Worth More than Gold: Lessons from a Former Teen Olympian

Makayla Maroney lands a vault routine in 2012

"I'm worth more than a gold medal," says Makayla Maroney, who took home a gold medal at age sixteen in the London Olympics four years ago. While two of her teammates, Gabby Douglas and Aly Raisman, conquered Rio this year, Makayla had to watch the games from home.
I only did gymnastics for a few years myself, and I never had any great skill in it, but I've loved following these two sets of teammates because I match up with them in age. I always keep an eye on young celebrities and public figures, though I don't blog about them now as much as I did in previous years.
Earlier this summer, I found a little blue notepad while packing for my travel term. I flipped it open and found it hadn't been touched since I was fifteen years old. It had drafts of blog posts and book reviews (I ran a book blog for several years) as well as topics and titles I wanted to cover in the future. The last thing on it was a to-do list for when I got back home from a family vacation. "Update blog, finish books, watch Olympics, and get ready for school."
On the train ride home from my travel term, I started to make a list of things I'd do in my brief summer before leaving for school again. Then I realized I could just reuse the list I made four years ago. Every item is the same, but now I'm going into my sophomore year of college instead of high school.
Fifteen was a big year for me. It's the year I wrote my first novel. The year I started high school. The year I watched the cops pull a body out of the river behind my house and never looked at life and death the same. And now I'm a full Summer Olympics away from being fifteen. Change sneaks up on you. My daily routine doesn't look much different, but in so many ways I've shifted from what I was four years ago.
Since Olympic time frames seemed like a good unit to measure my own life's progress, I checked up with the three members of the Fierce Five who didn't return for Rio to see how they're doing.

Aly Raisman, Gabby Douglas, Makayla Maroney, Jordyn Wieber, and Kyla Ross

Kyla Ross (I've always had a soft spot for her because we were both fifteen at the time of the Olympics, although she did flips and stuff and I sat on the couch and watched) is attending college at UCLA. Teammate Jordyn Wieber is there with her. And Makayla Maroney? The face that launched a thousand memes? A knee injury took her out of elite gymnastics, but she's doing fine now. She's writing music, something she barely ever had time for as a professional gymnast. Her first single, "Ghost", comes out next month. My favorite thing I found on any gymnast was this interview Makayla gave Us Weekly.

“I lost myself. It was an identity crisis, no doubt. I would go and meet people and they’d tell me, ‘You’re the gymnast.' And I’m like, now that I’m no longer a competing gymnast, it throws people off and that would throw me off. I don’t want to let people down. It was such a big test for me to be like, you know what? No! I’m worth more than a gold medal. I’m worth more than being a gymnast. I am not what I do. I am who I am and I’m what I love.”

Worth more than a gold medal. Most people would be happy to if they could measure their life in gold and just break even.
Makayla has put into words what I've wanted to say for a long time. I've watched plenty of my friends have identity crises. When you're young, your life is in flux, so your identity is vulnerable, and it hinges largely on hobbies. Some people get theirs in high school, but I saw the bulk of it my freshman year of college. When you go away to school, you're uprooted from your family, friends, and hometown. Athletic hobbies go away if you're not good enough to play at the college level and other hobbies disappear because you lose the time. And on top of all that, you're supposed to choose a major. That's the first question people ask after your name. They don't know how to learn who you are without asking what you do with your life. If you don't have a major yet, you're not just a slacker, you're a non-person.
A few months ago, a girl giving a talk at my church shared a story about her eighth grade soccer coach, who never gave her playing time. At first I thought it was ridiculous for her to be whining about playing time in a public meeting five years after the soccer season ended. Then she said, "All I'd ever known was soccer. Now that I wasn't playing, I felt like he'd taken away my identity."
Hobbies are the figurehead of childhood identity. When you hit thirty, people assume you don't have fun anymore and stop asking "What do you like to do?" at get-togethers. But at fourteen, you'd better have something good to say. You aren't working and can't be dating anyone yet, at least not seriously. A hobby is all you've got.
Gymnasts burn bright and brief, and all athletes have to slow down as they grow up, but all hobbies, even the non-athletic ones, fall by the wayside eventually. If age isn't your struggle, time is, or else ability.
One day back in fall semester, my roommate slammed her laptop shut and announced she was going to the library to print off a photograph. Once she had it, she was going to draw.
"What class?" I asked her.
She told me that no professor was forcing her to do it. She just wanted to draw, like she'd been able to in high school, when she took AP art classes.
That caught me by surprise. My roommate was an accounting major, I'd never thought of her as the artistic type. She loved it and was good at it but when college rolled around around it was time to study something else. She didn't even take drawing for her arts elective, opting instead for interior design. But art was a part of her and it needs to resurface once in a while.
My other roommate was a dancer and a Kiwi. I'm convinced hobbies are the biggest portion of most teenager's identities, but I can't skip over the  role race plays in shaping who you are. From birth to age eleven, she lived in New Zealand, surrounded by her people, and even when she moved to America she had her family. Then one day she wakes and she's sharing a dorm with three white girls. She very much wanted to get into our campus's Polynesian dance ensemble, but freshman don't make the cut. So she joined a Tahitian luau group instead and got to dance and connect with more Polynesians that way.
I've had my own crisis. When I was twelve, I watched my older brother receive the Sterling Scholar award in the category of English. The Sterling Scholar program awards full tuition scholarships to any school in the state of Utah, but my brother wasn't interested in either Utah schools or English, so he tucked that feather in his cap and ran off to Berkeley, eventually landing as a Chinese History major. At age twelve I knew I had a love for books and some level of talent for writing. I figured that if he could make it, I should be able to as well.
So I spent the next six years of my life turning myself into a perfect Sterling Scholar candidate. Every conference I attended, every extracurricular activity, and every teacher I sucked up to all tied back into getting that scholarship. I won for my school. That got me a picture in the yearbook and another in the display case by the library. But I only advanced one tier beyond that. Not to state level, where the glory is. And the money.
That's six years of my life I'll never get back.
I turned out okay. All those years were spent developing skills I loved and could use in arenas beyond the Sterling Scholar competition. They built me up. They contribute to who I am. But hobbies and interests will always be part of who I am, not all that I am. As Makayla puts it, "I am not what I do, I am who I am and what I love." Gymnastics will always be a part of her, but it's because of the passion she invested in it, not because of the medals she'll hang on her wall.
Next to holding your moral ground, finding your identity is the biggest struggle of your teenage years. And after you figure out who you are, you have to watch your identity torn down many times and built it up again. Whoever you are, you're worth more than gold medals or scholarships or a spot on the team. You worth an entire you and what that means is evolving all the time. 

Take a Breather

One of my high school teachers had a knack for calculating marriage ages. He'd ask a volley of question-"Are you dating anyone? Got a job? Want a job? Headed to college? How old were you parents? Sisters? Brothers?" and then he'd shoot out a prediction. "You shall wed at age twenty three!"

He claimed he had a 95% success rate. How does he know that? Students grow up, get hitched, and report back to him. Once, long before my sophomore year of high school, he did it for a handful of kids and predicted they'd all marry in their low twenties. Then he told the last girl she'd be thirty two.

The rest of the girls gasped their how-dare-yous, but she tilted her head to the side and said, "No, that's right." She had plans for herself, plans for New York City and art school, and marriage wasn't in the foreground. When she finally reported back to our teacher, she was thirty three and happy with the way her life had gone. 

If you've been reading lately, you'll know I'm currently enrolled in a summer travel term. I finished school the same time everybody did-late April-and originally planned to spend a spring term on campus. But when I found out I'd been admitted into my summer program, I knew I'd need a break. I'd catch a plane the morning after finals and do homework for my new classes during layovers. There would be no time to pack, no time to breathe. I'd have an unbroken chain of school for six straight terms. 

So I dropped by spring classes, canceled my housing contract, and spent seven short weeks with my family. Whenever I tell adults that I finished school at the end of April and started again mid June, they look at me funny. Not because I'm going the extra mile by taking a summer term, but because they think I'm not moving fast enough. They ask what I've been doing with my life, if my parents are supporting me, and how I could possibly not justify spending less than two months away from school if I'm not working. I spent seven weeks fielding these questions at church, family reunions, and lunch get-togethers. I thought the people asking me were ignorant because they hadn't been in college for a while and forgot how school schedules worked. 

But today, I got this question from a professor.  

I'm not sure why it surprises so many people that I scheduled a seven week break from college between August 2015 and May 2017. Is it such a radical idea to have a spring break now? When Malia Obama announced this spring that she would start classes at Harvard in 2017, the "not until 2017" was deemed significant enough for inclusion in headlines. She's graduating in a presidential election year. Is it so shocking that she wants to spend one more normal year with her family? Or spend a year by herself, figuring things out? Or a year in travel? 

Young people are expected to move ahead with their lives at breakneck speed. This simply isn't possible. Sometimes, in my hours of anguish, when I'm scribbling four year plans in the margins of midterm notes with one hand and scrolling through job listings with the other, I think back to some words a church youth leader shared with us a few years back: "You don't have to sing all the verses of your song at the same time." If you did, they'd be muddled beyond comprehension. 

I did a lot from the tail end of April to early June. I caught up with old friends and was a bridesmaid in one's wedding. I trained for and ran a charity 5K. I attended a multi day writer's conference. I went to doctor's appointments that I could not possibly make room for during the school year. I went hiking and boating with my family. In short, I did all the things a person in any stage of their lives might do in any seven weeks of the year. 

But I didn't go to school.

That's two more classes I'll have to fit into a normal schedule instead of having them out of the way a term earlier. And you know what? I'm fine with it. Other students in our program sprinted through spring term just in time to catch the plane. But I know if I did that, I would've had a breakdown and not completed one of those terms. 

Even though I resent the pressure people put on me to sing all the verses of my song, I've caught myself trying to do that same thing to others. My brother typed the final words of his master's thesis last week. I shot him a text of congratulations, and then, fingers hovering over the keyboard, I was tempted to ask him what he was doing next. Was he going to find a job? If so, would he stay in America or head out to China again? What about that girl he was dating before his last trip to China? Can I plan a wedding? What kind of job is he going to get with that Asian Studies degree to support his wife, and are they going to get married now or after she finishes her doctorate? Never mind that so far as I know, they only dated for two weeks. The need to know is always burning.

So cool the flames. 

Over the course of my travel term, I've gotten to know the life stories of people I never would've met otherwise. We're all in roughly the same ages but different stages. I have one eighteen year old friend who graduated from high school with her associate's degree. Another girl dropped out of school at sixteen, got the admission fairy to let her into college, and is now a year and a half into her education. Her eighteenth birthday was two months ago. They're both further along than they're supposed to be at the eighteen, but one took the steep path and one took the detour. 

You end up where you end up. For some people, the right answer is to get married at nineteen. For some it's thirty three. For some people, it's not right to go to college right now, or ever. Some people need to speed through it. Still others will get it done in that same, normal, plodding four year plan. 

When I was a sophomore, I thought my teacher was a some kind of psychic or number wizard, predicting marriage ages with such accuracy. Now I know he was just a normal guy who'd figured out what I'm figuring out right now: that everyone moves at their own pace. I can calculate my friends' marriage ages now. I look at her health, her school goals, and whether or not her mom graduated college, but most of all, I look at her desire to get married. Everyone moves at their own pace, in love and learning and other matters. Life's not about seeing how many verses you can sing at once, but about finding how you fit into the rhythms. 

Erica's Travel Log, And Why Every Young Person Should See the World

For the last three weeks, I've been traveling the East Coast and Midwest on a study abroad with Brigham Young University. It's a religious school and most of our focus is on religious historical sites, which I'll get around to blogging about later, but today I want to talk about Lincoln.
When I first saw the Land of Lincoln signs dotting Illinois highways, I thought they nicknamed themselves such because they didn't have anything else to brag about. So far as I could tell, Illinois is entirely made up of corn, and Nebraska took that nickname first. Then I got a chance to visit some of Old Abe's stomping grounds yesterday.

Lincoln's tomb is cooler than your tomb.

Since this a youth blog, I'm going to focus on the cool youth related stuff I saw. It's not hard. In addition to being the coolest and most dramatic museum I've ever seen, the Lincoln Museum has a lot to pique a child's interest. 

A few years ago I mentioned Grace Bedell, the eleven year old who wrote Lincoln a letter telling him he was ugly and could nab a few more votes if he just grew a beard. After hearing that story I've always had a special place in my heart for Cleanshaven Abe. 

Me and small, beardless Abraham Lincoln

Small, beardless Abraham Lincoln with a sword, guarding old, bearded Lincoln's tomb

Before and after

Here's Grace's letter:

Dear Sir

My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin's. I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you wont think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have yet got four brothers and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you to but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chautauqua County New York.

I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

Abe wrote Grace back with an "I'll think about it", but after he and his beard got elected, he arranged to meet her personally when his inaugural train stopped through her hometown en route to Washington.

Lincoln himself had no daughters, just four sons. His little son Eddie has his first tombstone (he's now entombed with his family) on display in the museum. When they moved him to be with his father and brother Willie, they didn't want a good tombstone to go to waste, so they flipped it and used it as a marker for some of Lincoln's relatives. Eventually it was unflipped and discovered in the 1950's. I've toured several disused graveyards in the past weeks, and it saddens me how many markers are lost to time. The last thing you ever get is a headstone. But we can't all have obelisks, so too many memories weather away.

Eddie's tombstone

Willie and other brother Tad had the run of the White House. Before that, the Lincolns had over eighteen hired girls quit on them during the seventeen years they spent in Springfield. Hired girls helped Mrs. Lincoln keep house and corral the children. They were young women between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, either African American or immigrants from Portugal or Ireland. In theory, this job would let them earn their own money and achieve some independence before they'd go apply their newly acquired domestic skills in marriage. In reality, they ran away and found better jobs. As the older sister of three brothers I can see why. 

Small Boy Fact: If it fits in your hand, it's a ball. If it's longer than your arm, it's a bat. In the background we have Wax Lincoln chilling while his sons play inkwellball. The older brother is on the ground with a broom. 

As a kid, I always loved the artifacts that weren't guarded by glass, and I guess I haven't changed. My favorite exhibit yesterday was one I didn't get a picture of: a metal cast of Lincoln's hands. I rested my own on top of them. They felt fatherly and strong, the kind of hands you'd trust a country in. A businessman in my community once told me that he trusts handshakes over background deals. Everything he needs to know about a man he can learn from his hands. If I could've shaken hands with Mr. Lincoln, I believe he would've had my vote. Well, aside from that whole female under the age of 21 thing. I'm in the same boat as Grace. By the way, Lincoln wanted votes for women, but he had bigger fish to fry at the time. Come back and run in 2016!

The Lincoln Museum has a lot more than old stuff and wax dummies. One of the most striking exhibits is a dark, crooked hall full of grotesque political cartoons drawn by Lincoln's haters. You can hear their whispered gossip from the ceiling as you pass through. That got me thinking. Another hall is full of angry retorts to the Emancipation Proclamation. Holographic faces spew criticism from every possible angle, and they're projected onto mirrors, so you see your own face between theirs. It made me think about the things I take a stand for, about the people who revile me past, present, and future. I want that. I want to be someone brave and bold enough to be worth the tides of hissing tongues. And I want the strength and dauntlessness to be able to stand in the face of those hissing tongues. What do I have today that's worth fighting for? 

Slave mother sold away from her child.

There's actually an entire family on that scaffold, she's staring at her husband. I couldn't get the father in the picture because a white mother and son were standing in the spot I'd need to be. The son couldn't read, he didn't know these were anonymous wax figures, meant to represent so many other families torn apart. He thought there might be some plaque nearby telling the end of their story.

"Mom, did those three people ever get back together?" 

"No, they didn't."

"What about after slavery was over?"

"No, they never got back together again." 

Several months ago, my nineteen year old roommate came home from class and announced that she'd registered to vote. I asked her why she hadn't done that at eighteen, and she said the last election wasn't worth her time. She then plopped herself on her bed and read an article about slavery for homework. When she was done, she sat up, horrified, and wondered aloud if she would have "done something" if she'd lived in the age of slavery. 

No, you wouldn't have opened your cellar as a station on the underground railroad. No, you wouldn't have stood on street corners distributing abolitionist leaflets. No, you wouldn't have helped newly freed slaves learn to read, or to gain other useful skills that would help them be financially independent. How do I know? Because you're not doing anything now.

I didn't tell her any of this, but I asked her what she thought was worth fighting for today, and she said there was nothing. 

I like studying history. It's the story of good people bringing bad things to an end. So many people talk about the present as a cart bouncing downhill, all the good old days behind it. But the world didn't end yesterday. There's still a long stretch of days ahead of us to make things right. 

Travel doesn't just get you out of the house, it gets you out of your everyday thoughts. One day at this museum halfway across the country from my home got me thinking. Thinking about freedom, families, youth, tragedy, memory, standing bold in the face of adversity, and about what I should fight for today. Any one of those topics could be enough for one post. Every young person ought to take some time to see new things and think new thoughts. So get out there! 

I've got another month ahead of me before Boring School starts up again. Let's see where I go next, 

Last Annual Independence Day Post (One Day Late)

I posted this video on the Fourth of July back when I was fifteen, and I've made a habit of reposting it in succeeding years. The music used is a blast from my past. I lapped up Liberty's Kids when all my friends were watching SpongeBob. You know those "You're not a true nineties kid unless you know this character" memes? Yeah, I'm a failure, a disgrace to my generation. My parents didn't let us watch Nick or Disney until I was eleven so I was stuck with educational channels.
When I rewatched Liberty's Kids as a teenager, I could appreciate the in depth, unbiased, multifaceted look at the American Revolution it offers. The core cast of a loyalist British girl, a patriot colonist boy, a French boy who is formerly an indentured servant, and a free black adult man. These are the only significant fictional people. Benedict Arnold and Abigail Adams are recurring characters, and we get to see more of them than the typical historical caricatures of "the traitor" and "the president's wife". The show has a knack for shedding light on overlooked historical heroes-like sixteen year old Sybil Ludington, the subject of one of my first ever history posts.
We get a good look at people involved from beyond Britain and America, as well as a frank portrayal of the lives of slaves and Native Americans under the fledgling American government.
Score one for children's television!
The entire series is available on YouTube-here's the first episode.
This is my last year as a teenager blogging, so here it is for the final fourth: America Through My Own Eyes. Fun Fact: For years, I misheard "Searching for a hero to idolize" as "a hero that I despise." In the opening theme, these lyrics play at the moment Benedict Arnold's face crosses the screen. My interpretation works too. Just saying.

Wait...
Did I just do what I did?
Yes, I did it! I managed to write an entire post recommending a children's TV show without using the condescending phrases "fun for all ages" or "adults can enjoy this as well". And if I did that, you can do it too. 

Who's REALLY Responsible for Teaching Teens About Sex?

Let's talk about tortoises and sex. But not tortoise sex, because I don't really know how they mate. Human sex. I know a fair bit more about their mating habits than those of tortoises. Here's a tortoise anatomy picture I found floating around the internet recently.

Above we have two people who know how tortoises work, two people who have never seen the inside of a tortoise before, and one person who has never seen the inside of a tortoise before and blames schools for not telling them how turtles work.
I hear lots of people-young people, mostly, since we're fresh out of school-blame schools for not teaching them how the world works. "I don't know how political parties work because my government teacher never taught me." "I'm broke because no one ever taught me how to stick to a budget." And the big one: "I don't know how sex works because my health teacher didn't give us a decent sex education unit."

Last month I went to my first bachelorette party. The bride was nineteen, and with the exception of the twenty three year old woman who hosted the party, everybody there graduated in the class of 2015. It was a clean party. No alcohol, since we're all under legal drinking age and most of us had religious drinking taboos besides. Bridal themed scavenger hunts and Pin the Tie on the Shirtless Guy Poster were enough to keep us entertained, we didn't need to play any raunchy games. Honestly, everyone's favorite part of the party was the chance to get together with girls we haven't seen since graduation. It's like a high school reunion, but with the people you actually like. The main topics of conversation were roommates, jobs, and college majors.

That's not to say we didn't talk about sex.
I don't usually have frank, open conversation about sex with girls my age, so when I do it always amazes me what people do and don't know. Two of my friends knew absolutely nothing about Where Babies Come From until tenth grade health class. Others knew way too much earlier on. At eighteen and nineteen, we're all technically adults, but still just as clueless as we were as teenagers.
My parents never sat me down and told me it was time to learn about sex. I'm the one who initiated that conversation. I was ten, maybe nine, and my mom mentioned over the dinner table that she was thinking about having another kid.
"How does that work, anyway?"
"We'll tell you after dinner."
My three younger brothers finished their taco soup and went off to watch TV. My parents explained the basics while I picked corn out of my soup with tortilla chips. When I knew all I wanted to know, I cleared my bowl. I took what I'd learned and turned it over in my head for the next few days. I had a children's encyclopedia and tried searching under "S" for sex (no results) and "L" for love, but that only explained the emotional aspects of a relationship. Sometime later that week, I ran up to my mom while she was weeding the garden and asked some follow up questions. I didn't view it as a landmark conversation until I got older and heard people gossip about getting The Talk.
Should every parent teach their kid about sex this way? No. Definitely not. Some kids are clueless and won't ever ask until you tell them. With those kids, you definitely need to sit them down and have The Talk. But I was just fine. Unlike lots of my friends, I wasn't scarred for life by The Talk. I loved it because it cleared up a lot of the misconceptions I had.
As a kid, I heard adults say "she has a baby in her tummy", so I honestly thought babies were stored in the same compartment as digested food. I assumed "womb" was a synonym for stomach because I didn't know what a uterus was. That was the big takeaway for me, not how-gasp! You can totally mash your private parts against somebody else's private parts and create a person. 

Over the years, I picked up additional tidbits of sexual knowledge. I never read a romance novel, watched sexy movies, or had a dirty minded friend. But I gleaned a thing or two from scenes in other books and movies. I listened to dirty jokes in the seventh grade locker room. I eavesdropped on the boys in my art class who sat at the next table over. One of them was pretty clueless, so his friends patiently explained terms and concepts he didn't understand. "Guys, what's a lesbian?" "It means gay, but only for girls." "Oh. Okay." 

Then I finally made it to eighth grade health class. Can we all have a moment of silence for all the health teachers in schools across the world? That's one job I never want. My middle school sex ed unit was light stuff compared to the course I'd take in high school two years later. It laid down the basics. We learned the anatomy terms for the male and female body, look at diagrams, discussed how sexual intercourse works, and covered fetal development from conception through birth.
Everybody took this course. You had to, if you want to pass the eighth grade. Yet I still had friends who didn't know anything about sex until high school health class. For that, they blame their parents.
Who's ultimately responsible for what teenagers know about sex? Schools? Parents? In all honesty, I think it's us. The teenagers. No, I don't mean you should skip off to porn land or corner your most promiscuous friend and make them give you the down and dirty details. I mean if you don't know something, it's your own fault, because you've had ample opportunities to learn it.
One of my friends who didn't know anything about sex read, watched, and performed in Les Miserables before hitting high school. If you haven't seen Les Mis lately, one of the main characters is a prostitute. I think that's a pretty big giveaway.

Valjean getting Fantine out of prostitution in the 2012 movie.

At my friend's recent bachelorette party, I used the word hymen in a casual conversation. The hymen is what breaks when a girl loses her virginity, though it can be broken in many other ways unrelated to sex, like if a gymnast falls down on a balance beam. I thought the existence and function of the hymen was common knowledge among our age group. But when I said it, the room fell dead silent.
 I panicked. Had I mixed it up with some other part of the body? Did I pronounce it wrong and look like an idiot? As the awkward silence stretch on, I asked, "Is that how you say it? Is that how it works?"
A girl told me that I was wrong, so I steered away from conversations of that sort for the rest of the night. Then I came home and asked my mom, who told me that I'd pronounced and described it correctly. Then she asked where I'd first learned the word hymen, from her or my health teacher.
I thought back and realized it was neither. Before the 2012 Olympics, I read an article about how Olympian women from certain Middle Eastern countries had to overcome cultural expectations that say a woman shouldn't strain herself physically. In many cultures breaking the hymen is equated with losing your virginity, even if you break it in athletic accident.
Of course my parents and my health teachers taught me what it meant to lose your virginity. But I learned that word, hymen, by reading sports news. My friends didn't stumble on that particular article during the 2012 Olympics, so they didn't know. I'm pretty sure it came up sometime in our health classes, but they forgot it. Most of what you learn in math and history class floats out of your brain during summer break. Why should health be any different?
I've seen news articles refer to "sex education" classes. To my knowledge, no high school anywhere in the US teaches a sex ed class. If you took one, please let me know. What we had was health class.
We learned about everyday matters like nutrition and exercise and covered serious topics, like drugs, mental illness, and yes, sex. But sex was a unit, not the entire class. It took a week and a half because we had plenty of other things to learn. I learned a few good, basic things about mental health from these classes. But most of my important mental health knowledge comes from reading formal articles, tumblr posts, novels with mentally ill characters, joining an anti-suicide club my senior year, talking to medical professionals, and having friends with mental illnesses. My classes were not the be all and end all of understanding mental health and I don't hold them accountable for what I don't know.
Lots of adults do. Particularly those parents who don't talk to their kids about sex and assume it will come up in school someday. Adults don't care too much about us satisfying our own curiosity, or about us learning one of the most basic functions of the human body. They want health classes to keep us from getting pregnant and catching STDs. They want this either via classes that teach us to save sex for marriage, or via classes that teach us how to use various types of birth control. Team Purity and Team Protection aren't so opposite as they seem to think, and the mistake they both make is assuming all teenagers want to have sex. Certainly some of us do. But for the most part, my friends and I are just interested in learning how sex works. We can apply that knowledge later in life. For now, just knowing is enough.
If your government class didn't teach you how political parties work, it's not their fault you don't know how to vote. It's your fault for not following the news, listening to conversations about politics, and seeing signs in your neighbors' front lawns. If you can't budget money, it's not your financial literacy teacher's fault. It's your fault for not watching how other people spend and basing your own money habits of theirs. If you don't know how to pick up a tortoise, it's not your biology teacher's fault for never showing you a skeleton. It's yours for never thinking, "Hey, I don't pick up my dog by his spine, so that's probably a bad idea for tortoises too."
There have been times in my life when I purposefully went to my parents, the Internet, encyclopedias, and "growing up for girls" books to learn about sex, but most of the time I didn't have to. If you don't know something about sex, it's your fault for not paying more attention to the world around you. The accountability is on your own head. 

Songs of Toxic Friendships, Delinquent Boyfriends, and Forbidden Elements of the Periodic Table

My friend is working as a counselor for a girls' camp this summer. All the counselors are required to compile a playlist of songs approved by the camp board of directors. I spent some time trying to help her with this last day and had little success.
They're not allowed to play love songs to their thirteen year old campers, because that might encourage them to have boyfriends at a young age. They also can't sing about partying or escape. That actually does leave a lot of songs to choose from, but most of what we could come up with was melancholy in tone, and she needs pump it up music for her campers.
Today I went to download my favorite song, Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's", when I stumbled across the Kidz Bop cover. Kidz Bop, who we know to be cool because they spell their name with a z, produces "By kids, for kids" cover albums of popular songs. They're not bad. These kids can sing, and some Kidz Boppers, such as Zendaya and Becky G, have gone on to have successful singing careers of their own. But I have trouble listening to these with a straight face.
Ex's and Oh's is, as the title would suggest, about a tough girlfriend haunted by clingy exes. If it disturbs anyone it's probably due to the rough, flippant, maneating tone of the song. Kidz Bop keeps the tone, but all the lovers are now friends. Oddly clingy friends. Friends that haunt you like ghosts. Friends that always want to hang but never want to leave (Elle King's lovers always want to come and not leave).

Elle King with some of her friends

Even though the song is now about toxic friendships, it retains the title Ex's and Oh's and keeps it titular lyrics in the chorus. Kids who listen to this will either
A. See right through the substitution
B. Not understand why the chorus obsesses over exes when the rest of the song is about losing friends
C. Come off thinking friendship is a lot more horrible than it actually is.
Here are some more gems. Most of them come from the latest album, Kidz Bop 31, just like Horrible Clingy Friends and Oh's.

Wildest Dreams, which I regard as the most sexual of T-Swift's songs, has the lover whispering "No one has to know what we do" as he strokes her hair and leaves his clothes in her room.
Kidz Bop:
"No one knows just what we went through.
His hands are in the air.
He looks across the room."
Hmm. What are those hands in the air for? I'd wager that Kidz Bop's lover is getting arrested and pleading with the cops to consider his tragic childhood. Except, we learn a few lines later that "He's so good and he knows it too well." Taylor Swift's lover is so bad and does it so well, but at least he isn't cocky.
Demi Lovato's "Confident" has a harsher tone than Ex's and Oh's and makes reference to sexual bondage. I've never felt comfortable listening to it. Kidz Bop sings "It's time to get the word out" when Demi brought out chains. That I understand. All the following lines:
It's time to get the chains out
Is your tongue tied up?
'Cause this is my ground
And I'm dangerous
And you can get off
But it's all about me tonight
Are left mostly intact. You can still be dangerous and self centered. But off is traded for out and tonight becomes today. That's right, kids. No one ever sex during the daytime. Wildest Dreams was allowed to keeps its "all night", provided the delinquent lover is just"hanging out" instead of "tangled up."
Some of these just feel like insults to children's intelligence. All About that Bass is edgy enough that Meghan Trainor recorded her own clean version. She retains the self-empowering body positivity message while removing anything sexual. In this version, Meghan's mother tells her boys like a girl for the beauty they hold inside, rather than a little more booty to hold at night.
Kidz Bop could have grabbed these lyrics, but in their version the mother tells her fat child, "Don't let it keep you home in your room at night."
Uh, thanks Mom?
The Kool Kidz Bop Krew also decided kids aren't mature to learn about the fourteenth element on the periodic table: silicon.

Meghan Trainor's "Stick figure silicon plastic Barbie dolls" are now fake plastic Barbie dolls. Now, I'm no chemist. I only passed eleventh grade chemistry because my Smart Friend's AP Chem class conflicted with marching band and she had to take non-AP chemistry with me. We sat in the back corner where the teacher couldn't see us and talked about Marvel comics. But I did pay just enough attention to know what silicon is, and I can confidently say there's no such thing as fake plastic. It's either plastic or it isn't.

Shawn Mendes, out of breathe after running. Presumably into a pole.

Kidz Bop even found something to edit in teenager Shawn Mendes' "Stitches". While Mendes' lover watches him metaphorically "Bleed until I can't breathe," Kidz Boppers prefer to watch him run until he's out of breath.
Best of all: Becky G sang for Kidz Bop herself, but when they later covered her song "Shower", it wasn't enough to change "Baby you make me hot like an oven" to "Baby you know me just like a friend". They also substituted "Your loving" to "Your love yeah" while "Homie, lover and friend" became "Only homie and friend."
Only? Wow, Becky G, your social life is kind of sad. You should've stuck around with your Kidz Bop crew instead of becoming famous in her own right.
It doesn't do much good to substitute keywords while the overall message stays the same. I appreciate good, clean music and other media. But the message of a song is carried in tone more than word choice. Weak, watered down versions that wipe away every trace of blood and nightfall from the lyrics can't match songs that are written to be clean in the first place.

Five Non-Sucky Reasons to Go to College

"You need to try harder if you want to get into college."
"Better retake that test so you can get into a good college."
"When you're in college..."
I've been hearing about college my whole life, and now I've finally done a year of it. One thing I've learned is that college is not for everyone. Sometimes that's for financial reasons, though those can be overcome through grants, scholarships, carefully choosing cheap schools, and frugal living. I've watched a lot of friends take breaks from school or forgo college together for other reasons. Health, physical and mental. Family circumstances. Traumatic events. Dreams and goals that simply don't require you to have a college diploma to access them.
While a university education is not for everyone, here are five reasons I find value in my education, and they all reach beyond the cliche "You don't wanna flip burgers for the rest of your life."

My college people

1. College is where the people are. YOUR people.
Whether you view yourself as a full-fledged adult the second that diploma touches your hand or not, one thing is sure: Graduating high school means you lose your flock. You are scattered and absorbed into the ranks of the Old People. Any activity that gets you out of the house-work, church, volunteering-usually puts you in a mix of people older and younger than you. This is especially hard after your senior year, when everything in you is focused on graduation and you only want to talk to people who can relate to that. No matter how solemnly you swear you'll keep your squad together, you'll drift apart, and you need to find new friends. I loved spending my first year in a dorm (despite the cramped living conditions) because there were always people my age just seconds away. Schools are the only large-scale organizations where you can be surrounded by people in the same stage of life as you. And let's be honest, college is where you find dates. Sure, there's an app for that now, but reasonably attractive people under the age of twenty five shouldn't be using tinder. You're still hot enough to go to parties and find a date in the outside world.

2. Generals don't suck that much, and they don't last forever
Yeah, college is a great chance to study whatever you want, but what about all those lame general educations courses you have to whether through first? It's not as painful as you think. My generals only really take up three of the eight semesters I'll be in college, and I could've done it a lot faster. After my freshman year, I only have six generals courses left to take. Two of those are upperclassman courses that double count toward my major, so I get to put them off a while. I'm intentionally procrastinating the art requirement because I want to have a fun class balance out a heavier term later on. The rest of my generals will all be done and gone after my next semester.
I actually wish they could last longer. Everybody's interested in things beyond that One Big Thing they want to do with their lives. I'd never want to be a plant science major, but I have questions about the green things growing around me, and taking a plants class satisfied that curiosity while earning me generals credit. I love history, but I'm majoring in English, so I'm happy that my generals can justify me taking a history class next semester. Most majors overlap with generals anyway. All the art, design, and illustration majors have to take art history. There goes your history requirement. My English major? Covers three generals. I've heard a lot of college graduates say, "I loved my major, until I actually had to major in it." Studying the same thing for four years bogs you down. Generals are built to give you variety.

3. You get to travel the world
I'm doing a study program this summer that will start in Boston and conclude in Nebraska.
It's not really a study abroad, despite out program director's stubborn insistence that we're journeying "abroad in the land", but we still get to travel. Everyone should see the world when they're young. During my first semester, I had an assignment where I had to get on the school's study abroad page, pick a program that seemed somewhat enjoyable, and write a 250 word response on it. I thought I would get it done in a few minutes, but I got caught up for several hours scrolling through the different adventures I could take. It was raining that day, and I felt small stuck inside my little dorm room, ready to travel the world. I still go back to the website whenever I have a spare minute to waste on the Internet. Some way or another, I'm taking a term in Europe before graduation.

4. Professors teach like intelligent people
One of my biggest teacher pet peeves is when an instructor makes a statement and doesn't back it up. Example: "Studies show that students who use their planners everyday are more successful." What study? Who conducted it? Was this study done before or after the invention of phone calendars? Will using a planner make more successful careerwise, or does this just apply to school?
Another one I hear a lot is when the phrase "in our society" or "in our culture" is used with no counter culture examples. My sophomore English teacher once told us, "In our society, what you do during your waking hours is considered more important than what happens in yours dreams. In other societies this is not the case." And then she left off at that. Well? Where are these mysterious, dreamy societies? Can I go visit them and chat about my dreams? Or are they societies who ceased to exist long ago?
During the first few weeks of my school year, my Western Humanities professor clicked through some slides on Ancient Greek art and said, "In our culture, portraying the human body is a major part of art."
Me: Yeah, Teach? What culture doesn't do that? You have to draw people. People are everywhere.
Professor: "In other cultures, such as the Islamic artistic tradition, this is not the case."
Me: Oh.
A few weeks later she gave us a unit on Islam and Middle Eastern art. We actually got to learn why Islamic art concentrates on geometric patterns rather than animals and people instead of being told, "Don't worry about it, that's not part of the lesson." If something is not at all part of the curriculum, you can ask the professor after class and they'll say, "If you want to study that, go take this class by Professor So-and-So instead."
One way or another, you learn what you want to learn.

5. Never a Dull Moment
If you move out to go to college (which I highly recommend, because the whole parents thing kind of loses its charm after eighteen, and they're sick of you too) then there's always fun to be had around campus. Everything's free or cheap with a student ID. I never cared much for high school sports, but you can bet I cheer my Cougars on now that I'm at BYU. It's not just sports, either. I found myself going to piano recitals, ballets, zumba classes, ballroom dance concerts, human trafficking summits, Disney History Club animation night, MLK commemoration walks, weird Swedish movie screenings, a guest lecture from Ruby Bridges, and more. And when there's not some official campus event going on, we make our, ahem, unofficial fun. By the way, it's against the law to go turtle hunting in the BYU duck pond at 2:00 A.M. Be sure to check with your campus's police for similar laws before going swimming. I am unable to show a picture for this item because it might get a certain friend in trouble.

Is college one long party? No. There's actual homework involved. School sucks your life away, but you steal some life back and live in stolen moments. And THAT's when the party starts.