Learn the Facts, Burn the Fat: Newcomers and Obesity in America
July 25, 2005
Students at Northwestern High School, working with adults from the University of Maryland, have created a flash movie that describes the changes in their diet after they immigrated from Africa, Asia, or Latin America to Prince George's County, MD. The movie is funny, but it's serious, too: the obesity epidemic is costing lives.
Posted by Prince Georges at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)
an oral history of desegregation
May 02, 2005
Northwestern High School in Hyattsville, MD was racially segregated until Bill Thomas became its first African American student in 1955. Some of today's Northwestern students interviewed Mr. Thomas and many other eye-witnesses to uncover the story of desegregation at their school. View their animated presentation and then proceed to see a timeline, interview summaries, and a discussion guide.
Posted by Prince Georges at 04:03 PM | Comments (15)
fast food
May 02, 2005
Some faculty and graduate students at the University of Maryland have been teaching students at Northwestern High School to investigate the causes of obesity in their community. The students are taping interviews of fellow youth and will create an audio segment for this website to publicize their research results. To give them some data to work from,
we surveyed all the students in the school's health classes. The response rate was poor, because students had to bring in parental permission slips before they could complete the survey.
Nevertheless, we received enough surveys to draw tentative statistical conclusions. Here is a suprising one. None of the 17 kids who said that they ate fast food every day are overweight (according to their self-reported combination of height and weight). However, 43% of those who said they eat "hardly any" fast food are considered clinically overweight.
What's going on? Maybe a lot of kids are mistaken or dishonest, but it's strange that the relationship between fast food and body weight would be so linear and negative. The sample is too small for serious statistical analysis, but we noticed that immigrant kids are more likely to eat fast food, yet less likely to be overweight. So maybe immigrants eat good food at home but go out a lot to McDonalds.
There are more possible explanations. For instance, the Washington Post's "Kid's Post" section reported that young people order less healthy food at restaurants like Outback Steakhouse and Red Lobster than they do at fast-food places. So maybe it's good to go to McDonalds if it keeps you from ordering the "surf and turf" at a sit-down restaurant. we don't know, but the students are busy asking research questions.
Posted by Prince Georges at 01:53 AM | Comments (0)
asset mapping
May 01, 2005
"Asset mapping" means collecting information about the unusual, valuable, and interesting people, businesses, projects, or places in a community. In 2002, Professor Derek Thompson, a University of Maryland Geographer, wrote a plan for us that described how the assets of Prince George's County could be comprehensively mapped. See this PDF document for his report. Over the next year, students at Northwestern High School used interviews and other forms of research to identify and map our local assets. They made preliminary maps of the following communities:
(Please note that the information on these maps is dated and may not be accurate.)
Posted by Prince Georges at 04:43 PM | Comments (1)
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