Making it count

Yesterday I enjoyed discussing The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks with a group of faculty members, and today I'm wearing a bit of white gauze over the spot where a nurse drew blood during the annual Wellness Screening. I'm seeing these little patches of white gauze all over campus--call it the White Badge of Wellness.

Our campus theme this year is Health and Wellness, which explains the choice of Henrietta Lacks for our common reading. Few students attended the reading discussions, but it was great to get together with colleagues and talk about medical and journalistic ethics, informed consent, and other hot topics.

Today's hot topic is how we can get more students interested in reading and discussing books outside of classes, but I don't know how to do that without somehow making it mandatory--or making it "count," as the students say. Here's a scary fact: when I asked a group of nine junior and senior English majors what interesting thing they'd read over the summer, three were unable to come up with a title.

Can we motivate academic wellness the way we motivate physical wellness? Our wellness program requires participants to fill out a health survey and participate in a health screening every year; the college receives anonymous composite information while the specific results go only to the employee. Participants who complete the wellness screening and log at least 150 wellness points (one wellness point = one half hour of exercise or other wellness activities, such as Weight Watchers meetings or smoking cessation classes) earn a $100 bonus at the end of the year. That's just enough motivation to get a whole bunch of my colleagues off their butts and up into the rec center.

So if busy faculty members are willing to exercise because it counts for something, we ought to find a way to encourage students to read books unrelated to classes by making it count. But how? That's the question many of us are discussing today.