Myers Park Hoofprint

The Myers Park High School Newspaper

Education

The Important of SEL and Mental Health

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Mental health hasn’t always been a priority among students compared to physical health. In reality, it is just as important. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in six youth in America from ages 6-17 experience a mental health disorder each year. Half of all mental health conditions start by age 14. The most commonly diagnosed mental disorders in children are ADHD, anxiety, behavior problems, and depression. When mental illnesses become undiagnosed or untreated, they can significantly interfere with a student’s ability to learn.

CMS’s approach to mental health education in school is in the form of Social Emotional Learning, or shortened to SEL. “Social and emotional learning is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions,” says the CMS website. There are essentially five pillars of SEL, Self-Awareness,”knowledge of emotions, thoughts and their impact on behaviors; cognizance of strengths and weaknesses, Self-Management- “regulation of emotions, behaviors, and thoughts across circumstances,” Responsible Decision Making- “ability to make positive decisions about behaviors and socialization based on ethics, values, norms,” Relationship Skills- “ability to establish and maintain diverse, healthy relationships,” and Social Awareness- “empathy for others; appreciating,” from the CMS website. 

The many benefits of the SEL Instruction include an increase in students’ performance academically by 11 percentile points, a 50% increase in the likelihood of graduating high school, a doubled chance in the likelihood of earning a college degree, and an improved positive attitude toward peers and self, as well as reduced aggression and emotional distress. 

School and its environment offer an opportunity to spot these mental health illnesses and work towards prevention and intervention where they already are. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, in an educational setting, students are almost as likely to receive resources and support for mental health as they are to receive speciality treatment from a mental health provider. In a recent study in 2019, 15% of youth between the ages of 12 and 17 were found receiving mental health services at school, compared to 17% who saw specialty health providers. On the flip side of these statistics, educational systems often lack the resources to deal with the issue accurately. More often than not, these counselors and other staff individuals are drowning in huge caseloads where kids fall through the cracks. 

One of the most important aspects of tackling the effects of mental health illnesses is understanding these are common problems and usually begin during childhood and adolescence. On the positive side, these illnesses are treatable through different techniques to not hinder students’ academic understanding. Taken from the Association for Children’s Mental Health, “early detection and intervention strategies work. They can help improve resilience and the ability to succeed in school and life.”

Classroom learning and social interactions can be affected by mental health disorders, both of which are crucial to students’ success. According to the Association for Children’s Mental Health, if appropriate aid is put into place to support students’ mental health needs, schools can maximize the success and minimize the negative impacts on youth. When choosing between the various types of support and services to put in place, it is critical to understand that all learners come with unique and different coping mechanisms and needs. Mental health interventions brought on by schools need to be situated based on the individual needs of each youth and be flexible enough to accommodate more or less support as needed. The Social and Emotional Learning portion of CMS’s curriculum aims to achieve those goals and help support all students in need. 

Education in a Post-Covid World

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Most Americans would agree that COVID-19 has affected many aspects of their lives. One of these aspects has been in the spotlight since the very beginning: education. After over a year of virtual learning,  the return to in-person learning was not a smooth transition for  many students and teachers.  For some teachers, lesson plans have had to be switched back and forth between a virtual and in-person setting since March 2020. During full-remote learning , teaching was difficult. Carefully planned lessons were met with black screens, internet instability, and plenty of incomplete– or worse, unattempted– assignments. 

Virtual learning started a trend that has transformed conventional lesson formats. Teachers nationwide had to find new, more flexible methods to engage with students. These unique strategies derived from online learning have also managed to significantly benefit in-person learning. Kate Lee, director of choirs at a local Park Ridge, Illinois, high school, had to cancel four choir concerts due to the Coronavirus. With conventional curriculum not being an option, she decided to assess her students another way. She asked her classes to select a personally meaningful song to perform. The community had a high number of immigrants, and Kate was moved by the unique songs. “Lee decided that going forward, she won’t just assign music and teach students how to perform it,” Reporter Marcella Bombardieri wrote for Politico.  Kate Lee’s story is just one of many examples of educators discovering the difference between assignments and learning. Lessons are being rethought like never before, making up for the lost year of unproductive online-learning by emphasizing the importance of the personal aspect that so many of us missed during the quarantine period. 

After learning online  for so long, many students feel relieved to be back to in-person education. However, virtual learning may be here to stay. A poll conducted by Politico and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shared that 29 percent of parents want their child to be in a remote or hybrid learning plan for the coming school year.  RAND Corporation’s survey of school districts revealed that by the fall of 2020, one out of five schools were either actively planning or considering implementing a virtual learning program post-COVID. There are hundreds of reasons why students may be choosing an online educational system instead of an in-person one. To name a few, virtual learning can better accommodate students who have young children, disabilities, jobs, or do not have access to transportation. Generally, online learning eliminates the physical obstacles that the average American student may face with regard to commute and availability. It is also simply just an easier way for some students to learn.

For those students who do return to school, they may come back to better buildings. Biden’s budget for the 2022-23 year proposes $102.8 billion in funds for K-12 schools. This is nearly a 30 million dollar increase from our previous education budget. And schools are certainly in desperate need of the money. The Government Accountability Office found that nearly 4 out of 10 of America’s school districts have poor air quality and circulation (correlated to air conditioning and/or ventilation systems). Studies show that poor air quality harms  academic performance. Additionally, Covid-19 is an airborne virus, so poor air circulation indoors is an obvious health hazard. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of building quality, and the influx of government funds will likely show some much needed improvements in public schools across the country. 

The pandemic, in addition to its other devastations, deconstructed our educational systems. In the process, it has called attention to the faults of the system. Now, educators, politicians, and students are working together to make schooling more productive than ever.

Annotations: Good or Bad?

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The most frequently complained-about component of high-level English classes, such as AP Language and Composition, AP Literature, and IB Literature, is without a doubt the annotations. The overly-structured process that students are forced to follow limits them from being able to fully engross themselves in and enjoy a piece of literature. 

For example, in IB literature courses, it is mandatory that students find three levels of annotations on each page: an example of craft, why that example is significant to the novel, and how it relates to a greater significance or theme of the novel. These requirements sometimes triple the amount of time that annotating would typically take, depending on the speed and quality of the annotations, and they cause students to be unable to immerse themselves in a story. It requires students to constantly stop and scour the page for an example of figurative language to highlight and connect. How are students supposed to relate to the characters’ emotions and the author’s thought process when they need to stop and highlight for central oppositions on every page? Often, these annotations end up being procrastinated as a result of their arduousness and subsequently rushed in order to get a good grade rather than to fully understand a text. An IB junior commented, “I think that having to write annotations in such a structured way limits a student’s creative thinking process and makes students annotate for quantity instead of quality. We only worry about the annotations rather than truly understanding the book.” The process of annotating makes students dislike the books they are required to read, purely off on the basis of the meticulous annotations that must be done with it. Is being completely disinterested in a book an appropriate price to pay when the actual intent of annotating is to introduce students to the love of the written word on a deeper level? 

However, there are some instances when students can enjoy annotations. In AP Language and Composition, students complete metacognitive logs for every passage they read and have to find multiple quotes supporting possible inferences they have about the text. This form of annotation is more personal to the writer and is, therefore, more well-liked by more students. Additionally, in AP Literature, students are given a list of motif and themes to center their annotations around but are primarily able to personalize them to their interpretation. A senior in the class commented, “It’s a pretty good way to annotate because it gives us some guidance but also a lot of freedom to analyze the books from our own perspective.”

In theory, yes, annotating is very helpful to understanding the deeper meanings of a text. However, when actually forced upon unwilling students, annotating does more harm than good. It causes students to resent the process of analyzing a piece of literature that they may love if done on their own terms. Instead of being required to annotate for specific components, students should be able to annotate for what they find to be significant. If completed in this way, students would be able to focus on actually understanding a text rather than just writing something down on each page. Overly-structured annotations are taxing and burdensome to students, and should not be a part of class curriculums. 

It is safe to say that if a student in their junior or senior year of high school is asked about their English class, whether that be IB, AP, or Honors, they will most likely mention annotations at least once. Over the years, annotations have become a bigger and bigger portion of Myers Park’s English curriculum. Although more than a few students would argue against this shift, it takes up large amounts of time and seems tedious, but these annotations actually help students understand what they are reading past the level of knowing the plot. It allows them to gain insight into the author’s intentions and technique while also gaining a new appreciation for the intricacy and mastery of literary works.  

Take IB English, for example. IB English classes have adopted a method they call “three-level annotating”. A student must first identify a literary device: imagery, tone, diction, etc., then explain how that literary device contributes to the progression of the work, and finally discuss what theme or “universal human truth” that technique is presenting to the reader. This process, although it can seem long, is actually a very efficient and helpful method of finding a deeper meaning within a text. By finding this deeper meaning, a student can begin to understand the work beyond just the actions happening within. This can allow a student to start to understand the intricate concepts and pieces that go into creating a literary work with substance and meaning. It is also teaching students how to search for these devices and buried meanings on their own with any text they are reading. The hope for many of these English teachers is that their students will continue to use these reading techniques outside of the classroom and give them a new appreciation for reading. 

AP Literature and Language also have similar methods. In AP Literature, students must find evidence and quotes within the text to prove an inference they have made about the work while in AP Language the students are given a list of motifs and symbols to annotate for. While these techniques are much less structured than the techniques used in IB, the basis is still there: students are still being forced to look deeper into a text and gain insight that would have been looked over otherwise. 

One of the stronger arguments against this process of annotating is that it tarnishes the work for students, not allowing them to enjoy the work they are reading and therefore pushing them farther away from an appreciation of literature. In some cases, this may be true, but in other cases annotating can actually bring a student closer to a work. If a student is struggling with understanding the appeal of a novel or a poem, that appeal can come from the analysis of the work. If the student is able to see the deeper levels that make up the work or to comment on the strategic use of literary devices, they may be able to connect with the text they had felt unattached to. For students who are not as interested in English and literature, the search for patterns within a work may be more appealing than trying to sit down and read with no guidance. People who tend to lean more towards math are able to impart the use of patterns and formulas to understand a work, making the process more enjoyable and the text easier to understand. 

While these points in no way apply to every student and their experience with annotations, that does not mean the importance and value of annotating should be discredited. Annotating can give students access to a deeper meaning within a text, a new appreciation for literature, and reading skills that will continue to benefit them throughout college and into their adult life. Should we sacrifice all of that just because the process is tedious?