November 21, 2021

Good morning and happy Thanksgiving week-

This has been a challenging couple of months but I am grateful to be able to work with such amazing and caring colleagues. I hope you find time to rest and rejuvenate over the Thanksgiving break with family and friends. I wanted to share the Thankful for a Colleague form one last time and encourage you to take a moment to thank someone for their support, collegiality, etc. this year. 

Please join me in welcoming Donna Weidman to the team. Donna has been subbing for us and has joined the special education department as an ESP.  

We will dismiss at 11:30am on Wednesday, November 24 : November 24 schedule

Administration, counseling and nursing will host the first faculty breakfast in the A wing upstairs kitchen next Friday, December 3rd at 7:45am. We hope you will join us!

A few reminders as we get into Term 2:

1. iPass must be updated every two weeks. 

2. Please remember you are able to Plus+ a student up until the start of X-block. Students are expected to stay in their assigned location once x-block begins. Please do not allow groups of students to leave the room and 

3. The cafeteria is struggling with having the correct amount of food ready at each lunch. Please make sure you are sending students to the lunch you are assigned and let us know if you need to make a change so that the kitchen can be informed. 

If you are a core teacher and you are not SEI endorsed please let me know ASAP. 

Interested in being an administrator? Check out ACCEPT’S Educator Leadership Institute

One-on-one conferences as a tool for building rapport with high school students

Opinion-A 6th grade class on racism got me ready for the rest of-my-life/2021/09

1. Surging Anxiety Among Adolescents: What’s Going On?

In this article in Psychology Today, psychiatrist Ralph Lewis (University of Toronto) says that in recent years, more and more young people have been coming to him with anxiety disorders. He suggests four possible explanations:

• There may be a genuine increase in distress among young people for any number of reasons – there’s a lot to be distressed about these days!

• Kids seem more willing to report mental health issues. Before, they were reluctant to admit they had problems, and would come to a psychiatrist’s office only at the insistence of concerned parents. Now more adolescents are self-diagnosing – and are disappointed if Lewis says their problems aren’t serious enough for clinical treatment. 

• This increased openness may be encouraged by media reports of widespread mental health problems among adolescents. 

• The most recent edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) loosened its language on anxiety: “clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational (or academic), or other important areas of functioning.” 

Mental health problems like anxiety can be mapped on the left and right sides of a bell-shaped curve, says Lewis. With anxiety, the majority of people are in the mentally healthy, average bulge in the middle. At the right-hand side, he says, are those “prone to experience anxiety more intensely, more frequently, and for longer durations than others, causing those individuals greater distress and impairment in their functioning.” They might have a moderate disorder or, at the tail end of the curve, a disabling condition requiring clinical treatment.

On the left side of the continuum are those who experience unusually little anxiety. These people may be courageous and cool under pressure, but they may also take unnecessary risks and come across as emotionally insensitive. “At the extreme of this end of the spectrum,” says Lewis, “some might even be predisposed to be psychopaths.” 

Interestingly, he says, the extremes have been important to human survival: “Diversity of traits is essential for a species to survive and evolve as environments change; a trait that is a weakness in one environment at one time and place might well turn out to be a strength in another environment at another time and place.” 

“Something has changed,” Lewis concludes. Perhaps “the cultural changes in society are significant enough that young people, now able to talk fluently about mental health, are looking to medicine as a way to explain the normal, if painful, parts of life.” 

“The Anxiety Boom” by Ralph Lewis in Psychology Today, November/December 2021 (Vol. 54, #6, pp. 28-29); Lewis can be reached at ralph.lewis@utoronto.ca.