#19 | Alter-Ed Part 3: Breaking Down Barriers
Hymens, Consent, and the Making of Simple Classrooms
Issue 19 | 25th Feb, 2024 | 10 minutes reading
Shantanu’s Note: Heyo, Multitude Readers, and welcome to the last instalment of Kartika Menon’s series on alternate education. Life’s come in the way for the last month, so this is much delayed from my end. This issue is about the complexity of making things simple, of not relying on jargon in classrooms, especially when discussing difficult subjects. I hope you enjoy it. If you haven’t yet, you can read part 1 and part two as well.
It is 1:35, and after a hot meal of rice and sambar, we’re gathered in the classroom. My colleague holds a Pringles can and a straw. I have my laptop open to a presentation about female anatomy. My students look on warily, eyes darting from chips to deck to me, wondering where this is going. ‘I want to bust a myth’, I announce. ‘Many of you may think the hymen works like this’, I say as I point to my colleague, who promptly pierces the seal of the can with great, startling force. Immediately, the kids dissolve into a flurry of ‘no ways’ and ‘that’s horrifying’. One starts shaking her head and retreats into the wall.
After a session of shushing, we relax a little. The demonstration had gone a little awry, the sheer force of it having caught us by surprise. But we’re back to the mythbusting now. The hymen is not a seal, and women are not cans of Pringles. Shocking. The hymen is a membrane, and it comes in different forms, we learn: septate, annular, cribriform. We break down the words. Septate is partitioned by a septum, annular is ring-shaped, cribriform is like a sieve with many holes. While, in rare cases, the hymen can be imperforate (with no opening at all), in most bodies it only partially covers the vagina. A rubberband is then passed around. The way it stretches is a more apt comparison to the hymen than the piercing of a seal.
My colleague, well into her forties, was also discovering these things for the first time. She tells me she’d always wondered that if the hymen were in fact like a tight seal, how it was possible for us to menstruate. I myself had bought into the myth for the longest time. While college and social media had told me I’d had it wrong, I had never actually sat down to understand the biology of it all. In fact, there was so much that I thought I knew well till I realised I couldn’t explain it in class.
Going back to school has been going back to school, in every sense. After five years of liberal arts education that constantly asks you to ‘complicate’ something, when you’re faced with simplifying a concept, you come to realise how unprepared you are. Without the crutch of jargon, it’s easy to be at a loss. I’ve spent all this time poking and prodding at what I know, have kids ask ‘why’ and often be stumped.
Take consent, for example. It should be easy enough to explain, one would imagine. Except there are so many strands to it - what kind of consent? What defines it? In what context? And is its violation always intentional? Do we demonize every transgression? That would leave us with no scope to learn at all.
There are no absolutes.
But before our minds begin to run a mile a minute, we stop. Before complicating a concept, we must lay out its bare bones, we say. We can’t give them all this in the first go, we should simplify. So we introduce the acronym FRIES.
Consent is:
Freely given, Reversible, Informed, Enthusiastic, and Specific.
All abstract ideas, which we concretise through roleplay. Consent isn’t limited to sexual activity, so we ask the students to demonstrate what they understand by these terms in different instances of day to day life. The kids surprise us with the nuance. One group does a play using Spotify permissions. ‘Just because I allowed you to use it yesterday doesn’t mean I’m okay with it today’, the owner of the premium profile says. The freeloader then beats a quick retreat, apologises, and is forgiven. ‘I understand now, I’m sorry’, she says.
So many new ideas now: that consent is often taken for granted, that it must be sought even if it’s been given before in a similar situation, that it is okay to withdraw consent at any given time, and, importantly, that open conversation is essential to communicating and maintaining our boundaries.
What we had thought of as perhaps too complex to begin with was clearly reflected in our students’ interpretations. Here - a learning for us. We went into these classes thinking of how for most students, this is their first and perhaps only formal and mediated introduction to sexuality while at school. The task to us seemed enormous, and we often presupposed naivete, ignorance, or misinformation. By allowing the students to demonstrate their understanding in different ways, we discovered our own biases, how we were often operating from the assumption that they’d know as much as we did when we were their age.
When we began our classes, in fact, the very first hurdle was the awkwardness - a tangible thing sitting smack in the middle of the group. It was not just the students. It was us too. I remember after a few months of having introduced SE and focusing on family groups and roles, we had some students tell us that some of this content was ‘irrelevant’ and that we should be teaching them about sexual safety and diverse sexual orientations. It was true - we ourselves had been hedging, trying to stick to things that felt easier, less ‘controversial’. Adults with the best of intentions bound by years of shame and taboo telling us all this cannot be spoken about - not in public, at work, in front of children.
We reworked our curriculum. We also tried to approach sexuality from different angles. So, in history class we’d talk of menstrual pads and their postwar origins. In English we’d talk of gendered language. We took courses, hunted for resources and support, attended workshops - all in the attempt to wrap our heads around everything there is to teach children about sex and sexuality. Biology, philosophy, sociology, history, law and politics - everything converged. In my class with the middle schoolers, as we discussed HIV/AIDS discrimination, we took aid from the biology teacher who came in for a session on how the virus works. I sat with my students, asking basic questions because my own knowledge was lacking. In my research, I came across the stories of children in India whose parents had died of AIDS. In the bid to bring the idea closer to them, to make the story of AIDS more directly meaningful for them, I was encountering so many new angles to a problem I thought I understood fairly well. To see their teachers learning often helped the students ask more questions. We fed each other’s learning, making space for doubt and reflection.
This was also connected to the emotion of it all: Learning when to coax an answer out of a student and when not to push further, learning how to keep talking even when it’s affecting our own responses, hearts pumping wildly as we talk of gendered violence. We came up with a set of rules for how to make the classroom a safe space. The children piped up with their needs - I don’t want to be asked extra questions, or I don’t want anyone to laugh. The teachers bring their own requests. Let’s talk in third person, let’s not be intrusive about personal lives, let’s allow people to leave the room if needed. The rules are reinvented as time passes, and we grow more comfortable.
Channelling their competitive spirit seemed another effective strategy to get them out of their shells. We would conduct quizzes and play pictionary and lo - Suddenly, the child who could barely say ‘sexuality’ is now yelling ‘nocturnal emissions’ as his team-mate draws a bed and a moon on the board. Time flies, and silence dies when you’re having fun. Through all these new ways, we were learning how to normalise without tantalising or fetishising.
With each class, as I learnt and taught, I found my sense of wonder nourished. All the jadedness I had begun to harbour from earlier classrooms, Twitter discussions, and the newspaper - it all began to dissipate, making place for this renewed ability to be amazed - at myself, my students, and the world at large. It wasn’t just the sexuality classes, it was the entire model of learning. I was thinking anew about my relationship with food, with nature, with children, with people older than me. I was asking questions I’d been too afraid to ask in school myself.
As I write this last piece now, I am back in a liberal arts college. Back to complicating, abstracting, theorising. It feels different, this time around. I sometimes sit in class with eager undergraduates, who, for the first time, are questioning what a fact is, or if reality is truly ‘objective’. I love it. I see their minds humming, the room coming alive with fragile new ideas finding their form. The jargon which earlier seemed inscrutable and pointless now feels like it can give me useful categories, words that might help me understand the world better.
I'm sure there will be times where this optimism will feel unfounded. Still, there's a reason all of these pieces end on a stubbornly positive note. There's a reason why, even after the dreariest days, I'd still wake up the next morning eager to get to school. I think it's because there's nothing quite like learning and teaching to remind you of everything the world has to offer - and in that, there will always be hope.
That’s it for this week, and for Kartika’s guest series. If you want to share it with anyone, you can do so through the link below.
In related news, Multitudes is going to be on a bit of a break until things calm down. I’ve got a lot of work piled up till the end of March, so I’ll hopefully be back in your inbox in April. Till then, stay well.
-Shantanu