Teaching English to Adolescents: Mental Health
Teaching English to Adolescents: An alternative platform if you are having trouble with youtube: https://vimeo.com/427723364
Online Course Teaching English to Teens and Pre-Teens
When we're teaching English to adolescents, creating an effective learning environment for our kids is like building the perfect nest. Without the right conditions, healthy development of mind, body, and spirit will be affected.
As teachers, we play a part in this bigger picture. Even though we see our kids a couple of times a week to teach them a language, a big part of our success with that subject will rely on how well we are building resilient and mentally well young people who are keen and ready to learn.
Before we look at the development of a child’s brain and body as they reach the age of nine onward, we need to clarify what we are talking about when we refer to mental well-being.
Teaching English to Adolescents
Mental well-being describes your mental state - how you are feeling and how well you can cope with day-to-day life. It can change from moment to moment, day to day, month to month, or year to year.
Mind, a mental health charity, identify good mental well-being as being able to:
- feel relatively confident in yourself and have positive self-esteem
- feel and express a range of emotions
- build and maintain good relationships with others
- feel engaged with the world around you
- live and work productively
- cope with the stresses of daily life
- adapt and manage in times of change and uncertainty.
Mental ill-health is defined as a condition that impacts your thinking, feeling, or mood and may affect the ability to relate to others and how you function on a daily basis. A mental health problem can feel just as bad, or worse, as any other illness.
We all try and look after ourselves physically – we care about what we eat and the quantities of it. We have a go at walking 6000 steps a day. We shower and bath, and clean our teeth. We try and get enough rest.
We do all of this for our bodies, but we don’t often look after our mental health and the mental health of people we love, or who are in our care, such as our students. We often leave it uncared for until illness and dysfunction arises.