STARS

Students Today Aren't Ready For Sex

STARS is a federally funded program in Oregon started by the first lady of Oregon several years ago to teach middle school students safe practices in dealing with sex and sexual pressure. Teen leaders from High School do the teaching. I am one of those teachers.

Yes, that tagline sounds a bit like the opening to a really boring and morally acceptable action movie, but it's not. It's just a segway into several funny stories that have occured during my STARS career. I figured I'd share some of those stories.

• TRAINING -- The teen leaders/teachers need to attend a training session during school one day. Ok, no problem, leave school early and go to training. That would be easy, if I had any sense of direction at all. What? A training session at noon? No problem, I'll leave school at 11:30 and get there 15 minutes early. WRONG! I left school and promptly got lost. I couldn't seem to find the right street to turn on. Well, after driving back and forth about 4 times I finally discovered that I wasn't travelling far enough to find the road. Ok, I found the road, but then I couldn't find the building. Back and forth again, several times, except now It's on a really busy street with traffic lights, lanes, and other speed-prohibitors. Did I mention that by this time it was noon and a) I was late and b) lunch hour traffic? I'm getting really frustrated by this point, I CAN NOT find the building. Eventually I pull into a parking lot with a map and just sit and stare. Eventually I find out that the building I thought I was trying to find didn't actually exist. The building I needed was farther down the street. Lovely. I finally found the place at 12:30. All the other people that left school at 11:30 were already there. They all laughed at me for getting lost. I felt bad, on to the second part of this story.
• TRAINING -- The second day of training was a little out of the ordinary. The standard second day of training conflicted with a marching band tournament so I had to go to a make-up training session. Well, there were only 7 people at the make-up and I was the only guy. That made the role-playing portion of the training quite exciting. Seeing as there were an odd number of people to pair up with for role-playing, I was in a group of three. Did I mention that my partners were twins? The role playing was originally designed for just a guy and a girl, with the guy pressuring the girl to have sex. We had to modify that. Now, the two girls were pressuring me to come over to their house to have sex. That made for some funny dialogue.

"Hey Michael, wanna come over to our house after school? Our parents won't be home, we could do whatever we wanted!"

"No thanks"

"Come on! We may never get another chance like this!"

"No, really"

"We know you want to have sex with us, just come over. We would do it if we were you."

Isn't that nice? We were laughing hysterically by the end of it, so funny.

• TEACHING -- Two funny teaching experiences come immediately to mind. Both involve role-playing, here's the first: After demonstrating role-playing with my co-teacher, we told the kids to practice. We gave them scripts and let the loose, but they quickly discovered a problem. Whereas I had role-played with a female, they were mostly paired up with people of the same sex. They were confused. I quickly gave them the answer to all their problems. . . "Just say 'Hey, do you and your girlfriend wanna come over with me and my girlfriend? We can do whatever we want!'" A kid raises his hand and says "So, just invite more people?" and I say "Yeah" but here is where I VERY nearly made a very crucial mistake. I almost said "Yeah, make it a group thing". Needless to say, that would definetly not be a good idea! So, I skirted it, but phew! That was too close.
• TEACHING -- While demonstrating the role-playing I was pressuring my co-teacher to have sex with me. We were going back and forth and at the end she was supposed to offer an alternative and I was supposed to say "That sounds great!". Here's what actually occured. Having discovered my affinity towards impromptu, I decided to deviate from the script. She says "I have a better idea. My parents are home, why don't we go to my house and make nachos and we can watch a movie?" I, instead of offering an alternative, say "Um, no. That sounds freakishly boring, I just want to go to my house right now and have sex with you right now." The look on my partner's face was priceless. She was completely caught off-guard. She just stood there, kinda stuttered and said "Um, no." and then she turned around and walked away. Cue uprorus laughter from 6th graders. Yeah, it was great. Good times.

So, that is STARS. I advise everybody to be a teen leader because not only is it a great experience, but you actually get to teach kids to do something good. And you can do fun stuff like I talked about up there ^^^. STARS.....Do it, not sex.