Safe Touches

This week I am required to give my students lessons on Safe Touches, or as they are known in my class: "Yes Touches, No Touches, and Confusing Touches."

The touching curriculum comes in a special canvas bag (it's purple, if you must know) and includes a giant binder with old, yellowing pages and an even more ancient VHS tape that claim to have all the resources I need to teach my kids about keeping their bodies safe.

My trusty binder told me that the first Safe Touches lesson was to include the viewing of a fifteen minute video, followed by a brief discussion about types of touching and whether they make people feel happy, sad, or confused.

This seemed easy enough, and as I brought my students back in from recess I settled them all in for the video which was supposed to not only provide them with the necessary skills to protect their personal safety, but give them lots of insight regarding bullying, manipulation, and "stranger danger."  The lesson would, surely, be flawless.

Except for one tiny detail: Upon pressing the play button it became evident that I had committed one of the greatest errors a teacher can make.  I did not watch the video before I showed it to the kids, and boy, was it a doozy.

For starters, it was painfully obvious that the video was made in the late seventies/ early eighties.  The cinematography, the costumes, the haircuts, they all screamed of a time when shorts were shorter and they mustaches were plentiful.

Secondly, (and this further proves the aforementioned reference to the eighties) I'm pretty sure the same people that made the movie Laberinth made this "Safe Touches" video.  Laberinth, in case you grew up in a cave/ were born anytime after 1989, is a movie about a girl who somehow casts her baby brother into a world of goblins (puppets) and then she has to go through a laberinth to find him again.   It stars Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie.  Director? Jim Henson.  Seriously, it is the weirdest movie ever.

Anyway, the Safe Touches video features "Thadeus," a freckle faced boy who keeps getting picked on by a big kid at school.  Thadeus' special flashlight takes him into a magic world where two talking frogs, a CARP (yes, as in, strange fish) and a squid teach him lessons about "Saying No, Getting Away, and Telling Someone."

My students could not get past the weirdness of the video.  Here were a few of their questions:

"Why is his name Fatty-ass?" (Thadeus rhymes with...)
"Who is the fish?" (Professor enter name I don't remember here)
"Why does the fish have a square on his head?" (He is a professor)
"Why does the fish have a mustache?" (Carp have mustaches?)
"Why does that rocket have legs?" (Because it's a squid)
"Why is there smoke everywhere?" (Would be stalkers, strangers, and "no-touchers" creepily emerged from some unexplainable, near-by mist whenever they were referenced).

When the video had ended I spent the remainder of the lesson answering many of the above questions. 

No time to talk about personal safety when strange men with short shorts and large mustaches are approaching a young boy learning life-lessons from a fish sporting facial hair and a graduation hat while his friend, the rocket with legs, looks on.

I think I'll do the rest of the lessons without the videos.