Q & A

Honestly it wasn't that much of a tangent.

Frankenstein being partly about man's power over life and creation, we'd started by reading about the stem cells debate, but that, as I knew it would, took some background and clarification.

"Are we clear then," I queried the class, "about what an embryo is?"

Her face and her tone telegraphing her rightful uncertainty, my volunteer comes out with, "a sperm?"

And thus for the 418th time in my tenure and perhaps the third time Friday, I'm detailing the miracle of life except this time, you know, in a Petri dish (and with a detour for, "No, Angel, not from dead people!"). "I swear," I tell them, "I teach more Health and Algebra than I ever do anything else."

They laugh in recognition and latch right on to a plan: "You should totally do that! Will they pay you extra?"

"No and no!" Education is not piecework: we're not paid by the task or the accomplishment. Who could ever count it, for one thing, on a day like that one. They did, at some point, put pencil to paper: I will have grades to enter in the book. And we discussed and made connections, related science to a classic novel. All perfectly appropriate. But the few minutes when my room was again transformed into Health class, prompting a 17-year old senior to ask about the patch she saw on another girl's arm, might have been more immediately educational:

"Was that birth control?"

"I suppose it could be."

And then she asks, in all curious sincerity, this girl with the 20 year old boyfriend, "does it work the same as a condom?"

I promise you I didn't even smile.

"How exactly would that be possible?" I ask, dying to hear the theory, on the verge of asking if she knows it comes out of the wrapper. But she just tells me she doesn't know what the patch is for, and I quickly explain how it's the same as the pill, and how they both work, but other than taking her word that she knows how a condom is used, I skipped back to my intended topic for the time being. I mean, I didn't even have a banana.

Maybe she's more innocent than I presume. I know she's more innocent than she dresses, given that she is not, in fact, a five dollar hooker, but generally a very sweet girl. Who, apparently, paid not one whit of attention (and yet, got a B) in the official health class she finished in December . At least she has someone to ask. At least she has a second chance to learn something, I suppose, from the fount of Is It My Job To Teach You Everything? Since the answer, we all know, is yes.