1 . Mental Health Crisis Among Teens Demands a New Approach

Since the CDC released its survey results last month showing alarmingly high rates of sadness and depressive thoughts among teens, fingers have been pointed from two sides at the causes of this crisis.     1    . Others say that today’s more secular(世俗的)culture has confused our most vulnerable young people. But neither side seems to grasp the true urgency of the issue.

According to the CDC’s findings, more than one in five of the 17,000 high school students surveyed reported mental breakdown. Their rates of sadness and hopelessness are the highest in a decade, reflecting an increasing trend exacerbated by society’s isolation(隔离)and stress.     2    .

Parents as well as teachers and others who have direct contact with children must accept this preventive approach. It is crucial that they not be afraid to ask direct questions about depressive thoughts.     3    . It is also especially important that parents understand what help is available to their children.

    4    . For example, we can demand equity equality, which means insurance coverage(保险范围)for behavioral illnesses health issues that is for physical , thus reducing the financial burden. We can also urge our congressmen to fund health programs and expand mental health professions.     5    . Put the politics aside. There are lives in the balance.

Stop Asian Hate

During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City saw a sharp increase in harassment and violence against Asian people and communities, especially Asian elders. Discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, age, and disability, including having or     1     (perceive) to be exposed to COVID-19, is illegal under the Human Rights Law.    2    the start of the pandemic, there has been a significant, troubling increase in anti-Asian hate crimes and bias incidents. These have been verbal attacks, physical and even things like the tragic shooting of eight Asian-American spa technicians in Atlanta, Georgia. Beginning in February of 2020, we received a sevenfold increase in reports of anti-Asian harassment, discrimination, and violence. It is crucial to note that hate crimes and bias incidents have been found to be vastly under-reported     3    these numbers reflect just a fraction.

We all want to live in a world that is free from prejudice and    4    everyone has the right to be proud of who they are. Unfortunately, this is a pretty tough ask. We’ve joined forces with other establishments to bring you some resources of the movement of Stop Asian Hate,     5    the aim is to an end to the rising tide of racism against east and south east asian (ESEA) people.

Since the pandemic, something has been made nasty in the media by comments from Donald Trump calling it “the China virus”, and ESEA people all over the world have found that their lives have been turned upside down. In the wake of the tragic deaths in the US and several studies     6    (reveal) the real increase of racism against this minority, the Stop Asian Hate movement started a conversation about what is going on. You can find out all about it on this website, and get resources and support to help you if you are dealing with the impacts     7    racism.

Working towards a world where no racism exists is always important to us, and will always be something     8    need to strive towards. The thing is, a lot of conversations around racism fail to distinguish between the multiple groups of people who are affected, and the issues     9     (face) by ESEA people will be completely different to other people of colour.

    10    the growth of attacks and hate crimes still on the rise, we want to give you the tools to be able to understand the value and necessity of our voice, and how to stand up and fight back.

4 . The “reading wars,” one of the most confusing and disabling conflicts in the history of education, went on heatedly in the 1980s and then peace came. Advocates of phonics (learning by being taught the sound of each letter group) seemed to defeat advocates of whole language (learning by using cues like context and being exposed to much good literature).

Recent events suggest the conflict of complicated concepts is far from over. Teachers, parents and experts appear to agree that phonics is crucial, but what is going on in classrooms is not in agreement with what research studies say is required, which has aroused a national debate over the meaning of the word “phonics.”

Lucy M. Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and a much-respected expert on how to teach reading, has drawn attention with an eight-page essay. Here is part of her argument: “The important thing is to teach kids that they needn’t freeze when they come to a hard word, nor skip past it. The important thing is to teach them that they have resources to draw upon, and to use those resources to develop endurance.”

To Calkins’s critics, it is cruel and wasteful to encourage 6-year-olds to look for clues if they don’t immediately know the correct sounds. They should work on decoding — knowing the pronunciation of every letter group — until they master it, say the critics, backed by much research.

Calkins’s approach “is a slow, unreliable way to read words and an inefficient way to develop word recognition skill,” Mark S. Seidenberg, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, said in a blog post. “Dr. Calkins treats word recognition as a reasoning problem — like solving a puzzle. She is committed to the educational principle that children learn best by discovering how systems work rather than being told.”

Many others share his view. “Children should learn to decode — i.e., go from print on the page to words in the mind — not by clever guesswork and inference, but by learning to decode,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, told me. He said the inferences Calkins applauds are “cognitively (认知地) demanding, and readers don’t have much endurance for it. … It disturbs the flow of what you’re reading, and doing a lot of it gets frustrating.”

Yet a recent survey found that only 22 percent of 670 early-reading teachers are using the approach of phonics and what they mean by phonics is often no more than marking up a worksheet.

Both sides agree that children need to acquire the vocabulary and background information that gives meaning to words. But first, they have to pronounce them correctly to connect the words they have learned to speak.

Calkins said in her essay: “Much of what the phonics people are saying is praiseworthy,” but it would be a mistake to teach phonics “at the expense of reading and writing.”

The two sides appear to agree with her on that.

8 . Both misinformation, which includes honest mistakes, and disinformation, which involves an intention to mislead, have had a growing impact on teenage students over the past 20 years. One tool that schools can use to deal with this problem is called media literacy education. The idea is to teach teenage students how to evaluate and think critically about the messages they receive. Yet there is profound disagreement about what to teach.

Some approaches teach students to distinguish the quality of the information in part by learning how responsible journalism works. Yet some scholars argue that these methods overstate journalism and do little to cultivate critical thinking skills. Other approaches teach students methods for evaluating the credibility of news and information sources, in part by determining the incentive of those sources. They teach students to ask: What encouraged them to create it and why? But even if these approaches teach students specific skills well, some experts argue that determining credibility of the news is just the first step. Once students figure out if it’s true or false, what is the other assessment and the other analysis they need to do?

Worse still, some approaches to media literacy education not only don’t work but might actually backfire by increasing students’ skepticism about the way the media work. Students may begin to read all kinds of immoral motives into everything. It is good to educate students to challenge their assumptions, but it’s very easy for students to go from healthy critical thinking to unhealthy skepticism and the idea that everyone is lying all the time.

To avoid these potential problems, broad approaches that help students develop mindsets in which they become comfortable with uncertainty are in need. According to educational psychologist William Perry of Harvard University, students go through various stages of learning. First, children are black-and-white thinkers—they think there are right answers and wrong answers. Then they develop into relativists, realizing that knowledge can be contextual. This stage is the one where people can come to believe there is no truth. With media literacy education, the aim is to get students to the next level—that place where they can start to see and appreciate the fact that the world is messy, and that’s okay. They have these fundamental approaches to gathering knowledge that they can accept, but they still value uncertainty.

Schools still have a long way to go before they get there, though. Many more studies will be needed for researchers to reach a comprehensive understanding of what works and what doesn’t over the long term. “Education scholars need to take an ambitious step forward,” says Howard Schneider, director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University.