Despite what you may think, I do other things besides reading magazine articles and thinking about education

This post, however, will not support that statement.

This week's TIME cover story is "How the first nine months shape the rest of your life," and I read it simply because I was interested in what they call "the new science of fetal origins." It reminded me that I miss science, but more importantly, it put some sense into the incredibly numerous physical and mental health problems that can be seen in a community like Richmond. The article gave me a lot of "oh that makes so much sense" moments.

To preface, I don't know how much I have already talked about this, but if there were only two descriptors for my students' health - healthy or unhealthy - almost all of them would fall in the latter category. It may not be a big deal in middle school, but in high school there are a lot of kids that are pushing obese, and pretty good handful of them are worst-case scenario definitions of the word. Most students don't understand the connection between what they eat and how their body functions - I think that should be 9th grade science curriculum - but frankly the malnutrition comes down to the effects of poverty. Still though, cheap and healthy is a possible combination. And contrary to the opinions of my third period, cilantro does not count towards your daily value of vegetables. It's so appalling to me that these kids do not change their behaviors even after many family members have been diagnosed with diabetes. I don't think they understand that the things that happen to their relatives is a sort of preview and warning about things that could happen to them if they mimic their habits.

As for mental health, I've written a lot about my special education students this year and last, and at first I thought it felt like there was a lot of them simply because they were being mainstreamed into regular classes and they usually require the most attention. But after reading this article I've realized that we really do have a crazy amount of special education students. This year and last I've had an average of five or six of them in each class, and my algebra classes create the heavy end of that average. ADD and ADHD run rampant at our school as well, and often that's what labels them as special education in the first place. And Lord knows I've had my fair share of bipolar students.

So now the question is whether these health problems trace back to the traumas of these kids' young lives, or if they go back to even before they were born. In arguments like this, I think it's a safe bet to say both. Anyway, the article talks about how an individual's health - early or late in life - can be affected by the health of your mother before birth. It was to little surprise to read that individuals born to diabetic mothers are more prone to diabetes themselves, but there are other connections that are interesting, like a higher risk of heart disease for individuals weighing less at birth. This one was crazy to me though: obese mothers giving birth to heavier children is more than just genetic, as proved by the fact that "kids conceived after a mother's successful weight-loss surgery were 52% less likely to be obese than siblings born while she was overweight." If all this is true, it's no wonder that communities like Richmond feel like it's so hard to reverse these self-perpetuating problems. The article also said that women who are pregnant during stress or malnutrition may disrupt neural development, contributing to mental health issues. Reading that line, all I could think about was our numerous high school pregnancy cases, who were likely malnourished and under ridiculous amounts of stress and trauma even before getting pregnant.

One interesting thought process that came from reading this article is that in education, you have to work with the cards you've been dealt. The amount of things that you wish you could affect or change is so frustrating, and you can always trace the problems back to some other source out of reach, but you have to accept what you are given and do the best with what you have. It's always so easy to say that things would be better if ________ (if the middle schools did a better job; if the elementary schools did a better job; if the parents were more involved; if we had smaller class sizes; if teachers were paid more; if our students schedules would stop getting switched five weeks into school; if the students families weren't wrapped up in drugs and alcohol, etc), and quite frankly it's just so hard not to say it sometimes. So while it's interesting to find out the scientifically true source of the problems that can be witnessed daily, it's not going to change my job at all.