complicated simplicity

I have the (un)fortunate luxury of teaching a few classes about sex and reproduction as I cover for a colleague who has gone on maternity leave. And I am pretty much at a loss. Not at how to teach it, but how to make it interesting while not straying to the dark side of a possibly mischievous class.

Times have changed since I was a student. In the past, the idea of teaching sex was all about chucking so much technical information into the brains of the the young ones that they no longer have the luxury time to ask cheeky questions. Now, we talk about "Teach Less, Learn More", which is simply about higher learning efficiency by making lessons more interesting, so the students will go enquire about the topic on their own… BUT, this topic, how to ask them go enquire! Keying in any keyword into Google/Live Search/Yahoo will probably get you expelled from school alone, if not a few strokes of the rotan with it!

Sure, the class is having fun when I am going through this topic, but I still feel what I have done with Flash animation (of copulation and fertility) is still not interesting enough for them to learn the intricacies and biological importance of the reproduction processes.  I feel a lot of them still see it very superficially, and not really looking at the science of it. My trained colleagues have given the poor RT (me!) some advice, but at the end of the day they always remind me that it’s probably one of the toughest topic to teach to these young ones, because it can be really dry and technical. And when you talk about sex, your students don’t want it to be dry and technical. Not to mention they are still a little too young and immature to look at it in terms of science, yet.