Warning Signs of Teen Suicide and Shakespeare
On Shakespeare’s birthday, April 23, 1564, we need to examine just how brilliant his insights are to today’s education.
As a fairly new teacher with a few years of experience in the early 1970s, I was struck by a list of “Ten Warning Signs of Teen Suicidal Behavior” that were put on view in both the offices of our school nurse and our counselors. For the first time, big name universities had researched and published these lists to be distributed in high schools across the nation. These lists and sites are now commonplace, and the number of warning signs vary.
At that time I was completing a teaching a unit on Romeo and Juliet to high school freshmen. I was astonished to see that recent research and list.
I took several of these lists and posted them in my classroom. For one day I had each class search for the signs in Romeo and Juliet which was written and performed in 1599.
Nine of the ten signs from that list were discovered in Shakespeare’s plays. The intense interest of each class, regardless of their ability level placement, was astonishing. They Warning Signs of Teen Suicide and Shakespeare | Reclaim Reform:
