Textbook criticized for showing a Brazilian wax on an illustration of a pregnant woman

Textbooks are meant to educate students, not give them inaccurate representations of the human body.

A 2017 edition of the "GCSE Pearson Human Biology"textbook has come under fire after featuring a cross-section of a pregnant women who's sporting a "landing strip." It shows a fetus inside the woman's uterus, but you can also clearly see her Brazilian wax on the outside of her body. The cross-section is a drawing, which makes the choice of pubic hair all the more bizarre. Parents in the U.K. were outraged over the illustration, calling it sexist, or, at the very least, "unnecessary."



The textbook is meant for 14 and 15-year-olds, so many parents feel that the textbook is setting an unrealistic and unhealthy example for their children."It may appear trivial, but it is definitely unhealthy," one parent wrote on online forum Mumsnet. Another user commented, "This is part of the learning that gets drummed into girls about how disgusting they are, how they should be ashamed of themselves, how their discomfort is irrelevant to others."

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Well Being

Teacher's viral 'baggage activity' brought her students to tears

What a beautiful idea.

Karen Wunderlich Loewe/Facebook

Update from the author: I wrote a follow-up to this article sharing a trauma-informed perspective of the activity. You can read it here.

Karen Loewe has been teaching for 22 years. Clearly, all of that experience has given her a solid bead on what her students really need.

The middle school English teacher from Oklahoma shared an activity she did with her students for the first day of school on Facebook and it's gone insanely viral. In just three days, her post has already been shared more than 335,000 times.

What has caught people's attention is something we all have in common—emotional baggage. We live in an era of rising mental health awareness, but also increased social pressures to appear as if you have all of your sh*t together. For kids in the turbulent middle school years, whose their bodies, minds, and spirits are growing at breakneck pace, having a place to share their emotional turmoil can be incredibly helpful. But many kids don't have a safe, supportive place to do that.

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Most Shared

9 handwritten notes from students to their teachers that are just heartbreaking

Kyle Schwartz started sharing the notes two years ago, and people responded — teachers, parents, child advocates and more.

Five years ago, Kyle Schwartz asked her Doull Elementary class to fill in the blank: "I wish my teacher knew ______."

Her students’ answers shocked her, and she shared some of the notes on Twitter.

One read: "I wish my teacher knew how much I miss my dad because he got deported to Mexico when I was 3 years old and I haven’t seen him in 6 years."

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Should school nurses be able to send unvaccinated kids home? Many parents say 'yes.'

In Philadelphia, PA, nurses used to have the right to keep an unvaccinated child out of school — until now.

Lincoln High School nurse Peg Devine explained to the Philadelphia Inquirer that, in her experience, exclusion — preventing a child from attending school until they are up to date on required vaccinations — “proved powerful.” In her 26 years on the job she kept only 15 students out of school and none of them ended up missing more than two days before proving immunization.

However, now her right to intervene has been taken away by the school district, which she finds especially concerning due to the local outbreak of mumps (so far, over 100 Temple University students have contracted the disease) and the measles outbreak in New York — less than two hours from Philadelphia.

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Family