There are a vast number of courses that Staples offers to its students, and although I have struggled through classes with immense rigor, I would rather take any of those again if it meant I was excused from the required health education classes.
My dislike for these courses is not a new feeling, but has come from the last three years of a repetitive curriculum with a desperate need for reform.
My first issue with the health classes I have taken is the redundancy of a majority of the topics we are taught. During a recent class, we were given a 12-page assignment that felt oddly familiar to me. Sure enough, when I checked my archived Google Classroom from two years prior, I found an assignment I had previously completed that looked identical.
As a junior with a heavy workload, being assigned work that feels repetitive and unstimulating, especially work I feel I have already completed, feels like a waste of time. Time spent completing redundant work is time I could be devoting to new and relevant assignments for my other classes.
In Sophomore Wellness last year, I felt it was the one health class where the material was both relatable and meaningful. We focused on practical topics such as prioritizing sleep, staying organized, and managing emotions.
The irony, however, was that while we were taught about the importance of sleep and stress management, the homework often took more time than my work for higher-level courses, ultimately creating more stress. At Staples, where students already face significant academic pressure, classes like these should not require hours of homework and should be treated for what they are: a foundational health class.
While I felt I resonated with the topics I was taught in Sophomore wellness, I felt the polar opposite in the remaining health courses I took. In each consecutive class I sat through, there was an increasing emphasis on identity and gender orientation topics.
While it’s important for students with diverse identities to feel they have spaces where they feel accepted and acknowledged, I do not believe health class should be that place. The way these lessons appear in our health curriculum often crosses into territory that feels completely unnecessary in the conversation of a student’s health education.
Not every student relates to or needs extended units about identity, yet the assignments often require us to reflect deeply on topics that don’t pertain to a majority of the class. At times, it feels like there is a correct viewpoint expected in order to succeed, and that can be uncomfortable for students who don’t interpret certain topics the same way.
Some students might not feel secure enough to have conversations as such with a teacher, and they shouldn’t be required to talk about parts of themselves they may not even be ready to understand. I understand some students feel as though they need aid along that journey, and that is why health, if it continues to teach these topics, should be an optional course beyond freshman year.
Health could easily be structured like other electives. I strongly believe students need a useful health education that does feel engaging, and I believe Staples is able to provide that. A solution would be to require a half-year health course in freshman year that provides a baseline education covering universally applicable topics. This could include bodily safety, mental health awareness, substance education, sleep, time management, healthy decision-making and so on. Then students who need or want more support with specific health issues, can choose to continue into a more specialized version of the course as they get older.
That way, the students who genuinely benefit from those discussions would still have access to them, while students who no longer feel they benefit from additional health instruction won’t be required to take it year after year.
In just one month, I will be done with health education for the rest of my life, and although my next class may feel harder, I would rather put effort into work that feels meaningful than sitting through a curriculum that hasn’t changed since freshman year.
