Posted by: Dominique D.
Happy Spring Semester! This means more blogs and more Michael Jackson songs as titles. :o)
I'll talk about my spring classes in my next blog, so I will use this one to talk about my Intersession 2010 experience this time around, which trumped last year's.
Last year, I stayed home longer and came back to take an awesome class. This year, I came for all of Intersession and took 2 classes and assisted another one.
Imagine if you could go to school, but not have any real work to do. You have all the perks of seeing your friends, using your mealplan having emptier/quieter dorms, but no real work, just random 1-2 credit classes about things you like. Kind of amazing. I also got a lot of movie watching time in and lots of time to spend with friends outside of club events. Relaxing...
The first class I took was a sociology class called "White Privilege." Weird and blunt title, which I liked. We learned about how being white in American came to be a hidden privilege and the benefits that came/come with that privilege. The class was a nice mix of white, black and Asian, so that was pretty cool too. People in the early 20th century in America used to go to court to try to prove their whiteness, because if that was legally proven, then they had access to better homes, jobs, schools, services, healthcare, etc. Japanese and Indian were among some of the races that tried to prove their whiteness based on skin color, but the courts refuted their claims and said whiteness went beyond skin color. Many of the "new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe were treated poorly by the "old immigrants" from Ireland and whatnot, comparable to the way blacks were being treated. After WWII however, they got new status as being "white." Very strange how our country has treated race...I could go on but there's not enough room in this blog.
The other class I took was a public health one, called "The Obesity Epidemic." This class was taught by one of my public health professors I had last year and he's great--very enthusiastic and animated when he lectures. Apparently, 70% of Americans are overweight and a third are clinically obese...which are astronomical figures. This epidemic isn't only in the US, but in other developed countries aqnd even in poorer, developing countries. The course tried to get us to think about WHY this was occuring, besides the fact that people are eating more calories than they are expending. The environment is the main culprit, as our teacher described it, because supersized, easy to get, unhealthy, cheap food is our default. He pointed out that life expectancies in the US shot up at one point in the early 20th century not because of new medicines or vaccines, but because the environment was changed through water sanitation.
Map=obesity...red is the most obese. Actually this map is kinda old...more states are red now
Changing the environment is a good way to make people healthier because people don't have to do anything...it sounds awful but it's true! We're more responsive and benefitted more when things are done for us and we have no choice but to live with it. Some things to change the environment include taxing junk food, advertising healthier foods, and soooo much more. If you couldn't tell I loved the class, despite the fact that each session was like 3.5 hours (well it was a 4 day class so it's ok).
The last thing I did was become a course assistant for a B'More! Freshman course, about cancer. Course assistants took care of registration of students. Each class was assigned a neighborhood to explore and assistants had to lead the students in our classes around, which was fun but a bit weird because I had a pack of 20 students following me. We visited local landmarks and took pics...and no one got lost or left behind so I was happy about that. Being a course assistant made me have to trust my leadership skills and be confident in my abilities to engage students and make them feel comfortable (especially important because they were freshmen). Not to mention, I made a cool new contact in the professor who taught the course. It was her first time teaching and she wants to go into it one day, so this was good practice for her. Plus, I met 20 cool freshmen, with whom I still interact when I see them around.
Now THAT'S what a relaxing, but useful, Intersession is supposed to be like...so happy I got to partake this time around.
Until next time,
Dominique
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