Celebrating Teachers and Raising Awareness of Mental Wellness

Scarlett Lewis 5/2/228:48 AM

Educators are modern day superheroes! As parents, we give our most precious asset, our children, to these individuals and ask them to help shape and mold them into the human beings they will become. There is no more important job on this planet. Every day should be a celebration of the essential role teachers play in the lives of our children to guide them on their path to flourishing.

Teachers, we salute you, especially during Teacher Appreciation Week, May 2-6. We celebrated educators, counselors and school staff on the latest leg of the continuing the Choose Love Bus Tour throughout the state of New Hampshire, sponsored by Governor Christopher Sununu. We had a gratitude station at every stop dedicated to the teachers and hundreds of students wrote letters of thanks to them and other staff. Hearing stories of educators, counselors, and administrators going above and beyond, portrayed in these heartwarming notes, filled my bucket!

May is also Mental Health Awareness Month which seems a perfect combination with Teacher Appreciation Week. You can’t acknowledge one without the other. For too long we saw our schools solely as a place for academics. Now, with a burgeoning mental health crisis, we are relying on our educators more and more to help our children navigate challenges both in and out of the classroom. As outlined by the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in his latest public health advisory, the mental health crisis of our youth is a major issue facing our educators in classrooms today. In speaking with teachers and visiting classrooms across the country throughout the pandemic, I have heard heartbreaking stories shared by our kids of all that they have been enduring. Educators must teach while addressing these increasing mental health struggles.

There are positive barometers of our children’s mental health and these can be cultivated by educators. According to the CDC some of these indicators include the ability to show affection, resilience, positivity, and curiosity in children ages 3-5 years old. Signs of mental health and wellness in kids up to age 17 include curiosity, persistence, and self-control. These personal strengths are taught, reinforced, and practiced within the lessons in our Choose Love for Schools program.

It is important to foster mental health and wellness in our children from an early age. Teaching essential life skills such as the Choose Love Formula, that encompasses Courage + Gratitude + Forgiveness + Compassion-in-Action, and empowering them with how to have healthy relationships, emotional management, and responsible decision-making, gives our children the ability to make healthy choices in their thoughts and actions which in turn creates a healthy Choose Love Lifestyle. This is the blueprint for flourishing.

Educators lay the building blocks for the formation of our children’s hopes and dreams. Providing children with essential life skills and coping mechanisms can help prevent anxiety and some mental illnesses. The Choose Love Movement was founded in love and support of our educators and it quickly spread worldwide. Our message has grown from schools, to homes, to communities across the U.S. to include governmental agencies, including health and human services, police departments and first responders, foster care, at-risk youth, residential services, and our prison system. Our programming solutions are free of cost so we can help everyone flourish and live better lives.

Let’s all work together to take back the health and well-being of ourselves and our children and create the world we want to live in that is safe and happy, and where we can, “Have a Lot of fun!”

Please take the Choose Love pledge here: https://chooselovemovement.org...-choose-love-pledge/

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Frank Sterle Jr.Member

Celebrating MOST teachers, anyway. ...

As a ‘difficult’ boy with autism spectrum disorder, ACEs and high sensitivity (thus, admittedly, not always easy to deal with), the first and most formidably abusive authority figure with whom I was terrifyingly trapped was my Grade 2 teacher (Mrs. Carol), in the early 1970s. Although I can’t recall her abuse in its entirety, I’ll nevertheless always remember how she had the immoral audacity — and especially the unethical confidence in avoiding any professional repercussions — to blatantly readily aim and fire her knee towards my groin, as I was backed up against the school hall wall. Fortunately, though, she missed her mark, instead hitting the top of my left leg. Though there were other terrible teachers, for me she was uniquely traumatizing, especially when she wore her dark sunglasses when dealing with me.

Rather than tell anyone about my ordeal with her and consciously feel victimized, I instead felt some misplaced shame. And as each grade passed, I increasingly noticed how all recipients of corporeal handling/abuse in my school were boys; and I had reasoned thus normalized to myself that it was because men can take care of themselves and boys are basically little men.

[For some other (albeit likely NT) students back then and there, however, there was Mrs. Carol's sole Grade 2 counterpart, Mrs. Clemens — similarly abusive but with the additional bizarre, scary attribute of her eyes abruptly shifting side to side. Not surprising, the pair were quite friendly with each other. It was rumored the latter teacher had a heroin addiction, though I don’t recall hearing of any solid proof of that. I remember one fellow second-grader’s mother going door to door in my part of town seeking out any other case of a student who, like her son, had been assaulted by that teacher. Meanwhile, I just stood there, silently, as my astonished mother conversed with the woman while unaware of my own nightmare-teacher experiences.]

Not surprisingly, I strongly feel that our standard educators should be properly educated on Autism Spectrum Disorder, especially when it comes to preventing the abuse of autistic students by their neurotypical peers and teachers alike. There likely are students who, like me, have ASD but do not exhibit low-functioning-autism disability traits yet nonetheless struggle with other superficially suppressible traits. [While sometimes told "But you're so smart," I know that for every 'gift', I'm afflicted with a corresponding three or four deficits. It is indeed crippling, and on multiple levels.]

Not only should all school teachers receive mandatory ASD training, there should also be an inclusion in standard high school curriculum of child-development science that would also teach students about the often-debilitating condition (without being overly complicated). If nothing else, the curriculum would offer students an idea/clue as to whether they themselves are emotionally/mentally compatible with the immense responsibility and strains of regular, non-ASD-child parenthood.

It would explain to students how, among other aspects of the condition, people with ASD (including those with higher functioning autism) are often deemed willfully ‘difficult’ and socially incongruent, when in fact such behavior is really not a choice. And how “camouflaging” or “masking,” terms used to describe ASD people pretending to naturally fit into a socially ‘normal’ environment, causes their already high anxiety and depression levels to further increase. Of course, this exacerbation is reflected in the disproportionately high rate of suicide among ASD people.

5/3/225:53 PM

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