Science department teacher James Blount stands in his classroom on Oct. 21. At the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, Clarke Central High School began offering Epidemiology, a class focused on disease and transmission, a class that Blount is teaching in the first semester. “Medicine is obviously an important sector in our society, and as I think we’ve all learned the past few years, public health is extremely vital,” Blount said. “Even if you are just a citizen, you can understand it when, say, a pandemic happens. You can be more informed, and make more informed decisions about yourself and your loved ones.” Photo by Molly Harwell
CCHS began offering Epidemiology, a class about the science of disease and transmission, for the 2021-22 school year, allowing students to apply what they have learned to the pandemic.
According to the 2021-22 syllabus for the newly offered Epidemiology course, epidemiology is defined as “the study of the distribution, patterns and determinants of health and disease in populations.”
Starting at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, Clarke Central High School began offering the elective as a way to teach students about the science of disease, especially students interested in the medical field.
“I’d seen Epidemiology (as a course option), and I thought it was pretty fascinating,” science department teacher James Blount said. “I thought it would be practical and informative because I know we have people here (at CCHS) that want to go into medicine.”
According to Blount, the class is not widely offered as a high school science course due to the lack of resources available about epidemiology.
“(Epidemiology) seems to be a pretty new set of standards. It’s not something where there’s a lot of history, like with astronomy,” Blount said. “It’s very rare (that) I find other high schools that teach epidemiology, so it’s been a real learning experience in terms of the materials I have.”
According to senior Thomas Jones, taking epidemiology has helped him better understand the COVID-19 virus.
“(The class) helps us to understand what is going on, (with the pandemic) and what has gone on in the past to help us move forward. It helps me understand what I should be doing in order to prevent our situation from getting worse,” Jones said.
“(The class) helps us to understand what is going on, (with the pandemic) and what has gone on in the past to help us move forward. It helps me understand what I should be doing in order to prevent our situation from getting worse,”
— Thomas Jones,
senior
Blount says that he is looking forward to the rest of the year and is excited to dive into more discussions of relevant diseases.
“In the future, I’m hoping this class is going to be a class about COVID, but before that, we have one more unit that’s more pure epidemiology,” Blount said. “I want to look at cancer, as well, (so) hopefully, it’ll give some relevance, and then (students) can see Epidemiology as it’s applied.”
