Marisa S. Final Reflection- Summer 2010

I enjoyed participating in the adolescent health promotion class this summer. I not only learned about valuable techniques for education adolescents, but I also gained invaluable experience during the workshops. While I was slightly intimated by the thought of giving a workshop with a group of my peers to a classroom of adolescents, I think it was a really good experience.

It felt really good to be an educator and promoter of positive lessons and important sexual health information.
I think there are still many barriers that adolescents face when it comes to having a healthy sexuality including their relationships with their parents, as well as, what/how the media portrays as appropriate behavior. However, after looking back on my initial reflection I think that I have a better understanding of what it means to be an adolescent and how they process information and go through everyday life. While from the outside they appear as though they don’t care or aren’t paying attention, they are actually in-tune with their surroundings and they are processing everything that is coming their way. I think this was especially apparent in the workshops. Even when we didn’t think they were the slightest bit interested or paying attention to anything we were trying to teach them, at the end each group reiterated the key themes and lessons we had wanted them to learn.

In one class session we went through an exercise where we took positive baggage and left our negative baggage behind. I think this definitely happened for me during the workshops. My baggage that I wanted to leave behind was that adolescents are intimidating and hard to ‘control’ or teach because they are ‘difficult.’ My fears about adolescents were put to rest during the workshop experience. I was relieved to see that they were actually interested in the topics that each workshop discussed and didn’t try to blow us off because we were yet another set of ‘educators’ coming to tell them more information. I think we as adults forget sometimes that while this is all old information to us, it is really new to a lot of the youth we encountered and they haven’t had the same experiences and don’t have the same knowledge base as us. But despite their lack of information, they want to learn and they want to know more.

Again, the class was an overall good experience and I look forward to being able to use the techniques I learned through this course in my future endeavors.