Please respond to the following question:
Based on your experiences this year, what advice would you give yourself so that you have a better school year and not have to attend summer school again?
Thursday, July 21, 2016
Assignment #6: Are You Stressed?
Read the following article and respond to the prompt:
What Role Does Stress Play in Your Life?
School resumes today for many students after the holiday break. If you are one of them, do you feel rested and ready to return to classes, studying and all your other activities?
Or do you feel some degree of stress and/or anxiety as you get back into the swing of things? And if so, how common do you think it is for teenagers to feel that way?
In the Opinion essay “Is the Drive for Success Making Our Children Sick?” Vicki Abeles writes:
Respond to the following question:Stuart Slavin, a pediatrician and professor at the St. Louis University School of Medicine, knows something about the impact of stress. After uncovering alarming rates of anxiety and depression among his medical students, Dr. Slavin and his colleagues remade the program: implementing pass/fail grading in introductory classes, instituting a half-day off every other week, and creating small learning groups to strengthen connections among students. Over the course of six years, the students’ rates of depression and anxiety dropped considerably.But even Dr. Slavin seemed unprepared for the results of testing he did in cooperation with Irvington High School in Fremont, Calif., a once-working-class city that is increasingly in Silicon Valley’s orbit. He had anonymously surveyed two-thirds of Irvington’s 2,100 students last spring, using two standard measures, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. The results were stunning: 54 percent of students showed moderate to severe symptoms of depression. More alarming, 80 percent suffered moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety.“This is so far beyond what you would typically see in an adolescent population,” he told the school’s faculty at a meeting just before the fall semester began. “It’s unprecedented.” Worse, those alarming figures were probably an underestimation; some students had missed the survey while taking Advanced Placement exams.What Dr. Slavin saw at Irvington is a microcosm of a nationwide epidemic of school-related stress. We think of this as a problem only of the urban and suburban elite, but in traveling the country to report on this issue, I have seen that this stress has a powerful effect on children across the socioeconomic spectrum.Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our kids march through hours of nightly homework, daily sports practices and band rehearsals, and weekend-consuming assignments and tournaments. Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. Children living in poverty who aspire to college face the same daunting admissions arms race, as well as the burden of competing for scholarships, with less support than their privileged peers. Even those not bound for college are ground down by the constant measurement in schools under pressure to push through mountains of rote, impersonal material as early as preschool.Yet instead of empowering them to thrive, this drive for success is eroding children’s health and undermining their potential. Modern education is actually making them sick.
What, if anything, makes being an adolescent today more potentially stress-inducing than, say, in your parents’ and grandparents’ generations? Explain.
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
Assignment #5:Who are your sports heroes?
Read the article below:
Who Are Your Sports Heroes?
Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and the anchor to 10 Yankees championship teams, died on Tuesday at age 90. Seen here at Yankee Stadium in
Sam Falk/The New York Times
Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers, died on Tuesday at age 90. He was a Yankees legend, and a hero for many fans.
Who are your sports heroes? Why?
In “Yogi Berra, Yankees Hall of Fame Catcher With a One-of-a-Kind Wit, Dies at 90,” Bruce Weber writes:
Yogi Berra, one of baseball’s greatest catchers and characters, who as a player was a mainstay of 10 Yankee championship teams and as a manager led both the Yankees and Mets to the World Series — but who may be more widely known as an ungainly but lovable cultural figure, inspiring a cartoon character and issuing a seemingly limitless supply of unwittingly witty epigrams known as Yogi-isms — died on Tuesday. He was 90.The Yankees and the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center in Little Falls, N.J., announced his death. Before moving to an assisted living facility in nearby West Caldwell, in 2012, Berra had lived for many years in neighboring Montclair.In 1949, early in Berra’s Yankee career, his manager assessed him this way in an interview in The Sporting News: “Mr. Berra,” Casey Stengel said, “is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”And so he was, and so he proved to be. Universally known simply as Yogi, probably the second most recognizable nickname in sports — even Yogi was not the Babe — Berra was not exactly an unlikely hero, but he was often portrayed as one: an All-Star for 15 consecutive seasons whose skills were routinely underestimated; a well-built, appealingly open-faced man whose physical appearance was often belittled; and a prolific winner — not to mention a successful leader — whose intellect was a target of humor if not outright derision.That he triumphed on the diamond again and again in spite of his perceived shortcomings was certainly a source of his popularity. So was the delight with which his famous, if not always documentable, pronouncements — somehow both nonsensical and sagacious — were received.
Write a response to the following questions:
1. Who are your sports heroes? Why?
2. Why do you admire them?
3. Do you see them as role models off the field, as well as on? Why?
Monday, July 18, 2016
Assignment #4: What makes someone a hero?
Click on the link below to read the article:
http://nyti.ms/1KJGmwr
After you read the article come back to the post and write a response to the following questions:
1. What is a hero? What qualities do you look for in a hero? Does heroism always require physical strength, or can it be defined in other ways?
http://nyti.ms/1KJGmwr
After you read the article come back to the post and write a response to the following questions:
1. What is a hero? What qualities do you look for in a hero? Does heroism always require physical strength, or can it be defined in other ways?
2. Does heroism demand extraordinary circumstances, like a train attack or war? Or can heroism take place in our everyday lives? Can anyone be a hero?
Friday, July 15, 2016
Assignment #3: Teens & Risk-Taking
Myths About Teenagers and Risk-Taking
ADOLESCENCE
Lisa Damour writes about adolescent behavior.
Teenage risk-taking heats up in the summer. Studies show that during the summer months adolescents are most likely to experiment with first-time use of alcohol, marijuana and cigarettes. For car crashes, the perennial leading cause of death among teenagers, June, July and August hold the grim honor of being the three consecutive months with the most adolescent traffic fatalities.
These are alarming statistics, but a quick spin around the research gives parents reason to feel hopeful, not helpless. The emerging science on adolescent boundary-pushing debunks some old saws and shows us useful directions to point our energy. Here are some common misconceptions and illuminating findings.
Myth: We were better
Adults have long fretted about “kids today,” but on the whole our teenagers are much better behaved than we were. A report published last month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that, compared to adolescents in 1991, today’s teenagers are less likely to carry weapons, smoke cigarettes, try alcohol, binge drink or have sex. And they are more likely to wear seatbelts and use condoms.
The report found an increase in marijuana use since 1991, but not a statistically significant one. Other studies confirm a rise in adolescent pot-smoking, and teenagers face new threats such as e-cigarettes and high rates of prescription drug abuse. But we are now raising the tamest cohort of teenagers in decades.
We might want to go so far as to give teenagers credit for this, because how we regard and talk about adolescents matters. One study found that parents who took a dim view of teenagers were likely to raise adolescents who ultimately lived down to their parents’ expectations. The study’s results held up even when the researchers washed out the conduct of older siblings (who might have soured the parents on teenagers) and the behavior of the children in question before they entered adolescence. In other words, low expectations can do harm, while high expectations have long been linked to positive outcomes for teenagers.
Myth: Teens think they’re invincible
Studies show that adolescents feel as vulnerable as adults do. In fact, when we ask teenagers to predict the likelihood that they will be jailed or dead before the age of 20, they grossly overestimate the actual probability of such events. Why do adolescents take so many risks if they feel so unsafe? Research provides an answer that shouldn’t surprise any ex-teenager: For adolescents, the wish to impress their peers often trumps their better judgment.
In a study demonstrating this phenomenon, the psychologists Margo Gardner and Laurence Steinberg compared adolescents and adults as they played a video game that allowed for risky choices. When individuals from each group played by themselves, teenagers were nearly as cautious as adults. When playing in front of people their age, however, the teenagers became reckless, while the adults drove much as they did when alone.
A finding like this helps explain how graduated drivers’ licenses have helped to reduce the rate of adolescent car crashes. Laws that limit the number of passengers allowed in cars driven by teenagers accord with solid evidence that adolescents make better decisions when they’re alone or with an adult than when they’re with friends.
What are the takeaways for parents? To start, striking terror into teenagers with dire warnings about their safety may be unnecessary and even counterproductive. Indeed some researchers suggest that teenagers may act rashly, in part, “because of an exaggerated feeling that they are not going to live.”
As an alternative, we might address the hazards posed by peer pressure. In addition to asking our teenagers who they will be with and what they’ll be doing, we could consider saying, “We love your friends, but if things are getting out of hand, please call. We’re always available to get you out of any situation that feels like it’s heading south.”
Myth: Teens are immune to adult influence
Parents offering guidance shouldn’t be put off by the occasional teenage eye-roll. Research consistently finds that adults can capitalize on their relationships with teenagers to reduce adolescent risk-taking.
In broad terms, adolescents who have open lines of communication with their folks and describe their parents as available and understanding are less likely to engage in dangerous behavior. More specifically, teenagers whose parents talk with them about sex and contraception have been found to take fewer sexual risks, conform less to their peers’ behavior and believe that their parents provide the most accurate information about sex. Teenagers drive more safely when their parents reinforce driving curfews and other motor vehicle laws. And adults who establish and uphold rules tend to raise adolescents who are less likely to use illegal drugs and alcohol. While peers certainly influence teenage behavior, parents do, too.
Adults must live with the nerve-racking reality that we cannot absolutely guarantee the safety of any teenager. But we can make choices that promote adolescent safety. With so much at stake, let’s ditch the myths about teenagers and ground our parenting in the objective, and in many ways encouraging, realities.
"Teenagers, peers have more influence on them than their parents."
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Assignment #2: 33 Suspected of Overdosing on Synthetic Marijuana in Brooklyn
Click on the link and read the article: http://nyti.ms/29DceL9
Come back to the page and write a response to the following question:
Why do you think there is such an increase in the use of synthetic drugs and prescription medication by teens? Do you think anything can be done to stop it?
Come back to the page and write a response to the following question:
Why do you think there is such an increase in the use of synthetic drugs and prescription medication by teens? Do you think anything can be done to stop it?
Tuesday, July 12, 2016
Assignment #1: The Pleasure of 'Likes'
Click and open the link below:
Read the NY Times article and respond write a response to the following prompt:
According to the article:
For Teenagers, the Pleasure of ‘Likes’, By
Roni Caryn Rabin
For today’s teenager, it’s all about the “likes.” Based on your own experiences. Do you agree or disagree with what is being said in this article. Please answer in complete sentences and provide evidence to support your claim.
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