We Are All Health Professionals Now

by Shelly Blake-Plock

category: Education and Technology

Published July 10, 2009 @ 08:21AM PT

When I was in eleventh grade, our class was marched down to the auditorium for a presentation on penises.

This wasn’t as strange as it might sound. I was one of a thousand or so guys in an all-boys high school in Baltimore, and this was part of the health program. I remember a teacher standing at a podium in front of huge projections of phalluses ravaged by untreated gonorrhea and other terrible things. And by the end of the presentation, I knew one thing for sure: I never wanted to be a health teacher.

Funny how those types of things catch up to you. Not the gonorrhea per se, but rather the sureness of my conviction about staying out of the health field. Because today I’m a classroom Latin teacher; which in the 21st century means that I am a health professional.

I should explain.

A few years back, a state trooper gave a presentation to our school where -- among others things -- he scared the bejesus out of the faculty by explaining to us how perverts stalk teenaged girls on MySpace. Apparently this was happening everywhere. MySpace was bringing perverts out of the woodwork; it was literally an oozing cesspool of teenaged innocence and depraved sexual criminality.

I did not raise my hand during the Q&A session to ask if he’d like to friend me.

Such were the early years of social media going mainstream.

Having been a BBS-head for almost a decade before our faculty had ever heard of MySpace, I was in an interesting position at school. I immediately noticed what kids were blogging and tried to encourage them away from posting ‘dear diary’ stuff on public pages and to start thinking of Live Journal and their MySpace pages in terms of how deep into the world they could connect. I was the teacher who wrote a letter to the editor of the school paper not ripping student blogging, but rather demonstrating ways of making it sharper while at the same time taking responsibility for the privacy issues involved.

In short, in those early years of social media going mainstream, I was becoming a health professional. I was teaching digital health.

There was a lot of talk at NECC this year about ‘Digital Citizenship’. In fact, digital citizenship itself is included in the new draft of ISTE’s NETS-A standards as one of the five standards for 21st century school administrators . According to the ISTE leadership, in a speech preceding this year’s oxford debate, it's all about students learning how to use technological communication in safe, responsible, and appropriate ways.

So I say, if that’s the case, then we better be darned sure that we’re actually teaching and modeling digital citizenship in the classroom. And a big part of that is talking about digital health.

Digital health involves much more than just explaining to kids the dangers of online predators and email scams. After all, in a regular health class we don’t just teach kids about the effects of diseases, we also demonstrate to them pro-active and positive ways of approaching things. We teach them about the benefits of physical exercise and we teach them about nutrition and preventive medicine.

That’s exactly the manner with which we should be approaching digital health. Because if we just bring in the state trooper to tell kids that meth addicts are going to rape them as they Tweet, then we’re really setting ourselves up for failure. Because the kids know when we’re afraid. And they know when we don’t know what we’re talking about. And they might not know any better, but once we talk out the side of our mouths about subjects so crucial to their lives, they are gonna turn us off.

And they should.

Instead, we’ve got to meet them where they are and talk openly about both the positives and negatives of online behavior. And we’ve got to model digital citizenship in every classroom. This doesn’t mean that teachers have to be clones of one another, but it sure as hell means that you had better realize whatever message you are sending to the kids when you talk about the Net or use it in class.

Because we are all health professionals now.

You can complain and roll your eyes at the latest ‘sexting’ scandal to hit CNN, but ask yourself: what am I doing to help kids to not get into this sort of mess? Am I just blocking access to cellphones and Wi-Fi in my school building? Or am I actively engaging my students in a discussion? Am I reprimanding teachers for using social media in class? Or are my teachers modeling the powerful positive aspects of connectivity?

Where are you as a health professional?

You may think that the filters you’ve set up are the best way to keep your kids ‘safe’ from Internet porn. But, guess what? Your filters are worthless. Any smart kid can proxy around your filter. And any Wi-Fi device will bypass it altogether.

If anything, the road to hell is paved with Internet filters.

Because, in effect, what those filters really are is a representation of fear. That’s what filters and blocks teach kids. They teach them that there are things that adults fear so much, that rather than talk to you about them in the safety of a high school classroom, adults would rather you just go off and find out about that stuff alone in the darkness of  your bedroom.

Except that there is no such thing as ‘alone’ online.

Digital Health: that’s what we’ve got to be teaching our kids. We should be covering precise topics -- understanding how to identify an Internet scam, empowering yourself with a strong digital profile, recognizing the social costs of Internet pornography and gambling, learning to balance online and physical life.

If we can't handle this stuff now, what in the world are we going to do down the road when we get into issues of on-demand virtual reality and shared nano-consciousness?

The kids need us to be adults about this stuff.

We shouldn’t be cowering from it. We shouldn't be living as though it's not happening. And we certainly shouldn’t be putting a block on it and then treating it as if we solved the problem.

We should be raising a new generation of health professionals. Health professionals who don’t yet realize their calling.

Photo by Amy_B cc 2.0.