One Marriage Under God by Melanie Heath

Author:Melanie Heath [Heath, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780814737132
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2012-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

“Whose Values”?

At Red Earth High, the students taking FACS classes were not among the more elite, university-bound students who take Advanced Placement (AP) classes. In fact, none of the students in the Marriage and Family Life class I attended were in AP classes. Maria Bailey, the FACS teacher who was a white woman in her early fifties, told me during our interview:

The classes are open to everybody, but it’s a scheduling conflict for AP students. It is a scheduling conflict for some of the sports people. So the majority of my classes are people that are not in band, choir, sports, or AP classes. I have a high percentage of special needs kids. They could be academic needs; they could be emotional, development problems. Of people that are pretty much not able to be successful in other classes or if they’ve already had art, which is one of their elective choices they have.

Offering marriage education in this context allows the marriage initiative to target some of the more vulnerable students who come from poor and/or minority families. According to Maria, a high number of her kids “are in foster homes, kids that come to me from juvenile detention, living with aunt, uncle, grandparents, best friends because of the situation at home. I have a very disrupted bunch of students.”

Due to the at-risk background of her students, Maria felt it necessary to spend extra time getting to know them. She described how she would “spend time with them, observe them, listen to their conversations, allow some freedom to talk so I kind of know their maturity level and their emotional level. Then, I can move them to the next step.” Her approach to teaching marriage and relationship skills concentrates on sex education and abstinence:

The most critical thing for my kids is how do I teach them to wait about having sex. They think . . . they are fifteen years old, and they think sex is entertainment, and everybody is doing it, and they either don’t understand the dangers or they have a really short-term analysis of the world that the most dangerous thing that could happen to me is I get caught today, and that’s the part that’s the most critical for me. How do you fit in and not be like everybody else?

I asked her whether she covered this issue using the Connections curriculum. She replied that the curriculum only indirectly addresses the issue, on teaching “personal standards and those kinds of things.” She supplemented these teachings with the Red Cross STD book to inform students about some of the myths that they believe in, such as “you can’t catch a sexually transmitted disease if you have only oral sex or if the guy looks pretty clean and all that kind of thing, he can’t possibly have anything.”

Maria’s perspective on abstinence and sex education highlights the complexity of teaching students who come from at-risk backgrounds and those who see having sex as a way to “be cool” and fit in.

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