On my first day as a high school PE and Health teacher, a student growled at me.  Never in my life did I think I would want to teach teenagers, yet here I was, on my first day, greeting this student whose name I didn’t yet know and she was legitimately growling at me! Let me give her some props though because she did, at least acknowledge me.  Most of the other students breezed right by me without a word.  Little did I know in that moment of angst, how much I would love these seemingly apathetic students and especially this pissy fourteen year old in a Metallica shirt growling at me through glasses too big for her face!

The thing about those students my first year, was that they only seemed apathetic on a surface level. I came to find out that for the most part, they really engaged personally with the content I taught them in health class.  Over the months that passed, I came to realize how brilliant, creative, and reflective they truly were and the most important lesson that I learned in my first year teaching high school kids was they learned far more from talking to each other about their experiences than they did from standing in front of the class and lecturing for 60 minutes. 

Unfortunately, I think it took me almost the entirety of the health semester to figure this out. The moment that really drove it home for me came during our very last unit: Drug Use and Abuse.  As a class, we read the novel Heroine by Mindy McGinnis which outlines how a very smart, popular, talented, and seemingly normal teenage girl devolves into a heroin addict following recovery from a car accident in which she is prescribed prescription painkillers. We finished the book and who do you think raised her hand? None other than that pissy 14 year old who growled at me on day one. And she said, “I get it now. I always thought my dad didn’t love me or that he was a really bad person. But now I understand what happened to him.  It started with prescription painkillers after he got his wisdom teeth removed.” 

And then another student raised his hand and told a similar story about a close family friend. And there were students in their table groups whispering to each other about someone they knew who went through something similar.  

“My uncle…”

“My sister…”

“My best friend…”

“I used to…”

And I realized that this student’s story and the others that were shared between them would have a far more lasting impact on their memories and decision making than any public service announcement, scare tactics, or lecture that I could use. A story is always far more powerful than statistics alone.

 My first year teaching my number one classroom management issue was getting kids to shut up long enough to give instructions.  Now, my number one classroom management issue is motivating students to get off their phones and talk to each other. And again, I have let myself believe that they really are that apathetic and it's out of my control… But aren’t there still kids whose families have been wrecked by drug abuse? Aren’t there still kids who struggle with body image?  Aren’t these hormonal teenagers still interested in pursuing romantic relationships with their peers and don’t they still care about being successful in these relationships? The stories and experiences they have that enrich each other’s learning are still there.  The problem is that they lack the confidence and social skills to share these experiences with others. 

I’m no longer going to choose to believe that students don’t care about health issues.  Because at the end of the day, every adolescent wants to know how to make good relationships, keep good relationships, and be good in relationships.  And every single topic that we cover in health is connected to and affects relationships. My job as their teacher is to facilitate their learning from each other through their own experiences and I believe it starts with putting structures into place that give them the opportunity to experience success in communicating with their peers. My journey in the CTEPs program has allowed me to really sit with and plan how exactly I’m going to do that.

A few of the structures I have built to roll out during the next school year are as follows:

• A schoolwide cell phone policy that requires students to turn in their phones at the beginning of each class.

• A classroom routine in which students will journal for the first 3 minutes of class and then be assigned random partners with whom they will chat about their answer to the journal prompt.

• Collaborative activities that engage students in conversations about class content i.e. Hitch or Ditch, our trashy classroom game show in which students work in groups to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a couple to make a case for whether they should break up or stay together.

Hitch or ditch