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 that focuses on the advancements of human medicine and bioengineering to help provide interventions to patients with various problems. Two of these units revolve around the ability of the body to interact with the outside world and how medical problems that diminish this ability can be solved using science.
As a teacher of medical science it can sometimes feel like my discipline is rather specialized and disjointed from the other core science courses. Many of my students have difficulty making connections between closely aligned courses like physical science and chemistry, let alone bringing the knowledge they obtain from those courses into something that seems so far detached as medical biology. As a result, I have discovered that students tend to separate many physical phenomena such as light and sound waves from the organs that we use to sense them. An inability to understand these basic principles diminishes their understanding of how these vital organs work and, even more, prevent a full understanding of how diseases such as color blindness and conductive hearing loss physically impact the body.
This curriculum unit emerged as a way for me to marry these disciplines together in a way that will allow for a deeper understanding of the interventions that have been created to mediate these medical problems.
