Health is the measure of our body's efficiency and over all well-being. This unit, we evaluated how healthy we are by using a sleep diary, tracking our foods, and doing various activities in class. When we started out, I wasn't aware how many aspects of my life were unhealthy, but after this unit, I realize what I need to change in order to have a healthy lifestyle. Unfortunately, others at my school live the same lifestyle that I did before this unit started, so even though SHS advocates health, the students rarely act on it. In order to improve health on campus, I think that we should integrate it more into our daily school lives as opposed to one-time assemblies advocating health.
One of the themes for this unit was being able to tell when someone is healthy or not, and what could be used in order to be healthy by learning about nutrition, sleep, stress, exercise, and social connections. I learned that in order to be truly healthy, you need to balance all of these pillars of health, instead of only maintaining two or three like most students do.
I felt that in this unit we could have had more emphasis on social connections. We had a potluck to advocate for it, but only talked on the superficial level on why we needed social connections as opposed to thinking of ways to maintain them and how to open up to someone when you need help, because even though students have those social connections, many ignore them when they are in need of help. For one of our assignments, we had to read a book about health from our school's library, and the book I chose was "Managing Your Depression: What you can do to feel better". This book was really good at making real life connections, and explained what it meant to have a healthy social connection by explaining the job of a counselor. Many students at SHS are afraid of going to their counselor when they have a problem for the simple reason of not wanting their college applications to be affected when the time comes. It seems that it would be better to reflect the image of a happy healthy student rather than one who was struggling through depression when it came time for a rec. This book focused on getting past that stigma, and by offering a real world connection, it made a big impact.
Lastly, we had to fill out a health goals sheet on how we wanted to improve our health, and here's mine :)
