Birthing Class

First off, let me acknowledge up front that I tend towards being a lousy student in the same way that doctors make lousy patients.  I've been professionally involved in adult education for twenty years, and have had the opportunity and privilege to learn from and work with some truly superb educators.  People who are not only enthusiastic about their topic, but are also experts in it and in the technical aspects of teaching, coaching, instructing, and presenting (all of which are different things, by the way).
This makes me admittedly highly highly intolerant of poorly executed adult education.
We signed up for a six week birthing class offered at the hospital where we're planning to be for the birth.  They have a bunch of different little classes, birth, breastfeeding, early childhood care, ect...
The six week program is sort of an overview collection of all of them.  It's two and a half hours on Thursday nights, beginning this past Thursday.
Some fundamentals of adult education:

• It's generally a bad idea to hire someone that says that they want to teach a class because the class "changed their life".  That's tricky, of course, because that's exactly who applies to teach these classes, but it's a bad idea.
• It's okay to tell your class how you felt when you went through what you're teaching them tools to get through.  It's absolutely not okay to tell them how they will feel when they go through it.
• If you are teaching a class of thirty or so adults, and you ask for participation, and get nothing but thirty people staring at you like you're some kind of tremendous asshole, the problem isn't likely that all thirty people are uncooperative, it's much more likely that you are, in fact, a tremendous asshole.
• If you say you're going to break for people to use the bathroom in ten minutes, don't babble for forty.  Babble for ten, or say the break will be in forty.
• If you've babbled for forty minutes on a topic, and then immediately show a DVD that covers exactly the same material more succinctly and with better visual aids:
  
• The class is too long.
• Something needs to go, and it's probably you.

You're getting and idea, I assume, of what the class was like.  The problem was that there was also useful information buried in there, so if we had just walked out (which we considered) we knew we'd be missing some important stuff.  We did get the books, which are essentially pregnancy books written at an educational level at which most are generally ineligible for pregnancy.  We got to see two DVDs with way too many vaginal images.  How many is too many?  I don't know, but I think this class was well past the outside limit.  I know where babies come from, so does everyone else in the class.  Maybe the women in the film derived some sort of empowerment from displaying hoo-hoo, but I don't think anyone in the room, with the possible exception of the instructor, derived anything but the overwhelming wish that the director had required that everyone use a sheet.  The whole point of the DVD seemed to be that labor pretty much sucks, but that at the end of it you get rewarded with a baby.  That point could be easily made by having the baby emerge from under a sheet.
We got told about how during labor, which was likely to last for three days (though everyone is different), that Kate would experience surges of Mother Nature energy.  Or maybe it was Mother Earth energy.  I can't remember.  Either way, it seems clear that a surge protector is in order.  Just don't give her margarine and pretend it's butter, that's all I'm saying.
There was a lot of imperative from the instructor that all of the women in the class feel what she felt when she gave birth.  That's simply inexcusable.  I'm sure some of the women in the class will feel surging energy of Mother [whoever it was].  Or indigestion, which could feel the same.  But the ones that don't feel that are now all set up to consider themselves to be failures if they don't.
Evidently there was one useful part of the class, but I missed it because I had to go run a hockey practice.  I do feel bad about missing the useful part, and leaving Kate to go through it alone, but in my defense, the whole DVD/lecture combination was completely redundant, and the graphics in the DVD (the animate where-the-baby-goes-when -it's -on-it's-way-out) were excellent.  Way better than the doll in the christmass stocking that the instructor used to make the point before showing the DVD that made the same point.  Then I'd have been on time.
This week we get to learn about anesthesia.  Hopefully they'll have some there to practice with.