Today was the first rehearsal for this year's Christmas pageant. We're doing The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, which was originally a book by Barbara Robinson. The story is about a family of horrible awful juvenile delinquent kids who muscle in on a church Christmas pageant, take over all the roles, and wind up Teaching Everyone A Lesson About Christmas. Yeah, I know. But it's going to be fun. The kids are really excited.

This year we're going with simplicity. Most of the exposition comes from a narrator, a teenage boy who will be reading from the script. A teenage girl plays the mother who gets roped into directing the pageant, and she also has a fair number of lines. The younger kids (who play the rest of the roles) have just a manageable few lines each.

The thing that's really ideal about this story, at least from my standpoint as the director, is that the play-within-a-play aspect means that I don't have to worry about the little kids learning where to go and what to do. If they need to be herded around the stage by adults or they wander off or whisper to each other? It'll just pass as realism. And I do have reasonably sharp kids in the key child roles.

Against my better judgment, I gave Alex a speaking part. She really, really, really wanted to be Gladys Herdman, the youngest delinquent kid, who winds up with the part of the Angel of the Lord in the pageant. She has one line, which she delivers at two different points: "Hey! Unto you a child is born!" Hopefully she will manage it all right. I painted a vivid verbal picture of how she'll have to deliver her line in a church full of people she doesn't know, and she insisted that she could. Cross your fingers for us.

Also, as if that weren't enough, I am gearing up to teach OWL again. OWL is the UU comprehensive sex education curriculum. It's a 27-session course aimed at grades 7-9, or about ages 12-14, and covering everything from the mechanics of the reproductive system to equal rights for GLBT people to dating and relationships to what people do when they have sex. It's intense, and fun, and draining, and awesome.

Neither of my two previous co-teachers are repeating. Instead I'll be teaching with my friend Laura and with Michael. Michael! Will be teaching OWL! Which means that we are going to need childcare for OWL every week, unfortunately. But Michael was the only likely male volunteer, and you can't have OWL with only female teachers. And Michael will be great.

We have parent orientation this coming week (twice - once Tuesday evening, and once Saturday morning) and then we start with the kids on January 5. Whew.

RE was a family affair today. I taught, Alex was in the class as usual, and Michael was my classroom assistant. His first time teaching Sunday School, and he picked an incredibly chaotic day to do it. All went more-or-less well, though. ( Read more... )

My RE teaching career has gone like this: preschool stories-and-crafts, ZOMG middle-school sex ed, preschool stories-and-crafts. Not sure if next year will be a ZOMG middle-school sex ed year or not, but let me just say that I find this pattern a bit... odd. Mindbending. At least it encourages mental flexibility.

When I taught preschool two years ago, our curriculum revolved around the natural world and cultivating a sense of wonder. This year our theme is home and family, including an appreciation for our church home and a sense that we belong to the human family. Once again we are using lessons cobbled together from three different curricula: Celebrating Me and My World, We Are Many, We Are One, and a modified version of a new curriculum for older kids called Creating Home.

Alex is in my class this year, and oh boy, is she proud of being a "Sunday Schooler" instead of a nursery kid. Every day last week she woke up and asked if it was a Sunday School day. It is especially exciting for her to have me be one of her teachers - I'm having to gently prepare her for the fact that I won't be teaching every week. Instead, I'm the lead teacher two weeks out of every four, and occasionally I also fill in as the assistant teacher. (For reasons of safety and practicality, all RE classes are team-taught.)

( I was the lead teacher this week. )

Not posted to the OWL filter.

I know I have some very smart, very clued-in people with disabilities on my Friends List. I'm pleading with you to help me fix the one messed-up session in OWL, the grades 7-9 sex ed class I'm teaching. Feel free to point other friends here, if you think they may have helpful comments.

( Here's the problem... )

Here's where I need your help:

1. I need readings. Anyone got anything they love? I knew I'd lent out my copy of With the Power of Each Breath years ago and never gotten it back, but I foolishly assumed that our library would have it. Nope.

2. I have three "Values Voting" statements. Please critique them, fix the wording, and suggest any better, or additional, ideas:

a) Mentally retarded people shouldn't have sexual contact, because they're not really able to give consent.
b) It's fine for disabled people to have children, even if the disability might be inherited.
c) Being in a relationship with someone who is seriously disabled would just be too hard. (Possible alternate wording: "It takes someone really special to be willing to have a relationship with a disabled person.")

I want to make this a good, engaging, educational experience for the kids. But I'm a little nervous about, um, how far inside I am on this issue. It makes it hard to know exactly what's going to be appropriate and helpful.

So... help?

I met with our Director of Religious Education and my OWL co-teacher on Sunday to plan out the course. We're getting a late start, unfortunately, because we won't go away for training until the weekend of October 19-21. Then we need to hold a parent orientation, to explain exactly what we'll be putting their children through. That leaves us with the choice of starting the course right before the holidays and then having a big gap, or waiting until January. We chose January.

In order to get a 27-session class to fit into the spring semester, we're planning to do two overnights at the church. Intellectually, I think it's a great idea. Most kids love overnights, and middle schoolers don't get to go along to the weekend-long cons that are the mainstay of the teen program, YRUU. So overnights will help make OWL attractive and special for the kids. They'll also give a big boost to group bonding and cohesion. (We're planning an overnight as our second class activity.) We'll do three 90-minute class sessions (one on Friday night and two on Saturday) and leave the rest of the time for games and fun stuff. So that's all good.

On the other hand: we'll be spending nearly 24 hours locked in the church with a bunch of 12-14 year olds, who will almost certainly want to stay up all night and get into as much trouble as possible. Why don't they just kill me now and spare me the hassle of organizing the course sessions?

The other thing we did at our meeting was look at the infamous OWL Slide Set. The slides are kept under lock and key, cannot be duplicated, and may never leave the church. They're sold only to churches with certified OWL leaders, never to secular organizations. Parents are required to view them before the class begins and sign a statement attesting to that fact. And, um, wow. For good reason. ( text below includes sexually explicit terms )

Do I still have to give a spoiler warning for Deathly Hallows? There are spoilers below the cut. Also below the cut: an extensive discussion of the Our Whole Lives sex education curriculum, for those who are interested.

( Westlake, Wilson, Heyer, Faber & Mazlish, Walton, Rowling, Barnhouse )

Total for July: 9
Total for the year: 50

That works out neatly - without intending to, I reached the 50-book mark precisely at the end of a month. I do intend to keep posting about books which are new to me; perhaps I ought to change the tag to "the increasingly misnamed 50 book challenge."

I've lost the piece of paper with my April and May books on it, so alas, this is a reconstruction. I need to come up with some fool- and scatterbrain-proof method of recording what I read for the 50-book challenge, or I'll never make it to December.

At any rate: New books I think I read in April: ( Moore, Klass & Klass, Baker, Ishiguro, Quart. )
Total for April: 5, unless I've forgotten something.
Total for the year: 31.

I mentioned a little while ago that I might teach Our Whole Lives, the UU sex ed curriculum, next year. Since then, I've done a lot of reading about the program, spoken to the RE director, checked in with my sister Debbie, who taught junior high Sunday School for six years, and decided to sign on.

Our RE director helped me examine my fears about teaching the program. I realized that a lot of what was holding me back was (okay, and this sounds ridiculous) my memories of being an awkward and socially rejected misfit of a junior high school student. When I tried to imagine teaching a class of 7th-9th graders, I imagined them judging and rejecting me the way that my childhood classmates did. She told me that there are hardly any adults who voluntarily interact with junior high kids (parents and teachers have to), and so the kids wind up with an enormous appreciation for the adults who do. Geekiness doesn't seem to matter all that much.

She also told me that, although kids are often reluctant to start OWL, the ones who get past the first class or two universally love it. And "for some kids it's a life-transforming experience." She really sold me on how great it would be to be part of that.

Only after I agreed did I discover that I'll have to go away for an intensive training weekend. I knew there would be training, but I thought it would be, like, a couple of six-hour workshops. Nope. The sample schedules I've seen pretty much involve nothing but solid training from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, plus a few hours for eating and sleeping. So poor Michael and Alex will be looking at a solo weekend, sometime this summer.

But whoa, the more I look at this curriculum, the better it looks. It really does look like it has the potential to be life-transforming. Take a look at the OWL values and issue positions. They almost make me want to cry.

My sex education as a kid was dry, factual - medically comprehensive but emotionally lacking. I was lucky to escape most of the false information and moral condemnation that so many other kids got (and still get today), although my mother was pretty direct about her personal disapproval of premarital sex. It wasn't bad sex ed, comparatively. But it was a far cry from stuff like, "Healthy sexual relationships are consensual, nonexploitative, mutually pleasurable, safe, developmentally appropriate, based on mutual expectations and caring, and respectful." Or "We are called to enrich our lives by expressing sexuality in ways that enhance human wholeness and fulfillment and express love, commitment, delight, and pleasure."

It's going to be such an honor to teach this course.

I was lead teacher for Religious Education again this morning, for the last time this year. The RE year ends June 10; June 3, which would ordinarily be my week, is an intergenerational service, and then June 10 all three of us will jointly lead some kind of end-of-year celebration.

This week was another tree-themed lesson. ( Read more... )

It's so fascinating to watch early skills and bits of knowledge come together into a framework that will, some distant day, become reading. I don't have any memories of that process, and I don't think Michael does either - so we're really seeing it for the first time in Alex.

( Okay, re-reading this, it sounds pretty braggy to me. So if you find that sort of thing annoying, you probably don't want to click through. )