Final post - from Katherine

I was thinking about the final posting questions and about the Metro Teen AIDS workshop yesterday, and was reflecting on the feedback Alis, Sara and all of us offered as a part of our post-mortem sessions. And I was thinking about the differences between teaching in a classroom and teaching a workshop.

One of the biggest things I struggled with as a teacher was consistently designing lessons, evaluations, and assignments that were effective learning experiences. As with many jobs, there are times when just getting through the day is a top priority -- making sure that every kid gets michondrial streaming or whatever topic might fall by the wayside. But you do see the kids EVERY DAY (sometimes more than once a day!) and so the BIG stuff gets hammered home. In these workshops, you have a short amount of time and it's about HEALTH, a subject that needs to go right the first time. You might not be working with these kids again, or when you do, one of them might have already gotten pregnant, or entered an abusive relationship, or gotten HIV. It sounds depressing, doesn't it? But it's not -- it's a positive challenge. How can we get good enough at working with kids and get informed enough and creative enough to make each minute count double -- no matter how many or how few we have?

As far as my career concerns, one of the things we look at in my work in alcohol policy is "unintended outcomes" of certain policies. One of the worst is when taxation or pricing controls are hiked steeply, illegal production and selling spikes, which often leads to a lot of poisoning deaths. What is always interesting to me about these is that we create policy (e.g., HPV vaccination mandates) with a specific intended outcome in mind (lessened rates of HPV and cervical cancer). But we don't always see the unintended outcomes that are possible because we've been looking at the problem as a PH problem for too long -- we need new eyes to look at the issues. Adolescents have some of the freshest eyes (and freest mouths) around. One of the projects I'm interested in taking on is an interview project, talking to adolescents about various health policy issues. Adolescents have an honesty and a clarity that adults, unfortunately, often lose. I've got a few of my former students roped in, and I'm really eager to see the fruit that work bears.

Those were pretty vague answers... but after six weeks with me, maybe that's not a surprise. I really enjoyed the class!