If you haven’t put kids through middle or high school recently, you might not know this: More and more kids are skipping that post-gym shower.
Read it and weep, my friends. This Orlando Sentinel story chalks the trend up to adolescents’ reluctance to be naked around their peers and school districts’ reluctance to force the issue. Parents, with their own yucky memories of group showers in high school, support their kids.
The trend has even sparked a new line of products: special wipes to substitute for a real shower.
What, might you ask, does all this have to do with curriculum? Maybe nothing, except for those of you unfortunate enough to have to impart a curriculum in a classroom packed with reeking teenagers. Or for the teenagers, clouding one another’s concentration with their post-gym perfume. Or perhaps for the health teachers among you, who might yearn to send quite a different message than the one being conveyed by toleration of this trend.
Does it have anything to do with curriculum? As we pack in double blocks of math and reading, stacks of AP classes, are we just too much in a hurry to make time for post-gym showers? Have we actually become wiser, reasoning that adolescents shouldn’t have their physical privacy violated, and can make their own hygiene choices?