Mike Taylor explains the joy of 6ex

This week’s column deals with adult themes and issues. If you’re easily offended by a three-letter word synonymous with the human reproductive process, please stop reading now.

I mean it. Stop. Now. 

Still here? OK.

“Six.” That’s the word. Well, not “six,” exactly, but a word that’s spelled the same, save one letter. 

It’s a word that has created more trouble in my life than any other, and I’m including “tequila,” “algebra,” and “Sister Sulpice,” which is technically two words but still gave me a lot of grief back in fourth grade.

My problems with six can be traced to my parents, as any good shrink could tell you. Mom and pop were enlightened, liberal products of their time, heavily marinated in the Dr. Spock-ish literature of the era and determined to make sure I wouldn’t have to learn about six “on the streets” as had their generation.

So instead of picking up inaccurate sixual tidbits in the school yard and from the half-hidden covers of Playboy magazine at the drugstore (as nature intended) I was subjected to not one, not two, but three books on the subject. These I read, under great duress, as my parents hovered nearby to answer any questions I might have.

If there’s a more nightmarish scenario for a fourth grade kid, I don’t know what it is.

Until the afternoon my folks sat me down with these allegedly educational tomes, I had considered six not at all. I had no questions, I had no interest. (Though both showed up in spades a few years later — thank you Debbie Kowalski!)

It didn’t matter; according to some “expert” my parents had seen on TV, it was time to deliver “the talk.” I was their first child and they were determined to discharge their parental responsibilities, even if the embarrassment killed me in the process.

The books were written with children in mind, but children maybe four years older than I was at the time. Most of what I read I understood not at all, but I will admit to being thoroughly captivated with the illustrations. So much so, in fact, that I think my parents began to have second thoughts about the entire project even as I worked my way toward the final passages.

At some point they started to realize they had delivered into my grubby, grass-stained hands the fourth-grade equivalent of the Kama Sutra. It was an experiment they never repeated with any of my younger brothers or sisters.

I remember almost nothing about those books now, other than the near total mortification which accompanied reading them in front of my parents.

That and one other thing: One of the books described the six act as “feeling a lot like a sneeze.” 

To this day, I’m abnormally fond of pepper.

Public education; maybe it’s time to suspend Socrates

Have you read about Natalie Munroe, the Philadelphia high school teacher suspended for posting unflattering blogs about her students? Ms. Munroe identifies neither herself nor her school in her blog, but a couple students recognized themselves and went whining to school administrators, who did as school administrators always do: they wilted like salt-covered garden slugs.

According to Munroe, she was only telling it like it is.

“My students are out of control,” Munroe wrote. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.”

How dare Ms. Munroe say such dreadful (and undoubtedly accurate and applicable) things about the blameless angels she must contend with every day?

And how typical that the school’s administrators should penalize her for her words, rather than consider the possibility she’s right and that it is virtually impossible to actually teach in many modern classrooms, owing in large part to the fact that students really are “rude, disengaged, lazy whiners.”

It’s so much easier to simply shoot the messenger.

Besides, shooting the messenger makes parents happy, the same parents who created and coddled the rude, disengaged, lazy whiners in the first place.

If the ‘80s really were the “Me Generation,” today’s youth are the “Me Me Me Now Now Now and Nobody Else, Ever!” crowd. The chimps are in charge of the zoo.

I blame it on the death of Sister Sulpischia, about whom I’ve written before, and other teachers like her. Sister Sulpischia (known to her students and fellow faculty members as “The Moose”) was 200 pounds of black-robed, rosary-thumping fury who ruled over her fourth-grade charges with a ferocity rarely seen outside rabid wolverine attacks.

I was one of her students and like most kids my age, I was by nature a rude, disengaged, lazy whiner. But not in the Moose’s class. Sitting only two rows from the good sister’s watchful eye, I was attentive, polite, engaged and determined to live to see fifth grade.

Sure, there were some kids, even back then, who had the guts to smart off to Sister Sulpischia. We all missed them during their protracted convalescences.

Do I really wish teachers were still allowed to clobber students? Well, no, I guess not. I mean, I do still remember the perve-o gym teacher I had in ninth grade who should have been in A) therapy, B) prison, or C) the Ninth Circle of Hell.

But I do wish there were at least a few administrators willing to back their teachers, stand up to the sort of parents who think their innocent babies can do no wrong, and insist that students who prevent other kids from learning be sent packing.

One of the greatest teachers of all time, Socrates, is credited with saying, “The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.”

Good thing he didn’t post this on his blog; he’d have been suspended.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com. BUY MY BOOK!! at www.mtrealitycheck.com.