Or they blame the Covid lockdowns, or the woke virus in the schools, or any number of things other than the miserable, bleak future kids can plainly see before them.
And as a teacher, it's being turned on us, with nearly all professional development over the last 3 years focused on things we can do differently, new things they want us to try, more work without additional pay, in order to solve the teen mental health epidemic.
To be fair, I think it's fantastic that some school districts are trying to address this problem, get staff to work from a more trauma-informed perspective, as it can make school more empathetic and less punitive; dig deeper to find the actual causes for tardiness and truancy and provide supports, when possible, rather than assume it's just bad behavior, requiring punishment; because it gets staff to listen more to their students and, hopefully, be less autocratic in their classrooms.
But like most educational reforms, they completely ignore the elephant in the room, the increasing poverty, decreasing access to healthcare, increasing costs of college, the existential threat of nuclear war and climate collapse--things that persist and grow worse nationally, globally, regardless of how much extra work they squeeze out of us at school.
