Overall...

At first to be honest this was a class I looked at as a walk through easy A. What I found was that 1) I had to put in a good amount of effort to get an A which I expect to receive, and 2) I was poorly educated in the past about sex and STI prevention. Throughout the course though, I learned what I thought I was going to learn and a lot more. I think that the most effective ways of learning in this class were through the guest speakers and the movies that we watched. Just seeing things from so many different angles and from nations across the world really gave me a much better understanding about how STI and AIDS are such a huge issue globally. I wasn't expecting to learn much about TB which was my project. I pretty much knew nothing about what TB was before this project and now I feel like I could teach the class about it. TB is a huge disease world wide and the fact the myself and out group did a presentation on the subject, I think, opened a lot of eyes. the least useful thing that we did as a class was doing any reading. I think that from the presentations and slide shows from you, we had plenty of information to thinik and write about various topics. the readings were just repeating what you had already said in class. I think that in the future, reading should be more along the lines of watching movies outside, like out extra credit project. Something that is not material that we had just talked about that day or that week. Something new that we had a little background on and by watching a movie or some form of media, information can be retained better. I think that this is the most important time to teach these kinds of things. Maybe even earlier in peoples college career like freshman year. This is very important information and could potentially save lives. This information needs to get out and spread through college campuses world wide. I raelly enjoyed the class. One thing that I would change is to have more class interaction activities. learning through experiences either first hand or from other students first hand experiences are very moving. That is the sort of information that sticks with a student like me.

Living with HIV/AIDS

First off WOW! I was very moved and, to be honest, truely disturbed about some of the realities about contracting and living with HIV/AIDS. I found it hard sometimes to look and listen to Bob Skinner talk. What he did in his past is absolutely unacceptable. I understand that he was not 100% aware of his condition, but if you were doing what he was doing (I will not repeat what was said) and was aware of his condition, he would be serving a multiple life time sentence at a federal penitentiary. Anyhow, what I learned was that living under these sorts of conditions is extremely costly. I knew that the medications were expensive but I had no idea to what extent. It is suprising that people are even able to afford that and still be able to buy the necessary things to live. It is a question of quality of life vs. quantity of life. Bob's life is very different from an ordinary persons life who is HIV positive. One, he has to live with the burden that he has personally infected over 1000 people in his life time. Think about how many people they infected and how many people they infected and so on. The numbers are catastrophic. Also, what Bob has done with his life, post 2000 has be inspirational and educational nation wide. Not a lot of people have the guts to tell their story, especially one as dark as his to others for health preservation reasons. The fact the Mr. Skinner lived in a rural area he said it pushed him to be more permiscuous. In his rural condition it was very common to have heterosexual transmission. It is also very hard to educate people in these rural conditions. Which ended up being his demise. Living in rural conditions usually means that they have little money which means that levels of education and prevention methods are low or not at all. Living with AIDS is hard but possible and Mr. Skinner tought me that.