Why gym teachers should get pay raises

Here's one of the many reasons you could never pay me enough to teach middle school: My seventh-grade daughter has health class instead of gym this quarter, and this week they're starting a unit on body parts. Not just any body parts. Those body parts. Body parts that can only be identified by names like "the P word" and "the B word." Body parts that boys and girls in a class together can't study without coming down with terminal cases of the giggles. Today my daughter came home all ablush with the news that they had had to sketch "the P word" in class. "That's so nasty!" she said again and again, undoubtedly echoing the sentiments of her classmates, who probably shared them in endless classroom whispering and gasping. But my daughter does at least have a theory about why kids should study this stuff in school, nasty though it may be: "So when people get married and do 'the S word,' they don't point and say, 'What is that thing?'" Thankfully, in our school district, they don't cover "the S word" in health class until eighth grade. I sure hope there will be no sketching involved.