We are thankfully seeing COVID more or less in the rear view mirror now. But I have been seeing articles like these over the past few months and I though they bring up interesting things to talk about.
The best thing about my own time at school where my friends, the worst thing where other classmates! If I could have ghosted a good 20% of the kids at my school: mean girls, bullies, parasites who just copied my homework and didn’t contribute, I would have been far happier. The pressure of getting good grades and EC accomplishments where also noted. I guess that the difference distance learning made was the reduced opportunity’s to compare with peers and taking on more than you really want? Doing exercise and hobbies, of course , has mental health benefits.
People often don’t realize the stress that peer pressure can bring. I have long felt that much of the uptick in mental health problems was due to increasing competitiveness of the social hierarchy nowadays–which is increasing because of social media (ie more likes = more popular).
In my opinion, many parents would be wise to homeschool their kids if their kids are socially unpopular.
My friend had a seventh grade daughter during the lockdown. She said that while the lockdown was hard on her D in many ways, it did keep her D from going through some of the difficulties many girls experience at that age. I heard other stories of kids being depressed because they felt so isolated.
I see teens almost every day. I worked with many of them remotely during lockdown. Since 2020, I’ve had the privilege of talking to 100+ kids and I hear the same things repeatedly, most of which will surprise no one. Most students I’ve met struggled with some kind unease, fear, or general unhappiness during the worst part of the pandemic. There were at least a few who confessed to me that they had very dark thoughts at times.
I’ve worked with exactly 2 students who loved lockdown and the subsequent remote learning. Those two students both suffer from anxiety and/or depression and were/are undergoing treatment. Both of them loved not having the pressure that comes from being at school daily. They both got their best grades ever during that time. One of them actively dreaded having to return to school once things retuned to “normal.”
Interestingly though, that same student now has a bunch of college acceptances in hand and is suddenly very excited about the prospect of college. She is noticeably happier. For her, I believe the ego boost of colleges wanting her and in some cases, offering her a LOT of scholarship money, was a much needed tonic. She can now see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Getting this young woman interested at all in the college application process was a feat in itself and she and her mother started very early because they needed to tread lightly.
I think high school can be a very isolating experience in many ways, especially for kids who feel they don’t fit in. For a lot of kids, college is a chance to finally choose the people they are around and study what they want to study.
The universal forcing of distance learning on every child in 2020 was obviously not ideal or a viable long term policy. But, I think the crux is that for some students distance is a preferable option, at least some of the time and going forward, providing a more flexible education model should be considered.
For the student you described, wouldn’t it be great if that choice offered at the college level was available in high school? Why should a kid have to share a class room with kids they hate? Why can’t they pick which classes to attend ?
Because it is a cheap and efficient way to ensure most of the public has a baseline understanding of core subjects which they can then choose to pursue or not. Few K12 students have the discipline or organizational skillss required for distance learning.
Just my thoughts, since the CDC has said emergency room visits increased in 2020 for kids attempting suicide, I wonder if having parents home helped save more kids?
I wonder too if remote learning just allowed some of these kids to delay or avoid issues that they were struggling with. Personal anecdote that of course is statistically useless. I have a friend whose daughter did online school for most of high school due to her anxiety and it worked well for her, but now she’s in her early 20s and lost. She still is living at home and doesn’t really participate in life much. Her mom wonders if she should have insisted her daughter attend high school in person and face some of her issues.
I am curious to see what the data is for after lockdowns. We know and have heard of a number of teen suicides in the past two years following them. The lockdowns may have stopped some during them but the effects have been devastating for many.
Many states offer free virtual high school, Stride runs the one in my state (Illinois). There are also many online options that are not free (but some are lower cost), and of course there’s home schooling.