Lets face it, the birds and the bees is an awkward lesson no matter who's teaching it. Doesn't matter if it's your parents or your teacher, there's bound to be some mishaps with such a sensitive topic. And being surrounded by your equally naive and unruly classmates doesn't make it go any smoother.
One in three
My teacher in high school and wanted to have a serious discussion about STDs because statistically speaking 1/3 students at my school already had one.
She explains this and that the two counties feeding into our high school had some of the highest rates of STDS in the nation. She then asks: “So why do you think that is?”
Before she can get in a word about staying protected, a kid pipes up: “It’s Nebraska; what else are we going to do?
[deleted]
Jupiter
In 8th grade class, the teacher (an elderly woman who was a nurse) did the usual anonymous questions deal, and it went about as you would expect.
But then she starts reading one to herself, and responds: “I, I…. I just don’t know…….. the exact, um… exactly how…. the exact circumference of Jupiter…”
Immediately, a stoner-type with long hair in the back of the classroom who had been silent up to this point pops his head up and says, “Oh, that’s me. I’m tryin’ to do my science homework.”
-AirOrFourOhFou
Tea-bagging
As a student I thought it would be funny to ask my grade 7 teacher what tea-bagging was.
I figured she wouldn’t know. Instead she went on a 15-minute speech about what it was and why people may want to do it. The class was so stunned, and I was pretty embarrassed.
-HeadNativeInCharge
Abstinence-only
I went to a public school in Texas, where abstinence-only is taught, as part of a unit on health your freshman year. There were three pregnant girls in my class. It was a little awkward.
-texass363
Good for the skin
A cute girl said, “I have never done this, but my boyfriend said sperm is good for the skin and can keep you looking younger if applied to the face. Is this true?”
I openly laughed and at the same time knew that she had been letting her boyfriend finish on her face because he was able to convince her it was “good for her skin.”
QA_QuestionableActs
Blue Blooded
A kid in my sex ed class once asked, “Why are periods blue?” He’d obviously seen a few too many tampon/pad commercials.
DeCoburgeois
Squirt
In 6th grade some kid asked, “When a girl sprays liquid out when she finishes, whats that called?” The teacher said, “Females do not do that.”
The boy looked at her and said, “Trust me, they do. I’ve watched like thirty of them do it. It’s called the internet.”
bobred92
An Arms Length
Our school’s gym teacher was missing her left hand at the wrist. It was a birth defect, she’s done some pretty cool things despite it.
In the 9th grade, we had her for the sex ed unit of phys ed. During her lesson, she was doing a bit about contraception. She was talking about different methods, then she got to condoms.
Someone asked “What happens if a guy is too big to use a condom?”
She took one, unwrapped it, applied it over her left wrist and rolled it all the way down her arm. Then said something along the lines of, “And most of you boys think you need magnums?”
dumbassbuffet
Church School
I went to a parochial (church) school. The pastor taught the sex ed class. At the end of the class we had question time. This boy asked the teacher if it was gay to take a picture of his own junk and then look at it while pleasuring himself.
anonymous579
Incest
A chick asked: “If I have sex with my dad and have a kid, is the kid my brother or my son?”
Seckzette
Four Week Course
I took my high school’s health requirement over the summer. I opted for the four-week course, which was about 70% the cliche summer school crowd. We had all types of troublemakers.
Also there was a pregnant girl. She was pretty far along, already showing in the belly department. The teacher had just done the contraceptives lesson and was doing a little post-lecture review. she asked us, “What is the most effective form of contraception?
As expected, we said “use the pill specifically for contraception, but wear a condom to protect against diseases.” Totally legit, everyone was on board.
But the pregnant girl raised her hand and said, “Mrs Miller, I’m confused. I thought the safest thing would be to not let the boy finish inside of you, so shouldn’t the pull-out method be the safest?”
Our teacher explained the error of her ways, to which the girl replied “Damn, I thought pull-out would be foolproof. That’s what I’ve been using.”
There were no words.
kyaPryse
Skeet
We had an inner city kid who openly asked in a very rural conservative small-town school whether it was possible for “the skeet” to “drip down from da booty hole” and “get a b** pregnant.”
lilsureshot
Calorie Counting
Girl sitting behind me stood up and asked, “How many calories are there in semen?”
RaptorGeezus
Pads vs Pons
In grade 6 sex ed, my friend asked “Why do girls use tampons instead of pads?” and before the teacher could say anything, another kid piped up with, “Because they get orgasms when they use them.”
kitennnnns
Superman
In 4th grade sex ed a friend of mine raised his hand and asked if it was possible to break a boner like you can your arm. The teacher answered no (I’ve since learned that you can sprain it). We went the rest of the year thinking our boners were invincible, occasionally running around yelling “super boner!
Like a Balloon
Some kid in my sex ed class asked if sperm floats … in the air … like a helium balloon.
whimsicalsteve
An Infant
When I was in sex ed many years ago, all the guys got to write questions for the girls on paper notes and vice versa. One of the guys wrote: “What is the largest thing you could fit inside of you?” One of the girls answered: “An infant.” Preach.
offspringofdeath
Gross
In grade six, my sex Ed teacher – who was a bald, fat, and just disgusting to look at – opened the class with “You girls might think I don’t know much about your bodies, but I just got my wife pregnant for the second time.” No one said anything.
Kittyroyo
From Paul
A kid in my first awkward 5th grade sex ed class asked if it hurts to get an erection. They were supposed to be anonymous questions written on notecards but adding “from Paul” didn’t help his case.
TZnrd
Scrotum
Our teacher was going over the male reproductive system and went on to say that the purpose of the scrotum was to protect the testicles. From the back of the classroom came the voice of a large football player yelling “Well it does a SHITTY job!”
Ahh_Gene_Parmesan
Genitalia function
As a teacher, I answered a lot of questions about how genitalia function on a day-to-day basis, what is normal vs what is abnormal. Things like, “vaginal discharge exists and is normal, you haven’t somehow gotten an STD without having sex like some sort of reverse Virgin Mary”. Or “genitalia vary widely in appearance. you’re not a freak”. Or “here’s a basic cleanliness checklist: how to wash your genitals, what not to use to clean them, tips on not getting UTIs”.
Funny Words
The teacher decided it was a good idea to say “you’re going to hear a lot of funny words like penis, so if you can’t handle that you should get it out of your system now”
The thunderous chorus of penis is something I will never forget.
Helping Hands
We were on the subject of condom usage and teacher asks “Now, why would it be important for a woman to know how to put on a condom?” Student responds confidently – “just in case the guy ain’t got no arms!”
Tentacles
When there was a diagram of male genitalia handed around, one of the girls in my class asked ‘why do they look so different on an octopus?’ Turned out she had the words ‘tentacle’ and ‘testicle’ very, very confused.
Nintendo
Is there a reason that the uterus and ovaries are arranged like a Nintendo64 controller” I died.
Pets
A kid in my health class asked if you could keep sperm, like pets in a fish tank.
Soviet Raised
My mom was raised in the Soviet union, there was no sex education. She got pregnant at 17, married my dad etc. We started talking about sex ed and she blurts out “I was so stupid that I thought you only got pregnant if you’re in a certain position.” Cue horrified face and drop of subject.
Orifice
When I was about 12/13 I asked my Sex Ed teacher if people could get an orgasm with food, she answered me that it would depend on where do you put the food. I wasn’t expecting that…
Belly Poked
In middle school our Health teacher (during the sex ed unit) told us a story of a student, who was now graduated, who was told by her mother that if a boy poked her in the belly button she would get pregnant.
Enter high school, during her junior year she was poked in the belly button by a boy in her circle group. So she slapped him at broke down into uncontrollable sobs. It took nearly half an hour to convince her that NO she wasn’t pregnant.
Drowning The Child
Was taking a bath when about 8 months pregnant, ex walks in, all color drains from his face and he panics.
He thought the baby’s umbilical cord was attached to my belly button and that with my belly button underwater, I was in fact drowning our child.
Basketball
A girl in my high school sex ed class didn’t quite understand how she could get pregnant if a dude pulled out before he finished. Then her basketball player boyfriend stood up and yelled, “Before a man shoots he’s gotta dribble!”
-guppycommander
A genuine question
Being a developing country, sex education and sex related stuff were still a taboo, so all we learned were male and female anatomy in the biology subject. So in fifth grade I asked my teacher what an orgasm was and if masturbation was anti-stress. Her face expression still cracks me up today.
Girls lay eggs right?
I once asked a really stupid question in either seventh or eighth grade health class. We were learning about how girls ovulate and have periods and all that stuff and the teacher explained how it’s about once a month that a girl ovulates and produces an egg. So I blurted out, “So a girl can have, like, 12 babies each year?” The health teacher just stared at me for a few seconds then I realized why what I asked was stupid.
“I’ve seen some things…”
In middle school, we had a guest speaker and he came in to tell us about STIs. He himself had AIDS and went on a very brief description of what it was and how it affects him.
Then he spent about thirty minutes telling us how he contracted it… and it was seriously the craziest, Studio 54-esque series of stories. He was telling us where he was having all these three-ways and doing tons of cocaine in mansions. By the end dude was pumped remembering all of this, and honestly, just about every boy in that class was pumped on this guy’s lifestyle too.
Then he kinda realized he had gone off on a tangent, turned to the actual instructor, then just kind of stopped talking and sat down.
Dancing around the truth
When I was in fifth or sixth grade, we did the anonymous questions on paper slips.
The teacher would tell us anything we wanted to know, as long as it didn’t involve contact with male/female parts.
I knew how intercourse worked, but I guess I was just trying to be annoying. So he explained how the sperm comes from the male part, and how it would fertilize the egg… yada yada.
So I asked anonymously how the sperm actually got to the egg. He said “through the female part,” but he didn’t want to explain that the male part made contact. So out loud, I asked, “But how does the sperm get from the male part to the female part?”
Well, for whatever reason, he didn’t want to tell us how sex actually worked, even though it was sex-education.
“You will get pregnant. And die.”
During my intercourse education (basically a class intended to scare us into abstinence) our teacher (a science teacher no less) just got done telling us that condoms don’t protect against AIDS/HIV because the “particles are so small they go right through the condom” and asked if we had any questions. One kid asked what the point of even using a condom was if it wouldn’t protect us. He was told to be quiet or he would be told to leave. That was about the extent of my education.
Rude kids
There was a unanimous question box in an all boys class during the fifth grade. It was taught by our gym teacher because he was the only male teacher in our elementary school.
He just so happened to have a very heavy set wife who sometimes came in to see him at work so all the kids were aware of her. One of the questions he picked up from the box at the end of class and read in its entirety aloud before processing it said, “How does your wife not crush you during intercourse?” It was awful and he did not handle it well. Immediately his face got red as hell and he chewed us all out trying to figure out who wrote the question. The perpetrator was never outed although we all knew who wrote it. 10/10 horrible scenario.
Witholding information
During school (I’m 36 now) I lived in an extremely conservative state in the U.S, and at the beginning of every sex education course (it was called “family life”) the teacher would do the introduction to the course and conclude it with, “We cannot, by law, discuss or teach anything having to do with masturbation or homosexuality, and this is the last time either of those topics will be discussed in this course.”
In retrospect I thought it was very unfortunate. I can almost understand reluctance to discuss homosexuality; being a very conservative state and all, but masturbation? Who doesn’t? It was an unfortunate disservice to deny knowledge about a very basic human behavior to teenagers who could really use the information.
Blue waffle
A kid in my class asked what a blue waffle was, knowing very well what it was. Well, it turns out the teacher didn’t, so she did a little research and the next day she came back with a presentation consisting of 30 or so huge pictures on the projector and talked about how it affects you and how it’s spread. One other kid asked to go to the bathroom and it turned out he threw up in the hallway.
I’m still traumatized.