Month: March 2023

Taken from “One Green Thing” by Heather White. Copyright © 2022 by Heather White. Used by permission of Harper Horizon, a division of HarperCollins Focus, LLC.
“Mom and Dad, we are running out of time. I can’t vote. You can’t wait for us to clean up your mess and fix it. We need you to act now,” my then fourteen-year-old daughter Cady pleaded.
It was September 2019. We were talking to the girls about the upcoming climate strike and student walkout inspired by young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg. The weather report called for heavy rain, so I offered to pick up Cady and drive her to the protest site after she left the high school. This parental gesture made perfect sense to me since she had to carry her trumpet and her freshman backpack, which weighed a ton. Besides, the protest starting point was a mile away.
Cady rolled her eyes and patiently explained to me, her environmental lawyer mother, that having a parent drive her to a climate walkout defeated its purpose. She said she w..

U.S. teens spend more than eight hours a day on screens, and there’s growing concern over how social media may affect their mental health.
Now, a new study, published Thursday by the American Psychological Association, validates what some parents have experienced when their teenagers cut back: They seem to feel better about themselves. I’ve seen this in my own kids when they return from summer camp, where phones are not allowed. They seem more at ease and less moody.
Social media can feel like a comparison trap, says study author Helen Thai, a doctoral student in psychology at McGill University. Her research found that limiting screen time to about one hour a day helped anxious teens and young adults feel better about their body image and their appearance.
Her research arose from her own personal experiences.
“What I noticed when I was engaging in social media was that I couldn’t help but compare myself,” Thai says. Scrolling through posts from celebrities and influencers, as well ..

Ever since the pandemic shut down schools almost three years ago, I’ve been writing about tutoring as the most promising way to help kids catch up academically. I often get questions about research on tutoring. How effective is tutoring? How many schools are doing it? How is it going so far? In this column, I’m recapping the evidence for tutoring and what we know now about pandemic tutoring. For those who want to learn more, there are links to sources throughout and at the end, a list of Hechinger Report stories on tutoring.
Well before the pandemic, researchers were zeroing in on tutoring as a way to help children who were significantly behind grade level. Remedial classes had generally been a failure, and researchers often saw disappointing results from after-school and summer school programs because students didn’t show up or didn’t want to go to school during vacation.
But evidence for tutoring has been building for more than 30 years, as tutoring organizations designed reading..

In his university teaching days, Mark Schneider watched as his students’ research sources moved from the library to Wikipedia to Google. With greater access to online information, cheating and plagiarism became easier. So Schneider, who taught at State University of New York, Stony Brook for 30 years, crafted essay prompts in ways that he hoped would deter copy-paste responses. Even then, he once received a student essay with a bill from a paper-writing company stapled to the back.
Teachers probably spend more time than they’d like trying to thwart students who are able to cheat in creative ways. And many educators are alarmed that ChatGPT, a new and widely available artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by OpenAI, offers yet another way for students to sidestep assignments. ChatGPT uses machine learning and large language modeling to produce convincingly human-like writing. Because users can input prompts or questions into ChatGPT and get paragraphs of text, it has become a p..

When this school year began, Issac Moreno just couldn’t get himself to go. During the pandemic, he’d gotten used to learning from his family’s home in Los Angeles. Then, last fall, he started junior high, five days a week, in person.
“It was a lot,” he says.
The last fully normal school year Issac remembers is third grade. Now, he’s in seventh, with multiple classes each day, a busier schedule and new classmates.
Issac’s mother, Jessica Moreno, says it’s been a struggle to get Issac back into the routine of going to school. Her eyes well up as she describes it: “Three days a week or four days a week, he will say to me, ‘I’m sick. I don’t feel OK. Can you just pick me up? I don’t want to be here.’ ”
She says Issac has already missed 10 days of school this year, which means he’s at risk of becoming chronically absent.
And Issac is not alone. Before the pandemic, about 8 million U.S. students were considered chronically absent, according to the research group Attendance Works. That’s..