My experience with a health class in its first year so far

This year at the the school that I teach is the first year in many that we have had an opportunity to give the students what they need...A health program. After bringing in a new great teacher the first thing that I have noticed is my is my class sizes went from the 60's to the 20's...Which is awesome.

But what about whats going on in the health room? Well to start off there are some things that I have noticed that I expected but didn't truly realize until the situations came about. The first is the students knowledge on basic content that most adults take for granted. Topics such as...how many minutes a day should children exercise. To me I went in knowing that students know they should exercise but how many they might not be 100% about which is ok, that is why we are here. The part that really worries me is their ideas on what is appropriate in terms of amount of time they spend on electronic devices such as video games, t.v., cell phones, etc. The first thing I did was ask my students by a show of hands of who spends less than an hour a day on screen time. In 6 classes about 4 kids raised their hands. The next question was who spends 1-2 hours in front of a screen. This time about 10 total kids raised their hands. The scary part is that the most hands were not raised when I asked about 2-4 but rather the question of 5+ hours a day. So far this group of students were the most prevalent. Not only were these students getting the most screen time but they tend to get the least amount of exercise.

This is very scary because I know that I am not the only teacher who will experience this and the studies stating that this generation of students will not have the life expectancy of their parents might be true. It is up to us as the teacher to change this. Notice I did not specify what type of teacher. In the game of life every adult they interact with is a teacher for them and it is up to us to inform them to get more active and put the electronic devices down. What have you seen in your classes?