How To Prevent Suicide Among Tweens | HuffPost

How To Prevent Suicide Among Tweens | HuffPost

How To Prevent Suicide Among Tweens

Suicide is the second leading cause of death for children ages 10 to 14, who are online more than ever before. A center in New Mexico is working to change that.

SANTA FE, N.M. ― As with most after-school clubs, the meeting inside Ortiz Middle School begins with kids bumping and jostling into a classroom. A boy with green hair grabs a bag of chips off a table, taking a seat next to a girl. He invites her to share the snack. Another student adjusts the tie-dye bandana she’s using as a headband and shows her friend a funny meme on her phone.

The adult advisers, Robert Kristy and Katrina Koehler, ask everyone to take a seat on the floor in a circle, assuring them that pizza has been ordered and will be delivered shortly.

Koehler asks, “So, on a scale of happy to crappy, how’s your suicide?”

Forget the volleyball team or chess club. This group, which has been meeting weekly since 2015, was formed in the spirit of Project Semicolon, an international movement that began when activist Amy Bleuel shared her mental health struggles on social media. “[E]veryone who self harms, is suicidal, depressed, has anxiety, is unhappy, going through a broken heart, just lost a loved one, etc. draw a semicolon on your wrist,” she posted to Twitter in 2013. “[A] semicolon represents a sentence the author could’ve ended, but chose not to. [T]he author is you and the sentence is your life.”

All over the world, people embraced the punctuation mark, with many acquiring real semicolon tattoos. The Sky Center, an independent mental health clinic that operates out of Ortiz Middle School, also adopted the semicolon for a suicide survivors group created as part of its effort to provide free, in-person support to a growing number of distressed young people.

For years, experts across the United States have been working to address the mental health crisis among teens and young adults. But a growing number of indicators suggest that the same emotional problems ― anxiety, depression and even suicide ― are affecting children at increasingly younger ages.

Even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there were worrying signs. The number of anxiety disorders diagnosed by health care providers in children as young as 6 has gone up 17% in just five years, according to the most recent data.

Self-injury, or intentional cutting, scratching, burning or hitting, has been measured as high as 30% in some populations of girls, with the age of onset around 12 or 13.

These intentional self-harming behaviors ― often separate from suicidal intentions ― have become so widespread that a new disorder, non-suicidal self-injury (NSSID), was added to the 2013 DSM-5.

Bark, an app that alerts parents when their children encounter worrisome content online, analyzed the online activity of more than a million tweens in 2019. A staggering 55% of CONTINUE READING: How To Prevent Suicide Among Tweens | HuffPost

Remote learning has been a disaster for many students - The Washington Post

Some children thrive in remote learning. - The Washington Post

Remote learning has been a disaster for many students. But some kids have thrived.

John was having some trouble in class.

The seventh-grader had been diagnosed with ADHD and a language disorder that makes processing verbal and nonverbal cues a challenge. Despite extra support he received through his Individualized Education Plan for students with disabilities, John often felt overwhelmed by the chaos of his middle school classroom.

“He just gets distracted,” said his mother, Alex, who spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld to protect her son’s privacy. “That’s his biggest issue.”

And then, suddenly, John was no longer in class. Like millions of other American schoolchildren, he was pushed into remote learning from home when the coronavirus pandemic hit this spring.

But something surprising happened. John did better learning remotely than he had in person, the opposite of the experience of most students. He even received a certificate from his school, in a suburb of Boston, for excellence in remote learning, something given to only a handful of students.

“He misses friends, obviously, but at the same time, I can tell that there was a huge change in his stress levels, and he was able to concentrate on his schoolwork,” said Alex. “He enjoyed learning again. Before, school was kind of tedious for him.”

Remote learning has been a struggle for teachers and is expected to set back the learning gains of a generation of students. It has been particularly hard on children of color, kids from families who are financially insecure, and those without access to computers and technology at home.

But a small number of students have done unexpectedly well. In some cases, those students struggled with distractions in the classroom during in-person learning. In others, they had social challenges at school: They were anxious, easily drawn into conflicts with other students, or embarrassed to engage in front of their peers.

“The challenge of in-classroom [learning] can be the social interaction. And for some kids, that’s actually really hard,” said Lynette Guastaferro, chief executive officer of Teaching Matters, a nonprofit that focuses on increasing teacher effectiveness.

Some educators are wondering how the experiences of kids who have done better during remote learning can be applied to improve in-person learning in the future. Takeaways might include having more social and emotional check-ins with students, increased inclusion of students with disabilities in general education class activities, wider use of technology, and accommodating unconventional techniques that individual students have found helpful.

“I know it’s a pandemic. I know it’s hellacious out there, I know it’s hard. I’m not saying it’s not all those things,” said Lauren Katzman, executive director of the Urban Collaborative, a national network of more than 100 school districts focused on improving outcomes for students with disabilities. “I am saying there are opportunities that we’re not thinking about clearly, and I want us to.”

For John, the freedom to work at his own pace and manage his own time, along with a few incentives, played key roles in his success. When Alex allowed him to play video games on weekdays (not allowed before the pandemic), he started to get more involved in planning his schoolwork for the week, and frontloaded assignments so that he could take off Fridays, and sometimes even part of the day on Thursdays.

“He just kind of did that on his own, and saw the value of not procrastinating, like he normally would,” said Alex.

Listening to music while he did his schoolwork was also important.

“He often said, ‘I wish I could do this in school; I bet I could do so much better, and I could concentrate better,’ ” said Alex.

Allowing students such as John to listen to music in a classroom is a simple accommodation a school could make in order for a student to learn better, according to Katzman. “It doesn’t cost anybody any money,” she said. “You don’t need any expertise in how to manage that. It’s a simple thing.” CONTINUE READING: Some children thrive in remote learning. - The Washington Post

Rebekah Ray: Florida Is the Worst Place to Be a Teacher | Diane Ravitch's blog

Rebekah Ray: Florida Is the Worst Place to Be a Teacher | Diane Ravitch's blog

Rebekah Ray: Florida Is the Worst Place to Be a Teacher

Rebekah Ray responded to another Florida teacher who complained the changes by the State Legislature has destroyed the promises made to him when he became a teacher. It’s method of evaluating teachers is one of the worst in the nation. If they don’t teach reading or math in grades 3-8, they are assigned ratings for students they never taught in subjects they never taught.

Ray writes:

I would not sign that evaluation. The first year Florida started its detrimental evaluation system I taught all 11th grade classes. I was asked to meet with the principal and the AP of curriculum (my evaluator) and was told I was a “Needs Improvement Teacher”. I was devastated because prior to that year, I had always received outstanding evaluations. I was also an NBCT teacher. Additionally, for that first year of the insane evaluation system, all teachers on campus who did not teach 9th and 10th grade were supposed to receive the school-wide VAM. I pointed out that I should have received the SW VAM scores because I taught all 11th grade students. The AP looked at me and said, “No, you have one 10th grade class.” At that point, my devil horns came out, and I CONTINUE READING: Rebekah Ray: Florida Is the Worst Place to Be a Teacher | Diane Ravitch's blog

Effective Remote Teaching Part 1: Tools of the trade | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Effective Remote Teaching Part 1: Tools of the trade | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Effective Remote Teaching Part 1: Tools of the trade

Like many teachers around the country, I am currently teaching my students in a room by myself. Remote teaching is very taxing. It takes me about five to ten times as long as it used to to prepare my lessons each day. At the end of the day my head is spinning from all the screen time and the lack of walking around. And the feedback that I’m used to getting, the energy I get back from seeing the students learn in person is replaced by students looking into a zoom looking equally struggling.

But if I’m going to do something in teaching, I want to do it as best as I’m able so I’ve taken the task very seriously and I’m hoping that I can share some of the methods I’ve come up with to be as effective a remote teacher as I can.

In this first post, I want to show you my setup. Every component of this setup is absolutely critical to me being able to do all the things I need to: teach, give feedback, get student input, and assess. I know that some teachers will not have access to all this technology and they will say they can’t afford to buy all this stuff. But hopefully many will be able to CONTINUE READING: Effective Remote Teaching Part 1: Tools of the trade | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

HARD PLUS INCONVENIENT DOES NOT EQUAL INEFFECTIVE – Dad Gone Wild

HARD PLUS INCONVENIENT DOES NOT EQUAL INEFFECTIVE – Dad Gone Wild

HARD PLUS INCONVENIENT DOES NOT EQUAL INEFFECTIVE

“That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.”
― William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace

Am I the only one that sees the irony in us planning to send kids back to school the same week as the President is diagnosed with the virus?

Or the irony that we are sending kids back to school because we feel we can keep them safe for 7 and half hours, but we are not allowing parents into sporting events because we can’t keep them safe for 3 hours?

Then there is the irony of spending 3 weeks focusing on SEL only to blow up any reaped benefits 6 weeks later in order to get back into school to satisfy some sort of political agenda.

It ain’t irony, but it’s still puzzling, we want to send kids back to school in an effort to “return to normalcy” while refusing to acknowledge that what they are returning to is going to be no more familiar then remote learning. Kids will arrive at a school where unscheduled bathroom breaks will not be permitted. If recess time is allowed, and playground equipment is used, equipment will need to be wiped down regularly. For many students, it’ll require remaining in the same room, while teachers rotate, for the majority of the day.

Interactions between kids will be limited. No small group studies. Computers will travel back and forth to school. Florida Virtual School will continue to remain the flavor of the day.

Right now, some of you are reading this and saying to yourself, “That’s not going to be my school. My principal has already told us, things for us are going to be as close to regular school as CONTINUE READING: HARD PLUS INCONVENIENT DOES NOT EQUAL INEFFECTIVE – Dad Gone Wild

CURMUDGUCATION: Covid Slide Panic Is Still Baloney

CURMUDGUCATION: Covid Slide Panic Is Still Baloney

Covid Slide Panic Is Still Baloney

Back in April, NWEA (the MAP test folks) issued a "report" about what we've taken to calling the Covid Slide, which is sadly not a cool new line dance, but is instead an important tool for people in education-flavored businesses who want to try to panic school districts and bureaucrats. Now Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) yesterday threw their weight behind this piece of scholastic chicken littling.

Let me remind you why you can still afford to be unimpressed.

First, even if you do not have first hand experience with NWEA's MAP test (I do--it's a lousy computer-delivered multiple choice test), you should always remember that one of their attempts to make some edu-bucks centers around their program that they promised can read minds by measuring how long it takes students to pick a multiple choice answer.

Second, you know that this "report" is baloney because it leans on that great imaginary measure, the "days of learning." Students during the pandemic will "lose" X number of days of learning. "Days of learning" is actually a measure that CREDO made up themselves, based on some "research" in a 2012 paper by Erik Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann. And if "days of learning" seems like a bizarro world way to measure of education (Which days? Days in September? Days in March? Tuesdays? Instructional days, or testing days, or that day we spent the afternoon in a boring assembly? And how does one measure the amount of learning in a day, anyway?)-- well, here's the technical explanation from that paper:

To create this benchmark, CREDO adopted the assumption put forth by Hanushek, Peterson, and CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Covid Slide Panic Is Still Baloney

THIS WEEK'S WILDNESS -Dad Gone Wild – Nobody reads it, everybody quotes it.

Dad Gone Wild – Nobody reads it, everybody quotes it.

THIS WEEK'S WILDNESS 

Dad Gone Wild 

Nobody reads it, everybody quotes it.

HARD PLUS INCONVENIENT DOES NOT EQUAL INEFFECTIVE

by TC Weber / 21h

“That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it. Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word.” ― William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace Am I the only one that sees the irony in us planning to send kids back to school the same week as the President is diagnosed with the virus? Or the irony that we are sending kid

GUTCHECK

by TC Weber / 1d

“[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir You would think that if a politician stood in front of a room full of microphones and made a pronouncement about pending dire outcomes, that the easiest question to answer after the announcement would be, where is the data to support your announcement? After all, if you a

LET’S SEE WHAT CREDO HAS TO SAY

by TC Weber / 3d

“Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.” ― Galileo Galilei One of my more pleasant discoveries si

A FIRING OFFENSE

by TC Weber / 4d

“No matter what happens in the world, however brutal or dystopian a thing, not all is lost if there are people out there risking themselves to document it. Little sparks cause fires, too.” ― Tomasz Jedrowski, Swimming in the Dark The field of student assessments is a complex one. Its a field heavily reliant on high level math, complex algorythm, and a deep understanding of subject matter. Used pr

DOES IT EVER STOP?

by TC Weber / 7d

“Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.” ― Patti Smith One might have thought that three days of posts on education practices and policies in Tennessee would suffice, they would be wrong. Today I turn away from the Circus of Illusions being crafted by the Tennessee Department of Education and it’s erstwhile leader, Penny Schwinn. The leaving out of the honora

DID THE GOVERNOR COMMISSION A BIRD?

100+by TC Weber / 8d

“Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach, and general wr

REPRESENTATIVE MARK WHITE’S INCREDIBLY FANTASTIC PROM DATE

by TC Weber / 9d

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” ― Anton Chekhov Yesterday Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn made a long-anticipated appearance before the Tennessee House Education Committee as part of their Summer study. Luckily she had Memphis State Representative and Education Committee Chairman Mark White to serve as her escort for the affair. White

WHAT’S LEFT WHEN THERE ARE NO GOOD OR BAD CHOICES?

by TC Weber / 10d

“I don’t feel very much like Pooh today,” said Pooh. There, there, said Piglet. I’ll bring you tea and honey until you do.” – A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh “You are either the sort of person who shapes society, or the sort of person whose life is affected by the shape of society.” ― Rumaan Alam, Rich and Pretty Like most parents in Nashville, last week was one fraught with a choice – to remain virt

PROCEED AT YOUR OWN PERIL

by TC Weber / 14d

“When the whole world is crazy, it doesn’t pay to be sane.” ― Terry Goodkind, The Pillars of Creation “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it” ― D.L. Moody It was about 7, or a little after, as we made o

Dad Gone Wild – Nobody reads it, everybody quotes it.