Texan Mosaic

*Editor’s note:  Photos were taken by students in COMM 1316 News Photography, including: Andrew Angelo, Esosa Iyengunmwena, Isabela Salas, Joshua Cantu, Noah Lopez, Sydney Oates, and Trista Stanley

With an evil smile, Kinesiology Department Chair and Professor Jon Marc Moore turns up the volume on his smart phone and it up high. Verse after verse… after verse …of a certain tune ring out inside classroom 116 in the Kinesiology Building. Moore knows it will stick in everyone’s head for hours.

“Baby Shark, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo….” 

But there’s a good reason for it.  It’s CPR training day in Moore’s KINE 1306: First Aid and Safety class.  The beat of that song, Moore says, offers the perfect rhythm for how fast to do CPR chest compressions.

With instructions listed on the wall, students clean their mannequins and move from station to station. There are adult, child, and infant mannequins on which to practice.

Student Yahaira Martinez says CPR is pretty easy because they’ve gone over the steps in class.

“But the only thing that’s hard,” she says, “is just like the adult compressions because the rib cage is a little bit stronger than the child’s and the infant’s.”

CPR is not the only first aid and safety topic students learn in this class. Next week, Moore says, students will learn how to help someone who’s choking.

“And then right after that,” he says, “we’ll go into the bleeding, severe bleeding, and I get a lot of people cringe in that one.”

Other topics include shock, diabetes, seizures, and stroke. In a couple of weeks, students will turn in a first aid kit for a grade.

Moore says a variety of students take this course.          

“Most of my students are going to be health care,” he says. “Radiology technology is my big one because they need that certification to get extra points on their application to try to get into their school.”

He says physical therapy assistants, surgical techs, and nursing students often take the class too. Martinez wants to be a physical therapy assistant or PTA. That’s one of the reasons she’s in the class.

“So, whenever I go into PTA I can already have that certificate,” she says.

The certificate she’s talking about is from the Red Cross. When students leave this class, Moore says they have the option to get their Red Cross certification. 

“So, they have to make an 80 or higher,” he says. “That’s American Red Cross standards to qualify. And then they have to pay the fee.  And then I can print the cards up here for them.”

Martinez  says she likes this class and calls it “beginner friendly”.

Student Kevin Nunez says he likes the class too. He is taking it because it’s required for the radiology tech program. CPR, he says, wasn’t as hard as he thought it was going to be to learn.

“But I feel like after learning it here in this class I would be able to use if I had to in order to help someone,”  he says.

In addition to practicing CPR, students practiced using an automated external defibrillator or AED. It’s used to help someone who may be having sudden cardiac arrest. 

Moore says he thinks everyone should have some type of first aid training. There are a lot of “neat skills” students can learn in this class, he says, that he hopes they never have to use.

“Because I don’t want to do CPR this afternoon,” he says. “If I’m doing CPR that means somebody’s in really bad shape. If I’m taking care of really severe bleeding, somebody’s in really bad shape. It’s good to know I can.  But don’t want to.”