RE scheduling changes; AYS and OWL

There was a scheduling mixup at church, which means that instead of starting tomorrow, the first grade OWL unit will start on February 1st. This means that three weeks of lessons have been shifted from March to January, and regular Spirit Play curriculum will resume on March 22nd. It's not a huge deal, but our assisstant DRE sounded rather harried when she called me this afternoon.

OWL, by the way, is short for Our Whole Lives, and is the successor curriculum to About Your Sexuality (AYS) which was begun around 1970. AYS was designed to be a sex-ed program for people in areas where there was no corresponding public or private school program, and to supplement the often very clinical biology- and abstinence-based programs you get in a lot of places. AYS had a lot of room for questions, treated sex as a perfectly natural aspect of life (so it actually talked about sex, not just biological structures), and consciously tried to bring up things like ethics and alternative sexualities.

The trouble (as I understand it) was that AYS was designed in the seventies, and as such included a lot of photographic slide-shows of real people having real sex, which eventually grated on the sensibilities of even 'enlightened' UU parents. (Trust me, they were some incredibly graphic slideshows. Not pornographic -- they were not intended to titilate -- but graphic as fuck-all.) So the curriculum was overhauled, first to change photographs into cartoon illustrations, and then to add a 'where do babies come from?' style of mini-curriculum for first graders, among other things. (The AYS program was for ages 12-14.)

I was in one of the last cohorts to go through AYS, in 1995-1996, and I remember it fondly, though my particular class was a little unbalanced. You see, all the boys were in 7th grade and all the girls in 8th grade, which made for a significant maturity gap, and meant we sometimes tiptoed away from certain discussion topics in an attempt to preserve order. But we talked about a lot of potentially fiddly and embarrassing things despite our tendency to laugh and be disruptive when we were uncomfortable, listened to cassettes of people admitting their own concerns and the stupid things they did when they were young (like the girl who was so nervous before having sex the first time that she tried to stretch her vagina by inserting three tampons at once), and even had a one-week unit on dirty jokes. (To this day, I can tell the one about the genie and the golf course at the drop of a hat.)

I admit that I'm kind of curious how the first grade OWL curriculum works. I think I may ask to sit in on one or two lessons in February, just to see what's what. :-)

[Fic] "Cut Clean" -- The Homeward Bounders

About two-thirds of this story began its existence as the introductory section of To Be of Use, my Yuletide story. But I ran out of time to get past Joris and Konstam's first meeting, which meant all this stuff didn't have any training sessions in Khan Valley, or demon-hunting missions, or post-book interviews and strategy meetings, or Joris's eventual emancipation, to balance it out. So I cut the introduction and turned it into a separate story.

Of course, that meant I had to add a section and elaborate on others, but I think it worked out reasonably well.

Summary: There weren't many labor slaves in Cardsburg, but Joris knew how the world worked. He just didn't think that knowledge would become personal. (The ff.net version is here.)

( Cut Clean )

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I do still want to get the rest of my original outline into words somehow, but I don't have time right now and I suspect that when I do have time, I'll have run out of motivation. I hate when that happens. *sigh*