When I was teaching 9th grade Biology, we talked about cancer briefly in the chapters about cell division, DNA and heredity, and other common places. We also talked about cancer in the nutrition chapter as we did projects on foods that can help reduce the risk of getting certain diseases. Students had to understand and explain what the disease was and how it worked before they could understand and explain how a food could help prevent or manage that disease.

My students had another project at one point in the year where they had to create a public service announcement about a certain disease and explain things like, causes, symptoms, treatments, etc. Some students were assigned different forms of cancer as their topic.

The last way we incorporated cancer into our class was through reading assignments. Students all had copies of a book about cancer and were assigned different sections for homework. The book was used to stimulate discussion about current issues in cancer research, policy, ethics, etc. Primary sources and outside novels can be a great way to introduce themes for discussion into a biology class and change it up from the standard textbook-driven, lecture-style class.