Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Almost Over Now – Health and Wellness Promotion



Well I’m almost finished with this semester at MCC. It’s been a strange and interesting portion of my life. Last night was my last class for Health and Wellness promotion. I still have 1 more quiz to do for that class (online) and then the final will be on Tuesday (also online) but there will be no more class time. That class started off being very interesting and fairly easy and ended up being still easy but less interesting. I really like Professor Magee but it felt like after the mid-term she was just pretty much phoning it in. That sounds like a strange thing for the student to say about the teacher. It’s usually the other way around. But all we were doing is going over stuff that was already in the book only she was putting it up on a screen in a PowerPoint format.

Last night she went over our last chapter (about Alcohol Addiction) and honestly she was going so fast I decided to just pull out the book and take the info from there for my notes. It’s not like there was anything really NEW to say anyway; everyone pretty much knows how alcohol will ruin your life if you get addicted. She also handed back 2 quizzes we had taken in previous weeks. On each quiz I got 1 answer wrong. There was a question I got wrong that I wanted to know the correct answer to because we still have the final to do. The question was: Men in which of the following ethnic groups have the highest risk of developing prostate cancer? When I asked her what the answer should have been she hesitated and then said look it up in your book. Translation: I don’t know the answer.   And in that small moment I knew why I had been feeling less enthusiastic about the class then when it first started. She doesn’t know the information. She only knows what she’s read….just like us. And if she doesn’t have the answer sheet in front of her she has no more idea of the correct answer than anyone else in the class. I was disappointed in her and I looked up the answer myself. The answer is: African American and Jamaican men.

Another reason why I felt disappointed was because I was hoping to learn NEW information in this class…and to have some class discussion/debate about this information. We did a little of that in the beginning but it went steadily downhill as the semester progressed. I also realized that she either has no concept of the many health debates going on in the world (GMO’s; radiated foods; factory farming, etc) or she chooses to remain ignorant of them. She only ever had the sanitized black and white version that came from the book and no opinion of her own.

She rushed through our class last night….there were only a handful of students there. I guess they wanted to get out of the class early. One of the students had asked me last week if I was going to bring in any baked goods for the last class. (I had brought in chocolate chip cookies earlier in the semester) She told me she’d love some brownies…..so I made them. Then when I got to class she wasn’t there…no big deal; lots of them wander in a few minutes late. Eventually she showed up with her little boy and a teenage girl….told the teacher she didn’t feel well and was only staying for a little while. She stayed long enough to help one of the older (clueless but nice) women get her report downloaded to the teacher’s inbox. When she was leaving I told her to take some brownies with her. She looked at me and said: Do I look like I need brownies? (not rudely; in a laughing manner). Now it’s true she is a little overweight but hey, she had ASKED me to make them! And that’s what I told her….also in a joking manner but I meant it. Her little boy took one on the way out.

At the end of the class one of the other clueless older women (one I’ve been avoiding all semester) heard me talking to another woman about how there is no class offered for my program, as a night class, until next Spring….and I’m pretty pissed about it too. Now she started grilling me and not understanding what I was telling her. This is the same woman that took up valuable class time making the teacher repeat herself over and over in several classes….about how to do the big final report we had to do. She is arrogant and ignorant about seemingly everything. She constantly flies off the handle about things she doesn’t understand…..I don’t need that crap. My customer service skills kicked in and I repeated the information (called the broken record) at her until she stopped asking me. She then moved on to badger the professor about how she “better get a good grade on her report because she busted her butt” doing it. Nervy huh?? (This is a woman that doesn’t have a computer at home and doesn’t know how to use one anyway. She’s been a problem all semester because she lacks these skills. Everything is done on line in these schools now) Professor wasn’t taking any crap from her. She told her you’ll get graded according to the outline that is listed on the syllabus, just like everyone else. I started saying my good-byes at that point. The professor actually hugged me and thanked me for bringing in the foods I had baked for the class. She’s a nice woman; is a personal trainer in her profession; and I like her very much. I just don’t think she makes the best teacher. I shouldn’t be complaining I guess. The class was easy and I’m fairly sure I got a good grade. I still have to do a quiz and the final before finding out for sure however.