Choate students and faculty gathered this past week for a morning of education, activity, and fun. On Wednesday, January 16, the Choate Health Fair took place in the WJAC. The event brought the Choate population together to learn about a plethora of topics related to both physical and mental health. It was a day of both edification and entertainment, as students took an active role in the fair’s proceedings, which were divided into three sections: A lecture, a physical activity, and presentations from Choate’s Peer Educators and Assessment Team.
The lecture and physical activity sections of the day each had three different programs which students could select over the internet. The lecture topics were highly relevant to the details of teenage life; for example, one lecture was given about stress and time management, a subject which students at Choate understand all too well. The physical activity section’s three programs provided participants with a cardiovascular workout that was casual and fun, but still intensive enough to get their hearts pumping. Between cardio kickboxing, yoga, and dance sessions, there was enough of a variety to keep everyone involved.
The other section of the fair involved a fairly large selection of presentations from the Peer Educators and the Assessment Team. Teams of students had poster boards set up in the WJAC with information on many different health topics. This part of the event was set up almost like a science fair, as students walked around the WJAC and went up to exhibits that caught their eye. The students involved had to create these exhibits from scratch, based on only their own research and hard work. Peer Educator Sam Wheeler ’08, who with fellow Peer Educator Max Mullen ’08, created a presentation on A.D.D. medication, recalls how carefully he had to look over the details of his research: “One place where we ran into trouble was making sure we chose the right sources and got the right facts… The last thing we want to do as peer educators is give students the wrong information.” In order to ensure the attention and interest of attending students, many groups provided fun activities or rewards for participation. Charlotte McCurdy ’08, who worked on a presentation about nutritional supplements, remarked before the fair about her group’s method of pulling students in: “We’re going to let people play a game, and when they win, they get a gummy vitamin.” The students who ran the fair definitely tried their hardest to make the experience enjoyable for the attending students.
One of the student body’s biggest gripes with the Health Fair was the fact that it took place on the morning of a day off from school, forcing them to not only get up early, but to exercise and try to learn on a morning when they felt that they should have been sleeping in. The opinion of the people behind the fair, however, was that students would get a lot of entertainment out of it if they simply kept an open mind and a positive outlook. John Ford, who was a key figure in getting the day set up, said, “When you’re dealing with teenagers, it’s never your first choice to do something where you have to get them up in the morning… The reason why we chose this day to do it rather than another was because it was the week before Martin Luther King Day, a day off, meaning that it wasn’t in a particular crunch time.” McCurdy recalled her own experience with sleeping in too late on the morning of the last Health Fair, which took place three years ago: “I overslept and was late, so I decided to get breakfast at the school store… I bought Doritos and Swedish Fish, and ran off to my first lecture, which was called ‘What are you Missing? Breakfast.’ The person who gave the lecture ended up using me as an example for everything she said.” Despite her morning rush, McCurdy still said that “It ends up being an event where you get to hang out with everyone in the school, wander around, and learn by osmosis.”
This year’s Health Fair was put together largely from the efforts of Jim Yanelli, and Charlotte Davidson, the advisers of the Peer Educator program, who collaborated to organize the event and bring everyone involved together. Ms. Davidson noted the longevity of the project: “We began laying the groundwork for [the Health Fair] in October and November of the fall term… it’s a big process because it’s a big event for a lot of people.” One major decision that had to be made in planning and scheduling the proceedings was the split of the attending group into two smaller groups who went at different times. Mr. Yanelli said, “We needed to make the split in order to maximize space and to make sure that we had in-depth coverage of the events in order to do everything that we had set out to do.” There was also a crunch for time this year due to multiple home games occurring at the WJAC in the afternoon; however, it seems that the division in the attending students and faculty did the trick in avoiding any time conflicts.
Overall, this year’s Health Fair seems to have been a success. Most importantly, the event delivered on its promise to both educate and amuse students despite its somewhat early starting point. If it lives up to its predecessor, Choate underclassmen can look forward to another wonderful Health Fair in the future.
