An Essay for the Masters

In a world of plenty, theoretically everyone would have sufficient resources (food, healthcare, jobs, etc.). Tragically this is not the case for millions of people who struggle to make ends meet. For those who can, their wellness is probable. For those who cannot, their disease is probable. The most pressing public health issue is this disparity and the need to build or strengthen a culture of health literacy and action to guarantee everyone can at least possess skills and the will to pursue the health of their family and their community. In a world as dynamic as ours is becoming, whereas it was always said ‘it takes a community to raise a child’, it now takes a highly motivated, indeed vigilant, community to raise a healthy child. As my experience in the school system shows, the ease with which young people access unhealthy foods and their comfort eating those same foods means either they cannot access healthy foods or they don’t want to. Now, we must come to see that the young person is not to blame for his/her ignorance. We, the leaders in this field, must develop appropriate strategies to teach young people how to commit themselves to living a healthy lifestyle for themselves and their community. Thus, we must bolster both the individual and the community, both externally through the demanding of additional resources, and internally community members must embrace health and banish disease. It will be this kind of promotion of health from within and the demand of stability to the outside that will bring a form of happiness that lasts beyond the sugar fix at the bottom of a chocolate milk carton.

There is nothing quite so enjoyable as feeling healthy. There is nothing quite so stabilizing as wellness coming to a family. It’s these happy and healthy faces that not only create lasting results, but also propel me to persevere. Now, it’s easy to confuse the happy faces of a healthy family sitting down to enjoy a healthy home-cooked meal with the relieved faces of a family out to eat at one of the innumerable fast food chains. But it’s impossible to confuse the pain of a family coping with chronic disease or even an early death, with a family developing together within a community network built to guarantee health. It’s this guarantee that appeals to me. A guarantee of health literacy through education, a guarantee of healthier living, and a guarantee of money saved (families save money and public institutions save money). I have seen the guarantee in person. I have seen the guarantee of information retained and motivation gained because happy faces met healthy skillbuilding. Inevitably these happy, thinking, minds develop positive connections between experiential learning and the subject matter to the point where they will never forget the lesson and are hungry for more. These opportunities to teach young people self-reliance in a team setting amounts to the strongest lessons of public health in action. The individual exists within a social framework (like a team) but the team is dynamically altered by every individual within it. Giving young people a space to safely explore those connections will produce cohorts upon cohorts of health leaders. My graduate work in public health will give me the tools to teach this effectively.

To be honest, it's impossible to quantify the elements involved in teaching a lesson that truly engages an audience. Really, you just know it when your in it. I can say that I've been there a handful of times. I know this kind of lesson when I sweep my eyes across a classroom of students leaning forward in anticipation of the next variable to be introduced. Much like a lesson I recently taught about persuasion to a group of 12 year olds, at one point the five students performing at the front of the room were following precise directions with smiles on their faces simultaneously looking up and down in deep thought. The rest of the students looking on had body language indicating engagement: chest squared with their desk, back straight, eyes wide, mouth open wanting to speak to the learning. In these moments I know teaching is in my blood. Every one of those students was ready to learn more and apply the knowledge in the streets. Each was ready to lead. And truth be told, I so badly wanted to follow up the lesson with another skill intrinsic to leadership and advocacy. If I can learn to link multiple engaging lessons together with the right information and skill building, there is literally no telling what the students will amount to: certainly leaders, but perhaps more.