The inundation of corporate media advertising and corporate-sponsored programming also play a major role in how young people learn to see themselves and the world. (Morrell, p. 158)

The media affects everyone, even adults, but it has a much greater and more detrimental effect on the students we teach.

Just last week, a student showed me a Youtube video of a group of guys making a multi-layered brownie cake filled with a liquid bacon milkshake, topped with whipped cream, that weighed in at over 80,000 calories. And then… they ate it.

From the students’ point of view, this makes it okay for them to have horrible eating habits. Suppose one of my students looks up to these guys and wants to be like them when they grow up? There goes their cholesterol. The unfortunate thing is that since the media is all around us we cannot do anything about it to prevent it from brainwashing them. We have a responsibility to get through to our students in a way that they know to make decisions by themselves, but the right decisions. This applies to their everyday lives too. If they see violence on TV, they might think that it is okay to be violent in real life. This actually reminds me of an assignment I did for another class in which I asked myself the question: how can we stop the damaging aspects of the media from reaching our students?

**title credit: Jim Morrison**