A Journalist's Education in the Classroom by David S. Awbrey

Author:David S. Awbrey [Awbrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: R&L Education
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

v

Courting Middle Schoolers

“Mr. Awbrey, can I talk to you about something?” Mia asked in a pleading voice that meant her question would not be about the economic foundations of medieval feudalism.

“Since you are our only male teacher, some of us girls were wondering if you could tell us why the boys keep calling us hos and bitches,” she said. “We’re not like that, but they say it all the time. We really don’t like it.”

Like most early adolescent girls, Mia was wistfully romantic—in love with the idea of being in love. Every day she seemed to have a new boy’s name scrawled with a colored Sharpie on her notebook; the morning social studies crush crossed out, replaced by someone who teased her in afternoon Spanish class.

But I understood her question.

Today’s young people are the first generation raised in a climate of open pornography. On several occasions a boy would sidle up to me and confide that he found a particularly lewd website and was eager to fill me in. It was sad: How would Mia and her girlfriends ever construct positive relationships with these boys? When I was middle-school aged, my buddies and I might score a furtive glance at an older brother’s Playboy magazine—in the days before photographers discovered pubic hair—but real girls were intimidating and unfathomable mysteries, fascinating creatures who prompted intense conversation over what made them tick and why we felt weird around them.

In today’s MTV-saturated youth culture, such naiveté is inconceivable. At a time when young teenagers should be experiencing the first pangs of puppy love, trying to cope with strange goings-on with their bodies and disturbing new emotions toward the opposite sex, they are assaulted by sleazy media images and tawdry attitudes certain to cheapen what should be one of the most poignant—if painful—transitions in their lives.

After reassuring Mia that the boys were just trying to get her attention and that she should ignore their crude comments, I realized I should give my students an alternate vision of love and sex, one that honored women and turned semibarbaric males into sensitive knights eager to make themselves vassals to fair damsels, to risk death fighting dragons, with her smile as their only reward. They needed to hear the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Courts of Love.

Love as we know it today—the idealization of the beloved, the intimate connection between romance and marriage—was largely invented in the Middle Ages. Of course, people have always had sexual relations with one another, but before the medieval era sex was used mainly to procreate or to satisfy lustful and erotic urges. Marriage was primarily a financial and property arrangement between families. What we think of as passionate romance apparently originated in Islamic Spain, where Arab poets first wrote of faithful and devoted lovers overcoming tremendous obstacles to unite in almost sacred emotional and physical bliss.

Those ideas filtered into southern France and took root among the troubadours, wandering singers and poets who entertained high and low society with tales of noble knights pursuing shy maidens.

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