I’m talking about publicly announcing everyone’s gpa. That just seems weird to me. Announcing what school is no big deal.
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I have not seen gpa announcing
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Same. Which is why I was surprised by the OPs comment. It seemed needlessly intrusive.
I think both my kids and I don’t know their gpa at the end of high school because it is on some random 13 or 14 point scale, and you see the grades on a website that you then need to type into a spreadsheet to compute your gpa that kids
usually don’t bother to. The school doesn’t calculate a gpa nor reveal it to anyone.
When you are applying to a college, it is their problem to compute a gpa if they care about it. I am not even sure all the colleges calculate a gpa. It is a lot of work transcribing a pdf document into a spreadsheet that I found painful to do when I was helping my kids with SRAR. My guess is that they look a transcript and say “hmm strong transcript” or “hmm weak transcript”. And move on lazily to the counselor letter to see if the kid is any good according to the counselor.
Some colleges do recalculate – and SRAR type arrangements offload the work of translating unusual grading systems and transcript formats to the applicant. The college still has to deal with that for verification for the smaller number of matriculating students later, of course.
But yes, it is likely that some of the most selective colleges just look at the high school record holistically, with counselor and teacher recommendations providing an approximate class ranking.
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I agree that we don’t take the mental health of teenagers seriously enough. Especially in many public schools.
What methods do you feel would be most effective in teaching young adults coping skills for stress?
Do you feel that the bulk of this responsibility should be on our school systems or parents? Another source?
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Only parents can teach.
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I’m not clear what you mean. We can all learn from others. The conversation about mental health needs to happen openly.
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TOTALLY agreed. Politics aside, it takes a village.
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Society cannot teach a kid that the kid needs to ignore external validation from society and instead focus on an inner compass / goals / values etc. Then society becomes irrelevant. Without this you cannot move beyond peer pressure, need for external validators and all the other baggage that comes along with it.
This teaching can only come from parents.
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Agreed. If parents haven’t imparted that wisdom before high school, it is a late lesson to learn. There will always be those either greater and lesser than you; run your own race. Count your blessings in an uncertain world.
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I don’t think it’s enough to put the responsibility solely on parents. Wealthier more educated parents will almost always be more informed. Access is a huge problem. If we don’t prioritize mental health on a larger scale then I fear this inequality gap will only widen.
I think teaching emotional regulation and mindfulness is a good start. Also, I think we need to work with parents more by making sure that they are aware of available resources. They need support.
Cultivating mental wellness is not an innate skill. It needs to be taught. Many people struggling to survive don’t have the luxury to prioritize their mental health.
I don’t know what the answer is but as a community I think we need to be doing much more.
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Wealthier parents may be more informed, but their kids also have more mental health challenges than average, perhaps, as a famous book is titled, the Price of Privilege. Our school had a mindfulness program; the students barely tolerated it. It was well-intentioned but utterly ignored.
It does seem that students who have had more adversity earlier in life, usually economic, have developed more grit and resilience by high school than their more privileged colleagues. As a result, they have a more mature perspective regarding the relative importance of college prestige.
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One other thing to mention is that the kids I knew who had more actual responsibility had much better mental health than those who defined themselves only by their school experience. Other roles gave confidence, self-esteem and perspective. Paid employment, serious volunteer activities with the underprivileged, even family caretaking or church duties provided maturity and balance.
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This. My understanding is that kids’ brains are still developing into their 20s. While they may be “adults” in the view of many laws, they surely have lots of maturing to do. I’m not a fan of coddling kids, but understanding where they are in the process is important to supporting them in their growth. As stress negatively impacts brain dev (just based upon my reading), it’s definitely important to teach them to manage stress and try to learn not to compare themselves to others, it’s surely a work in progress for us all.
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Did these students barely tolerate SAT prep or tutoring?
I’d use your example and see that as a shortcoming of their parents to impart the importance of mental wellness. Thankfully these kids have better safety nets and can afford to squander more of the opportunities that are bountifully available to them.
If parents with more education and access to resources struggle to impart the importance of mental wellness on their children then how do we expect parents with less resources to do it so effortlessly?
I’m not convinced that wealthier children have more mental health challenges than their less wealthy peers.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) overwhelmingly affect children in poverty. These experiences can have insurmountable effects on the long term mental, physical, and spiritual well being of these kids.
Studies show that these effects are long term and can negatively impact an individual for the entire duration of their lives.
I’m under the impression that there is a dire need for systemic change in order to provide these kids with the resources they need to thrive.
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The wellness director was a well regarded psychologist. The students rolled their eyes or slept through most of his presentations. They were not particularly interested in what he, or any adult, had to say about their mental health, and were certain that the program was useless. The school had substantial concerns about mental health due to an alumni suicide earlier and students had serious academic pressure, so they had plenty of focus on the SAT tutors.
I suppose the wellness director is still employed there. Candidly what turned things around was a drop in homework requirements and easing of school rules like dress code. And the school day started an hour later. That helped a lot, much more than any wellness program.
Exact same experience at my child’s school! Eye rolling and basically thinking it was really dumb. My child now can’t stand the word “mindfulness” because she associates it with cringy exercises. The program was run by competent people, but the execution just didn’t work in the school setting.
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I’ll assume the 2 posters above @cocomokes going back and forth are done with their sidebar or will take it to PM or will open a separate mental wellness thread.
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Teens can spot hypocrisy a mile away. It is all very well to ask teachers, adults and their peers to tone down the emphasis on college admission, but when the student knows their parents care greatly, such efforts fall upon deaf ears.
The most successful way to decrease the college admit stress that I have seen is transparency in public admissions. A student and his parents knows whether they are in or out at UT, McGill and many other schools before the application is submitted. No more stressing about ECs, sports teams they would rather drop, or even grades much, much less the application process. It has its disadvantages but the drop in stress level for both those admitted and those declined is noticeable.
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