Know your students! This is just High School students, but they surveyed about 15K of them across the nation. With all the other problems in fixing the “process and means” of education, it seems like sort of piling on to study who the actual students are, what their lives are like, what behaviors they engage in.
As with most tragedies, we respond to these high attempted suicide rates viscerally. Or I think we do anyway. We have already seen those numbers for DAC and NM as very high. In this study, which does include breakouts for ethnicity, gender etc, I saw somewhere in this mass of statistics that hispanic females in HS attempted, not just thought about, suicide at a rate of about 13.5%.
Maybe I don’t understand something here, but to me that’s an astounding statistic, and represents an enormous failing by whoever is supposed to be taking care of these kids, whether it’s the parents, the schools, the community, the government, employers, siblings etc.
The kids themselves have some responsibility for the situation, although exactly how far that responsibility extends is hard to know. Teens are an in between group, not still totally children, and not yet fully adults. One wants to assume that teens would choose “life” if there was a modicum of hope in their lives; and we’d also want to know how/why they are making such dysfunctional choices. Some of it is just normal considering the rapid changes and adjustments of teenage life, but geeze, not at those levels.
Learning is a holistic endeavor involving the whole person, and what is going on with someone during a “learning event” is going to have a definite effect on what gets learned and what doesn’t. And we should note that learning doesn’t “count” unless it is incorporated into the person in such a way that they now carry that changed awareness and capability around with them…IOW in more than just a temporary and superficial way, such as might show up on a short term and standardized assessment.
So yes.
Apparently there is a total word count limit to a comment…as part of mine disappeared when I posted it. Probably had said enough anyway. Basically I was noting that everything that is going on from the macro environment such as economy, to the micro environment such as health and homelike, is going to be part of the learning equation. And that’s tough to deal with, it’s such a big job it will never be fully accomplished. We won’t achieve utopia, but these massive efforts by our society are about something very very important. It’s not something that can be ignored or put in a category of an optional expense. Hopefully, online education will be a powerful tool to help move the needle off the redline for many of these kids.