Very thorough, Elise. Thanks.

As you and I discussed in class, you will want to

identify the several kinds of action you want readers to take. I think you should be
able to find organizations / groups who are already advocating for these changes, so
you might find ways to support them, to get others to join, and / or to use their
materials / backing for specific action you envision. Also, as I say in a comment, you
will want to do some research to determine how decisions are made and by whom,
especially related to education.

1. Exigence and purpose

a. Identify actual, ideal, possible:
i. High school curriculums are set up to
insufficiently educate their students on birth control, STD
transmission, and safe sex in general. The problems lie within
the administration in charge of the curriculum possessing the
mindset that not acknowledging teenagers' options to maintain
their sexual health (and instead promising the abstinence is the
way to safety) is ignoring the fact that that statistically makes
teenagers much more reckless and curious. (added: While they
may be outwardly ignoring it, another factor may be that the
people involved believe that the rise in sexual behavior is due to
their views arent widely followed, which may encourage them
to tighten regulation.) By not giving the tools necessary and not
acknowledging that they will most likely engage in sexual
activity, we are failing teenagers and setting up a scenario in
which they are predestined to harm themselves and others.
ii. Should: The students should be given access
to comprehensive knowledge on the resources available to them
/ modern sexual health knowledge with the assumption that
they will experiment before marriage.
1. All schools should teach a more
comprehensive sexual education
2. Comprehensive sexual
education should be required in every school curriculum
iii. Possible realistically: communicating with a
local legislator in charge of the decision to find out what's the
real bare minimum and find out how to petition to change it (if
possible). Also setting up specific groups to help maintain the
funding of sexual health clinics. (Added: a compromise in
curriculum may not be realistic, and instead I may switch my
focus onto joining another pre-established group with the same
intentions. Possibly Advocates for Youth:
http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/ )
So what?

iv. Significant to me: I want to know that future

generations are educated enough to life their lives in a
knowledgeable way and prevent taking down other individuals
with them
1. I want to be able to expect my
own children to get that type of education (along with
what I teach them myself) so that they have resources
available to them to refrain from being confused about
their own body/sexuality
v. Other should care: Inadequate birth control
contributes to the growing overpopulation of the planet and will
lead to a lower quality of life for us all when we have to spread
the limited resources that between us. Along with that, not
knowing how to prevent the spread of STD's will lead to a much
less healthy population. Also, babies born out of reckless sexual
activity often (specifically during the teenage years) tend to
then be put in the care of the government (by putting them up
for adoption). (Added: People have a fundamental right to
control over their own bodies and to knowledge, which can very
well pertain to knowledge about their own body. )
b. What am I trying to accomplish with my writing? : I'm
trying to justify why having a largely sexually clueless generation is
detrimental to us all, and instilling a feeling of urgency in reversing the
effects of insufficient sexual education through contacting their local
school board. Eventually, getting people to bring others together to
talk to their local congress(wo)men who are either in charge of sexual
health clinic funding or sex ed curriculums.
c. Readers should take personal steps of their own to decide
how they would like to educate their own children (current or future) in
the home and then look into their local district's sexual education
curriculum and try to make changes to it (if necessary) (Added: This
section brought my scope much larger that I was proposing earlier, and
assuming that my reach would include people outside of the local
biosphere. Id like to scale it back to remain local, to Austin.)
d. Readers should act because the people who decide on the
curriculum aren't going to do anything differently unless somebody
(probably a large amount of people) demand that they change the
requirements
e. How should readers act:
i. I am focusing on the problem of inadequate
high school sexual education, and others should be concerned
because their children might be the ones who are left sexually
confused. Once out in the world, they will be unarmed with the
knowledge on how to keep themselves healthy.
ii. Readers should think about the effects of
teaching developing children insufficient (or even incorrect!)
information regarding sexual health so that they will look into

what the children in their very own school district are really
being taught because those poor children will grow up with a
strong disadvantage in life. (Addition: When joining in with the
activist organization, we can influence people to do more
proactive things, like voting for a congressperson who is openly
for the improvement of sexual education and/or reproductive
rights.)
2. Kairos = timing, the WHEN of the rhetorical situation
a. ...definition...
b. Why is NOW the time to act? :Because with every high
school graduating class sent out into the world with this lower-quality
sexual education, another class begins to be taught the same
information unless we break the cycle and request a more
comprehensive curriculum
i. Follow-up/future: As these children then learn
already well-documented information (that wasn't given to them
at the time when it was useful), they then have to learn through
trial-and-error how to keep themselves healthy. In the process,
they may gain avoidable STD's, transmit them, or even get (or
cause someone to get) pregnant and be forced to spend their
time , pain, and money either deciding to abort it, adopt it, or
keep it. This could very easily lead to a lower quality of life for
the child created.
3. Persons involved: Who is involved in the issue (causing / sustaining or
affected by) and what roles do they play?
a. People benefited by the status quo: legislators who don't
have to debate over the uncomfortable conversation of debating what
sexual health content should be offered to high school students.
Better: legislators implementing their own personal beliefs into the
curriculum that they create without thinking of the needs of the
general public.
b. Who would lose something if change happens: No one
would really lose anything, but the legislators/the people that influence
them would feel as though their "help" is being squandered due to
persecution of their beliefs which may consequently become a legal
issue
c. Who maintains the status quo: The people in charge of
officially writing up the curriculum for the school districts and bills that
defund sexual health clinics (addition: Includes everyone who votes for
them and supports them.)
d. Who can affect change?: The people (adults and children)
of each individual school district, and if enough people came together
they could go even further than a school district - maybe even
statewide change
4. Speaker: Who is compelled to speak or write?

a. How are you perceived by others? : Adolescent teenage

female, college student at TAMUCC, graduate of a Texas high school,
Honors student, musical individual, Texas resident,
b. What makes you qualified to speak with authority?: I've
both been through a Texas high school (who STILL TEACHES
ABSTINENCE, EVEN IN AUSTIN, which is one of the most progressive
cities in Texas!) who was required to teach me their form of sexual
education per the curriculum. I have utilized the services provided by
Planned Parenthood in the past. I strongly admire and appreciate what
Planned Parenthood has to offer in terms of education and extremely
affordable services (along with places similar to it) and think that that
type of education should stem further than when they offer sexual
education to you on an as-needed basis. The attitude that the
company has towards sex and being informed about it is something
that I want to leech into more places in the united states, specifically
where kids (often) get their first dose of sexual education: high school
c. This issue affects me personally because the lack of
knowledge/ease to speak about sex creates situations where
legislators don't even want to have a conversation or are uninformed
and thus DON'T FEEL COMPELLED to inform themselves which leads to
uneducated individuals making legislature which puts places like
Planned Parenthood out of business, which I believe is an extremely
vital resource to SO MANY PEOPLE, including myself. While I consider
myself to be rather educated on the subject, I consider it to be
necessary (regardless of your knowledge level) to have a resource like
Planned Parenthood who doesn't charge you to the extent that a
doctor's office does. They treat you like an important individual and
understand that sometimes something isn't worth a trip to the doctor
and instead have countless resources, testing, prescriptions, and
they're most importantly: a safe place no matter what you're going
through. The price is the most important part, and if they get
eradicated, so many people will no longer have access to healthy (or
even legal) resources to help them. I want to know that I have a place
to go if I need help.
d. I will convince others of my credibility not only by
introducing countless studies on the effects of children who were never
sufficiently taught about sexual health, the benefits of access to, or a
place similar to, Planned Parenthood, and the scuzzy people that play
into the decisions to require incomprehensive curriculum in schools,
but also incorporate my own experience with Planned Parenthood and
how they've benefitted me and so many others and why that connects
to the need to be sexually-educated.
e. What motivates me to act?: Anger, logic, and past
experiences
5. Audiences: Who/How many different groups does the speaker address
and why?

a. What does audience know, need to know, want to know:

The audience needs to know the sex education curriculum in their own
school district, they know the quality of their own experience with
sexual education and are able to compare it to what they know now,
and they want to know how a more comprehensive sexual education
affects others and the greater portion of the human population
b. Why? : So that they can comprehend the faults in schools
and possibly figure out what they find important for their own kids to
know, and then ideally feel compelled to change the documents that
state what is taught in schools, defunds sexual health clinics
c. How is the audience affected by the issue or any part of
the solution: The issue may pertain to their own children, and if the
individual is sexually active, they may be at risk of getting involved
with another individual who wasn't taught how to keep themselves
healthy, leaving the first individual at risk (unless they know what to
do!)
d. Demographics: parents or future parents, sexually active
individuals, children of high school age, any human above age 13 or 14
(all genders and sexual preferences), (added: people in poorer classes,
more relevant in developed countries because were really working
more on improving our process of handling sexual education and
reproductive rights, though it could greatly benefit developing
countries as well whose citizens may not have access to the knowledge
that were being censored from.)
6. Relations: What are the relationships, especially the differences in
power, between the various persons involved (writer, readers, those affected
by issue or change?)
a. We're all basically at the same level, and thus I'm not
talking down to anyone who would be reading this, instead it would be
more like a casual conversation (with me being really angry). The
difference comes between the people (including myself) who will be
acting upon the problem and the people that they are trying to
persuade to change the curriculum. The curriculum-changers are more
powerful than us, and that's part of the problem why this hasn't been
addressed head-on before.
7. Location Where will your text(s) be distributed and read? Think in
terms of the actual delivery media (paper, pixels, image, video, sounds, etc.);
and think also in terms of geographical place: where will readers encounter
your text, using what technology, if any? Inside, outside, alone, with others,
time of day, etc.
a. I could distribute my writings online on my own website, I
could share that website on social media for others to distribute. I
could also turn my information into a pamphlet on how others can
make changes themselves and hand-distribute that at locations where
it would be pertinent - maybe get a kiosk at a local fest/fair?
b. I could create an educational video, put it on YouTube, and
distribute it that way to incorporate those more interesting elements.

c. Readers will be sitting at their own computer or on their

phone and come by my writing, they will probably read it either at their
own home or while at work.
d. Distributing however I decide to put my information out
there through social media and asking my own friends to spread it
around could get the information further than just a blog on Weebly
would.
8. Institutions: limits on 1-7
a. (4) The speaker (me) is limited by what I can say because
this topic directly affects many people on a personal level. I'm limited
in the sense that I may have to censor myself at some point to spare
the feelings of some individuals.
b. (5) I've originally thought that I was specifically
addressing a population of women, as I had assumed that men may
not be as interested (stereotypically they're much less inclined to join
conversations about sex and control over your body). But seeing as
both genders are involved in sex, it's actually relevant to all genders
and sexual preferences. The age is limited to people who are of the
age to become involved in sexual activity, so I'm really not addressing
children under 14 or 13, instead addressing them through the actions
of their parents(or siblings).
c.
9. Questions (instead of the chart)
a. (isolated, static entity) What features characterize this?
Schools not providing children with enough information on sexual
health
b. How it differs from others of its kind: It's about the health
curriculum, which is much different than Math, Science, or English
curriculum. This information is much more relevant to real life, but is
offered by the same institution
c. How it fits into the larger system(s): Not sure yet, will
return with an answer
d. How is it changing?: It's always been a problem, but even
though we're coming into a much more progressive era where we feel
comfortable to talk about much more difficult topics, it's failed to
modernize even though it continues to gain importance
e. What are the parts and how do they work together:
Communication between the school board to teacher, teacher teaches
student extend of what school board allows, student goes into the
world without knowledge to question what they are taught, parent
realizes that kid is disadvantaged, goes to school board and breaks the
cycle