I am a high school science teacher at a small magnet school. Our health science and sports medicine magnet theme is aimed at providing students with the background materials necessary to pursue careers in the medical and health fields. Many of our students take multiple biomedical science courses each year depending on the track they have decided to follow.
One of the courses that I teach is a health science class where students step into the role of various medical professionals to diagnose patients based off of their medical files. Students study the body systems through the lens of a doctor attempting to diagnose and treat their patient. As a result, students need to learn what does and does not constitute “normal” within the human body and how a change can create problems. In a final, year-end project, students are responsible for creating their own medical case based off of a disease that they pick.
Since we are a small school, many of these students have had me for previous classes, including a course with strong microbiology and epidemiology units. As a result, many students associate me with communicable diseases and are comfortable with discussing their transmission and development. Next year, this will not be the case as most students will have me for the first time. Even so, a quick poll of the students in the pre-requisite class confirmed the same idea: students are comfortable with the idea of a transmittable disease.
The course I currently teach puts the focus on non-communicable diseases which students are not comfortable explaining. Many students do not understand how their bodies, which excel at maintaining homeostasis, can be the direct cause of several devastating diseases. I am frequently asked, “How can I catch this?” when the real culprit has been lurking inside them all along. Explaining this idea was a never ending source of frustration for both myself and my students.
This unit was developed with the goal of teaching students how the body is able to keep itself health through regulation mechanisms and the catastrophic results when those checks are out of balance or overwhelmed. A large portion of this unit will be a quick survey of some of the many mechanisms that the human body uses as quality control checkpoints. We will be specifically talking about the surveillance involved with the formation of new DNA, fixing broken DNA in the cell, removing proteins that are misfolded, and the immune system’s ability to recognize self vs. non-self. After, these surveillance mechanisms will be demonstrated using various non-communicable diseases.
At the end of this unit, students will be able to explain how the body’s own system can be responsible for the development of chronic, degenerative diseases. This unit will allow students to move into patient case files and explore with more confidence the cause of the disease. My goal in providing this content is to demonstrate the various causes of non-communicable diseases. I believe that by providing a wide variety of samples, teachers and students will grasp a better understanding of how these various disease mechanisms function.
