unsurprisingly, the united states' national fetish for useless, puritanical sexual education curriculum has failed to penetrate the berkeley public school system. i remember comprehensive, practical, age-appropriate sex ed in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, and i think they're doing it even earlier now. i also remember "sex ed" in tenth grade. that one was considerably less useful - not because abstinence fanaticism had snuck its way into the high school, but because it turns out that sex ed doesn't exist solely on a spectrum between "usefully comprehensive" and "uselessly moralizing." there's a third option: just tell the kids a bunch of dumb nonsense. they're kids, how are they going to know?

the one-semester class that contained sex ed was called "social living," and it had some other stuff too, like:

• learning conflict resolution via roleplaying exercises
• me losing immediately at "mafia" because i resented the obligation to convince anyone else i was innocent
• the teacher telling us that if you declare yourself a "national" instead of a "citizen" you don't have to pay taxes

i suspect that not all of those were on the formal curriculum. i only remember the conflict resolution stuff because it was another example of a bhs teacher outmaneuvering some smarmy teen boys, albeit, in this case, unintentionally. our sketch's "conflict" was a cop giving someone an illegitimate parking ticket, and in a twist - oh ho, we were so clever! - the cop would be unwilling to budge at all, even when shown photographic evidence of his wrongdoing, irrespective of the conflict mediation strategies the poor civilian tried to deploy. take that, teacher! we reject your premise entirely! some conflicts can't be resolved!

we were not prepared for ms. black to address the class immediately after our presentation to praise our accurate depiction of what it's like to talk to cops and remind us how important it is to document every interaction with them. once again, berkeley high's putative curriculum ("how to resolve conflicts") was superseded by its unrelated actual lesson ("do not trust cops"). ms. black's reponse to irreverence was generally pretty positive - one early assignment was for each of us to personalize some folder in a way that reflected who we were, and because i hate that shit, and i'm lazy as hell, i just used white-out to draw a smiley face with a flat mouth. that was my entire decoration, and i got a 'b+'. one of my classmates made some elaborate, dumb collage, and when he complained about the 'b' he got for it, her response was straightforward: "i got more of a sense of cody from his folder than i got of you from yours."

my memories of the sex ed itself are few but amusing. one memory is her telling us that when penises are swabbed for sti tests, the entire q-tip gets shoved all the way up the urethra; upon seeing every boy in class visibly wince, she laughed and admitted she was just fucking with us. the other memory places ms. black's understanding of sexual biology at about the same level as her understanding of tax law: she told us to forget about big pharma's expensive, chemical-based spermicides, and to just use honey instead, as it's a fine natural prophylactic. (the sperm just gets stuck, you see.)

i wonder whether that woman indirectly caused more pregnancies or yeast infections.

having a high school sex ed class taught by a black sovcit named "ms. black" who tells you to slather honey on your junk to avoid pregnancy feels like something that'd get cut from a sitcom for being too unrealistic, but, hey, berkeley high. hopefully the district's other layers of sex education kept her from doing too much damage, and at least the subject of the class gave her the opportunity to have the funniest hall pass of all time: an enormous, black dildo. you could leave whenever you wanted, to go do whatever you wanted, as long as you were willing to tote this monster dong around campus. what a great school.