There’s often no right or wrong answer when it comes to answering job interview questions, but it can be helpful to prepare in advance of your interview. Here’s our ultimate guide on how to answer every interview question.
Let’s face it: There’s plenty of career advice to go around. Some pieces of it are more relevant than others, but for many people it’s almost impossible to sort through the number of well-intentioned career tips they’ve heard throughout their lives to highlight just one.
You don’t want to seem painfully abnormal or bland and unoriginal—how do you let your potential employer know you’re unique (in a good way)? Here are our tips for striking that all-important balance.
It seems like such a simple question, but “tell me about yourself” is notorious for wrecking many interviewees’ chances to make positive first impressions. Turns out there’s a simple formula, and we’ve got you covered.
When you go to an interview, you expect questions about your work history, skills, and drive to succeed. The last thing you expect is for the hiring manager to ask you a personal question like, “What are you passionate about?”
You’ve spent so much energy constructing a succinct, yet informative resume, but now you have to cast it aside and hope an improvised answer makes you shine. Tricky? Yes. Impossible? Not if you’re prepared.”
Most interview questions ask you to discuss the positive aspects of your working life. But every now and then, a question takes a turn for the negative, potentially wrecking your whole enthusiastic vibe. “Tell me about a time you handled a conflict” is one such question.
When an interviewer asks you to tell her about your leadership experience, it’s important to have an answer ready. If you stutter at this question, you’re automatically putting yourself at a disadvantage when it comes to convincing the interviewer you’re a strong, confident leader.
When recruiters ask, “Why do you want this job?”, what they really want to know is, “What is it about this company and position that interests you, and what assets can you bring to us?” Here’s how you can answer that.
Most people’s biggest interview fears include having to respond to classic hard-to-answer questions, including “Why are you looking to leave your current job?” It’s a completely understandable query—after all, most people don’t leave positions they love, so the reason for your job search isn’t always going to be a pleasant one. Whether you can’t stand your boss or are uninterested in your day-to-day responsibilities, there are ways to answer without throwing anyone under the bus or burning any bridges—something you should avoid no matter how tempted you are.
At one point, “where do you see yourself in five years?” was a great question. It let interviewers gauge your ambition, or lack thereof, as well as your thought process. Slowly, it became a cliché. Yet, it’s still asked. Your challenge: to take it seriously and turn the predictable into an opportunity. Here are five formulas that can guide you toward a great answer to “where do you see yourself in five years?”
What is the best way to answer, “What’s your Dream Job?” While you don’t want to set the bar too high, setting the bar too low can make it sound like you don’t have goals and aspirations. So how do you find that middle ground between “I want it all” and “anything will do?”
Published: May 09, 2022 By Andrea Moran Washington Post Ads
When it comes to resumes, there are some classic mistakes you always want to avoid. But there is also room for interpretation about what makes a “good” resume. Tips and tricks you learned from your parents, or your teachers may be outdated at this point. So how do you freshen things up? Read on for ideas that can help you set your resume up for the modern age.
1. Clean it up
If you have been “updating” your resume by slapping on additional job titles as your career advances, it’s time to clean house. If you have spent ten or more years in the workforce, chances are you can go back and remove those first few entry level jobs you had when you were fresh out of college. Better yet, select which ones to keep based on how well the skills for those jobs match the skills required for the new position.
2. Replace your objective with a summary statement
Include a “summary statement” (aka: a brief blurb describing what skills and experience you can bring to the company) instead of the previously popular “objective” (aka: a brief blurb describing what you want). This is a terrific way for recruiters to get a better idea of exactly how you could fit into their office culture.
3. Remove dated language
Once upon a time, “references available upon request” was a mainstay at the conclusion of any resume. Nowadays? Employers recognize it as the space waster it is. It’s an obvious phrase (of course you will give references if requested!) that uses up valuable space that could instead be dedicated to fleshing out your work experience.
4. Refresh the format
Forbes mentions that one new consideration for resume writers is the fact that oftentimes, applicant tracking systems (ATS) are used to screen them before a human ever takes a look. Since you want both the ATS and humans to be able to read your resume with ease, it’s important to keep the formatting clean, simple, and consistent. This means putting job titles and section breaks in bold, using an easily readable font, and skipping any overly busy graphics or charts.
5. Make it pop
Your resume, when it does meet a human eye, will be skimmed extremely quickly. What is easier to read than long paragraphs and chunks of text? Lots of bullet points. These can be used when mapping out your various accomplishments, job responsibilities, and any other relevant facts that can be conveyed in short, digestible pieces. Making each bullet point succinct and action-oriented will further help move things along for the reader. Just remember to list your job experiences in reverse chronological order (aka: start with your current/latest job)—that is one piece of advice that has not gone out of style!
6. Play the numbers game
Numbers tend to make a much stronger impact than words when it comes to resumes, so keep that in mind when inputting your information. Think beyond the usual roles that numbers play and consider other ways to incorporate them into your resume: How many clients did you serve? How large was your team? How many products did you sell? How often did you represent your company?
7. Add something extra
With the space you save by streamlining your resume (and deleting “References available upon request”), think about adding another experience that (while not work related) could help identify you as a good fit for the company culture. Whether it’s volunteer work or an extra college course you took, these additions can help potential employers get a better picture of you as a whole person.
No matter which style you choose for your resume, just remember: Proofreading will never go out of style.
Asian students are victims of Montgomery County’s achievement gap
Carol Park is a strategic research analyst at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit legal organization that defends Americans’ liberties when threatened by government overreach and abuse.
Is it legal to penalize top-performing Asian American students to help students of other ethnicities? Legal or not, it is happening all around the country. In February, a federal judge sided with the Pacific Legal Foundation and ruled that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County adopted a test-free admission process to discriminate against Asian American students.
Just a short distance away in Maryland, Asian American students have also been suffering discrimination in Montgomery County Public Schools since 2018.
To make more room for Black and Hispanic students, the Montgomery County Board of Education manipulated the admissions process of its four highly coveted magnet middle schools to guarantee that fewer Asian American students would be offered admission.
The new admissions process includes peer grouping and local norming, meaning applicants are at a disadvantage if they live in a low-poverty area with many high-performing students.
Because Asian American students are clustered in 25 of MCPS’s low-poverty schools, the new process forces those students to compete against each other instead of competing against every MCPS student — with the purpose of altering the racial composition of magnet schools to include fewer Asian Americans and more students of other ethnic groups.
The school board’s admissions changes achieved their intended result. The number of Asian American students enrolled at all four magnet schools dropped from 2017 to 2021: from 58.9 percent to 24.3 percent at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School; from 64 percent to 44.4 percent at Roberto W. Clemente Middle School; from 39.3 percent to 35.4 percent at Takoma Park Middle School; and from 26.4 percent to 23.9 percent at Eastern Middle School.
More than a dozen Asian American students who scored between the 95th and 99th percentiles on the entrance exams (CogAT) and received top scores on state assessment tests were rejected.
To combat this overt racial discrimination, the Association for Education Fairness, represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation, filed a lawsuit against MCPS on behalf of the Asian American students.
The board adopted a racial balancing scheme that systemically excludes high-performing Asian American students. It was designed to cover up the government’s systematic failure at improving public education for low-income Black and Hispanic students.
From a legal perspective, a policy with discriminatory intent is unconstitutional even if it uses nonracial or seemingly race-neutral factors to achieve a racial result: It violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Also, from a social science perspective, a policy that pits one racial minority against other minorities is unacceptable.
Here is the cold and sad truth: Asian American students are being used as scapegoats for the serious and growing achievement gap problem that MCPS has avoided dealing with: The county is failing at educating many of its Black and Hispanic students.
For example, only 34.4 percent and 30.1 percent, respectively, of Black and Hispanic students between third and fifth grades passed state math exams in 2019. Meanwhile, the rates were 79.8 percent and 71.8 percent for Asian American and White students, respectively, despite that many Asian American students also come from families with modest means.
Though MCPS claims that lack of diversity at schools is the problem, there is little to no academic evidence that increasing racial diversity, especially in middle schools, helps students perform better in reading or math. Nor is it a good idea to enroll Black and Hispanic students into magnet schools where they might not succeed.
The focus should be instead on strengthening the educational quality of all local MCPS schools so that students of all colors can succeed.
Or even better, how about increasing the magnet school options so that more children can be admitted? Maryland is known for ranking near the bottom in the nation for its school choice, but Montgomery County can be a leader in driving change for the better.
In any case, the solution is not to water down the admissions standards for the district’s highest-performing schools and hard-working students, threatening these schools’ quality and reputation.
We all know that the ambitious children of Montgomery County deserve better. The Montgomery County school board must address its achievement gap problem without victimizing high-performing Asian American students.
The Montgomery County Council is boosting funding for services offered to students in the county amid an escalating mental health crisis among children during the coronavirus pandemic.
The $8 million investment wouldinclude $2 million toward immediatelyestablishinginterim wellness centers at county high schools in existing space and relocatable classrooms, county officials said. More permanent facilities would be built at each high school over a five-year period.
The fundingpackage alsoallocates $3 million for mental health programming and $3 million for portable classrooms.
Montgomery is one of many school systems across the country that has witnessed exacerbated mental health challenges among its student population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned of the accelerating mental health crisis among youths in a report last month. A survey by the CDC found that 4 in 10 teenagers reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless,” and 1 in 5 said they have contemplated suicide. And in October, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health, noting soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness and suicidal thoughts.
Northwood, Gaithersburg, Watkins Mill, Wheaton and Seneca Valley high schools already have school-based wellness centers. A sixth is being built at Kennedy High School.
Community members testified at a council meetingTuesday that the need for additional resources in schools was urgent.
“The few centers that we have are not enough,” Carmen Centeno, who works at Northwood High’s wellness center, told the council in Spanish through an interpreter. “The challenges that young people and their families are facing today are countless. We must act now before it’s too late.”
The centers offer medical care, mental health and social services to students and their families. Each center also focuses on positive youth development, a county initiative that aims to curb violence and gang activity and support families that may have been exposed to complex trauma.
Identity Executive Director Diego Uriburu said in an interview that there are tremendous mental health needs everywhere. The wellness centers have an advantage, he said, because they serve both students and their family members, who may also be struggling. The wellness centers should also help elementary-age students and middle-schoolers, he said.
“These efforts are not just to help young people heal; it also has other benefits,” he said. Citing the increase in fighting and bullying that has been reported in schools, Uriburu said that having the system make a more robust effort on mental health could help with those issues, he said.
Council member NancyNavarro (D-District 4) spearheaded the funding effort. It was supported by the Montgomery County Board of Education and Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight, who over the past several months have heard testimony from students pushing for additional mental health support services after the pandemic kept many of them in virtual learning and away from their peers for almost two years.
McKnight has pledged to direct additional resources toward mental health services in schools. In a letter to parents and other community membersTuesday, McKnight wrote that school leaders were working on other initiatives including hiring and placing more social workers in high schools and exploring ways to add counselors and psychologists.11 CommentsGift Article
American kids are struggling — and they’re asking adults for help
The kids have been saying itthroughout the pandemic: They’re not okay.
“I was going through a rough phase with friends and had lost a loved one,” said Elizabeth Abatan, a high school senior in D.C. who wants to become an orthopedic surgeon.
“I fell behind in my school work and started to lose interest in school,” said Daniela Mendez Castro, a D.C. 16-year-old who wants to be a pediatrician.
“High school students are in a mental health crisis,” said Julissa Canales, another D.C. 16-year-old. She wants to be a therapist.
But these very D.C. teens on Monday weren’t posting on social media or complaining to their friends. They had gone to a virtual D.C. Council budget hearing, sitting before a government body, to ask for help.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that nearly all the students who spoke or submitted testimony want to do the work — taking care of others — that the adults aren’t doing well today.
“Students are taking the lead on addressing mental health,” Alynah King, a student at Wilson High School, saidat the hearing. “Not the adults.”
A few days later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report that confirmed to Americans what they had known all along in their classrooms, at their dinner tables and in their heads: Our children are in serious trouble. In the grips of the pandemic last year, 1 out of every 5 American teens that the CDC spoke to had considered suicide. Forty percent said they felt “persistently sad or hopeless.”
“These data echo a cry for help,” said Debra Houry, a deputy director at the CDC. “The covid-19 pandemic has created traumatic stressors that have the potential to further erode students’ mental well-being.”
It’s “a national emergency,” the American Academy of Pediatrics declared last fall.
That’s what the kids in D.C. said on Monday, too, in the middle of an annual budget process for the public school system that had nearly 250 witnesses submitting testimony on behalf of their passion, their profession or their pet projects: more baseball fields, a food-education program, fixing thefilthy bathrooms in one of the biggest high schools in the city.
And students from across the city who work with the Young Women’s Project, a nonprofit that helps kids find power in their voices, wrote impassioned arguments for more robust and effective mental health programs in all D.C. schools.
“My school doesn’t provide many mental health resources and does not share much information about what they do have,” said Noemie Durand, 17, a junior at BASIS. “It’s baffling and incredibly frustrating that the current health and school systems create so many obstacles to receiving that help.”
Durand said she, like many of her peers, suffered during the pandemic.
“The combination of stress from school, isolation from friends, and an extremely toxic relationship and eventual breakup led to destructive burnout and situational depression for most of my 10th-grade year,” she said. But she has parents with the money and means to get her help. Therapy pulled her out of her depression, she said. When she returned to school, she saw the same issues in peers all around her who didn’t know how to get help.
No surprise: She wants to study psychology.
She’ll have no trouble finding work — there’s a startling shortage of mental health workers in America right now. And that doesn’t bode well for the plan that D.C. Public Schools proposed to help students.
The proposed budget for the 2023 fiscal year is big, up to $2.2 billion from last year’s $2 billion. And mental health services have a starring role, making sure that licensed therapists or psychologists from the Department of Behavioral Health are on all 216public school campuses.
“Everybody knows that, around the country, there are really not sufficient numbers of [licensed social workers] to serve in various capacities,” the agency’s director, Barbara J. Bazron, told The Washington Post’s Perry Stein. “We are also working closely at getting more people in our pipeline through our internship programs and so forth. We are doing some of the same things that people around the country are doing.”
Good plan, adults. For the future.
But kids need help now.
“Many students don’t realize that their stress levels are rising until they have a panic attack,” said Abatan, a student at McKinley Tech High School. “They need to know what to do in the moment before they are overwhelmed to the point of adding more mental harm to themselves.”
The students proposed a $5 million initiative to create after-school mental health programs in 125 schools.
And they explained that while many schools do have resources, kids don’t know about them, are disconnected from them or are embarrassed to use them.
“At my school, you usually have to go to a teacher first to get help from a therapist,” Canales, a student at Columbia Heights Educational Campus, said in her testimony. “This presents a problem because students have to share why they need to see a therapist and may not feel comfortable sharing that with a teacher.”
Canales’s goal of becoming a therapist one day is a good one.
Let’s hope we can get it right sooner, though.
‘A cry for help’: CDC warns of a steep decline in teen mental health
By Moriah BalingitMarch 31, 2022 at 1:00 p.m. EDT Washington Post
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning of an accelerating mental health crisis among adolescents, with more than 4 in 10 teens reporting that they feel “persistently sad or hopeless,” and 1 in 5 saying they have contemplated suicide, according to the results of a survey published Thursday.
“These data echo a cry for help,” said Debra Houry, a deputy director at the CDC. “The COVID-19 pandemic has created traumatic stressors that have the potential to further erode students’ mental well-being.”
The findings draw on a survey of a nationally representative sample of 7,700 teens conducted in the first six months of 2021, when they were in the midst of their first full pandemic school year. They were questioned on a range of topics, including their mental health, alcohol and drug use, and whether they had encountered violence at home or at school. They were also asked about whether they had encountered racism.
Although young people were spared the brunt of the virus — falling ill and dying at much lower rates than older people — they might still pay a steep price for the pandemic, having come of age while weathering isolation, uncertainty, economic turmoil and, for many, grief.
In a news conference, Kathleen A. Ethier, head of the CDC’s division of adolescent and school health, said the survey results underscored the vulnerability of certain students, including LGBTQ youth and students who reported being treated unfairly because of their race. And female students are far worse off than their male peers.
“All students were impacted by the pandemic, but not all students were impacted equally,” Ethier said.
It’s not the first time officials have warned of a mental health crisis among teens. In October, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health, saying that its members were “caring for young people with soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidality that will have lasting impacts on them, their families, and their communities.”
In December, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy issued an advisory on protecting youth mental health.
“The pandemic era’s unfathomable number of deaths, pervasive sense of fear, economic instability, and forced physical distancing from loved ones, friends, and communities have exacerbated the unprecedented stresses young people already faced,” Murthy wrote. “It would be a tragedy if we beat back one public health crisis only to allow another to grow in its place.”
The CDC survey paints a portrait of a generation reeling from the pandemic, grappling with food insecurity, academic struggles, poor health and abuse at home. Nearly 30 percent of the teens surveyed said a parent or other adult in their home lost work during the pandemic, and a quarter struggled with hunger. Two-thirds said they had difficulty with schoolwork.
But the survey also offers hope, finding that teens who feel connected at school report much lower rates of poor health. The finding calls attention to the critical role schools can play in a student’s mental health.
Ethier said the findings add to a body of research that show that feeling connected at school can be “a protective factor” for students. Schools can deliberately foster connectedness in a number of ways, including instructing teachers on how to better manage classrooms, to facilitating clubs for students and ensuring that LGBTQ students feel welcome. Such steps can help all students — and not just the most vulnerable — do better, she said.
“When you make schools less toxic for the most vulnerable students, all students benefit — and the converse is also true,” Ethier said.
Katelyn Chi, a 17-year-old junior at Rowland High School in Rowland Heights, Calif., said her school’s Peer Counseling Club was key to helping her get through last school year, which was entirely virtual. At the beginning of each online club meeting, she and other members filled out a Google form that simply asked them how they were doing. The forms were viewed by the club’s president, who checked in with her whenever she indicated she felt down.
“It really helped,” Chi said. “I received support and validation.”
Concerns about adolescent mental health were rising before the pandemic: Teens had been reporting poor mental health at higher rates. Between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported having “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 37 percent. In 2021, the figure rose to 44 percent.
The survey results also underscore the particular vulnerability of LGBTQ students, who reported higher rates of suicide attempts and poor mental health. Nearly half of gay, lesbian and bisexual teens said they had contemplated suicide during the pandemic, compared with 14 percent of their heterosexual peers.
Girls, too, reported faring worse than boys. They were twice as likely to report poor mental health. More than 1 in 4 girls reported that they had seriously contemplated attempting suicide during the pandemic, twice the rate of boys. They also reported higher rates of drinking and tobacco use than boys.
And, for the first time, the CDC asked teens whether they believed that they had ever been treated unfairly or badly at school because of their race or ethnicity. Asian American students reported the highest levels of racist encounters, with 64 percent answering affirmatively, followed by Black students and multiracial students, about 55 percent of whom reported racism. Students who said they had encountered racism at school reported higher rates of poor mental health and were more likely to report having a physical, mental or emotional problem that made it difficult for them to concentrate.
The study also shed light on household stresses. One in 10 teens reported being physically abused at home, and more than half reported emotional abuse, including being insulted, put down or sworn at.
The survey also revealed that students who felt connected at school fared far better than those who did not. Teens who said they felt “close to people at school” were far less likely to report having attempted or thought about attempting suicide, and they were far less likely to report poor mental health than those who did not feel connected at school. The same held true for teens who felt connected virtually to friends, family members and clubs.
“Comprehensive strategies that improve connections with others at home, in the community, and at school might foster improved mental health among youths during and after the pandemic,” the report concluded.
Chi said she wishes policymakers could take adolescent mental health more seriously. She sometimes feels like people her age are dismissed because of their age.
“I’d like to ask them to provide us with a lot of more resources and a lot more empathy on what we’re going through,” Chi said, adding that her school delayed the opening of a much-needed student wellness center this year. “With things so hard right now, it’s hard to see the future as something better.”
John Gies, the principal of Shelby High School in Shelby, Ohio, said he noticed a rise in the number of his students who were “struggling.” Sometimes, they would not make eye contact. Other times, students without previous disciplinary issues acted out and ended up in his office.
So he used some of the money the school received from the American Rescue Plan to connect more students with counseling, and created an arrangement to bring counselors from a local counseling center to school several times a week. The school has created a support group for grieving students and for a cohort of freshmen who educators worry could fall through the cracks.
“The mental health struggle had been there” before the pandemic, Gies said. “The pandemic really brought it to the surface and made it actually a little bit worse.”
A beautiful day in New York City isn’t just a day when the sun shines and Central Park is sky blue meeting lawn green, shining out in all its glory. It is also a day when New York hotel staff are happy to see you, and do their best to accommodate your needs, like checking in early or securely storing your baggage if you can’t.
When AmeriCorps Project CHANGE arrived last Friday, we were treated to an abundance of the first blessing, a magnificent day in Central Park, flowers blooming, happy people walking, biking, running. On the second score, we got the opposite- a bravura performance from the Hotel staff who could not do enough to frustrate, delay and confuse. If one wanted to experience New York City in all its extremes, the good, the bad, the ugly, we got it in the first New York hour. It is not what we signed on for, but it is what one can expect anytime in NYC and one has to be ready.
The manager- she could not cope with 11 rooms being booked through Expedia. “Why didn’t you book directly with us?” There was $200+ per room reason to use Expedia, but we didn’t tell her that. Working from a crammed space that looked like an annex to an Amazon storage facility, with parcels stacked everywhere, she asked us to give her the 11 separate 14 number booking references, which she laboriously wrote down on her notebook, and I mean lab-or-ious-ly.
She breathed out a sigh for each one, a sigh that got deeper and deeper until I thought by 7753, the 11th registration, she might have sighed herself out and needed CPR.
We had sent these same registrations to the manager two weeks before, after we had stayed at the hotel in person to ensure that there were going to be no problems. Two weeks back, the head manager gave us all assurances that they had all they needed. Show up two weeks later and it was as if our earlier planning trip was a total waste of time. It was. The Hotel was there to frustrate, diss and deceive and in that, they could not do enough.
Six rooms were ready, not 11, so rather than split the team, we decided to come back later when all rooms were prepared. When we did return, a different staff person-(only one person on duty) was on the phone taking a complaint from another unhappy customer who was demanding her money back. This staff person was writing a verbatim report of all that went wrong for someone else. “You kept us waiting” I thought she was writing down!
Despite 15 people suddenly showing up at her desk, she did her best to ignore us. When finally we managed to get some attention, she told us that all our rooms were cancelled because someone had come in and booked 10 rooms earlier in the day, and that we had to go back to the end of the line as far as having rooms ready. When we told her that we booked them in November 2021, she didn’t care. She was going to make us wait till after 5pm, and that was that. Check-In time was 3pm and seemed to be fine for any other guests who arrived while we were there. But it was not called La Quinta ( after 5 in Spanish) for nothing.
The luggage storage facility was the crawl space beside the front door, and any space out from that, all in public view and not secure at all. Some of our team were not happy to leave their bags so exposed, so another member, Dawn, stepped up to say she would stay because she had work to do and she would mind the bags for us. No Central Park sun for her.
So began our weekend in NYC. Central Park was perfect. The Imagine circle off 72nd street as always, was full of singers and artists keeping alive the legacy of John Lennon. “Imagine there’s no heaven,” Imagine NYC as the kindest place in the world. Imagine Early Check-ins. I’ll say you are a dreamer.
The team dinner at Harvest Kitchen was another highlight, where the food was amazing and the welcome and efficiency of the staff such a total contrast to the Hotel. The manager, Igor, was a chef himself and a long time New Yorker who made you want to come back. The team explored the night away in Times Square and good ice cream and good banter, ready for the next day of walking across Brooklyn Bridge and seeing Lion King. What was not to like?
New York is a great and fun place to visit and while it can bring out the best, it can often bring out the worst. If someone goes with a hunger to enjoy, and a curiosity to explore, and not let New York entitlement or cynicism or incompetence get you down, then it is always going to be fun.
But if you are sighing all the way instead of singing all the way, it’s best to stay home. New York doesn’t need more disgruntled, unhappy people. They work hotel desks. It doesn’t have to be that way, but enjoyment in the Big Apple, especially with a team of 20 people is going to take some generosity of spirit and stoic patience to ensure that no one misses out, that people are not left waiting, and that everyone’s interests are fairly accommodated. “Everyone out for themselves,” the stereotypical New York frame of mind of “Me Me Me’ will not work. To enjoy New York, the message is don’t be a New Yorker.
That is not what AmeriCorps is about and that is not why we visit NYC. Next time we visit, we will be closely checking vaccination forms ( some forgot) and also asking members for their license to enjoy, to make sure it is renewed and up to date before they come.
There is a song “If you go to San Francisco, wear a flower in your hair.” Perhaps New York needs a song too. Not “New York New York” and its cringeworthy “Top of the List, King of the Hill” arrogance , but try this, “if you are going to New York City, remember- come singing, not sighing.” Sinatra could sing that as a tribute to the poor manager who we clearly overburdened with our welcome. But she need not worry. We will not be back at that place anytime soon.
Many Thanks to Mary and Carl and Mary and Deborah, and Igor and Harvest Kitchen and Simba and John Roebling and Elton John and Amtrak. No thanks to the La Quinta Inn & Estates by Wyndham Central Park and their unmanagement team.
‘It’s Life or Death’: The Mental Health Crisis Among U.S. Teens
Matt Richtel spent more than a year interviewing adolescents and their families for this series on the mental health crisis.Published April 23, 2022Updated April 26, 2022Editors’ Note:This article examines the increase in anxiety, depression, self harm and suicide among U.S. adolescents. Parents and teenagers dealing with these issues can find resources here.
One evening last April, an anxious and free-spirited 13-year-old girl in suburban Minneapolis sprang furious from a chair in the living room and ran from the house — out a sliding door, across the patio, through the backyard and into the woods.
Moments earlier, the girl’s mother, Linda, had stolen a look at her daughter’s smartphone. The teenager, incensed by the intrusion, had grabbed the phone and fled. (The adolescent is being identified by an initial, M, and the parents by first name only, to protect the family’s privacy.)
Linda was alarmed by photos she had seen on the phone. Some showed blood on M’s ankles from intentional self-harm. Others were close-ups of M’s romantic obsession, the anime character Genocide Jack — a brunette girl with a long red tongue who, in a video series, kills high school classmates with scissors.
In the preceding two years, Linda had watched M spiral downward: severe depression, self-harm, a suicide attempt. Now, she followed M into the woods, frantic. “Please tell me where u r,” she texted. “I’m not mad.”
American adolescence is undergoing a drastic change. Three decades ago, the gravest public health threats to teenagers in the United States came from binge drinking, drunken driving, teenage pregnancy and smoking. These have since fallen sharply, replaced by a new public health concern: soaring rates of mental health disorders.
The decline in mental health among teenagers was intensified by the Covid pandemic but predated it, spanning racial and ethnic groups, urban and rural areas and the socioeconomic divide. In December, in a rare public advisory, the U.S. surgeon general warned of a “devastating” mental health crisis among adolescents. Numerous hospital and doctor groups have called it a national emergency, citing rising levels of mental illness, a severe shortage of therapists and treatment options, and insufficient research to explain the trend.
“Young people are more educated; less likely to get pregnant, use drugs; less likely to die of accident or injury,” said Candice Odgers, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. “By many markers, kids are doing fantastic and thriving. But there are these really important trends in anxiety, depression and suicide that stop us in our tracks.”
“We need to figure it out,” she said. “Because it’s life or death for these kids.”
The crisis is often attributed to the rise of social media, but solid data on the issue is limited, the findings are nuanced and often contradictory and some adolescents appear to be more vulnerable than others to the effects of screen time. Federal research shows that teenagers as a group are also getting less sleep and exercise and spending less in-person time with friends — all crucial for healthy development — at a period in life when it is typical to test boundaries and explore one’s identity. The combined result for some adolescents is a kind of cognitive implosion: anxiety, depression, compulsive behaviors, self-harm and even suicide.
This surge has raised vexing questions. Are these issues inherent to adolescence that merely went unrecognized before — or are they being overdiagnosed now? Historical comparisons are difficult, as some data around certain issues, like teen anxiety and depression, began to be collected relatively recently. But the rising rates of emergency-room visits for suicide and self-harm leave little doubt that the physical nature of the threat has changed significantly.
As M descended, Linda and her husband realized they were part of an unenviable club: bewildered parents of an adolescent in profound distress. Linda talked with parents of other struggling teenagers; not long before the night M fled into the forest, Linda was jolted by the news that a local girl had died by suicide.
“You have no control over what they’re thinking,” Linda said. “I just want to tell people what can happen.”
M at home in Minnesota last fall.
M is one of dozens of teenagers who spoke to The New York Times for a yearlong project exploring the changing nature of adolescence in the United States. The Times was given permission by M and the family to speak with M’s school counselor; M’s medical records were shared with The Times and, with the family’s permission, reviewed by outside experts not involved in M’s care.
“This is a typical outpatient,” said Emily Pluhar, a child and adolescent psychologist at Harvard University, describing M as “an internalizer.”
M, now 14, is tall, with red hair and blue eyes, and has a younger sister and older half brother. By turns shy and outspoken, M has thought extensively about pronouns and currently prefers “they.” At the beginning of seventh grade, M also asked to be called by the name of a popular Japanese anime character, whose first name starts with M. “I think we’re similar in that she’s, like, quiet and smart and plays electric bass, and I really like bass and guitars,” M said.
When M was 4, a psychologist the family consulted to assess M’s school readiness concluded that their “intellectual ability is in the very superior range,” according to the report. M enrolled in kindergarten as one of the younger class members.
At 10, M got a smartphone. Linda and her husband, Tony, both of whom had busy work schedules, worried that the device might lead to heavy screen time, but they felt it was necessary to stay in touch. At 11, M hit another adolescent milestone: puberty.
Over the last century, the age of puberty onset has dropped markedly for girls, to 12 years old today from 14 years old in 1990; the age of onset for boys has followed a similar path. Experts say this shift probably now plays a role in the adolescent mental health crisis, although it is just one of many factors that researchers are still working to understand.
When puberty hits, the brain becomes hypersensitive to social and hierarchical information, even as media flood it with opportunities to explore one’s identity and gauge self-worth. Laurence Steinberg, a psychologist at Temple University, said that ability to maturely grapple with the resulting questions — Who am I? Who are my friends? Where do I fit in? — typically lags behind.
The falling age of puberty, he said, has created a “widening gap” between incoming stimulation and what the young brain can process:
“They’re being exposed to this deluge at a much earlier age.”
M first got a phone at age 10, a concession their parents felt was necessary to stay in touch.
M’s first hint of trouble came in sixth grade, with challenges focusing in class. The school called a meeting with M’s parents. One teacher suggested testing M for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but Linda and Tony were skeptical. The number of A.D.H.D. diagnoses in the United States rose 39 percent from 2003 to 2016, according to the C.D.C., and M’s parents, both scientists in biomedical fields, were concerned that consulting an A.D.H.D. specialist would tilt the scales toward that diagnosis.
Instead, Linda tried to help M stay organized with an app that parents and students used to track assignments, test scores and grades. M felt put under a microscope.
“She would say, ‘Can you bring me your iPad so we can check Schoology?’” M recalled about Linda. “I would literally have an anxiety attack because I was so scared.”
By the fall of 2019 — seventh grade — M was struggling socially, too. A close friend got popular, while M often came home from school and got into bed. “I felt like a plus one,” M said. “I just wanted to be unconscious.” Other times, M said, “I just sat in my room and cried.”
The behavior seemed alien to Tony, who had lived a different childhood. As an adolescent in Vermont in the 1980s, he fished and played outdoors. By 15, he had his first serious girlfriend; in 1990, the summer before their senior year, he got her pregnant. Their son was born that December, and Tony and the mother shared custody.
Times have changed. Federal research shows that 38 percent of high-school-age teenagers report having had sex at least once, compared with roughly 50 percent in 1990. The teen birthrate has plummeted.
Rates of smoking, drugs, alcohol and sex declined among high school students over the last decade, continuing trends that started over two decades ago.
Experts cite multiple factors: public awareness campaigns, antismoking laws, parental oversight and a changing social lifestyle that is no longer strictly in-person.
Dr. Nora Volkow, director for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, described drug and alcohol use as “very much of a group dynamic.” She added: “To the extent that kids are not in the same place, one would expect a decrease in the behavior.”
A virtual crush
Drawings by M.
In the spring of 2020, M retreated further. Bewildered by online classes, M lied about participating, felt guilty and watched YouTube instead, devouring an anime series called “Danganronpa.” It is set in a high school where students learn from the evil headmaster, a bear, that the only way to graduate is to kill a peer.
M became enamored of one of the characters, Genocide Jack (sometimes known as Genocide Jill), who is described on one fan site as a witty “murderous fiend” who “kills handsome men” using scissors.
One night after dinner, M was upstairs and used scissors to cut both ankles. “I was mad at myself for not doing homework,” M said. “I was kind of thinking, ‘Oh, the pain feels good,’ like it was better than being stressed.” M couldn’t recall where the idea came from: “I wanted to hurt myself with anything.”
M’s parents noticed superficial scratches on M’s thighs that resembled cuts but did not raise the subject. Linda worried about the screen time but “it was pandemic,” she said.
When school ended for summer break, M’s mood improved. Over the summer, M discovered the mobile version of the “Danganronpa” video game and how to override the parental screen limits. M played all day.
“I was in front of my screen staring at Jack,” M said. “Then I was playing ‘Trigger Happy Havoc,’ and I was, like, more in love.”
“I was kind of just lonely,” M said. M fantasized about the future with Jack: “I’d want her to almost kill me but not, and then we could spend the rest of our lives together.”
An obsession with a virtual character is not uncommon, experts said. “This is a kid who is a bit lonely, a bit caught up in these narratives,” said Nick Allen, a psychologist at the University of Oregon. “There’s nothing new in coming up with stuff that freaks out their parents.”
Nonetheless, he added, “extremely powerful” online experiences like these can encourage users to think, “That is going to be my identity, my sense of the future, my sense of where I belong socially,” at a time when one’s identity is a work in progress.
Dr. Pluhar of Harvard noted that “the challenge and the progress” of modern adolescence “is there are so many types of identity” — more choices and possibilities, which in turn could be overwhelming. Among the factors shaping mental health, Dr. Pluhar said, is the mind’s churning and obsessing: “Rumination is a big piece of it.”
M had a name for the main source of their mental health challenges: “Loneliness.”
Elaniv
Tania Gainza, a social worker in Minnesota, and her daughter Elyana at home.
Health experts note that, for all its weight, the adolescent crisis at least is unfolding in a more accepting environment. Mental health issues have shed much of the stigma they carried three decades ago, and parents and adolescents alike are more at ease when discussing the subject among themselves and seeking help.
Indeed, Linda had begun having conversations with other parents who wondered whether the challenges their adolescents were facing represented typical moody teen behavior or something pathological. A colleague told Linda about her daughter’s eating disorder. A mother named Sarah confided that her middle-school-age daughter was in therapy for anxiety and depression. “I told her, ‘I understand where you’re at way better than you think,’” Sarah recalled.
How to Help Teens Struggling With Mental Health
Recognize the signs. Anxiety and depression are different issues but they do share some indicators. Look for changes in a youth’s behavior, such as disinterest in eating or altered sleep patterns. A teen in distress may express excessive worry, hopelessness or profound sadness.
Approach with sensitivity. If you are seeking to start a discussion with a teen who might be struggling, be clear and direct. Don’t shy from hard questions, but also approach the issue with compassion and not blame.
Get the correct diagnosis. Find the right doctor for your child by asking for recommendations. Ask the specialist about her experience treating specific conditions in children and the measurement tools she uses to make medical assessments.
Carefully consider medications. Press doctors on their experience treating children with specific drugs and make sure you understand their side effects and interactions with other treatments, as well as how to tell if a medication is working and how hard it is to wean off of it.
Don’t forget the basics. Young people, with developing brains, need eight to 10 hours of sleep to promote mental and physical health. Lack of sleep can interfere with development, and can dramatically impact mood. Physical activity is also vital.
In a nearby suburb, the parents of Elaniv Burnett were struggling to understand their daughter’s desperation. As a young child, Elaniv had been joyful, an eager student and graceful gymnast, her father, Dr. Tatnai Burnett, a gynecological surgeon at the Mayo Clinic, recalled: “The kind of kid where you go, ‘Huh, we should have more kids.’”
But in 2014, when Elaniv was 9, her parents’ marriage began to fracture, and Elaniv injured her ankle; she developed chronic pain, which sidelined her from gymnastics, and she went through a dark period. Then, in 2016, Dr. Burnett, who is Black, was held at gunpoint at home by the police, in full view of the family, after officers responded to a call of a possible intruder.
Recent research has found that wealth, education and opportunity do not shield Black families from mental health issues to the same degree they do for white families. From 1991 to 2017, suicide attempts by Black adolescents rose 73 percent, compared with an 18 percent rise among white adolescents. (The overall suicide rate remains higher among white adolescents.) The suicide rate leaped particularly for Black girls, up 6.6 percent per year on average from 2003 to 2017, new research shows.
In the fall of 2019, Elaniv was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. In a poem in her journal, she wrote: “Thoughts like racecars zoom constant in my head/ Self-hate and worthlessness/ Perpetual, they speed ahead.”
Elaniv began therapy, took medications and enrolled in an outdoor inpatient program in Utah. “We worked on ourselves, worked on our parenting, we changed so many things to try to help meet Elaniv where she was,” Dr. Burnett said. “We controlled electronics, monitored friendships.”
Elaniv’s mother, Tania Gainza, a clinical social worker, saw a generational trend. She had counseled an adolescent for years who was terrified of not meeting expectations. She heard about a local boy who killed himself seemingly without warning.
“There’s something different about this era or generation that makes them much more susceptible or vulnerable,” Ms. Gainza said. “There’s not that community, I guess.”
“They’re hanging out with friends, but no friends are there,” said Bonnie Nagel, a psychologist at the Oregon Health & Science University. “It’s not the same social connectedness we need and not the kind that prevents one from feeling lonely.”
Often, she said, online social connections amount to seeing “pictures of people hanging out, flaunting it, as if to say, ‘Hey, I’m very socially connected,’ and ‘Hey, look at you by yourself.’”
The pandemic factor
When Linda cleared M’s home of knives in the autumn of 2020, M began hitting their head with a barbell.
One day in the autumn of 2020, with the pandemic in full swing and eighth grade having gone fully remote, Linda found M sobbing in bed. M confessed to wanting to die.
Linda found an online therapist. After several sessions, “the therapist broke confidentiality,” Linda said. “She said, ‘You need to know about the knife.’”
In M’s night stand, Tony found a pocketknife and a box knife with a cat’s paw image on the handle that M had surreptitiously bought on Amazon and was using to self-harm. One night, M went further, tightening a red hair tie around their neck. “I was trying to see how far I could take it,” M said.
The following February, M entered full-day group therapy. A psychiatrist at the clinic notified the family that M had admitted to being unable to stop cutting, medical records show. Linda “de-knived the house,” she said, and hid all the pills. Then M engaged in a different kind of self-harm: hitting their head with an eight-pound workout barbell.
Linda recalled feeling stunned: “Oh, now I have to get rid of the blunt objects, too.”
M was discharged with a diagnosis of depression and a prescription for antidepressants. From 2015 to 2019, prescriptions for antidepressants rose 38 percent for teenagers compared with 15 percent for adults, according to Express Scripts, a major mail-order pharmacy.
Subsequently, M also received a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, not A.D.H.D., and given a prescription for methylphenidate, the generic name for medications including Ritalin and Concerta. “I’m still not sure I believe it,” Linda said.
M’s middle school has a trained mental health counselor. In March 2021, M visited him for the first time. During that visit, on a scale of 0 to 10, M ranked hopelessness and anxiety at 9, expressing terror at returning to school, a fear of falling behind and a wish to die.
But M’s mood improved; at a meeting a month later, M ranked hopelessness and sadness at 5 and anxiousness at 2. M felt therapy was crucial but wasn’t sure the medications helped; the school counselor credited M’s improvement to family support and getting back to school. He cautioned the parents, though, that the pendulum could swing back.
Into the forest
Tania held an urn containing the remains of her daughter, Elaniv.
Around that time, Linda heard through the grapevine that a girl named Elaniv Burnett had died following an overdose. “I’m sorry, I can’t take it anymore,” Elaniv wrote in a note. Her mother rushed her, still conscious, to the hospital, where Elaniv expressed regret at the overdose and described her terror. She died four days later, at age 15.
The news was still on Linda’s mind a few weeks later when M fled into the forest.
M’s family had recently returned from visiting both sets of grandparents. One set criticized M’s pronouns, the other M’s heavy screen use. Linda said she felt judged. She stole a look at M’s phone and saw the troubling photos.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said to M and went upstairs briefly. When she returned, M had vanished, so she followed them into the woods, texting as she frantically looked for flashes of M’s white dress.
Finally M texted back: “I don’t want to talk to you.”
Linda returned home, and Tony went out. He found M along a commonly used trail. They walked, mostly in silence. “Then they were ready to come home,” he recalled.
The school year ended, and M improved, the anxiety ebbing. M took joy spending time with a friend, in person, walking home, strolling the forest.
But a few weeks later, a hurtful text from the friend plunged M into despair again, “like I was back to having no friends.”
M used an exfoliating blade to cut both ankles. “I don’t know how to stop it,” M said. “I can bet $20 that I’ll be in the hospital next year.”
When Linda saw the cuts, she confronted M, who handed over the blade. M let Linda examine the wounds.
“I think that’s good,” Linda said. “They let me look.”
How the reporter Matt Richtel spoke to adolescents and parents for this series
In mid-April, I was speaking to the mother of a suicidal teenager whose struggles I’ve been closely following. I asked how her daughter was doing.
Not well, the mother said: “If we can’t find something drastic to help this kid, this kid will not be here long-term.” She started to cry. “It’s out of our hands, it’s out of our control,” she said. “We’re trying everything.”
She added: “It’s like waiting for the end.”
Over nearly 18 months of reporting, I got to know many adolescents and their families and interviewed dozens of doctors, therapists and experts in the science of adolescence. I heard wrenching stories of pain and uncertainty. From the outset, my editors and I discussed how best to handle the identities of people in crisis.
The Times sets a high bar for granting sources anonymity; our stylebook calls it “a last resort” for situations where important information can’t be published any other way. Often, the sources might face a threat to their career or even their safety, whether from a vindictive boss or a hostile government.
In this case, the need for anonymity had a different imperative: to protect the privacy of young, vulnerable adolescents. They have self-harmed and attempted suicide, and some have threatened to try again. In recounting their stories, we had to be mindful that our first duty was to their safety.
If The Times published the names of these adolescents, they could be easily identified years later. Would that harm their employment opportunities? Would a teen — a legal minor — later regret having exposed his or her identity during a period of pain and struggle? Would seeing the story published amplify ongoing crises?
As a result, some teenagers are identified by first initial only; some of their parents are identified by first name or initial. Over months, I got to know M, J and C, and in Kentucky, I came to know struggling adolescents I identified only by their ages, 12, 13 and 15. In some stories, we did not publish precisely where the families lived.
Everyone I interviewed gave their own consent, and parents were typically present for the interviews with their adolescents. On a few occasions, a parent offered to leave the room, or an adolescent asked for privacy and the parent agreed.
In these articles, I heard grief, confusion and a desperate search for answers. The voices of adolescents and their parents, while shielded by anonymity, deepen an understanding of this mental health crisis.
We are losing a generation: The devastating impacts of COVID-19
The first impact was the millions of lives lost due to the disease caused by the COVID 19 virus. The second was the human suffering caused by job instability and poverty. The third is on children and youth who should have been in school but were told to stay at home.
It is two years since the pandemic started. Nearly all countries decided that one of the main ways to fight the pandemic was to keep students out of school and universities. Public health experts had decided that keeping education institutions open would lead to further spread of the virus. To “flatten the curve” and prevent overcrowding of hospitals, kids would have to stay home.
Many European and some East Asian countries reopened school relatively quickly, conscious of both the obvious costs for kids and the scant evidence of the benefits of the complete closure. But in many countries in South Asia, Latin America, Middle East, and even in East Asia, school closures were maintained for exceptionally long periods. Our own countries, India and Peru, are tragically representative.
Most of the impact will be on children and youth who happened to be between 4 and 25 years old in 2020 and 2021, generating a huge intergenerational inequality. Being out of school for that long means that children not just stop learning, they also tend to forget a lot of what they have learned. In late 2020, the World Bank estimated that a 7-month absence from schools would increase the share of students in ‘learning poverty’ from 53 to 63 percent. An additional 7 million students would drop out of school. The effects on marginalized minorities and girls will be even worse. Our loss estimates have been revised upwards, and now we expect that, unless swift and bold action is taken, learning poverty can reach 70%.
Biggest losses for those with the least
In all countries—rich, middle-income and poor—kids from the poorest families are bearing the largest losses as their opportunities to maintain any educational engagement through remote learning are limited. Internet access for them is poor: only half of all students in middle income countries and just a tenth in the poorest countries have web access. The use of TV and radio and facilitating learning materials has helped, but it cannot replace interactive education. ‘Learning’ cannot just mean watching television or listening to the radio for a few hours a day.
The result is a widening of the already large inequality of opportunity. In the developing world, COVID-19 might lead to lower growth, higher poverty and more inequality for a generation, a terrible triple threat to global prosperity for decades to come.
“The future of a billion kids around the world is at risk. Unless we get them back in school again and find ways to remedy the effects of the interruption, COVID-19 will result in a huge setback for this generation.”
By late last year, we had hard data about learning losses in middle-income countries like Brazil and India. In the state of São Paulo, for example, educators decided to measure the status of learning continuously—as opposed to many countries who have postponed any type of learning measurement, maybe to avoid getting bad news. They find that after a year without in-person classes, students had learned 27 percent less what they would have learned in normal times. India’s Pratham, a well-regarded education NGO, has found that minimum proficiency levels have been cut by half in the state of Karnataka.
Three new “Rs” for a novel coronavirus
Encouragingly, by the end of 2021, schools had reopened in many countries. But nearly one in four education systems were still closed and many systems had reopened only partially. 1.5 billion children were back in class, though 300 million kids still need to be brought back to school safely. But that was before the Omicron variant of the virus. These numbers have changed since the start of this year.
We think a blend of reopened schools, remote learning and remedial programs can limit the damage caused by the disruptions and serve as a model response for future shocks—and maybe even make public education better than it was a couple of years ago.
Reopen schools safely. If you’re unsettled by the image of millions of kids sitting and staring at the TV, consider this: more than half the households in 30 African countries don’t even have electricity. For just too many children in the world, conditions at home are not conducive for learning, too many do not have Internet access, a decent device, or money to pay for data or books, and a space to study at home. And education is inherently a social endeavor: it requires incessant interaction. This means brick-and-mortar schools, which must open and be made safe for students and teachers. Investments are needed. Quite often there is money available for this and there is no dearth of guidelines from international agencies on how to reopen schools safely. What is generally missing in many countries is a national sense of urgency.
Invest in remote learning. World Bank and OECD teams completed an assessment of remote learning during the two years of the pandemic. The results are not always encouraging. But the pandemic showed that hybrid learning innovations -combining in-person and remote instruction through smart use of digital technologies— are here to stay. But investments in technology have to be cleverly coupled with investments in learning skills. The pandemic has quickened a change in mindset about the use of technology, and we have a small window of opportunity to get teachers and administrators to see technology as part of the learning process. Besides, this is not the last pandemic or natural disaster that might force schools to close. By facilitating the continuation of the learning process at home, better learning technologies in the classroom can also make the system more effective both when schools are open and when they have to be closed.
Remediate to recoup missed and lost learning. In the United States, students returned last Fall with about a third less learning in reading during the 2019-20 academic year than they normally would have. In many countries with long school closures, students are attending a grade without having grasped even a small portion of what was taught in the previous grade. If kids don’t catch up, particularly those in the early grades where losses are larger, they might eventually even drop out. Across the world, schools must adapt to the needs of students—both the fundamental skills of literacy and numeracy, and their mental health and well-being. Encouragingly, though, students who learned less last year tend to rebound faster than others—if they are provided access to remedial instruction. But this cannot be done without additional support to teachers and principals.
Averting a permanent loss
To help in these efforts, the World Bank Group is working on nearly a hundred COVID-related education projects in more than 60 countries. These projects sum up to $ 11 billion. These are record numbers for the World Bank, but a fraction of the $72 billion the US federal government is making available for public schools to reopen safely. We are supporting countries as diverse as Chile, Jordan and Pakistan. More efforts are needed to finance the return to classroom-based teaching, and help public schools adopt teaching techniques that blend on-line and in-classroom learning and teach students at the level they need today after the months and years they have been denied of an education, focusing on foundation skills and in their emotional wellbeing
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