State Writing Assessment

The biggest challenges facing teens

I just spent three days with 131 other teachers scoring the state writing assessment given to all juniors in February. Every junior must write a persuasive essay about a prompt provided by the Nebraska Department of Education. This has to be completed in two 40-minute class periods, so their final draft is really more of a working draft—but anyway.

The grading team gathered and graded over 20,000 essays from 8:30 in the morning until 4:00 in the afternoon. This year’s prompt asked what the biggest challenge is that faces teens today. Goodness, not much humor in their answers; most of the essays addressed things such as peer pressure, alcohol, drugs, smoking, sex, stress . . . it was enough to make me depressed.

Thankfully, most of the essays were pretty well written—not many that made me scratch my head and wonder what the student was saying—but the content got to me, especially some of the sad, sad stories they told as examples. To top it off, I got a call Saturday morning informing me that one of the juniors at my school had been killed in an accident involving alcohol. How sad. So many of the essays said that students feel pressured to drink or use drugs just to fit in.

Give your kids and grandkids lots of hugs, and tell them to stand up for their beliefs and values—hard as it may be to do that. We are losing too many kids because they want to feel they belong.

By Carla Hedstrom
Meaningful Meanderings Blog