If you were to redo high school, what would you prioritize at the top out of your high school experience? Getting into good universities? Building long-lasting relationships? Having fun?
Yes, they’re all goals of a typical high schooler –yet none of them can be achieved without maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle. If you disagree, think again.
Can you ace all your tests without a stable mentality? Would your friends keep talking to you once you desert your social life? Can you have fun when your everyday life is a wreck?
Becoming a high schooler throws you a tsunami of assignments and shoulders you with high expectations and immense responsibility. Eventually, students may experience an unstable mentality, which perpetuates a nonstop, vicious cycle of stress. Hence, in order to actually experience the high school experience– and even bear fruit out of it–students must be educated and learn how to balance their academic, social, and emotional life. My school promotes well-being such as self-awareness, self-management, social and emotional competence, strong relationships, and purposeful action through Social and Emotional Learning (SEL).
The well-being lessons were first introduced to me in elementary school, during Language Arts classes. A grade counselor would take our class time to discuss ways to focus better on class—yes, they taught us such self-explanatory solutions like “Close your iPad” or “Talk less with your friends during class time”. Of course, most of the other fifth graders and I rolled our eyes whenever a counselor rolled into our classroom. We were all silently preaching for our homeroom teacher to dismiss SEL for extra recess—which never happened, by the way.
But the anti-SEL episodes halted as soon as we transitioned to middle school and were bestowed with oh-so-delightful “Mentoring lessons”.
Almost every day, an assigned grade-level teacher introduced us to topics on well-being while ten of us half-discussed and half-munched on Oreos. In our eyes, Mentoring was that beautiful time for us to put aside academics and just relax or have fun (or at least that’s what it looked like on the surface).
In fact, in the first few months of the year, my mentoring group naturally bonded with each other and our mentor through lots of wholesome activities; we went on over-night trips at the Olympic Park (where we canoed and skated and campfire-ed), made rice-crispies at our school kitchen, and chanted the Kokonut song. Looking back, I realized that the devious intent of all this fun time was for us to talk more freely and engage during well-being lessons. And it was indeed very successful; whenever our mentor gave a presentation on mental health, my friends and I freely shared our experiences—a peer of mine even felt comfortable sharing ways in which we can help her with OCD. But on top of that, I sincerely thank my school for not only providing well-being education but also for pairing me with a trusted adult to freely reach out to. In fact, my friends and I frequently stayed after the lessons to seek guidance on time and stress management.
In high school, the lessons became a bit scary. We had fewer lessons but covered heavier topics like eating disorders, depression, and suicide—yes, topics that scream the dark side of adolescence. Seemingly as our mentors were aware of the heightened alertness in the classroom, they stressed that “what is said in the classroom stays in the classroom” and let students leave when they needed a break. It was so easy to tell that many of us felt uncomfortable and thus were relating silently to the issues. Still, even if no one dared utter a word, we were learning ways to help our peers with real-world problems.
Though I felt highly targeted when discussing depression and highly restrictive diets, I found the mentoring lessons liberating (and I hope my peers felt the same) that we were actually speaking about serious well-being issues that are highly stigmatized and censored.
Yet, I guess it’s just me in my mentoring group and a few in our entire grade who felt something during mental being lessons.
Even if my mentoring peers are comfortable sharing with each other and the mentor, most of them don’t bother to pay attention to the lessons. Rather, many usually make small talk, check their phones, or even study– really. My hypothesis is that students do not bother to engage in the lessons because they are not graded and that SEL delivery fails to capture the students’ minds.
Our school psychologist agrees that our school is so grade-driven to the point where students don’t put effort into non-graded activities. Yet, on the other hand, he believes that the teachers may not be delivering mentoring lessons in the most interesting or professional way possible which seems understandable as some teachers at our school come from backgrounds where mental and social education was shunned until the last few decades or so.
It is indeed upsetting to see my fellow classmates missing out on crucial life-changing lessons provided by our school. Hence, I proposed a club to spread awareness of the value of well-being and promote healthy living at our school. But most importantly, through joint teamwork of students passionate about mental health, I hope to enrich our school’s social and emotional curriculum with students’ perspectives.
What are your thoughts on mental health education in schools? Share them in the comment section below.
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