The advisory topic for the day was stress. I asked the kids how they managed stress. One boy reads. Another boy writes poetry. One eats. A number of boys and girls sleep. Sleep as a strategy appealed to most of them. Other students screensuck, mostly through gaming or social media.

We talked about recognizing stress, knowing our own personal tells. Those tells included twiddling fingers, tapping, and knuckle-cracking, mostly nervous hand gestures. We included gaming and eating. Sometimes kids knew when they were gaming or eating to make themselves feel better. We talked about recognizing depression as well, since stress and depression often travel hand-in-hand.

This half-hour advisory class will focus on stress for a couple of weeks. I like the idea. We started with time management, a big source of stress for middle school students and just about everybody today. If I don’t start my full day of grading of unit tests and other random assignments soon, I will definitely be stressed by tomorrow.

Eduhonesty: I’d recommend this advisory unit for middle schools across the country. Childhood has become terra incognita today, as evidenced by that post — was it just yesterday? — about first graders plotting to kill a classmate. Kids living in the Too Much Information Age learn too many scary facts and ideas before they can realistically process these facts and ideas, and I don’t know that we can shut this information flow down in any substantive fashion. I guarantee readers that some of my Spanish for Native Speakers students are running in fear of Donald Trump. They pretty much told me so yesterday.

“Why should I do all this work? Donald Trump’s just going to deport me when he is President!” My student said.

I don’t often hear excuses I have never heard before, but Trump as a reason to avoid classwork was new to me. The class laughed loudly. But the looks on their faces were not all entertained. The room sank into a more serious mood quickly. Whether there are ten or fourteen million illegal immigrants in this country, I guarantee readers many children in those families are not only stressed, they are living in fear.

As far as America’s “regular” kids go, the new show, “The Internet Ruined My Life” captures one reality that all these kids experience. Many of them feel one click away from disaster. Dumping your boyfriend or having a fight with your best friend has now become an event fraught with scary, potential consequences. What might that person share on social media? What pictures do they have?

Teaching stress and coping strategies ought to be obligatory topics that are regularly revisited in our students lives, even at the elementary level, at the expense of test preparation and other academic requirements. We keep pushing sex, sexual harassment and birth control discussions down into lower grades. We keep pushing academics down into lower grades. The teachers in the teachers lounge almost all agreed a few days ago that parents had to send their students to a local all-day kindergarten option, instead of the half-day option, because half-day students would be too far behind academically when they started first grade. (I was the lone vocal dissenter.) As we raise expectations at lower ages, we should teach healthy coping strategies for stress such as art, meditation, music and other relaxation techniques.

The poet and the reader in my advisory seem to have found healthy ways to manage stress overloads in their lives, but I naturally worry about my sleepers and eaters. Yahoo yesterday carried an article that said 1 in 8 adults on the planet is now obese. I don’t trust that source and if the actual number is 1 in 22.3, for example, I would not be surprised. But the big idea strikes me as real. The world is gaining weight nowadays.

And the reason has little or nothing to do with an increased food supply.