Tuesday, November 1, 2016

TOW #7 - Teaching Teenagers to Cope With Social Stress

In Teaching Teenagers to Cope With Social Stress, Jan Hoffman shows what teenagers should really be learning to stop all of their ongoing stress.  Jan Hoffman attended Cornell University and Yale Law School and has been writing for The New York Times for roughly twenty years now.  Geared toward an audience of teenagers, educators, and parents, he utilizes hypophora and facts from experts to help show the simplicity of lowering stress in teenagers.  In the beginning of the article he asks an empowering question that states, “Almost four million American teenagers have just started their freshman year of high school. Can they learn better ways to deal with all that stress and insecurity?” (Hoffman Par. 1).  Hoffman is able to set up his entire argument to show what he is going to be talking about and how he is going to answer his question.  This draws in the reader's attention and helps organize the article. He uses research from an expert named David S. Yeager to answer his own question.  Hoffman says, “His latest study, published in the journal Psychological Science, found a surprisingly effective technique. At the beginning of the school year, students participated in a reading and writing exercise intended to instill a basic, almost banal message to help them manage tension: People can change” (Hoffman Par. 4).  This fact shows the simplicity of the solution to teenagers problems with stress, and makes it seem easily attainable.  He later provides statistics stating, “Afterward, students who received the intervention showed half the cardiovascular reactivity of the control group. Their levels of cortisol dropped by 10 percent; they were coping. By contrast, the cortisol levels in the control group increased by 45 percent” (Hoffman Par. 23).  This statistic drives his point home and helps achieve his purpose in showing what teenagers can really do to decrease stress. In my opinion Hoffman fully achieved his purpose and left me thinking about things that I can do to decrease my own cortisol levels.

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