Why are teens hurting themselves?

An estimated 13% to 26% of high school students engage in non-suicidal self -injury, according to the latest info from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Cutting is the most common method, but teens also burn themselves and pull out their hair. I have seen this on the rise in my middle school.

 

Students harm themselves mainly to regulate emotions, particularly anger, fear, and loneliness.  The physical pain temporarily distracts the student from emotional distress. Teens who injure themselves may be dealing with feelings that they cannot cope with, or hard situations they think cannot change. They may feel desperate for relief from these feelings. These teens sometimes have other mental health problems that add to their emotional pain.

Someone who cuts uses a sharp object to make marks, cuts, or scratches on the body on purpose — enough to break the skin and cause bleeding. People typically cut themselves on their wrists, forearms, thighs, or belly. They might use a razorblade, knife, scissors, a metal tab from a soda can, the end of a paper clip, a nail file, or a pen. Some people burn their skin with the end of a cigarette or lighted match.

According to the New York Department of Health,  self-inflicted injuries are the fifth leading cause of injury-related hospitalizations for children ages 10 to14 years. Self-inflicted injuries, such as cutting, burning, and pinching, are the second leading cause of hospitalizations due to injury for children ages 15 to 19 years. Each year in NYS, over 240 children ages 10 to14 years and over 1,250 children ages 15 to 19 years are hospitalized for self-inflicted injuries. More than 2,300 children ages 15 to 19 years are seen in hospital emergency departments each year for these types of injuries. Self- inflicted injuries most often occur on the arms, legs and front of the body because they are easier to reach and hide under clothing. However, the injuries could affect any part of the body.

 

A sense of shame and secrecy often goes along with cutting. Most teens who cut hide the marks and if they're noticed, make up excuses about them. Some teens don't try to hide cuts and might even call attention to them.

Cutting often begins as an impulse. But many teens discover that once they start to cut, they do it more and more, and can have trouble stopping. Many teens who self-injure report that cutting provides a sense of relief from deep painful emotions. Because of this, cutting is a behavior that tends to reinforce itself.

Some schools have put programs in place to help students learn how to regulate their emotions.  Dialectical Behavior Therapy or DBT is the leading treatment for self-injury.  Lessons include work on Mindfulness, the intentional, non-judgmental focus of one's attention on the emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring at the present moment.,  The therapy also teaches students alternative actions to take when they feel an urge to hurt themselves. 
Mental health issues must be stripped of the elements of shame that cloud attention and treatment.  Our kids need help.  If you know a student who is self-injuring call the Self-injury Resource Line (1-800-DONTCUT).  We can help.

Some of the material for this post was gathered from the District Administration Journal October 2015, (p.21).

 

 

Sometimes Questions are More Important Than Answers

Each year,  I spend some time setting goals.  One of my goals this year is learning how to ask better questions.  Asking great questions leads to much more thinking than almost anything else.  The September 2015 Educational Leadership journal has devoted the entire issue to Questioning for Learning.  Much of the work mentioned in this post comes from articles by Marge Scherer and Grant Wiggins.

Leonard Mlodinow is a famous physicist.  In his book The Upright Thinkers he recounts a conversation he had with his father who was a Holocaust survivor. While in the Buchenwald concentration camp, a fellow innate showed him a math puzzle.  Intrigued, his father, who had only a 7th grade education himself, tried to solve the puzzle, but could not.  When he asked for the explanation, the mathematician offered a deal ---the solution for a crust of bread.  "my father's need to know was so powerful, he parted with his bread in exchange for the answer," Mlodinow writes (p.3).

Humans have the unique propensity to think and question.  How can educators learn how to encourage students to ask their own questions, and explore answers?  Innovators ask questions.  According to Warren Berger in his book A More Beautiful Question, the question, "What if we put wheels on it?" led to the rolling suitcase.  "What if Morse code could be adapted graphically?" led to the creation of the bar code.  "Why did my candy bar melt?" led to the invention of the microwave oven.  Here are some tips to help ask better questions.

1. Ask questions that may be answered many ways. Good questions are divergent.  They are sometimes unanswerable or have multiple possibilities.

2. Ask questions that invite argument and debate. Arguments involve unsettled issues of understanding or application.

3. Will the  pursuit in answer of the question lead to a Big Idea? A good question will take you to the core issues and insights of a topic. A good question has to be more than just intriguing.

4. Ask questions that can be used across disciplines. For example, after reading Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad series, a question may be asked: How do Frog and Toad act like friends?  A better version of this question would be this---Who is a true friend?  This version connects to varied texts and to personal experience.

5. Does the question get at what's odd, counterintuitive, or easily misunderstood?  A common question teachers ask is What the difference between fiction and nonfiction?  A better version of this would be ----When is fiction revealing, and when is it a lie?

6. Am I trying too hard to craft the perfect question?  Asking a good question takes practice.  Use brainstorming techniques and draft webs of related questions.

7. Am I looking for questions in all the wrong places?  To aim for understanding is to aim for three kinds of learning:  acquisition, meaning making, and transfer.  What problems will prompt learners to inquiry?  So instead of asking students to compare and contrast mean, median, and mode ask,  "What's the fairest ways to calculate grades?"

High level questions yield a high level of student inquiry.  As Claude Levi-Strauss once said, "The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

Dedicated to Diane

 

June 26 marked the last day of my friend Diane's career as an assistant principal of a k-6 elementary school. I was happy for her, but so sad for the children who will never experience her unique methods.  I worked with Diane when I had the privilege of being the principal in a beautiful old school that was well maintained and filled with pride.  She was my assistant principal.

 

Public schools are microcosms of communities.  They are small neighborhoods, and as such, the teachers, the students and their parents were our neighbors.  We celebrated their weddings, played with their babies, mourned their deaths, cheered on their victories, and kept their secrets.  Being in charge of a community gives you great power---and with great power comes great responsibility.  We worked hard to keep our neighborhood in good shape.  Our hallways sparkled, our teachers collaborated and our students worked hard.

Teaching is one of the most human of careers.  It is really all about relationships. We have to build connections. It was our school's great fortune that this was Diane’s greatest strength.
One of Diane’s main responsibilities was discipline.  Despite all of our combined efforts, some students in our neighborhood insisted on testing their limits.  Diane had an interesting way with the students.  She did not want to impose any random consequence.  She always wanted to teach a lesson and build a child’s character. She wanted students to show remorse if they did something they shouldn’t have. Sometimes I really didn’t know how she did it.  One day I walked into her office where she was holding after school detention.  Instead of studying, she was feeding this fifth grader baked ziti.  Somehow, I know her system worked.

One year we had a very challenging kindergarten class.  The group did not like to follow rules and challenged us at every turn.  While the teacher was working with a reading group, two boys painted each other blue.  The next week one boy took off all his clothes on the bus.  A week after that one child dropped his book bag while walking to the bus at afternoon dismissal.  The bus driver got off the bus to help the student.  No sooner had he stepped off the bus then a kindergartner who had already boarded jumped in his seat, and pulled the lever to close the bus.  There he was ---a beaming six year old in the driver’s seat ready to put the bus in gear, with 10 of his buddies cheering him on.  Two weeks after that, the kindergarten toilet overflowed.  Someone had shoved some blocks down the bowl and a small flood was the result.  This was the last straw for Diane.  She marched into the kindergarten class snapping a new pair of latex gloves onto her hands.  “Who here has ever watched CSI on TV?” she bellowed.  A few hands went up.  “Well,” she said, “those people taught me how to take fingerprints.  I am going to get the fingerprints off those blocks and I’m going to find out who did this.  Then I’m going to call CSI.”  One boy jumped up and cried, “Please don’t send me to jail.  It was me!” Diane quietly walked him out of the room into her office.  I was worried that she would just give him a plate of ziti, so I left right after I watched him dial his mother’s phone number.
Diane’s methods remind me of the culture of a rural tribe in Africa:

When a woman in this tribe knows she is pregnant, she goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray and meditate until they hear the song of the unborn child. They recognize that every soul has its own vibration that expresses its unique flavor and purpose. When the women attune to the song, they sing it out loud.  Then they return to the tribe and teach it to everyone else. When the child is born, the community gathers and sings the child's song to him or her. Later, when the child enters school, the village gathers and chants the child's song. When the child passes through the initiation to adulthood, the people again come together and sing. At the time of marriage, the person hears his or her song once again. Finally, when the soul is about to pass from this world, the family and friends gather at the person's bed, just as they did at their birth, and they sing the person to the next life. To the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them. The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another. Diane has always been able to help students recognize their own special song. A friend is someone who knows your song and sings it to you when you have forgotten it. Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused. Sometimes when we meet with our students, including our very own sons and daughters, we tell them we are not their friends.  We are their teachers and parents and we demand their attention.  But we must remember, that when we discipline another soul, we must think with our head, but lead with our hearts.  We must, as a true friend, remind our children of their songs.
You may not have grown up in an African tribe that sings your song to you at crucial life transitions, but life is always reminding you when you are in tune with yourself and when you are not. When you feel good, what you are doing matches your song, and when you feel awful, it doesn't.  Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, and show our soft underbelly of our humanity.  It is my hope that we shall all recognize our own song and sing it well.

Thank you Diane for always reminding us of our own songs and for whistling these tunes to our children  for so many years.  Your very big heart has embraced us all.  Much luck to you whatever you do.

Making Decisions is Hard

Making decisions is hard.  When you are making decisions that affect the lives of others, the process becomes even more challenging. Sometimes we can suffer from decision paralysis.
An ethical dilemma case was presented to a group of physicians.  The problem was created by Donald Redelmeier, a physician, and Eldar Shafir, a psychologist. The physicians were asked to consider the medical records of a 67- year old patient who had chronic hip pain from arthritis. The patient had been given drugs to treat his pain, but they had been ineffective, so the doctor was forced to consider a more drastic option:  hip -replacement surgery.  Recovery from this is long and painful. Then came an unexpected surprise.  A final check with the patient’s pharmacy uncovered one medication that had not been tried.  Now the doctor faced a dilemma:  Should he prescribe the untried medication, even though the other medications had failed, or should he go ahead and refer the patient for surgery?

 

When doctors were presented with this case history, 47% of them chose to try the medication , in hopes of saving the patient from surgery and hospitalization.

Another group of doctors were presented with almost exactly the same set of case facts, except this time, the patient’s pharmacy discovered two untried medications.  But when the doctors were presented with two medications, only 28% chose to try either one.  This doesn’t make sense. The doctors were acting as if having more medication options somehow made medication a worse option than surgery.

This is a perfect example of decision paralysis. More options, even good ones, can freeze us up and make us retreat.

Here’s another example of this:  In a gourmet food store, a display table showcased 6 different types of jams for sampling. At another time, they displayed 24 jams.  Although the 24 jam display attracted more customers,  shoppers who saw only 6 jams on display were 10 times more likely to purchase the jam.

In schools, administrators and teachers have to make dozens of decisions every day.  One of the most important decisions we have to make is on curriculum.  Research is clear that when we are crystal clear on what we have to teach, we are the most effective.  Collaborative curriculum planning must be done  to plan a road map that is easy to follow.  If we offer no directions, we will wind up with decision paralysis—often resulting in behavior and practices that are well worn, comfortable, and sadly,  ineffective.

Much of this material was adapted from the book Switch–How to Change Things When Change is Hard  by Chip and Dan Heath