Credit Cards and STDs

Friday, July 29, 2011

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Credit Cards and STDs

By J’AMY PACHECO

I know that’s a strange title, but it’s been a strange summer. The past two weeks of it, anyway.

Last year, my then-freshman daughter put off a requirement that she take half a year of Freshman Health class in order to take a foreign language. Shortly before the year ended, we discovered that rather than spend part of her senior year learning about the reproductive system with a bunch of ninth graders, she could take an accelerated version of the class online over the summer.

We were all over that. Two weeks ago, she started an intensive online course that squeezed half a school year’s worth of material into 12 days of study and testing.

Speed school, we called it. It’s not for the faint at heart.

The class was titled, “Lifestyle Management.” At first, it seemed like it would be fairly simple. She breezed through the first module, which covered nutrition, and came out with a shiny, happy “A” in the cumulative grade section of her screen.

Module by module, the class got more complex. Nutrition was followed by lessons in suicide prevention, smoking, goal setting, banking, consumer lending, drug and alcohol abuse, teen pregnancy, child rearing, the human reproductive system, sexually transmitted diseases, gender specific health examinations and…recycling.

Day after day, my daughter sat on the couch, computer on her lap, reading about the importance of getting the right amount of exercise on a daily basis.

Her days turned upside down as she worked until after midnight, compensating by sleeping until noon. Or later.

Decades ago, I saw a movie titled, “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium.” It was about some tourists on one of those 31-countries-in-five-days tours.

The class reminded me of that as she jumped from learning how to read a nutrition label to the dangers of engaging in unprotected sex. Whew.

Some of what she learned was very interesting to her.

“Mom,” she’d call from the couch. “Did you know…,” and rattle off some fascinating fact about calories or drunk driving. Further down the lesson plan, I’d hear a loud, “Ewww!” coming from the other room on a fairly regular basis.

“Too much information,” she’d explain.

As I watched her progress through the assignment list, I found it sort of cool to think that this is probably how school will one day be taught. My best friend just finished earning her Bachelor’s Degree this way. I think she worked just as hard as any student who ever sat on a college campus, and she came away with a head filled with knowledge and a gig to do demonstration teaching next month.

It’s kind of scary, too. Working alone eliminates that whole dynamic of interacting with other adolescents. I suppose that’s not all bad – I certainly remember sitting in Health class with a football coach as my instructor and a bunch of immature boys making fun of virtually every diagram we had to look at. Ewww, as they say in high school.

I don’t remember learning as much as she did, though. HIV was undiscovered in those prehistoric days, and teen pregnancy was something that we didn’t really talk about. Nobody had ever heard of a debit card, but even then, we didn’t learn about checking accounts and W-4 forms in Health.

On the last day of class, we dragged ourselves out of bed at an ungodly hour and over to a cross-town rival high school for the in-person test. It’s the only way schools have of verifying that the enrolled student is actually the one doing the work, so it was a good thing.

I read on a planter outside the classroom while my daughter took her final. That’s when I realized online school is probably not for everybody.

A young man in a soccer jersey ambled past me about 20 minutes into the test. Before long, he was back outside, talking into his cell phone.

“Mom,” he said. “Uh…do you know my password?”

I didn’t have a lot of hope for the poor guy, and suspect he’ll be spending part of his senior year with freshmen. Oh, well.

My daughter came out with a near-perfect store, a brand new “A,” and a nice little boost for her GPA. As an added bonus, she knows how debit and credit cards work, doesn’t ever want to drink or smoke, and now knows how to spell some very personal diseases that I’d never even heard of a month ago.

Not bad for two week’s work, I think.