Blog 5

This year I have been doing a service learning project with Project Open Hand. It has been an experience that I will never forget. From the first day wondering how I am going to fit all the hours into an already crammed semester, to being sick for a week and coming to back and finding out that I have only completed seven of the required fifteen hours. To me the most rewarding element of the project was that it taught me how to manage my time better. At the end I felt very satisfied knowing that I not only completed the fifteen hours that I needed, I also completed and extra hour, and made a movie for the organization.

This experience will help me with my time management skills which will help me with everything in life. The programs that I used in making the movie (Photoshop, iMovie, Final Cut, and Sound Board) are programs that I had never used before and that I am now proficient at. Also, I had never used an Apple computer before, and now that I have done this project using primarily Apple computers, I have gained an invaluable wealth of knowledge about how they work. It is something that I will need to have in the workplace as well as for the rest of the years that I am in school.

I can see myself doing more volunteer work for Project Open Hand. I had a lot of fun doing it with my friends and would love to do it more with other people. However, I think that I would be more helpful to work for an organization that was not so developed. The movie that we made them, while helpful, is not something that they are in dyer need of, where as a less developed group would benefit from my new found skills more.

I have had a hard time connecting what the service learning project with what we are doing in the class. The history of sex and a discussion about what everyone thought about sex does not in my mind directly relate to packaging and delivering food to people that are sick. The one thing that I did notice about both the classroom discussion and the service learning project is that it made everyone think outside of the norm. The most interesting thing for me when I was doing the service learning project was how to coordinate four people’s extremely busy schedules to find time for all of us to drive in one car to deliver meals or make meals. Overall the project helped me to better understand that when you think out side of the box that things get done that you would never have though possible.

The project helped my woven communication skills because only one member of the group could talk to our contact at Project Open Hand. Through this one person we had to relay instructions and coordinate our actions. When I was making the movie I found that it was very time consuming at first to have to email Wojohn and then wait for him to email our contact at Project Open Hand, and then wait for him to email me back the response. It would take days to get a simple response about what type music she wanted to have playing in the background. I eventually learned how to look ahead in my project and know what I needed to ask her next so that I could ask the question a day or two in advance of when I needed the answer. It is something that I never thought that I would need to know how to do, but now that I have been exposed to it, I can see many times that I would need to use during the course of my life. One example of this is when I go to an interview or something to do with a professional job, and have to give a presentation. I need to be able to ask questions about what the presentation needs to have in it with out actually starting it. This process of learning how to look ahead has greatly increased the probability that I will be able to ask the correct questions when given an assignment of this nature.

Sex Education Talk

The sex education talk that was given by Planned Parenthood was by far the best sex education talk that I have ever experienced. What I remember the most from the lecture is all the different types of birth control. For all female birth control there seems to be one main way it works. The birth control pill, patch, or ring all release a drug into the body that does not allow the sperm to travel to the eggs. The female birth control is being constantly developed and improved. The male version however has not changed all that much. It is simply a piece of latex that does not allow the semen to enter the female body. It has not changed all that much in the past fifteen or twenty years. She said as the class was ending that there is a product being tested and developed that is similar to the female birth control that simply stops the semen from containing sperm. By doing this the ability to control pregnancy would be increased greatly. To me the best type of birth control is one that does not need to be used on a regular basis and that is per say forgettable but not permanent.

The lecture related to all the movies and stuff we have been doing in class. During high school the best sex education lecture that children received is that here is a boy and here is a girl, do not you take off each other’s clothes until you are married. There was basically no information given. It is the classic version of an abstinence talk. The movie we watched previously in this class, The Education of Shelby Knox, showed that the children want a better sex education talk and the school system and government does not want to approach the topic. It is a topic that is per say taboo and that the general population does not want to have to think about. The unfortunate side effect of this is that more and more teens are getting pregnant and AIDS is spreading more rapidly. The sex talk that was presented to our class is what is needed in schools today. By presenting teenagers with the necessary knowledge about their body and the risks that are associated with sexual activity it gives teens a fighting chance of understanding without getting hurt. The comparison between what is accepted as the normal for sex education in schools today and what needs to be presented to students as the normal is like trying to compare apples and oranges. There is really no way to compare them. Abstinence talks, while it pleases the loud minority, does not help the vast, softer spoken, majority of the population that knows that it needs to change. The belief that teens are not going to have sex until they are married is in all reality a dream. It is never going to happen. The hormones and curiosity of that age are too overwhelming for every teen in the country to not have sex. The talk needs to change so that teens are able to understand the side effects of their actions before they occur.

One example of this is that the abstinence sex talks imply/ inform people that there is only one form of sex. This is not true. While this is the only type of sex that you can become pregnant from, it is not the only form of sexually activity. Other forms include oral and anal sex. Neither of which will cause you to become pregnant but can cause you to receive sexually transmitted disease. This is something that most teens would be/ are unaware of because they were never told, and via experimentation you would never know that you had a disease. Other things that the speaker talked about that is not discussed in the normal talks are stuff about the male and female body. About how similar the two bodies are. Also, that the reproductive tract of a female takes up no more than the size of your hand. The differences are endless and it is all saying the same thing. Give a better talk so that teens will be correctly educated.