Every Monday and Tuesday I teach English at the primaria to the 5th and 6th graders. I`m like a guest teacher and come in for an hour and the regular teacher usually ditches me the first opportunity they get. Every week I generally teach the same thing to all four classrooms with a couple variances based on the attention span and capabilities of each class. I just look at my handy dandy English manual written by volunteers from the English teaching committee, and I follow it almost exactly to a T, because I don’t want to spend time on lesson plans that aren´t my main focus. So I was happy to see that this week was “body parts”, which you practically don’t even need a lesson plan for. Draw a body on the chalkboard, label the parts, sing, “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes,” and you’re golden.
My first class was with the 5th grade girls (all of the classes are separated by gender). I started out by drawing a crazy looking person on the board with limbs flailing everywhere, a large potbelly, and eyes popping out of their head (cause everyone has more fun when the lesson is a little silly). I then drew the backside of the person, exaggerating the butt and labeled it “rear”. The girls all giggled and copied my drawings in their notebooks.
We practiced saying all of the basic body parts (arms, legs, elbows, knees, etc), we sang, “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” and we played a game where a volunteer stands at the front of the room and I cover them with sticky notes (on their arms, legs, and face) that have body parts written on them. It always gets the kids giggling when, for example, you have to label the volunteer’s nose with a huge sticky note.
So we’re getting close to the end of the class and I’m thinking about filling the time with having them practice some more rounds of, “Head, Shoulders, etc” when the teacher for the class starts asking, “Wait, how do you say this in English?” while cupping her boob. Well, on my crazy-person drawing, I had purposely made them boob-less and labeled the area as “chest”.
“You mean ‘chest’ ?” I asked, hoping she really didn’t want me to label boobs.
“No, not chest, these! Tetas,” she said, while full-on grabbing both boobs.
“Uh, well, they’re called ‘breasts’,” I said.
“Draw it on the board!” she said.
So I turned to the board and began drawing the curves of a woman, outlining the curves of breasts, while mumbling to myself, “Alrighty then, drawing boobs for 10 year-old girls.”
“Everyone repeat after me,” I began. “ ‘Breast’, or ‘breasts’ if plural.”
Most girls repeated, a couple giggled, while others diligently worked on drawing boobs in their notebooks.
“And this part? What about this part?” the teacher asked while poking herself in the area of her nipple.
“Oh, uh, the part in the center?” I asked, not sure what I was trying to accomplish by asking dumb questions. I thought I would get away without having to draw everything, but I was wrong.
“Yeah, where milk comes out. They need to know about their body,” she said simply.
I agree 100% they need to know about their body, I just didn’t realize my English lesson was going to turn into an anatomy lesson. Luckily, I’m not in the U.S. where I would probably be sued for saying the word “nipple” without a signed permission slip from home. Then again, if I were in the U.S. the teacher probably wouldn’t grab her boobs in the classroom or poke herself in the nipple, either. So I began adding nipples to my drawing while more snickers started rising out of the class.
“And this part?” the teacher asked, pointing to her crotch.
Alrighty then, it was obvious this lesson had taken a turn and I was now not only teaching kids how to say ¨arm¨, but also about the female body in general. I turned back to the board wondering how I was going to label a woman’s crotch. I mean, technically the external area is called the vulva. People use the word “vagina” as a catch-all term when it is just one part of the entire system, and it’s not even external. However, I really didn’t want to have to draw an entire diagram of the female anatomy, so I just labeled it as “vagina”. (Vagina is spelled the same way in Spanish, by the way, you just pronounce it “va-hee-na”.)
My woman drawing on the board now looked something like a leg-less Venus de Milo; robust and armless (but of course, without the sheet). I looked back to the teacher hoping to God she didn’t, in fact, want me to draw the entire female anatomy.
By this point all of the girls in the class were giggling, and I was trying really hard not to join them, and starting to fail. The teacher then interrupted the giggling with a lecture about how they shouldn’t be laughing because it’s not funny, it’s a woman’s body and it’s part of life, and they needed to be mature about it. I wiped the smile off my face and nodded my head in agreement, trying to look serious.
I then made everyone stand up so we could practice singing, “Head, Shoulders, etc”, since I felt we had plenty of body parts to worry about and should probably work a little more on the basics.
After finishing up I went to the next classroom, the 5th grade boys. I drew the same crazy person on the board; big curly hair, maniacal facial features, flat chest, and a big round potbelly.
“Miss Amanda, is this a man or a woman?” one of the boys asked as he started drawing the same image in his notebook.
“It’s just a person,” I said. “We’re sticking to the basics today, boys.”
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