An Interesting Article

Dear Members of the WSSB Community,

The cover story for this week's Independent is titled "TEACHING TEENS TO COPE: Social-Emotional Learning Helps Students Deal with Stress and Cell Phones."

This feature article explores the "high levels of stress, depression, anxiety, and feelings of isolation" among local teens, high levels linked to "the pressures and effects of cell phones and social media." The article also reports on the "instructional intervention" put in place in the Santa Barbara Unified School District recently to address these high levels of anguish. This recent intervention rolled out by SBUSD is called "SEL": social-emotional learning.

This article is at once very disturbing and very heartening: disturbing to read of the "massive alienation and loneliness" of today's teens but also heartening to learn that certain educators are dis-enthralling themselves from the educational practices of our time to help these teens. It is also heartening to see that our school -- the Waldorf School of Santa Barbara -- has been privileging social-emotional learning and a healthy skepticism of unchecked technology since 1983! Indeed, our education at WSSB seems to only get more and more applicable, more and more relevant, to the juggernaut of challenges facing our time. (By the way, we encourage parents to learn more about the consequences of screen time for children. Please talk to your child’s teacher if you have questions.)

(And related to the above, Science Daily just published an article about research done by the University of Pennsylvania -- research published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology -- that asserts a causal connection between social media use and in increase in depression and loneliness. "Here's the bottom line," psychologist Melissa G. Hunt says of her findings. "Using less social media than you normally would leads to significant decreases in both depression and loneliness." The Science Daily article, should you be interested, is linked here:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181108164316.htm)

In gratitude,

Carolyn and Teddy
Admin Team

PS -- Astonishing Word of the Day: Dulaoisc (Irish)

which means "sea-level cave."