La tortuga

“Miiister Aaaaaadam…?”

“Yes?”

“Thaaaaat, are there more melones in the world than boys?”

Snorted giggles ripple through the class, and I am obliged to take a moment to consider my position.

The lesson has deteriorated rapidly. Within the space of five minutes, we have gone from discussing what we expect to learn from our Evolution and Inheritance module to a question and answer session about the ins and outs of, well, the ins and outs, with accompanying hand gestures. So much for student-directed learning.

I look down at the owner of this latest inquiry. His grubby little elf face is etched with a maniacal grin. His eyes gleam through his permanently grime-fogged glasses. His head is cocked expectantly. I like him. He knows what he’s up to. I decide to call his bluff.

“Yes. Yes I suppose there are.” The class erupts in a whoop of delighted laughter. Suddenly I find myself longing for last week’s PSHE session, when we were discussing the moral conundrum of cannibalism. Talking about whether it was okay for disaster survivors to eat one another in order to remain alive was somehow more straightforward, even if I was a little unnerved by how emphatically one student said he would definitely kill and eat the other crew of his hypothetical lifeboat if he was hungry enough. “What if one of them was your Mum?” asked another. He immediately re-considered his position, looking a little distressed. They are 10, after all.

Anyway, I reckon I’d take most Raft-of-the-Medusa-style scenarios over this barrage of kids struggling to remember the English word for pene. Their questions range from the deliberately subversive (see above), to the existential (“But why do we have to do it that way?”), to those which require more careful handling (“Is it true that when a girl turns 13 her bits start bleeding?”), to those which seem to bear the heartbreaking mark of personal experience (“What happens when a baby dies inside a mummy’s tummy? How do they get it out?”).

To an extent I’ve been here before. I remember in one Year 7 Citizenship lesson having to field the wide-eyed panic of “CAN YOUR PENIS GET TOO BIG???” Likewise the quiet angst of “What do you do if people make fun of you for what’s happening to your body?” But this time it feels somehow different. These kids are younger, less embarrassed, and more catholic. I’m pretty sure our school policy is that we’re not even supposed to teach about puberty for fear of offending religious sensibilities (read parents). Our lesson on human evolution should be interesting then. Added to that, they’ve clearly been told something, and it’s clearly playing on their minds. What to do? To duck out now would surely be a coward’s work. Also, unless I let them take the lead, I may be faced with the grim prospect of actually having to plan my PSHE lessons. Shuddering at the thought, I plough on.

The questions keep coming, and I keep fending them off, cool and calm, unflappable and unfazed.  At least, this is what I’m going for. In reality I reckon I’m over doing the dour, and I just look grumpy. “Why don’t you laugh?” says one girl, her jaw hanging drunk with glee from the rest of her face. “Because it’s just science”, I answer stupidly, like someone who’s read half of the blurb of a book on the Enlightenment, or watched too much David Attenborough (I’m joking, of course. There’s no such thing).

 

I think back to my own sex education, which consisted of the whole year group watching a video in the drama studio followed by a half-hearted ‘any questions?’, which drew nothing but a predictable and frankly well-deserved “If you’re only going to get in trouble for it, what’s the point in wanking?”. No help there, then. Earlier, when I was in Year 6, there was the thermal imaging video of the erect penis. That didn’t really help either, and in a weird way felt like nothing more than a progression of the Magic Pencil. Then there was the pop-up book of course, my favourite, where you could make the sperm go in and out of the egg, after you’d pulled the lever that made them file along the fallopian tubes like Lemmings. Quick! We need a builder! Oh Shit, that’s not the builder that’s the digger! Why do they all look so similar? Fuck, now he’s got his pick-axe and he’s digging right through the pelvis. Bollocks, I’ll just nuke the level and start again. Except you can’t, because by this stage you’ve had a little cardboard baby. Thanks a lot.

Anyway, there are more questions. Luckily we’re getting on for 16:30, it’s Friday, and as long as none of them talks too extensively to their parents about this, we’ll be fine. I’m already in trouble because my classroom displays are not up to scratch.

“How do dogs do it?”

“Don‘t some people do it in clubs for money?”

“How do jellyfish do it?”

“The jellyfish that we saw it in Humanities, how does it do the thing?”

“Could 24 jellyfish kill a shark?”

“What about monkeys and turtles and birds and all the animals, do they all reproduce like we do?”

“Do I have to have children?”

I answer honestly, or at least quickly, which is a good replacement if you do it with enough confidence. Those that I don’t know go in the Question Box, which we introduced because my kids have more questions than I can physically answer and still be in with a chance of getting them ready for SATS. They also have a habit of shouting them out at random intervals and then arguing about them:

“What is the biggest animal?”

“That he say it Mister Adam. It’s a blue whale”

“Noooooo.”

“Djyeeeees.”

“Ah, and the elephant?”

“Chaval, the elephant is like a, like a, like a, like a…”

“It’s a mammal the whale?”

“Nooooo, it’s a fish.”

“It’s a mammal.”

“Ah djyeeeees?”

“And how does it make the milk?”

Anyway you get it.

Question Box questions are those that we can’t really deal with in class because they are too big/complex/off-topic/poorly expressed/nonsensical, and so are dealt with at some point over the following week once I’ve come up with a suitable response. My favourite so far is “What is the strongest turtle?” Honestly, Google it. The answer is Raphael.

Non-starters and duds aside (“Why does it look so disgusting?”) there are far worse ways to spend your time than finding out how jellyfish see, or how big bacteria can get, or why a snake has no legs, or whether I am, in fact, the boyfriend of Miss Rachael.

Being ambushed with a chaotic sex-ed lesson on a Friday afternoon is one thing. What would really scare me would be a job where I had to work with adults.

The box jellyfish, which has 24 eyes and a central nervous system.
Some species may be able to see colour.