Health class needs a serious revamp. It hasn’t even been a year since we took the class, and the information that was supposed to be ingrained in our minds has already been forgotten. Our class was taught by the beloved and missed former Upper School Counselor Dr. Gary Childrey. He was an experienced professional who worked at Parker for many years, and despite having an amazing teacher, we still felt that the health class curriculum was unmemorable and that the material taught lacked relevance and use in our lives.
Health class is supposed to teach students lifelong skills and habits and help students transition into the Upper School through the teaching of various study skills and stress coping mechanisms. While our class somewhat covered that, we usually found ourselves doing unrelated and unhelpful activities that didn’t support the overall goal of the class.
Not only was the class very repetitive, the activities that we would do didn’t really benefit us in any way. When you repeatedly answer “what would you do” prompts on a tiny 3×5 index card, it gets boring and redundant very quickly. Moreover, most of the situations are things that wouldn’t even happen anymore because of the dated curriculum. It felt like every class had the same routine: sit down, stare at the projector and then write a response based on the video we just watched.
Along with our thoughts on how the class was run, we also think that the curriculum was disorganized. A prime example of this is when we spent an entire week watching Good Will Hunting, a movie with no clear relevance to our studies within the Health class. We would also constantly jump around from talking about something like how to deal with anxiety to talking about STI’s the next day.
Between the two different sections, there was little overlap in what we were learning. It always felt like they were covering topics that we hadn’t and vice versa. The inconsistency makes us wonder if vital parts of the curriculum were not taught to us which could’ve given us a totally different impression on the class.
While we were going through health class freshman year, we didn’t really have an opinion on it because we thought that all of the boring activities we did would eventually lead to something bigger. Now, after completing and reflecting on the class, we can confidently say that many of the topics and activities never really lead to a more important or central idea that could really help us.
To us, health felt like just another class the administration was forced to add to the general curriculum, and didn’t feel like a class that was very thought out. Once some of these issues have been worked out, the class might finally be considered an important and interesting course, but right now there is still lots of room to improve.
