The one where my students asked what the heck is going on

I feel like if I title this like a Friends episode, it might seem less dystopian.

Night before last, I was preparing for my HBSE class (Human Behavior in the Social Environment). We explore topics across the lifespan, and learn about bio-psycho-social-spiritual functioning at each stage of life, after a few weeks of introducing some core concepts. This week we are in newborn and infancy stage. We look at typical development of each stage, and then explore some “special topics” that social workers and other helping professionals would need to know. One of the special topics we examine in this stage is the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR).

One source that I always use on this topic is the Center for Disease Control, aka the CDC. I use CDC website for several special topics, including bullying (a middle school special topic focus) intimate partner violence (a topic we talk about in young adulthood, though of course it happens across multiple stages) and dementia (which I am guessing you can guess…we talk about in older adulthood). Anyway, when I was prepping for class, I saw the dreaded statement at the top of the website that I knew would be there.

When I pulled up the website in class, I saw some students look at the site, look at each other, and look at me quizzically. I asked them if they were confused by the banner of words in pink, about the website modification. They said they were. By now, other students had moved to taking pictures of the website and/or were sharing with peers what they knew about the situation. Most of the students in my class had not heard specifically about health related websites (trusted, governmental websites) being scrubbed of certain information.

This particular class is a BELL Core class, ie part of our general education curriculum, and so there are a number of different majors in there. The students who were the most upset were students going into nursing, social work and PT/OT fields. One of the nursing students asked “How am I supposed to provide the best care for all my patients if I can’t access information?” Another asked “How should I try to respond to this? I have been trying to ignore politics but that isn’t working.” And then another student just said, speaking for many of us, “what in the heck is going on with our country?”

And this, friends, is where time ran out of official class but some students stayed behind to talk. Some of them are still kind of numb or in shock about some of the things going on, and some are very concerned about their future, both personally and professionally. They want to know how to make a positive difference in the world.

I encourage them in the best way I know how, which is to make your voice heard, and to speak to the elected officials in your area even if you didn’t vote for them. Make your voice heard and try to bring light to the world in ways that you can. Do the next right thing in front of you. Remember to care for others.

What other things would you tell them? What are you doing to bring about change you want to see?