Juno Critical Thought Questions

Juno Critical Thought Questions-Health Through Film & Fiction

1. Is unwanted teenage pregnancy an issue with high school kids?

2. What can be done to prevent it from happening?

3. What's your opinion about aborting a teenager's unwanted pregnancy? Would you consider it under any circumstances?

4. What about giving the child away for adoption? What do you think about it?

5. What should children be taught about conception and pregnancy?

6. Is it better that teenagers remain celibate/abstinant or that they become sexually active, using condoms? Explain it?

7. What should parents do when it happens?

8. What about the future father? What should he do under the circumstances below?

      a. What would happen if the father told his parents his girlfriend was pregnant?

      b. What would his mother's reaction be?

      c. How about his father's reaction?

      d. What about his friends reactions?

      e. What did Juno say she was going to do? Do you like her idea?  Would the father like this idea?
      f.  Is there a double standard on expectations of the father vs expectations of a mother?

What would you do if this happened to you? 

- You were Juno?

- You were Juno's best friend?

- You were Juno's parents?

- You were the father of the baby?

- You were the foster parents to whom Juno promised to give the baby away.



COURSE EVALUATION:
Please write a short sentence about the class.  Did you enjoy the format (film and questions as opposed to unit/test).  Were classroom discussions helpful?  Anything else that you think I should know or suggestions for course improvements?   Thanks!  I hope you have a FANTASTIC summer!

Alcohol Policies & Binge Drinking

Hello students!

The following link gives us a TON of information and stats.  Before you go there, please know that there is so much information here that you can get overwhelmed.  Please be sure to go to page 5 and 6 and look at the stats.   I'd also like to encourage you to look at the table of contents and see what interests you.  This is a "guided free-form" day, so read, learn and then be ready to answer a few questions.

http://www.dhhs.nh.gov/dcbcs/bdas/documents/modelschoolpolicy.pdf

Here is Summit's School Drug/Alcohol Policy:

BEND-LA PINE SCHOOL DISTRICT PARTICIPATION AND TRAINING CONTRACT FOR ATHLETICS/ACTIVITIES 2014-2015

ATHLETIC PROGRAM PROFILE

Any student who participates in school-sponsored athletics or activities must agree to abide by the School District Board Policies, Administrative Rules, Code Of Conduct, building rules, and team participation/training regulations. All students who participate in athletics and extracurricular activities are expected to be positive role models for other students and members of the community at all times. This signed contract shall be in effect at all times during the contract period. “At all times”, means 24 hours a day, every day of the week whether at school or away from school. The contract will be in effect from the beginning of the OSAA calendar (see OSAA web site for each years start date) and conclude with the last day of high school. 

ATHLETICS/ACTIVITIES TRANSFERS

Students moving with their Parent/Guardian to the Bend–La Pine School District from another school will enter this District’s athletics/activities program based on their athletics/activities status upon leaving the student’s previous school. The Bend-La Pine School District will honor all sanctions, suspensions, etc., from the student’s previous school.

CONTRACT

Rules will apply at all times during the contracted period.

A)    Each head coach/advisor shall be responsible for determining the General Rules for training, behavior, letters, and awards for their sport/activity. Each coach/advisor shall be responsible for communicating the standards and criteria to the students who participate in their activity and to their parent(s) or guardian(s).

B)    Participants will abide by all rules as written in the District Code of Conduct and individual school handbooks. Any conduct by an athlete deemed by administration to be detrimental to the program or school is grounds for sanctions. Students shall not be involved in any illegal acts in school/community or engage in any activity that endangers the health or damages the property of others.

C)    Alcohol, tobacco, or drugs: Students shall not sell, use, possess, or be under the influence of alcohol, tobacco in any form, illegal or illegally obtained drugs, imitation drugs (including smokeless cigarettes), restricted drugs or controlled substances that are not being used for the purpose for which they have been prescribed by a medical professional. Athletes that are present where others are engaging in illegal activity, including the underage consumption of alcohol or the illegal use of drugs, shall immediately leave. Failure to immediately leave will constitute a violation of this contract. Students in violation of these expectations are subject to consequences as set forth below.

CONSEQUENCES

A)    Any confirmed violation may result in temporary or permanent suspension from the activity/sport as determined by the coach.

B)    Any confirmed violation will result in the sanctions imposed by the school disciplinary process. Suspension or expulsion from school for violation of the Code of Conduct automatically suspends students from all practices/contests during the suspension or expulsion period. If there is no competition/contest during the suspension or expulsion, the student will be suspended from the next competition/contest.  If the infraction or misbehavior occurs away from school, the athlete will be suspended from the next competition/contest.

C)    Any confirmed violation of the Bend La Pine Drug and Alcohol Policy will result in suspension from competition. During this suspension period the athlete is: 1) required to attend all practice sessions, 2) athletes must finish his/her season in good standing and 3) Suspensions shall carry over from year-to-year, season-to-season and sport/activity-to-sport/activity. Summer athletic camp infractions that are school supervised will be dealt with in the same manner as the OSAA/BLP contract period.

a.     The first violation will result in 14 days or two competitions, whichever is longer:

b.     The second violation will result in a 9-week suspension from competition.

c.     The third violation will result in an 18-week suspension from competition.

d.     The fourth violation will result in the athlete losing the privilege to compete in all athletics and activities for the remainder of his/her high school career.

APPEAL PROCESS

The student shall have the right to an appeal with the appeal committee to review the sanction imposed and to hear the charge(s) leading to disciplinary action. The building principal or designee shall notify the student and student’s parent(s) or guardian(s) of the findings of the review.

The athlete may appeal a decision under the following conditions:

●      The appeal must be submitted in writing and signed by both the athlete and parents or guardians.

●      The request must contain specific reasons for the appeal.

●      The written appeal must be submitted as soon as possible and no later than 3 days after the violation.

●      The committee will consist of the building administrator, district athletic director, high school athletic director, and a member of the coaching staff of the athlete’s choosing shall review the appeal.

●      The committee shall give the athlete and/or parents opportunity to present the appeal.

●      The appeal meeting shall take place as soon as possible after the written appeal has been submitted.

●      The committee shall inform the parents of the committee’s decisions concerning the violation of the Participation and Training Contract at the earliest practical opportunity.

I have read the above and agree to abide by the rules as stipulated, beginning on the first day of the contract time period or the date this agreement has been signed.

Student Signature                                                       Date

Parent/Guardian Signature                                          Date

This gives you information as to why we have policies in place.   Now let's look at Summit HS vs other schools.  Do we have unique issues at Summit?  Why in the heck does Turnbull do random drug tests for his track athletes?  Do we have an issue with drugs and our track team?

So….what do I turn in?

Please write up a short (1/2 Page) writeup on what you think about high school alcohol policies.  (you can choose policies in general or Summit)  Are these policies beneficial to students? Do they work?  Doesn't it just remove kids with risky behaviors that NEED a sport?  What do you think?? Turn in your thoughts to the drop box today!

Contagion Movie Notes

Name ____________________  Date __________               Period ___

Health Through Film & Fiction – Contagion  

***Adapted and credit given to Morgan Park High School for the use of this lesson! 

Overview: In this lesson, students consider the movie Contagion in the context of public health, epidemics, and the nature of disease outbreaks.

Movie Questions:

1. What is the movie about?

2. What emotions did you feel as you watched? How did the characters, images, dialogue and background music contribute to your perceptions and feelings?

3. Which elements seemed realistic? Did anything strike you as having been dramatized for the sake of the story?

4. Explain how this outbreak is a “pandemic” and not an “epidemic”.  What is the difference?

5. Describe some of the ways in which the movie Contagion incorporates actual events or facts about contagious diseases into its storyline.

6. What do you remember about recent global pandemics, like the H1N1 flu, or more localized outbreaks, like measles? Does the  statement that “pandemics are never everywhere” ring true in your knowledge of these or other contagious diseases? Explain.

7. What were the strains of the virus?  MEV-1 and what else?  What were they? 

8.  Take a moment to research “SARS”.  What is that?  Tell me a bit about it. 

---

September 12, 2011

The Cough That Launched a Hit Movie

By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.

When Hollywood turns to medicine, accuracy generally heads for the hills. But the creators of the new action thriller “Contagion” went to unprecedented lengths to fact-check their story of a destructive viral pandemic, retaining a panel of nationally renowned virologists and epidemiologists as consultants. The intent was to infuse the usual hyperbole with an extra frisson: This is the way it could really happen. Be very afraid.
You have to applaud the effort, for the movie does indeed offer a procession of dead-on accurate scenes that not only could happen but, in many cases, have already happened. Still, the whole thing is an improbable caricature, with 100 action-packed Hollywood minutes veering far from reality. You can still be very afraid if you want, if a contagious apocalypse happens to be your thing. But it’s not going to happen this way.
“Contagion” begins modestly and realistically enough, with a cough. Gwyneth Paltrow, a midlevel executive for an international corporation, gets sick on her way home from a business trip. She coughs from Hong Kong through a layover in Chicago and on to Minneapolis, producing clouds of a deadly Asian virus and leaving infectious droplets on everything she touches. She is the pandemic’s index case, and her napkins, used tissues, drinking glasses and three-ring binder are all vectors of disease.
Her infection is a fictional combination of influenza and brain infection caused by the exotic Nipah virus. Nipah (NEE-pa) is carried by fruit bats in South Asia: bats don’t get sick from it, but their saliva and urine may infect pigs, which do. Sick pigs have transmitted Nipah to their human caretakers, and in the dozen small outbreaks described since 1999, sick humans sometimes passed it on to their own caretakers. The disease has never been seen outside a rural setting and has certainly never traveled on a plane. Still, Nipah, with its 50 to 75 percent mortality rate in humans, tops most lists of scary new animal-derived viruses.
The creators of “Contagion” scaled down the mortality rate of their “MEV-1” virus infection to 25 percent (for comparison, the mortality rate of SARS in 2003 was about 15 percent, and that of even the worst influenza substantially less). Then they jacked up the viral infectivity so that a few days into the fictional epidemic dozens of unrecognized cases already dot the globe. By the time Kate Winslet, who plays an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gets off her plane in Minneapolis, that city has enough brewing cases to fill a couple of football fields with hospital beds. A few weeks later, with disease exploding everywhere, the world’s social fabric begins to dissolve.
What follows is a series of gruesome worst-case scenarios, crumpling together every conceivable social and ethical complication of epidemic disease, for what boils down to a giant in-your-face public-service advertisement for the world’s beleaguered health agencies.
The medical details, including the rapid demise of several excellent actors (after some highly unrealistic foaming at the mouth) are the least of it.
We also experience, in short order, the downside of contact tracing, a time-honored epidemiologic term for figuring out who has touched whom — all privacy immediately disappears. Likewise, a forced quarantine, the major tool for fighting contagious disease, sacrifices individual rights for the public good. Competing governmental agencies square off on turf and budget issues, while entire countries adopt aggressively misguided routines.
We see gigantic public mood swings, amplified by Internet scares. Some people become irrationally terrified, others irrationally fearless. Many succumb to the lure of unlikely patent medicines. Unscrupulous entrepreneurs quickly appear, like maggots, to feed these instincts and to feed off them.
We see selfish and selfless behavior, often in the same person. We see unexpected scientific setbacks (“It’s mutated!”) and slow steps to ultimate control. All unfold against the eerie visuals of quarantine, with uncollected garbage lining deserted streets, empty public spaces, masked faces, isolated clusters of families reduced to a primitive, almost tribal existence.
And indeed, from AIDS to SARS to the swine flu, pretty much all of this has actually happened somewhere in the world, if on a much smaller scale.
But for all the relentless realism, much of the real drama of epidemic disease never quite makes it to the screen.
First, nowhere but in Hollywood does medicine, even in its most catastrophic form, unfold with the sustained hysteria that requires the beat of this unnerving, tympanitic score.
The real horror of most disease is that it all moves so slowly, leaving everyone involved all too much time to think. The worse the illness, the more time seems to drag.
And that is not only for relatives sitting in waiting rooms. At every medical ground zero, doctors and nurses pace and dither and second-guess themselves, waiting for tests to be done and results to dribble back, cursing when the IV falls out and struggling forever to put it back in, counting days and doses, watching trends. Patients do nothing but wait for the next footfall outside their door. Waiting is where much of the real drama of contagion lies. But you cannot make a movie out of that.
Further, while medical heroics may abound these days, characters like Ms. Winslet’s are vanishingly rare. Medicine has become a team sport, and public health even more so. It rumbles forward like any bureaucracy, creating policy in a series of endless meetings — deadly for narrative purposes. So character-driven screenplays like this one become parables, with cardboard characters standing in for what is really a nuanced cast of thousands.
Finally, pandemics are never everywhere. Even in the midst of history’s worst, ordinary life has always lurched on. Millions died from the flu in 1918, but many more millions were untouched. The early years of AIDS unfolded against a breathtakingly bland backdrop — the social equivalent of the crystalline blue sky on 9/11. Walk one block from hospitals on whose wards all hell is breaking loose and you would never know there is a problem.
The bizarre disconnect cocooning AIDS fueled an anger in affected communities that persists to this day. You cannot tell the story of AIDS without exploring the surrounding silence.
So artists seeking to represent the realities of epidemic disease have a difficult mission. The noise and action are only half the story. The rest is all very pedestrian and quiet.
The C.D.C.’s main spokeswoman during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic was Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of immunization and respiratory diseases. Dr. Schuchat, who has been with the agency for almost 25 years, has been involved with dozens of epidemics. She has the standard drills down cold — in fact, the creators of “Contagion” enlisted her to coach Ms. Winslet before filming began.
But in an essay published a few months ago in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology that reflected on the toll H1N1 took among pregnant women, Dr. Schuchat veered away from the usual story line.
“Pandemics are personal,” Dr. Schuchat began, going on to tell the story of her great-aunt Bessie, who was killed during childbirth by the 1918 flu. Bessie’s death resounded through generations of the Schuchat family, just one of the millions of quiet, necessary footnotes without which the big glitzy narratives are neither accurate nor complete.