Introduction
It is tempting to start this unit with a pun about teenagers and their hormones. Just the word “hormonal” brings to mind a very particular, mercurial temperament. When I ask my students what a hormone is they have very little to say other than it is “the stuff in our bodies that makes me grow up.” They are not wrong—hormones do play a crucial role in our development from infant to teenagers to adulthood. A simple flip through the senior baby photo section of the yearbook is enough to confirm the incredible metamorphosis the human body goes through as it matures.
However, hormones are more than mystical compounds responsible for human transfiguration or the inevitable teenage mood swing. They do not disappear after puberty and their impact is greater than facilitating the growth of hair in places where there was no hair before. This system of connected chemical signals, released by the endocrine system, oversees the various complexities of our bodies—it ensures that we have enough water in our blood, controls our sleep cycles, helps us build muscle, and even causes that sinking feeling in our stomach when we realize that we’ve overslept and missed an important meeting. I would argue that the endocrine system is the most important physiological system our bodies possess.
Why, then, is this system often one of the first dropped from the study of secondary school anatomy and physiology? It certainly isn’t because of its lack of relevance. Endocrine related topics are scattered through-out the news—diabetes, obesity, and even news stories about gender reassignment therapies pop up in newsfeeds alongside stories of athletes abusing androgen steroids like testosterone or supplementing their training regimen with growth hormone. Small, street side placards claim to be able to boost waning energy of men with Low-T and everyone knows someone who is going through menopause.
The simple truth is that tackling the endocrine system is daunting for student and teacher alike. There is no easy way to approach this topic—it isn’t centralized like the brain or connected like the digestive system. The endocrine system is a tangled web of pathways that amplify and antagonize and disrupt one another in just the right pattern to leave us in a precarious balance, much like an intricate pattern of dominoes. Tip just one, even by accident, and the whole mess comes tumbling down.
This curriculum unit was written to fulfill a gaping hole in my own understanding of endocrinology in order to better teach my students. The following document presents a survey of how the various factors of the endocrine system work together to maintain homeostasis and how disruption can cause disease. While it is written for high school students, there are pieces that are applicable in to courses at any level that consider the function of the human body.
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