Why Roper Mountain Science Center Makes Me Not Want To Buy An iPhone

A friend's Facebook post lamenting the ability to just be able to dial on his otherwise much loved smartphone prompted me to start thinking about having an iPhone.  Even though the phone has many appealing features, I always come back to the fact that I don't like touchscreens.  I prefer to push real buttons.  I have had this thought on numerous occasions, but tonight, for some reason, the thought occurred to me that maybe there is some underlying reason for my preference of button pushing.  I mean, it is kind of a strange thing to keep me from wanting to buy an iPhone.  My other reasons for not buying one - including price, excessive hype, and outsourced labor to China - are all pretty typical reasons for avoiding the purchase of this product, but liking to push buttons?  That's a little strange, even for me, but I was surprised that I quickly came up with a theory to explain this particular personality quirk.

I attended public school in Greenville County, SC from the end of 1st grade until I graduated from high school.  This region is, as I heard it called many times in the past, the buckle of the Bible belt.  Greenville County Council was (and, from what I hear, still largely is) made up mostly of people affiliated with Bob Jones, a fundamentalist Christian school that, as my husband likes to say, "offers kindergarten through PhD - and you only have to read one book!"  Southern Baptist is the predominant denomination of Christianity in the area.  So, it is probably stating the obvious to say that official opinions toward sexuality and sexual education tended to be on the puritanical side around there.  I often heard the words "sex" and "sin" used together in the same sentence, which, for me, was a confusing contrast to the books my mother (a nurse, MSN) had been making me read since I was seven years old.  I now believe I was fortunate to be the child of a doctor and a nurse who took a clinical approach to sex ed, and started young, but at the time, it was kind of hard being raised so differently.  Very few of my friends' parents tried to educate them about sex before they already learned about it from their friends, but my parents did.

Official sexual education classes were taught in the 5th, 7th, and 9th grades.  The 5th and 7th grade sex ed programs both included a trip to the Roper Mountain Science Center.  I have a theory that the powers that be in Greenville County really think that 5th grade is too young to be talking about sex, but grudgingly allow the curriculum to remain because it is the time when some adolescents' bodies start changing, and they probably do need an explanation as to why.  They don't, however, believe the students could (or should) handle having their regular teachers talk about S - E - X at age 10 or 11.  How could the students ever look at the teacher the same way once the dirty thing called sex enters the picture?  We weren't allowed to find out, and were instead bussed en masse up to Roper Mountain Science Center.

Clearly, given the environment, the 5th grade sex ed trip was a BIG DEAL.  The students' moods ranged from interested, to terrified, to amused, to glad to be somewhere else besides the 5th grade portables at Mauldin Elementary.  The 5th graders were loaded up on the bus for the twenty-ish minute drive to Roper Mountain.  The crowd was (predictably) boisterous, and the teacher had to yell several times to settle down.  By 5th grade, the Science Center wasn't anything new or exciting, as we probably went there at least once a year during elementary school.  For some reason, though, the sex ed trip cast Roper Mountain in an entirely different light.  Everyone was shuffled inside upon arrival and brought into a room with tiered, stadium-style seating, but with just the flat surfaces, not the actual seats.  On these surfaces were evenly spaced out buttons, similar to the buttons on arcade games.

I, along with what I am speculating would have been most of the 5th graders, experienced a small surge of adrenaline at the unexpected and promising sight of - wait for iiiiiit - buttons!   You can play video games with buttons!  I use a button like that to beat my brothers in Street Fighter 2 at Fuddruckers all the time!  Are we going to play video games involving naked people?  What scary but exciting adventures could these buttons possibly hold in store for this group of 10 and 11 year olds?

The answer turned out to be nothing.  Nada.  Zilch.  After getting everyone settled down, we were told NOT TO TOUCH THE BUTTONS!!  The buttons, we were informed, are only used for the 7th graders.  I, for one, was dumbfounded.  Why on earth would they put all of us in this room with these buttons and tell us to leave them alone?  That would be like making us sit next to candy and not eat it!  And what makes 7th graders so special, anyway? 

The day continued on for what seemed like forever, and we weren't allowed to use the buttons once!  What an incredible letdown.  The mood became more tense as the day went on, because of what I would guess was caused by the large number of kids whose overly religious parents had, for years, been acting as if their genitals were shameful things that must be kept hidden becoming uncomfortable with the clinical terms and manner of fact manner being used to describe male and female anatomy.  They were more afraid of the word "penis" than the word "fuck," which was, of course, *the* cuss word at the time.

We were sent back to school with a promise of some type of undefined button-related frivolity in two years time.  Two years?  When you're ten?!  That is twenty percent of your current lifespan.  Two years is so far away I had to just forget about any potential pleasures that might be given to us by the button gods and carry on with my mundane life of being a kid and having fun all of the time.

Once the 7th grade trip finally came around, things were undeniably different.  We were much more wordly than we were in 5th grade, and we acted even more wordly than we currently were.  Sex was much less of an unknown than that ancient day on which we visited Roper Mountain two years earlier.  Not only that, it was the year of the button!  The 7th grade curriculum was expanded from 5th grade to include classroom time and textbooks.  Apparently, 12 or 13 is an acceptable age for kids to be able to handle their teachers talking about some aspects of sex, but 10 or 11 is absolutely NOT.

As you might imagine, the buttons did not live up to the promises they had made to the roomful of adolescents on that fateful day back in the 5th grade.  They just allowed you to answer questions put up on a screen!  The only way to get any sort of enjoyment out of the buttons was to press them about 50 times with each question, no matter how many times we were told only to press it once because it doesn't count any more than that.  I, personally, played a game to try to press my button before I heard any other buttons pressed, and as a part of the game, I had to get the right answer to get credit.  The root cause of that particular personality quirk is indisputable - my father deserves all of the credit for it (or blame, however you want to look at it).

So, not only are the buttons an unbelievable waste of time, we also have to spend time in the classroom with sex ed textbooks.  I must say, though, in the surprise department, Greenville County schools are just the gifts that keep on giving.  These particular textbooks were unlike any I had ever had before.  I have this thing with books - I love to read, but I am very anal about the condition of my books.  I always take the care to hold paperbacks so the spine doesn't crease, I never fold the cover over or fold pages, even corners, I take the dust jackets off of hardcovers to prevent them from getting bent, and I avoided highlighting textbooks in college at all costs.  I have some paperbacks that have been read over a dozen times that barely look like they have been read at all.  (Now I love to read from my Kindle because I don't have to worry about keeping pages from getting bent!) 

I went off on that tangent because when I received my sex ed textbook, I opened it up to discover it had been mutilated on the inside.  Entire sections of the book had been ripped from the spine.  Seeing a book that's been damaged like that just irks me, I don't know why, it's like a fairy loses its wings every time it happens or something.  I discovered my classmates' textbooks had suffered the same brutal fate as mine.  I knew that I had to find out who had perpetrated this disturbing offense, and to what end, so I hurriedly flipped back to the table of contents.

Methods of Contraception.  That was the section that had been callously ripped out of a bunch of unsuspecting textbooks.  While 13 years old is apparently old enough to still be able to sit in class with a teacher taught them about sex, it is not old enough to learn about methods of contraception.  It was as if most kids hadn't already seen a condom by the time they were 13.  I knew of a couple of people who claimed to have had sex during 5th grade.  By 7th grade, it was a lot more, not a lot percentage-wise, but it was there.  But, Greenville County said that contraception could only be included on the 9th grade curriculum, with strong undertones indicating they would prefer not to allow teaching contraception at all because, after all, you would have to be quite slutty to have the need for contraception.  

Once 7th grade sex ed is over, it's almost like a case of deja vu.  We are once again left knowing that we will get to discover something in sex ed that seems pretty sweet, but then we aren't allowed to do it for another two years.  In 5th grade it was the buttons, 7th grade was condoms.  9th grade was sex, of course. 

The underlying message of the 9th grade sex ed was that while you need to know about sex, you shouldn't even think of having it any time soon.  People in the movies might look like they are enjoying sex out of wedlock, but they are ignoring the fact that their souls are going to burn in eternal hellfire.  BUT - you will be having sex at some point in the future. 

That point is clear. 

Only unlike 5th and 7th grade, we aren't given a two year countdown until sex, just an unspecified "at some point in the future, when you are a part of a heterosexual marriage."  All three years, though, we had to sit there with the possibility of a more exciting future being shoved in our faces while being constantly reminded that we couldn't have it yet.  If that isn't an environment ripe for the manufacture of sexual frustration, I don't know what is.  To be constantly told part of the truth, and teased with all that is left to learn, yet scolded for being too interested in learning more.  Thankfully, a South Park episode came along soon enough that has a wise character named Chef who provides us with a more definitive timeline of when we were going to get to experience the mythical creature named SEX by exclaiming, "There's a time and a place for everything, children, and it's called College!"

And now that I made it all the way through my analysis, I have realized that it could be construed as an argument of why I should NOT like buttons!  Buttons should have a negative connotation because they are associated with so much frustration, but it seems more like the opposite.  Maybe the buttons are symbolic of something else.  Maybe they just remind me about a better time, back before Greenville County schools had really had the chance to fuck with my head, and that's why I like them.  Come to think of it, though, I actually grew up with a very healthy outlook on sexuality and never had any feelings of repression, so maybe the sex ed buttons have nothing to do with it at all.  I still, however, do not like touchscreen phones.