8th Grade Editorials 2023
The Articles In This Section are...
*(NEW)* Why Are Students Afraid of Bad Grades?
*(NEW)* Google Classroom's Got to Go
*(NEW)* MLB Editorial
Melissa Ploss
Mr. Jockers
Period 3
4/5/23
Why Are Students Afraid of Bad Grades?
As a student myself, life in school can be rough. You get harassed; teachers are strict, and sometimes, parents are even stricter. With all of these harsh conditions you’d think students have a lot more on their minds besides grades, however that’s the furthest from the truth.
Many students find that they desperately want straight A’s. This can be due to the desire of academic approval, to satisfy parents, or for other reasons.
Commonly, these students are overachievers, and said by the National Society of High School Scholars, “some students fear failure, so they neglect their studies and stop trying”. This is because when they do fail, they don’t find it their fault. Behavior such as this can be attributed to the fear of failure or success, and/or lack of motivation or preparedness. According to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America 2020 survey, about “43 percent of teens surveyed in 2020 said their stress levels had gone up” and “45 percent said they had a hard time concentrating on schoolwork. Many reported feeling less motivated.”
Most overachieving students also tend to wear themselves down from an excessive amount of work and a full schedule, as they have an unrelenting desire to create the finest work they can. “Some of the common triggers of stress in teens might be anxiety to perform well in academics,” says Sakshi Khurana, a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Weisz Lab for Youth Mental Health.
School has a strong tendency to corrode a student’s mentality, which can result in them performing worse academically. “The most common source of stress for high school students, according to the 2017 APA Stress survey, is school itself, with about 83 percent of teens identifying school as a major stressor.” states the Harvard Division of Continuing Education.
However, not many people believe this. It isn’t new for people to accuse students of being lazy and that they are unwilling to do anything, as regularly close adult figures in a child’s life don’t believe that someone young can grow to have disorders like depression or anxiety from such stressors. This causes mistrust on both sides.
The logical way of solving this ongoing issue is for adults to realize when a child is struggling academically or showing signs of a constant declining mood, and confront them. This is the most efficient way to reassure them that you care. Sometimes just knowing someone is there to support you is the first step to helping a student get back on track.
Word Count: 417
Mr. Jockers
N/A
ILA
April 6, 2023
Google Classroom’s Got to Go
In the millennium’s first two decades, the number of internet-accessing U.S households grew from 7 to 120 million. Simultaneously, the values Americans once honored plummeted.
A recent Wall Street Journal poll shows the percentage of people considering patriotism “very important” dropped from 70 percent, in 1998, to 38 percent, in 2022; likewise for religion (62 to 39 percent), starting a family (54 to 30 percent), and, community involvement (47 to 27 percent).
The concurrent rise of the internet and fall of foundational American values may be coincidental. But probably not. As longtime UConn biology professor Thomas Crivello recently told incoming freshmen: “History will view the internet as the best and worst thing to happen to humanity.”
The same for public education.
As a teacher, I’ve seen the internet help. Students can research topics independently and collaboratively create engaging presentations. But it’s hurt, too, and our reliance on technology must be reigned in following our wholehearted dependence upon it during covid.
Tech platforms providing opportunities online once relegated to the classroom, like Edmodo, started in the late 2000s, and then Google revamped the idea, offering Google Classroom to districts already using complementary platforms like Gmail and Drive. Thus, when covid closed school, Google Classroom became the default classroom substitute, and myriad tech programs rode its coattails.
But the pandemic is over, yet many online-learning methods remain. My son, for example, still watches Edpuzzles for his eighth-grade Spanish class. Why? Has all this tech helped?
No, according to results from the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the “nation’s report card,” which shows fourth- and eighth-graders scoring the lowest in math and reading in 20 years, with skills dropping precipitously since 2019.
Aside from its questionable assistance, educational technology contributes to a monumental societal problem: childrens’ exorbitant screentime. Author and psychologist Jean Twenge’s research team recently reported teenagers spend 10 hours per day online.
In a poll, a quarter of my eighth-graders report spending up to seven hours a day on their smartphone; half watch TV and/or play video games for at least another two. In school, half use school-issued Chromebooks for another two to four hours.
Schools cannot support this unhealthy habit as well as burden parents with more devices to monitor. Half of the 15 most-visited websites globally are social media and adult sites whose content is undoubtedly contributing to the explosion in teenage suicide, depression and anxiety which the White House deemed an “unprecedented mental health crisis” in June.
In school, we must relinquish the technology whose omnipresence has not coincided with improved learning and mental health. CNBC reports Gen Z is leading a resurgence of Nokia dumbphones.
The kids are screaming for help. Are adults listening?
Word Count: 450
Many people feel that MLB has been slowly “dying” as baseball used to be “America's pastime” but it is losing that title. MLB games on Fox are averaging 725K viewers per game, down 15% percent from last year, states Sports Business Journal. Fox is also down 957K viewers since 2019. Baseball once was the most popular American sport, but has since been replaced by both football and basketball. 37% of U.S adults picked football as their favorite sport to watch with basketball coming in at 11% and baseball surprisingly down to 9%. Some people feel baseball is an uneventful and boring game to watch. A study from Michigan University says, “Despite all the sport has done, many see it as a “dying” sport, as viewership has started to see a sharp decline. Over the last decade, there has been a “14% decline” in viewership.” Even during the World Series, viewership has declined from 23.4 million people per game in 2016, down to 14.7 million in 2022, according to MLB.com. There are a couple of changes I would make to MLB to help improve the viewing excitement. First, I would shorten the MLB season so that each game feels more important. Currently, there are 162 games per team each season, which is too many. Next, I would expand the playoffs to 16 teams so that more teams have a chance to get to the World Series. Viewership for playoff games is more than double regular season. Additionally, the MLB needs to implement a salary cap. Currently, there are several large market teams (New York Yankees, New York Mets, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Angels, and Los Angeles Dodgers) who have superior resources to spend on player salaries. The smaller market teams, such as the Kansas City Royals, Oakland A’s, Tampa Bay Rays, Colorado Rockies, and Pittsburgh Pirates, struggle to compete with these top teams season after season and often lose all their good players to the richer teams because they can not afford to pay them. If a salary cap is not implemented soon, then there will be a few superteams that will dominate the league because of their higher market value. Baseball has already tried to make their game more action-filled with some new rules in 2023 such as: (1) putting a pitch clock limit between pitches to reduce downtime: (2) eliminating the shift so that batters have more space for base hits: (3) limiting pickoff attempts per batter, which should lead to more stolen bases. Baseball is my favorite sport and I am hoping that these changes along with some other possible changes that I noted above, can help revive interest in this great game. Word Count: 450