you wouldn't believe the gross thing we had to do in school today? This goes two ways: 1.they said something and we ignored it, or 2.they didn't say anything.

Which one is worse?