Body Image Issues.

In first year at university, I would have been classified as Class II Obese.  Over the course of last year I was able to (safely) lose and keep off about 90 pounds and am currently in a normal weight range.  To this day I still have very prevalent body image issues.  However I would not have been able to do any of this without taking a good look in the mirror and saying I was not happy with myself. I was not okay with who I was.

  

What irked me during our lecture on body image and when I read statistics in general, is the very "accept your body for what it is" and "be happy to be you" mentality and the always negative statistics on diets.  For most people this is a wonderful idea and should be in more people's ideologies .  However I guess my question is what about the kids that really do need to lose weight?  How are their body image issues when they go through day to day life?  How can we have so much information on the epidemic in this country yet still I walk through the ARC and pay $8 for a booster juice when it's $5 for a pizza, chips and fries combo.  When someone on the Biggest Loser (which lets face it, is probably the most widely viewed work out program) loses 10 pounds a week and a student loses 1, how do we ensure they know that that's okay.  If stores sell triple XL tshirts, is that normalizing obesity?  If I am a teacher teaching positive body images and "be happy with yourself" do we lose opportunities to talk frankly with students about safe workout routines and nutrition to accommodate physical activity?  (which to be honest, I am just learning about now through friends I go to the gym with.  From my experience this information seems to be reserved for the athletes in high schools)

I apologize for another rant post, however this issue strikes a chord with me.   What would be interesting in the future is more date on successes/failures of plans made by school boards to promote healthy lifestyles.  Or on society's role on obesity.  This is because everyone seems to talk a big game about obesity, about how it’s on the rise, how our children are in danger etc…but nothing, in my eyes, is constructively being done about it.  It’s time for a change.

I’m a poser

I decided the best place to start writing my blogs this semester is to look back at my blogs from last semester.  Upon doing this I realized one thing:  I like to pose a lot of questions.  Rarely do I answer them, that’s for someone else to do.  But nonetheless a question mark gets used frequently. Why do I do this?

Well that’s one question, after some reflection, that I can answer.  I’d like to make the conjuncture that as young educators, our role is to pose the questions.  Questions that don’t necessarily need answers, but questions that need to be asked.

In the past week or so, it has been amazing the amount of discussion I have had on students identified with giftedness in our classroom.  The majority of them have been based around a comment made by a professor that (and I am paraphrasing) gifted students are the ones that will be future leaders and should be treated accordingly in the classroom.  What was great is most people questioned the validity and intention of this statement. 

As a former gifted student, the discussion touches a bit of nerves. I use the word former since my record states I was “demitted” from the program after middle school.   One reason I left the program was because I didn’t like the type of people it seemed to breed.  It might have been just my experience, but there was a sense of elitism that just rubbed me the wrong way.  As well, when everyone is put in the program based on math/science and only one in Language/Verbal, one has to question how we test these students.  Does Gifted just mean smarter?  Should students with tutors or who had Kumon as a kid have an IEP?  Because as of right now, at least for the kids who get in for their math capabilities, this seems to be a way to do it.

At the end of the day I’m all for the idea of Giftedness as a reason to have an IEP.  However in the way it is tested at the moment, we lose a lot of the aspects that I believe to be important for someone to deserve an IEP in a classroom in favour of how well they can perform on a standardized test.