Hawk Herald
News and Notes for Teachers- Feb 4
Dear Staff
Congratulations on finishing the semester. You have set up some routines and systems to help students through the rest of the year. Make sure that you review norms and expectations and give everyone a fresh start. We continue to improve the climate, culture and systems in our building and I hope we can all work together to make our current systems more consistent, implement new ideas and communicate in the most effective way.
Have a good week.
Mary
You can also find the newsletter on the staff site: Staff Site
EL Audit
If you are involved in observations or interviews Connie has contacted you.
Academic Seminar-Wed
Climate and Culture
LA/SS observations
Test Administrator training
Honor Roll Celebration
Mid-year goal review and reflection
Meetings and Events
Monday-4 Check your:Advisory Calendar Pennies for Patients begins
- EL Audit 12:45-3:15
Tuesday-5(Mary out all day)
Wednesday-6
- Academic Seminar in Leadership room 229 7:50
- Attendance 10:10
Thursday-7 Bus evacuation drills before school
Friday-8
- SST
National School Counseling Week
Let's celebrate our counselors, February 4th-8th and the theme is "School Counselors: Providing Lessons for Life." Be sure to give a big thank you to your School Counselor(s) for their leadership, advocacy, collaboration and systemic change efforts for improving student outcomes.
Climate and Culture update
We have been experiencing an increase in the number of suicide screenings during the last few weeks. If you hear students talking about hurting themselves, we need to know right away so we can take the appropriate mental health precautions. In addition, the suicide awareness lessons that the counselors have been presenting in science classrooms have stirred up feelings in students and led to a higher number of abuse reports by students. This is good news. We definitely want to know if something bad is happening with students, so please be aware of this situation and inform the counselors if you hear of anything concerning.
Climate and Culture: Orchids and Dandelions
“Many children are able to thrive in any environment, while others may flourish only under the most favorable conditions,” says pediatrician/professor Thomas Boyce (University of California/San Francisco) in this article in Psychology Today. Early experiences with psychological trauma and adversity create obstacles to normal development and impair mental and physical health, says Boyce, but there’s variation in how children respond: “While some are powerfully affected by trauma, others are able to effectively weather adverse experiences, sustaining few, if any, developmental or health consequences.” Here are the two types:
• Dandelion children – About 80 percent of kids “show a kind of biological indifference to experiences of adversity,” says Boyce, “with stress response circuits in their brains that are minimally reactive to such events. Like dandelions that thrive in almost any environment, such children are mostly unperturbed by the stressors and traumas they confront.”
• Orchid children – About 20 percent “show an exceptional susceptibility to both negative and positive social contexts,” he says, “with stress response circuits highly sensitive to adverse events. Like orchids, which require very particular, supportive environments to thrive, these children show an exceptional capacity for succeeding in nurturant, supportive circumstances, but sustain a disproportionate number of illnesses and problems when raised in stressful, adverse social conditions.”
Why did orchid children survive over the course of human evolution? Boyce suggests that early hominid groups may have benefited from having a few individuals in their midst who were super-sensitive to impending attacks by animals or hostile rivals. Being an orchid “might also be of great benefit to those living at the other extreme,” he says, “in environments of exceptional safety, protection, and abundance. Here, the propensity of orchid children to be open and porous to environmental events and exposures would garner even greater advantages. Most children would thrive in such settings; orchids would thrive spectacularly.”
Dandelion/orchid differences are not entirely innate, says Boyce: they are the result of the interaction of genes and social contexts, with environmental cues regulating the expression of genetic differences. “Recognizing this differential susceptibility,” he says, “is an essential key to understanding the experiences of individual children, to parenting children of differing sensitivities and temperaments effectively, and to fostering the healthy, adaptive capacity of all young people.”
In a telling experiment, researchers measured the correlation between newborn babies’ Apgar scores in the first five minutes of life and teachers’ observations of the same children in kindergarten. On average, children with lower Apgar scores were less compliant with rules and instructions as five-year-olds and had more difficulty sitting still and focusing, less interest in books and reading, and more difficulty grasping and using a pencil. “At each lower step on the Apgar scale,” says Boyce, “such physical, social, emotional, language, and communication domains of development were all significantly more compromised five years later.”
But it’s not all about genes, researchers have found; genetic characteristics create children’s dispositions, but don’t necessarily determine the outcomes. Children born with orchid-like genes who are raised in different environments – for example, those placed in cruel, negligent orphanages in 1980s Romania versus those welcomed into nurturing foster homes – had strikingly different outcomes: the latter recovered remarkably well from a bad start in terms of development and mental health. What’s at work here is epigenetics – the new science of how the environment influences the expression of genes.
Boyce says there’s an adage among pediatricians that all parents are environmental determinists until they have their own children, at which point they switch to believing that it’s all about genes. Watching a child throwing a tantrum at the next table in a restaurant, a pre-child couple says it’s clearly the parents’ fault for not raising their child properly. But when the same couple is dealing with its own out-of-control child in a public place, “we hope that those around us understand that we’ve done our best, but the child came into the world with this temperament,” says Boyce. “It’s far more comforting to ascribe the behavior of our own noisy or troubling toddler to genes, for which we have only passive responsibility, than to our capacities as parents, for which we are more directly accountable.”
The truth lies somewhere in the middle, he concludes: it’s not either/or but rather both/and. “Every human disposition and disorder of mental or physical health depends on an intricate interaction between internal and external causes to take root and advance. The key to understanding human differences… will involve a keener knowledge of how genetic difference and environmental variation work together to change biological processes. This approach to ‘unpuzzling’ human nature and wellness brings us closer to understanding what makes orchids and dandelions bloom, wither, or move between these states over the course of a changing life… You can think of human life as the song that issues from the epigenetic piano and its equalizer, the result of a complex compositional process shaped by both genes and environments. Each person is predisposed to play certain types of scores, like those of the orchid or the dandelion, but there is abundant space for unique variation and improvisation.”
South Meadows Middle School
Email: mendezm@hsd.k12.or.us
Website: http://schools.hsd.k12.or.us/southmeadows
Location: 4690 Southeast Davis Road, Hillsboro, OR, United States
Phone: 503-844-1220
Facebook: facebook.com/SouthMeadowsMiddleSchool