school stress speech

How to help children and teens manage their stress

The pandemic pushed stress to historic highs. Here are healthy ways for children and teens to cope.

In the short term, stress can push a child to practice for her piano recital or inspire a teen to study when he’d rather be out with friends. But chronic stress —for example, from unrelenting pandemic-related pressures, social unrest, or violence—is different. Left unchecked, long-term stress can contribute to a long list of physical and mental health problems . Prolonged stress can cause high blood pressure, weaken the immune system, and contribute to diseases such as obesity and heart disease. It can also lead to mental health problems such as anxiety and depression—disorders that are becoming more common in youth.

More than two full years into the covid -19 pandemic, mental illness is at an all-time high—especially among children. In fact, between 2016 and 2020, the number of children aged 3 to 17 diagnosed with anxiety grew by 29% and those with depression by 27%, according to a study published in 2022 in JAMA Pediatrics . The findings also suggest concerning changes in child and family well-being after the onset of the covid -19 pandemic.

At the extreme end of the stress scale, nearly 270,000 children suffered tragic loss, with covid -19 claiming one or more of their caregivers .

Stress in young people doesn’t always look like stress in adults. But like adults, children and teens—even those with life-altering losses—can find healthy ways to cope. Together, young people and their parents or caregivers can learn to spot the signs of excess stress and, with the right tools, manage it.

Sources of stress in young children

For young children, tension at home is a common source of stress. Children may be troubled by family discord, divorce, or loss, for example. Even happy changes, such as a new home, the arrival of a new sibling, or a beloved new stepparent can be hard on a child.

School is another frequent source of concern for kids. Young children might be stressed about making friends, dealing with bullies, or getting along with their teachers. They might also be anxious about tests and grades.

More significant stress is also rising in this cohort. While pediatric emergency department visits declined during the pandemic, the number and proportion of mental health-related emergency department visits increased for children ages 0 to 11, compared to 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( Radhakrishnan, L., et al., Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report , Vol. 71, No. 8, 2022 ).

Sources of stress in adolescents and teens

As children get older, their sources of stress expand. Teens are more likely than young children to be stressed by events or situations outside the home.

Mental health crises are on the rise for this age group as well, with mental health-related emergency department visits increasing for kids ages 12 to 17 compared with 2019 emergency department visits. In particular, emergency departments saw increases in visits related to self-harm, drug poisonings, and eating disorders among this age group since the pandemic’s onset ( Radhakrishnan, L., et al., Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report , Vol. 71, No. 8, 2022 ).

In addition, during the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, according to the Healthy Minds Study, which collects data from 373 campuses nationwide ( Lipson, S. K., et al., Journal of Affective Disorders , Vol. 306, 2022 ).

Peers can help buffer stress, but can also be a source of it. Social relationships are especially important in adolescence. Many teens worry about fitting in, their first romantic relationships, and peer pressure around substance use and sex.

Recognize the signs of stress

Signs of stress in youth can show up in a number of ways:

• Irritability and anger: Children don’t always have the words to describe how they are feeling and sometimes tension bubbles over into a bad mood. Stressed-out kids and teens might be more short-tempered or argumentative than normal.
• Changes in behavior: A young child who used to be a great listener is suddenly acting out. A once-active teen now doesn’t want to leave the house. Sudden changes can be a sign that stress levels are high.
• Trouble sleeping: A child or teen might complain of feeling tired all the time, sleep more than usual, or have trouble falling asleep at night.
• Neglecting responsibilities: If an adolescent suddenly drops the ball on homework, forgets obligations, or starts procrastinating more than usual, stress might be a factor.
• Eating changes: Eating too much or too little can both be reactions to stress.
• Getting sick more often: Stress often shows up as physical symptoms. Children who feel stress often report headaches or stomachaches, and might make frequent trips to the school nurse’s office.

Stress management for kids and teens

Facing stressors is a fact of life, for children and adults. These strategies can help keep stress in check:

• Sleep well. Sleep is essential for physical and emotional well-being. Experts recommend nine to 12 hours of sleep a night for 6- to 12-year olds. Teens need eight to 10 hours a night . Sleep needs to be a priority to keep stress in check. To protect shut-eye, limit screen use at night and avoid keeping digital devices in the bedroom.
• Exercise. Physical activity is an essential stress reliever for people of all ages. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends at least 60 minutes a day of activity for children ages 6 to 17.
• Talk it out. Talking about stressful situations with a trusted adult can help kids and teens put things in perspective and find solutions.
• Make time for fun—and quiet. Just like adults, kids and teens need time to do what brings them joy, whether that’s unstructured time to play with building bricks or uninterrupted hours to practice music or art. Also, while some children thrive bouncing from one activity to the next, others need more down time. Find a healthy balance between favorite activities and free time.
• Get outside. Spending time in nature is an effective way to relieve stress and improve overall well-being. Researchers have found that people who live in areas with more green space have less depression, anxiety, and stress .
• Write about it. Research has found that expressing oneself in writing can help reduce mental distress and improve well-being. Some research has found, for example, that writing about positive feelings —such as the things you’re grateful for or proud of—can ease symptoms of anxiety and depression.
• Learn mindfulness. In a study of a 5-week mindfulness training program for 13- to 18-year-olds, researchers found that teens who learned mindfulness experienced significantly less mental distress than teens who did not.

How parents can help

Parents and other caregivers have an important part to play, by adopting their own healthy habits and helping children and teens find stress-managing strategies. Some ways parents can take action:

• Model healthy coping. Caregivers can talk with children about how they’ve thought about and dealt with their own stressful situations.
• Let kids be problem-solvers . It’s natural to want to fix your child’s problems. But when parents swoop in to solve every little glitch, their children don’t have a chance to learn healthy coping skills. Let your children try to solve their low-stakes problems on their own, and they’ll gain confidence that they can deal with stressors and setbacks.
• Promote media literacy. Today’s kids spend a lot of time online, where they can run into questionable content, cyberbullying, or the peer pressures of social media. Parents can help by teaching their children to be savvy digital consumers, and by limiting screen time.
• Combat negative thinking . “I’m terrible at math.” “I hate my hair.” “I’ll never make the team. Why try out?” Children and teens can easily fall into the trap of negative thinking. When children use negative self-talk, though, don’t just disagree. Ask them to really think about whether what they say is true, or remind them of times they worked hard and improved. Learning to frame things positively will help them develop resilience to stress.

How psychologists can help

Psychologists are experts in helping people manage stress and establish positive mental health habits. Visit APA Division 53 (Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology ) for advice about choosing a psychologist and information about evidence-based treatments.

Thanks to psychologists Mary Alvord, PhD, and Raquel Halfond, PhD, who assisted with this article.

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School Stress Takes A Toll On Health, Teens And Parents Say

Patti Neighmond

Colleen Frainey, 16, of Tualatin, Ore., cut back on advanced placement classes in her junior year because the stress was making her physically ill. Toni Greaves for NPR hide caption

Colleen Frainey, 16, of Tualatin, Ore., cut back on advanced placement classes in her junior year because the stress was making her physically ill.

When high school junior Nora Huynh got her report card, she was devastated to see that she didn't get a perfect 4.0.

Nora "had a total meltdown, cried for hours," her mother, Jennie Huynh of Alameda, Calif., says. "I couldn't believe her reaction."

Nora is doing college-level work, her mother says, but many of her friends are taking enough advanced classes to boost their grade-point averages above 4.0. "It breaks my heart to see her upset when she's doing so awesome and going above and beyond."

And the pressure is taking a physical toll, too. At age 16, Nora is tired, is increasingly irritated with her siblings and often suffers headaches, her mother says.

Teens Talk Stress

When NPR asked on Facebook if stress is an issue for teenagers, they spoke loud and clear:

• "Academic stress has been a part of my life ever since I can remember," wrote Bretta McCall, 16, of Seattle. "This year I spend about 12 hours a day on schoolwork. I'm home right now because I was feeling so sick from stress I couldn't be at school. So as you can tell, it's a big part of my life!"
• "At the time of writing this, my weekend assignments include two papers, a PowerPoint to go with a 10-minute presentation, studying for a test and two quizzes, and an entire chapter (approximately 40 pages) of notes in a college textbook," wrote Connor West of New Jersey.
• "It's a problem that's basically brushed off by most people," wrote Kelly Farrell in Delaware. "There's this mentality of, 'You're doing well, so why are you complaining?' " She says she started experiencing symptoms of stress in middle school, and was diagnosed with panic disorder and generalized anxiety disorder in high school.
• "Parents are the worst about all of this," writes Colin Hughes of Illinois. "All I hear is, 'Work harder, you're a smart kid, I know you have it in you, and if you want to go to college you need to work harder.' It's a pain."

Parents are right to be worried about stress and their children's health, says Mary Alvord , a clinical psychologist in Maryland and public education coordinator for the American Psychological Association.

"A little stress is a good thing," Alvord says. "It can motivate students to be organized. But too much stress can backfire."

Almost 40 percent of parents say their high-schooler is experiencing a lot of stress from school, according to a new NPR poll conducted with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health. In most cases, that stress is from academics, not social issues or bullying, the poll found. (See the full results here .)

Homework was a leading cause of stress, with 24 percent of parents saying it's an issue.

Teenagers say they're suffering, too. A survey by the American Psychological Association found that nearly half of all teens — 45 percent — said they were stressed by school pressures.

Chronic stress can cause a sense of panic and paralysis, Alvord says. The child feels stuck, which only adds to the feeling of stress.

Parents can help put the child's distress in perspective, particularly when they get into what Alvord calls catastrophic "what if" thinking: "What if I get a bad grade, then what if that means I fail the course, then I'll never get into college."

Then move beyond talking and do something about it.

Colleen pets her horse, Bishop. They had been missing out on rides together because of homework. Toni Greaves for NPR hide caption

Colleen pets her horse, Bishop. They had been missing out on rides together because of homework.

That's what 16-year-old Colleen Frainey of Tualatin, Ore., did. As a sophomore last year, she was taking all advanced courses. The pressure was making her sick. "I didn't feel good, and when I didn't feel good I felt like I couldn't do my work, which would stress me out more," she says.

Mom Abigail Frainey says, "It was more than we could handle as a family."

With encouragement from her parents, Colleen dropped one of her advanced courses. The family's decision generated disbelief from other parents. "Why would I let her take the easy way out?" Abigail Frainey heard.

But she says dialing down on academics was absolutely the right decision for her child. Colleen no longer suffers headaches or stomachaches. She's still in honors courses, but the workload this year is manageable.

Even better, Colleen now has time to do things she never would have considered last year, like going out to dinner with the family on a weeknight, or going to the barn to ride her horse, Bishop.

Psychologist Alvord says a balanced life should be the goal for all families. If a child is having trouble getting things done, parents can help plan the week, deciding what's important and what's optional. "Just basic time management — that will help reduce the stress."

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Dealing With Stress at School in an Age of Anxiety

Building a culture of resilience at school counters a growing stress epidemic..

Posted August 15, 2017 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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In our modern age of anxiety , many of us are so stressed out that it’s hard to maintain focus on important goals . This isn’t just in our imaginations, or because of increased sensitivities that in an earlier era we would have simply ignored or overcome. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show sharp increases in stress-related disorders and diseases over the past few decades , and the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project found that the physical stress load we carry is sharply higher over a similar time period . Even more worrisome in that report is that this stress epidemic appears to be increasing with each new generation.

Teachers and educational leaders in particular feel the stress coming from all directions—teachers are stressed, students are stressed, staff is stressed, and parents are stressed. Added to the mix are demands for compliance with multiple directives and heightened accountability from numerous sources. Dealing effectively with this system-wide stress is critical, and it helps to first understand how it works.

Early Life Adversity Impacts Mental and Physical Health: A “Vicious Cycle”

We’ve known for some time that toxic stress arising from early life adversity poses a high risk for mental as well as physical health, and recent evidence shows that these risks are long lasting. Excess stress in early life—even in the womb—can “get under the skin” to affect how the brain is wired as well as how genes are expressed . “Stress dysregulation” (SDR) is a common consequence of early adversity . It shows up in most students with a clinical mental health diagnosis, but many students even without a diagnosis exhibit behaviors—such as hair-trigger anger , inability to self-regulate or calm themselves, sudden withdrawal from learning and social interaction—that affect not only themselves but everyone in their orbit. It acts as a silent disruptor in the classroom and in school life generally.

New research findings also show that stress is contagious at a physiological level (Palumbo et al., 2017). More students are arriving at school with SDR and with difficulties in coping, making it hard to build a positive learning environment. The source of this dynamic is more obvious in schools that serve a high proportion of students from families facing major economic and social challenges, but it is also observed in schools that serve students from advantaged families with highly competitive expectations, as Denise Pope documented in Doing School .

This “vicious cycle” of disruption connects the phenomena of more stressed-out students, accelerating stress contagion at school, and increased societal demands and anxieties. This cycle poses a difficult but often unrecognized challenge for teachers and educational leaders. We don’t yet know all the social and cultural forces that contribute to this stress epidemic, although increasing inequality and decreasing social mobility surely play a role in provoking the anxiety that is at the heart of the matter. But even if educational leaders can’t directly change the larger social dynamic, they can work at the classroom, school, and system level to counteract its effects .

A Culture of Resilience at School

In doing background research for my recent book Born Anxious , I had a conversation with the principal of an alternative secondary school for high-risk students, many of whom display this SDR pattern. His approach struck a chord: building a culture of resilience throughout the school. This notion draws on extensive research on individual resilience, explained in Ann Masten’s Ordinary Magic , and extends those findings to considering how any educational organization can build support for resilience to counteract the negative effects of excess stress for everyone. Here are the key elements:

Social connections . The single most effective route to providing a more resilient developmental pathway for students with a history of adversity is through positive social connections. Schools can provide a crucially unique setting to support resilience, offering an opportunity for students to connect with teachers, coaches, and mentors who exhibit caring and concern for students, communicating to them that they do matter to important adults in their lives. In addition, schools can create a context for meaningful engagement and participation in a larger community in which positive social connections can flourish (Eccles & Roeser, 2013).

The principal I spoke with described an exemplary scenario. One particularly troubled student, with an extensive history of early and continuing adversity, seemingly could not be reached when he arrived. A teacher kept probing to find any point of connection, and would not give up. Eventually, finding an interest in popular music that was meaningful to the student, the teacher began making innovative links, both to the curriculum and to broader social issues. Taking the time for this kind of “super-nurturing” doesn’t happen in a vacuum—it requires a culture of resilience as well as committed teachers. This student became one of the school’s best “turn-around” successes.

Neither of these—involved teachers and an engaged community—is automatic. Both depend predominantly on educational leadership within the organization to promote a culture of resilience. And a key part of that culture is that it needs to include not only students but also the whole organization, which in turn requires a collegial, collaborative leadership model, such as the one described by Michael Fullan in The Six Secrets of Change . This emphasis on positive social connections also highlights the reality that effectively counteracting the ravages of excess stress is critical not only for students, but also for teachers, staff, and education leaders themselves.

Mindfulness in action . The practice of mindfulness has received increasing attention in educational practice recently, and for good reasons. Social connections lead to resilience through social support and socio-emotional learning, but also biologically, as they counteract the stress hormone cortisol (Keating, 2017). Mindfulness confers benefits similar to social connection, but using the uniquely powerful part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex, propelling us toward a habitual focus on the present and the opportunities it offers, while minimizing rumination about the past or fear of the future. For organizations, this implies thoughtfully learning the lessons from past experiences combined with openness to a well-considered, collaborative process of change. For individuals and for organizations, a mindful approach provides a valuable “workaround” for stressful times, allowing us to avoid anxiety-driven responses that launch an excessive stress response.

Attention to the physical . A third major approach to supporting resilience and counteracting toxic stress is to attend to the physical domain. Although not always seen as central to the educational mission, there are crucial supports as well as risks that can be identified and implemented. Physical exercise is a readily available, highly effective method of stress reduction, and one that can be promoted in school settings as part of the school day and/or through extra-curricular opportunities that are available to all, not just to elite high school athletes.

A second major physical contributor to personal resilience is sufficient sleep. Sleep deficits are a major risk factor for a range of mental and physical health problems, as well as depleting the ability to cope with stress. The challenges to learning arising from early start times, especially for teens, have been increasingly recognized, but their impact on mental health and the ability to cope with stress are equally important.

The dangers of short-term “remedies” for feeling overstressed and being unable to cope with demands are also essential: comfort food and psychoactive substances can provide instant relief but are highly likely to lead to long-term problems. Education that highlights and explains these risks can be effective, along with the provision of healthy nutrition options during the school day.

It’s important to emphasize that these supports for resilience and for counteracting excess stress are just as important for teachers, staff, and leaders as they are for students . The pathways to teacher burnout and student burnout travel the same route, and benefit from the same protective factors: social connection; mindfulness; and taking care of the physical dimension. A bonus to this approach is that they can benefit everyone, even those not at risk from toxic stress or mental health challenges.

Building a Culture of Resilience for Mental Health, Learning, and Positive Development

Drawing on what we know about how supporting resilience, it is clear that a leadership style that integrates collaboration , social connection, and mindful attention to current challenges offers the best opportunity for moving toward and sustaining a culture of resilience. Articulating this approach as an explicit goal, and bringing all the stakeholders—including parents—on board creates the basis for sustainable progress toward building a culture of resilience.

The impact of the stress epidemic and of increasing SDR among students is felt in all areas of the school experience. It clearly interferes with learning, not only for the students who struggle with staying in the game while feeling highly stressed, but for teachers and the rest of class who need to cope with the resulting disruptions.

When it begins to manifest as diagnosable mental health issues, which will be true at some point for about 25% of students (Merikangas et al., 2010), providing an appropriate blend of services becomes paramount. The need for a comprehensive approach is acute, pulling together a shift toward a culture of resilience but also providing a range of prevention and intervention services. A helpful organizational framework is to think of such services as existing along a continuum from universal services helpful for everyone (mindfulness, coping strategies), to targeted services for at-risk students, to direct clinical or educational services for students with an existing diagnosis. Although these are often not exclusively school-based, they are more effective when there is close coordination between schools and community-based mental health providers.

A hopeful direction for teachers and educational leaders at all levels is that a better awareness of the sources of the stress epidemic will enable a broader and more effective approach to dealing with it. Rather than adding a new stressor, the path toward a culture of resilience has the potential to be helpful in coping with these increasing challenges, both personally and for organizations. This can benefit all students as well as school professionals, and function as a major support for positive youth development.

Center on the Developing Child (2007). The Impact of Early Adversity on Child Development (InBrief). Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu .

Eccles, J. S., & Roeser, R. W. (2013). Schools as developmental contexts during adolescence. In R. M. Lerner et al. (Eds.), Handbook of psychology: Developmental psychology (pp. 321-337). Hoboken, NJ, US: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Keating, D. P., (2016). The transformative role of epigenetics in child development research. Child Development , 87 (1), 135-142.

Keating, D. P. (2017). Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity – and How to Break the Cycle. New York: St. Martin’s Press. stmartins.com/bornanxious

Merikangas KR, He JP, Brody D, Fisher PW, Bourdon K, Koretz DS. (2010). Prevalence and treatment of mental disorders among US children in the 2001-2004 NHANES . Pediatrics, 125(1):75-81.

Palumbo, R. V., Marraccini, M. E., Weyandt, L. L., Wilder-Smith, O., McGee, H. A., Liu, S., & Goodwin, M. S. (2017). Interpersonal autonomic physiology: A systematic review of the literature . Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21(2):99-141.

Schanzenbach, D. W., Bauer, L., Mumford, M., & Nunn, R. (2016). Money Lightens the Load. Brookings Institution: The Hamilton Project. www.hamiltonproject.org

Walker, T. (2016). Educators Look to Parents and Communities To Help Reduce Student Stress. NEA Today . (Retrieved at http://neatoday.org/2016/09/16/reducing-student-stress/ )

Daniel P. Keating, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Pediatrics, and Research Professor, Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

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16 Public Speaking Tips for Students

Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

Aron Janssen, MD is board certified in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry and is the vice chair of child and adolescent psychiatry Northwestern University.

Public speaking tips for students aim to reduce anxiety that can interfere with giving presentations or speeches in class. These tips can also be helpful for those with social anxiety disorder (SAD)   who have difficulty speaking in front of a group or telling a story among friends.

Public Speaking Tips

If you have SAD and need to give a speech  in elementary school, high school, college, or university, it helps to be as prepared as possible . Beyond preparation, however, there are strategies that you can use to reduce anxiety and fight the urge to stay home with a fake illness.

Even great speakers practice their speeches beforehand. Practice out loud with a recording device or video camera and then watch yourself to see how you can improve. If you are feeling brave, practice in front of a friend or family member and ask for feedback.

• Talk about what you know : If possible, choose a topic for your speech or presentation that you know a lot about and love. Your passion for the topic will be felt by the audience, and you will feel less anxious knowing that you have a lot of experience to draw from when other students ask you questions.
• Concentrate on your message : When you focus on the task at hand, anxiety is less likely to get out of control. Concentrate on the main message of your speech or presentation and make it your goal to deliver that message to the other students in your class.
• Grab the audience's attention : Most of your fellow classmates will pay attention for at least the first 20 seconds; grab their attention during those early moments. Start with an interesting fact or a story that relates to your topic.
• Have one main message : Focus on one central theme and your classmates will learn more. Tie different parts of your talk to the main theme to support your overall message. Trying to cover too much ground can leave other students feeling overwhelmed.

Tell Stories

Stories catch the attention of other students and deliver a message in a more meaningful way than facts and figures. Whenever possible, use a story to illustrate a point in your talk.

Being prepared to speak in public can also be important if you have social anxiety disorder. Feeling confident and prepared to give your speech may help lessen your feelings of anxiety. Some of the things that you can do to prepare include:

• Visit the room : If you have access to the classroom where you will be speaking outside of class hours, take the time to visit in advance and get used to standing at the front of the room. Make arrangements for any audio-visual equipment and practice standing in the exact spot where you will deliver your speech.
• Rack up experience : Volunteer to speak in front of your class as often as possible. Be the first one to raise your hand when a question is asked. Your confidence will grow with every public speaking experience.
• Observe other speakers : Take the time to watch other speakers who are good at what they do. Practice imitating their style and confidence.
• Organize your talk : Every speech should have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Structure your talk so that the other students know what to expect.

Manage Your Anxiety

Taking steps to deal with your feelings of anxiety can also make public speaking easier. Some of the things that you can do:

• Tell someone about your anxiety : If you are speaking in front of a high school or college class, meet with your teacher or professor and describe your public speaking fears . If you're in elementary or high school, share your fears with your parents, a teacher, or a guidance counselor. Sometimes sharing how you feel can make it easier to overcome stage fright.
• Visualize confidence : Visualize yourself confidently delivering your speech. Imagine feeling free of anxiety and engaging the students in your class. Although this may seem like a stretch for you now, visualization is a powerful tool for changing the way that you feel. Elite athletes use this strategy to improve performance in competitions.
• Find a friendly face : If you are feeling anxious, find one of your friends in class (or someone who seems friendly) and imagine that you are speaking only to that person.

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Maintain Perspective

Remember that other students are on your side. Think about a time when you have been an audience member and the student delivering the speech or presentation was noticeably nervous. Did you think less of that student? More likely, you felt sympathetic and wanted to make that person more comfortable by smiling or nodding.

Remember—other students generally want you to succeed and feel comfortable. If for some reason the audience is not on your side or you experience bullying or social exclusion, be sure to discuss this with a parent, teacher, or guidance counselor.

Be Confident

Sometimes just knowing what makes a good speech can help you feel more confident. Focus on some of the following elements and practice them before you have to speak in public.

• Develop your own style : In addition to imitating good speakers, work on developing your own personal style as a public speaker. Integrate your own personality into your speaking style and you will feel more comfortable in front of the class. Telling personal stories that tie into your theme are a great way to let other students get to know you better.
• Avoid filler words : Words such as "basically", "well", and "um" don't add anything to your speech. Practice being silent when you feel the urge to use one of these words.
• Vary your tone, volume, and speed : Interesting speakers vary the pitch (high versus low), volume (loud versus soft), and speed (fast versus slow) of their words. Doing so keeps your classmates interested and engaged in what you say.
• Make the audience laugh : Laughter is a great way to relax both you and the other students in your class, and telling jokes can be a great icebreaker at the beginning of a speech. Practice the timing and delivery of your jokes beforehand and ask a friend for feedback. Be sure that they are appropriate for your class before you begin.
• Smile : If all else fails, smile. Your fellow classmates will perceive you like a warm speaker and be more receptive to what you have to say.

Don't Apologize

If you make a mistake, don't offer apologies. Chances are that your classmates didn't notice anyway. Unless you need to correct a fact or figure, there is no point dwelling on errors that probably only you noticed.

If you make a mistake because your hands or shaking, or something similar, try to make light of the situation by saying something like, "I wasn't this nervous when I woke up this morning!" This can help to break the tension of the moment.

A Word From Verywell

It's natural to feel frightened the first time you have to speak in front of your class. However, if you fear continues, interferes with your daily life and keeps you awake at night, it may be helpful to see someone about your anxiety.

Try talking to a parent, teacher, or counselor about how you have been feeling. If that doesn't get you anywhere, ask to make an appointment with your doctor. Severe public speaking anxiety is a true disorder that can improve with treatment .

Spence SH, Rapee RM. The etiology of social anxiety disorder: An evidence-based model . Behav Res Ther. 2016;86:50-67. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2016.06.007

By Arlin Cuncic, MA Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

Speech on Stress Management for Students and Children in 800 Words

In this article, we have published a speech on stress management for students and children in 800 Words. You can take help from this speech for various events and for exams.

Speech on Stress Management (800 Words)

Attention Getter: Life is a journey full of difficulties and twists and turns. Usually, in this journey of life, people face various difficulties that arose from these ups and downs because they have to fight with the challenges by themselves alone. Mostly, getting out of such situations is tricky and takes much time. 

I am here to discuss some useful information and scientifically proven facts about the causes and effects of stress. We will also discuss some useful techniques and methods to reduce stress.

People take alcohol and drugs to reduce stress for a while, but it doesn’t work in that way. Alcohol and drugs are hazardous for health in the long term. 

Talking with a health care professional or a clergy also helps in reducing the feelings of distress. Studies suggest that taking part in events with other people who experience similar difficulties like you, are also beneficial to some point to ease distress. 

This will be beneficial for you in a better way. When you walk, you can see the clear sky and enjoy other natural or artificial views and get relaxed. It usually feels boring by visiting the same place every day. Try changing your routes, and you can visit a lake or a beach, you can also take a walk beside a river. Take a bike ride, which also helps in reducing stress.

I hope you liked this Speech on Stress Management for Students and Children.

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Stress in School: What Kids Need to Know

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Stress in Students: Causes & Symptoms

Unlike adults, who can communicate about how stress impacts their lives, children and teens may not recognize or even have the words to describe how they’re feeling. Students are experiencing stress at growing rates, with a 2014 American Psychological Association study finding teens in the U.S. are even more stressed than adults.

However, parents and teachers can watch for short-term behaviors and physical symptoms that manifest when stress becomes a problem. Since age plays a major role in how stress affects us, here are some common causes and symptoms for students in elementary school, middle school, high school and college to help identify when there may be a concern.

Elementary school

While most kids don’t enjoy taking tests, it can cause extreme stress in some children. Those with extreme test anxiety may end up completely shutting down during exams, which can directly impact a student’s grades.

Getting up in front of the class is scary for students worried they’ll do something embarrassing and become the fodder for peer gossip.

In addition to the dread of being picked last when the class divides into teams, kids often must prove they’ve met fitness standards (curl-ups, push-ups, etc.) in front of the group each semester.

Whether it’s for being tardy, eating an unusual-looking lunch or not knowing the answer when called on, being the center of attention can be stressful for young children.

School lockdowns, fire drills, tornado drills … kids are reminded about potential dangers on a regular basis.

Middle school

The amount of homework students receive in middle school is markedly higher than elementary school, with an average of over 3 hours of homework per night for students with 5 classes according to one study.

For middle schoolers involved in activities outside of school (sports, dancing, playing an instrument, and other enrichment) finding downtime can difficult.

Even before middle school begins students are starting to care more about what their peers think including drugs and alcohol.

Social media has created a 24-hour-a-day platform for peer pressure and bullying, a problem that didn’t exist for their parents.

In middle school, kids who can’t afford the hottest brands of clothing, backpacks or smartphone can feel left out.

High school

Pressure to be in a romantic relationship picks up in high school and cause stress for students, especially for those questioning their sexuality.

High school teens, especially those who don’t have an established peer group, worry about making friends and avoiding bullying.

Keeping grades up to get into college becomes increasingly difficult as classes become more challenging.

It takes considerable time and effort to decide which colleges to apply to, complete applications, visit schools, go on interviews, etc.

Parents often put pressure on their high schoolers to excel and get into a good college at the same time teens are trying to establish independence.

Keeping up with classes can be hard, especially for students juggling large course louds and part- or full-time jobs.

Because learning to balance social activities and academic responsibilities takes time, mistakes are often made along the way.

It’s easy to skimp on sleep when there is so much competing for your time.

For college students living on campus, homesickness and loneliness are common.

Whether working part-time, full-time, or living on financial aid, learning to manage money is an issue in college.

By senior year, students feel pressure to secure a job for after graduation.

How Teachers Can Help Limit Student Stress

Because children and teens spend most of the day in classrooms, teachers can play a powerful role in limiting stress. One way to “displace nervous energy,” according to mental health professional Stefanie Juliano, is to allow students to use standing desks, sit on exercise balls or even work on the floor. She also suggests creating a quiet, serene corner by adding a beanbag chair, relaxing pictures and positive sayings.

Below are some additional ideas teachers can use to limit stress in the classroom:

Classroom Activities to Reduce Stress

Jessica Tappana, a mental health therapist who works with students of various ages, calls things that stress them out “cling-ons.” Here are three strategies she teaches to students that teachers can use for wiping these stressors away:

Brush it off!

Beginning at the top of the head use your hands to gently brush down the face and front of the body, flicking away the negative energy (not onto the person next to you!). Then repeat for the back of the body, arms and sides. When finished, shake your hands and stomp your feet!

Leave it at the door

Place a small paper shredder, paper, pens and a trash bin by the classroom door. Ask students to write a word or sentence that represents something causing them stress and then have them shred it! The problem won’t disappear, but the activity encourages them to leave stress outside the classroom.

Me the Tree

Sometimes when we are stressed, it feels like we are floating above the earth so it’s important to ground your feet and reconnect. Stand tall and bend your knees a bit and imagine your body is a tree trunk. Pretend that there are roots growing out of your feet and picture them growing into the earth. Then imagine your arms are branches and reach out and stretch into the sunshine!

Parent Tips for Reducing Stress

When children suffer from stress, it affects the entire family. Because parents are used to being able to fix problems, not knowing how to intervene can be frustrating and even add to stress in the home. Fortunately, parents can take action by instituting the following tips to reduce symptoms of toxic stress.

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Related Stress Disorders

When sadness and depression become unmanageable it can be a sign of a mood disorder, which affect 1 in 5 children . While experts can identify many reasons why mood disorders occur in children, such as parents getting divorced, loss of a loved one and emotional trauma, stress can be a trigger. In addition, coping with stress can exacerbate symptoms, increasing the pressures associated with having a mood disorder. Here are some examples of mood disorders related to stress and links to more information.

Primary symptoms of continued sadness and hopelessness that interfere with the ability to function and last longer than two weeks. Other symptoms of depression may include irritability, changes in sleep, loss of appetite and mood swings.

Families for Depression Awareness

Anxiety and Depression Association of America

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

Excessive worry and fear that interfere with normal activities. Children and young adults with GAD commonly feel anxiety over past or future events involving family, peers and school which can also present as physical symptoms.

Child Mind Institute: Anxiety

Coping Skills for Kids: Calming Anxiety in Children

Panic Disorder

Sudden, unexpected episodes of intense anxiety. People who suffer from panic disorder may feel shortness of breath, sweating and heart palpitations as well as an overall feeling of loss of control.

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH): Panic Disorder

American Psychological Association (APA): Panic Disorder

Sleep Disorders

Sleep disorders occur when abnormal sleep patterns interrupt emotional, mental and physical health. Stress and anxiety can cause sleep disorders such as Excessive Sleepiness, Insomnia and Sleep Apnea, among others.

National Sleep Foundation: Sleep Disorders

National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI): Sleep Disorders

Social Anxiety Disorder

Young people with social anxiety disorder experience an overwhelming fear of social situations. They also have difficulty when performing in front of others or being the center of attention at school or during sports activities.

AnxietyBC: Social Anxiety

Anxiety Disorders Association of America (ADDA): Triumph Over Shyness

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)/Acute Stress Disorder (ASD)

PTSD can occur after a stressful or traumatic event. While the symptoms (anxiety, intrusive thoughts, difficulty functioning) are normal reactions to trauma, PTSD occurs when they negatively affect the ability to function. A less severe form of PTSD is Acute Stress Disorder, which is also triggered by a stressful event but is short-term.

StudentsFIRSTProject.org: Posttraumatic Stress

Learning & the Brain: How to Recognize PTSD in the Classroom

Substance Abuse/Addiction

Repeated drug use changes the way the brain functions. Young adults who suffer from anxiety and depression may use drugs to cope.

National Institute on Drug Abuse: College-Age and Young Adults

National Institute on Drug Abuse for Teens: Drug Abuse and the Brain

Test Anxiety & How to Treat It

Most people get nervous before taking a test. In fact, feeling nervous motivates us to study so we can pass! But for some students, it goes beyond feeling nervous to the point that it causes them to freeze up and be unable to perform well. In this section, we discuss the definition and symptoms of test anxiety and how students can prevent it from getting out of control.

What is it?

Students with test anxiety become so anxious that it causes a physical response. They may feel their heart beating fast, begin to sweat and become nauseous. Unfortunately, the more they are preoccupied with the anxious feelings, the more anxious they become, creating a seemingly never-ending cycle. In other words, it’s the worrying about worrying that gets in the way.

What are the symptoms?

The main symptom of test anxiety is an accelerated heart rate. However, there are additional physical, emotional, and behavioral symptoms that can occur. For instance, students may feel light-headed, have digestive problems and sweat profusely. It’s also common to become angry and scared and feel disappointed in yourself. All these symptoms make it impossible to concentrate.

How can students handle it?

Therapist Jessica Tappana explains that knowing how to breathe is an important part of fighting test anxiety. “Breathing helps us to ground and center and feel present. The increased oxygen flow to the brain will help students think more clearly.”

Getting a good night sleep and eating a balanced meal in the morning is mandatory, adds mental health professional Stefanie Juliano. College students should avoid substances such as alcohol before a test.

Juliano stresses that knowing your triggers will help. “If you feel yourself tensing, getting a headache, feeling your back hurt, or so on, take a quick break either standing (if able) or seated and continue to breathe. Older students can also investigate alternative practices prior to major tests, such as acupuncture, essential oils, massage or chiropractic care.”

Quick Student Stress Busters

Learning how to recognize signs of stress and practicing ways to address these symptoms are important steps on the path to good mental health. Here are some activities from our mental health experts that parents and educators can teach children and teens to get them started.

For elementary school kids

Draw your feelings.

Children respond well to visual manifestations of stress. Ask them to draw their feelings of stress on a piece of paper. They can use crayons, markers, colored pencils or even paint. Then ask them to crumple up the paper or tear it into pieces. As they get up to throw the paper away, explain to them that they are also throwing away the negative feelings and stressors.

Deep breathing exercises

Breathing exercises are good practice for learning how the body responds when we breathe correctly. Ask children to take a deep breath through the nose and then slowly, slowly, slowly breathe out as though they are blowing bubbles, dandelions or candles on a birthday cake. Remind them to pay attention to how their stomach and chest move in and out.

Protective bubble

This activity models how to feel safe even when feeling stressed. Instruct children to image they are in a big bubble that surrounds them completely. Inside the bubble are all the people and things that make them feel safe like family members, friends, pets and stuffed animals. Let them sit for a few minutes as you prompt them to listen to how their bodies feel in a safe space that they can go to in their minds when they are feeling stressed.

For middle schoolers

Silent catch.

This activity requires complete silence, so children should be instructed that there is no talking at all. Use a lightweight ball such as a nerf ball to ensure nobody gets hurt. Tell the children to throw the ball to each other but that they can’t throw it to the same person who threw it to them. If they miss, they must sit down. This activity can relieve stress and calm down an anxious classroom.

Learning to stretch

Teach older children how to stretch correctly to relieve tension and help their bodies relax. It can be done at any time of day for a quick break.

Neck: Put your hands behind your back, grasping your right wrist with your left hand. Use your left hand to gently straighten your right arm, pulling it slightly. Lower your left ear toward your shoulder and hold for 30 seconds. Switch to the other side. Repeat with your left wrist and right hand.

Back: Lie on the floor stretching your arms above your head and pointing your toes. Bend your right leg to your chest with your hands behind your knee and hold for 30 seconds. Repeat with the left leg.

For high school students

Progressive muscle relaxation.

Progressive muscle relaxation is a useful tool for teens to relax, especially at night when having trouble falling asleep. They can sit or lay on the floor. Instruct them to relax each part of the body, starting with their toes and working up until they get to their heads. Take time to address each part in detail. Instruct them to repeat what you say in their heads, “I’m relaxing my toes, relaxing the top of my foot, bottom of my foot, etc.”

Diaphragmatic breathing

Because breathing becomes erratic when we are stressed, it’s helpful to practice breathing from the diaphragm which is the natural method. Lie down, place a hand on your chest and a hand on abs. Breathe in through nose and out through mouth.

Experience classical music

Classical music slows your pulse and heart rate, lowers your blood pressure and decreases stress hormones . Make it a habit to play classical music in the classroom and at home to reduce stress and prevent distractions . Free classical music is available on Spotify and YouTube.

For college students

Visual imagery.

Visual imagery involves using the imagination to create soothing feelings. Using free guided imagery scripts like those available from Healthy Place PSU at Plymouth State University, teaches students how to use visual imagery to feel calm and centered.

Mindfulness meditation

There are many benefits associated with mindfulness including lowered heart rate, decreased stress hormone levels, and better physical and emotional health. Instruct students to sit on floor with their legs crossed. Posture should be straight but relaxed. Have students place their hands on their legs. They should become aware of their breathing, letting their thoughts go. It’s alright if a thought comes, in which case they should acknowledge it and let it go while continuing to breathe in and out.

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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen!

Previous speakers here stressed on the numerous stress factors (pardon me for this wordplay) many people face on a daily basis. I partially agree with them: the amount of potentially stressful situations is indeed rather high, especially if you are a person that can feel dissatisfied even with your own face in the mirror; I will return to this point a bit later though. So, stressful situations are all around us. Hence, say my colleagues, every sane individual should organize a personal crusade against stress; eliminating stress from everyday life is a task worth efforts, a great personal feat! Certainly, this is if you can ignore the fact that such a struggle can become stressful itself—an ultimate stress I would say. So, you might ask me, what should we do with all that stress? My say is that many of your problems are fictional. What do you mean, you might reply—I am stressed right now! (laughter).

Let me explain my point.

First of all, let us think about what situations people usually see as stressful. I will not touch on health issues, job loss, divorce, and other similar situations, because they are truly stressful, and this stress must be dealt with somehow. Instead, I want to focus on what I call mood-eaters. These guys are cunning: they sneak up on you while you are unaware—texting with somebody, for example—and snap!—they bite off a piece of your good mood in a blink of an eye. The bite is tiny, so you do not usually notice the loss. But mood-eaters are numerous; they lurk around, waiting for their chance to grab a piece. This is a metaphor, of course; by mood-eaters, I mean situations in which we are able to choose our attitude instead of immediately getting stressed.

According to my observations, many stressful situations are not as serious as they might seem. Here are the most common situations that may influence your mood. Your hilarious post did not get as many likes as you expected. You texted your beloved and she or he did not respond. Your wi-fi connection was down right when you were watching a TV series online. Your flight was delayed for an hour. Your boss asked you to stay at work for two more hours “just to finish that project off.” Your mom calls you 25 times per hour to ask whether you’re not hungry (laughter). These are only some of the possible cases. Of course, these situations can be unpleasant, but what if I told you that you do not need to fight this stress?

Listen to how the word “fight” sounds. Personally for me, it resembles something violent and complicated, and implies I have to do something extraordinary beyond my capacity. So, my choice is not to fight, but to accept and turn the obstacle in my favor. Like in the example with the delayed flight: sure, you might be late, you are nervous, but does it really help the situation if you are still unable to do anything except sit and wait for the next plane? When my flights are delayed, I never worry, because I always have a couple of interesting and useful books with me. Or, say, your boss added some additional work to your schedule. This is a nightmare for sure… or not? You have several ways to approach the situation. For example, you can see it as an investment in your reputation; who knows, perhaps your agreement would positively affect your image in your boss’ eyes? Or, if the boss abuses you with such requests, this might be your chance to learn how to say “No” in the politest and the most delicate way. You might enjoy working in a completely empty office (this is my preference—I love to work when nobody else is nearby). You can come up with any other problem-solution scenario. Be creative! Be creative instead of automatically becoming stressed and dissatisfied.

What I was trying to tell you here is that not any situation we got used to call stressful is a stress. To a significant extent, it is your choice how to react to what is going on in your life; it is you who chooses how to behave and what to do. Most people think like this: “These situations are bad , so I am going to become upset every time I face one.” In reality, all situations are neutral, and only you are responsible for how you feel about them.

Thank you for your attention!

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Stress Measurement Using Speech: Recent Advancements, Validation Issues, and Ethical and Privacy Considerations

George m. slavich.

1 Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-7076, USA

Sara Taylor

2 Affective Computing Group, MIT Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,Cambridge, MA02139, USA

Rosalind W. Picard

Life stress is a well-established risk factor for a variety ofmental and physical health problems, including anxiety disorders, depression, chronic pain, heart disease, asthma, autoimmune diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders.The purpose of this article is to describe emerging approaches for assessing stress using speech, which we do by reviewing the methodological advantages ofthese digital health tools, and thevalidation, ethical, and privacy issues raised bythese technologies.As we describe, itis now possible to assess stress via the speech signalusing smartphones and smart speakers that employ software programs and artificial intelligence to analyze several features of speech and speech acoustics, including pitch, jitter, energy, rate, and length and number of pauses.Because these digital devices are ubiquitous, we can nowassess individuals’ stress levels in real time in almost any natural environment in which people speak.These technologies thus have great potential for advancing digital health initiatives that involve continuously monitoring changes in psychosocial functioning and disease risk over time. However, speech-based indices of stress have yet to bewell-validated against stressbiomarkers (e.g., cortisol, cytokines) that predict disease risk. In addition, acquiringspeech samplesraises the possibility thatconversations intended to be private could one day bemade public; moreover, obtaining real-time psychosocial risk information prompts ethical questions regarding how these data should be used for medical, commercial, and personal purposes. Althoughassessing stress using speech has enormous potential, there are critical validation, privacy, and ethical issues that must be addressed.

Hospital rooms, bedrooms, cars, and dormrooms arelocationswe still assume are relatively private—places where we believe we can have intimate conversations thatwill not betransmittedto, or analyzed by, third parties. However, smartphones and smartspeakersare rapidly changingall of that.In this article, we discuss the quickly growing capability for thesedigital devicesto assess human stress levels and psychosocial wellbeing, and thecritical concernsthat are raised by such surveillance. Ultimately, although technologies that can assess stress using speech acousticshold enormous potential for monitoring and potentially improving human health, serious validation, privacy, and ethical issues exist that must be addressed.

Questions regardinghow health data should be acquired and used have circulated for many years. However, the recent increase in availability of low-cost microphones and sensors—and a corresponding increase in interest in digital health—have made these issues a high priority in medical ethics( Rivas&Wac, 2018 ). By 2020, for example, it is estimated that everyindividual will own an average of seven internet-connected devices that have the ability to transmit health-related information to distant third parties ( Topol, Steinhubl, &Torkamani, 2015 ). Smartphones and smart speakers arerelatively unique in this context, though, as they arealready ubiquitous and can non-invasively collectand sendlarge amounts of rich information (i.e., big data) that canbe used to indicate real-time disease risk.

If you want to continuously assess aprocess that greatly affects disease risk, then focusing on stressis a great option. This is because stress is implicated in not just a few disorders, but rather is a common risk factor for a variety of different mental and physical health problems, especiallywhenit is chronic ( Miller, Cohen, & Ritchey, 2002 ; Slavich, 2016a , 2016b ).For example, greaterstress exposure is associated with increased risk foranxiety disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, chronic pain, coronary heart disease, asthma, respiratory infections, autoimmune diseases, and neurodegenerative disorders, among others ( Cohen, Janicki-Deverts, & Miller, 2007 ; Juster, McEwen, & Lupien, 2010 ; Slavich & Irwin, 2014 ).Stress is also associated with accelerated biological aging and premature mortality ( Holt-Lunstad, Robles, & Sbarra, 2017 ; Kelly-Irving et al., 2013 ; Mayer et al., 2019 ), making it a critical factor to assess when predicting human health ( Epel et al., 2018 ; Malat, Jacquez, & Slavich, 2017 ; Toussaint, Shields,Dorn, & Slavich, 2016 ).

Standard Methods for Assessing Stress

Given these effects of stress on health, numerous approaches have been developed for assessing individuals’ stress levels. The current gold-standard method involves conducting life stress interviews using instruments such as the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule, UCLA Life Stress Interview, and Stress and Adversity Inventory ( Monroe & Slavich, in press ; Slavich, 2019 ). In turn, the most commonly used approach involves administering brief self-report questionnaires such as the Perceived Stress Scale ( Monroe, 2008 ). Interview-based measures can be time consuming and costly, though, and self-report questionnaires often lack item specificity and validity ( Cohen, Kessler,Underwood,&Gordon, 1997 ; Dohrenwend, 2006 ; Shields & Slavich, 2017 ). Moreover, both methods are retrospective in nature and subject to (often unmeasured) degrees of cognitive bias and social desirability that can influence the veracity, reliability, and validity of the resulting scores ( Monroe, 2008 ; Monroe & Slavich, 2016 ).

Stress has also been assessed by measuring biological processes that are upregulated by stress and implicated in disease. Assessing stress in this way has several advantagesover and above interview-based and self-report instruments. Two ofthe most importantadvantagesare that stress-related biomarkers are(a) proximally related to biological disease processes and (b) not subject to self-report biases. The full list of biologicalindices that are known to increase in response to stress is very long and beyond the scope of the present discussion. As an example, however, these outcomes span cardiovascular, sympathetic, neuroendocrine, and immune outcomes, and include things like heart rate, systolic blood pressure, skin conductance, cortisol, adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA, and its sulfated ester, DHEA‐S), epinephrine, norepinephrine, α-amylase, and the pro-inflammatory cytokines interleukin(IL)-1β, IL-2, IL-6, and tumor necrosis factor-α ( Allen, Kennedy, Cryan, Dinan, &Clarke, 2014 ; Irwin & Slavich, 2017 ; Slavich, in press ; Slavich& Auerbach, 2018 ).Thesestress signals have become easier to assess over time—for example, smart watches can now be used to continuously monitor heart rate, skin conductance, and skin temperature—but for the most part, assessing stress-related biomarkers is still relatively invasive, requiring (for example) a blood or saliva sample from the individual ( Shirtcliff, Buck, Laughlin, Hart, Cole, & Slowey, 2015 ).

Assessing Stress Using Speech

These limitationsof interview-, self-report, and biomarker-based approachesmake assessing stress using speech very attractive, especially given that doing so is nowrelatively inexpensive and non-intrusive.When preparing to speak, an individual must decide which sequence of words will best communicatehis or her intended message.Stress can affect these decisions and change the wording, grammar, and timing of speech, which can in turn be used as vocal markers of stress ( Paulmann,Furnes, Bøkenes, & Cozzolino, 2016 ; Scherer& Moors, 2019 ). However, stress induces other changes as well. In order to produce speech, for example, the bodymodulates the tension of numerous muscles in order to force air through the vocal folds and out the vocal tract to produce sound waves ( Titze, 2000 ). Stress increases both muscle tension and respiration rate, which in turn change the mechanics of speech production and, consequently, the way that speech sounds ( Sondhi, Khan, Vijay, &Salhan, 2015 ; Zhou,Hansen, & Kaiser, 2001 ).

Current approaches for assessing stress using speech take advantage of these stress-based changes in the quality and pattern of speech acousticsto quantify the amount of a stress a person iscurrently experiencing.As summarized in Figure 1 , this can beachieved by assessing several features, including the fundamental frequency (i.e., pitch), jitter (i.e., changes in pitch over a short period of time), energy in different frequency bands (e,g., mel frequency cepstrum coefficients, MFCCs), speaking rate, and length and number of pauses made while speaking ( Hansen & Sanjay, 2007 ).These features areanalyzed using machine learning to produce a real-time index of an individual’s stress level ( Fernandez & Picard, 2003 ).The resulting continuous stress signal can, in turn, contribute to quantifyinga person’s continuous health risk —something that is not possible with interview-based or self-report instruments.

Assessing stress using speech. ( a ) When an individual speaks in the presence of ( b ) an actively recording smartphone or smart speaker, ( c )an audio signalis captured. ( d ) Various features of the audio signal (e.g., pitch, jitter, energy, speaking rate, length and number of pauses) are then extractedand used as inputs to ( e )a machine learning algorithm that yields a stress score. ( f ) The resultingscore can then be integrated into an individual’s clinical chart as an indicator of the person’s potential disease risk.

This last step—namely, analyzing features of speech to produce a stress level output—has been accomplished in many ways. Some models are physiologically-based and directly incorporate what is known about speech production and how it changes under stress to estimate an individual’s stress level (e.g., Mendoza&Carballo, 1998 ; Van Puyvelde, Neyt, McGlone, &Pattyn, 2018 ). Others models have usedonly simple acoustic features (e.g., MFCCs) and deep neural networks(e.g., Han, Kyunggeun,& Hong-Goo, 2018 ; Hansen & Womack, 1996 ).The interpretability of the physiological models makes them especially attractive tophysicians, who often want to knowwhy particular outputsare given.The neural network-based models, in turn, are enticingbecause theyrequire very little domain knowledge to achieve acceptable accuracies.

Regardless of the particular method used for extracting a stress signal, what is arguably most impressive is how easily this can now be done. Indeed, whereashigh-quality speech analysis was once only possible in labsequipped with specialized recording equipment and teams of signal processing experts, researchers can now assess stress in speech inexpensively and without specialized training, using portable devices that can be carried around or placed anywhere in the natural environment. For example, Lu and colleagues recently used Android smartphones to detect instances of stress in multiple environments, including indoors during a job interview and outdoors while participants were interacting with other individuals ( Lu et al., 2012 ). The modeling strategy used wasimpressive, accurately detecting the presence of stress in 81% and 76% of cases, respectively, for indoor and outdoor environments, when evaluated against the ground truth of increased skin conductance as assessed using an electrodermal activitysensor that was calibrated for each individual.Opensource programs like openSMILEin turn make the collection and analysis ofvoice data relatively easy for those without a background in signal processing (see Eyben, Weninger, Gross, &Schuller, 2013 ). In sum, therefore, assessing stress using speech and speech acoustics is now widely possible and relatively inexpensive.

Validation, Privacy, and Ethical Concerns

These technical advancements have transformed our ability to monitor individuals’ stress-related disease risk. Indeed, smartphones and smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home are now commonplace, with one market analysis suggesting that nearly one million smart speakers will be integrated into hospital rooms by 2021 to help facilitate patient-physician communication ( Montany, 2018 ). Moreover, at least one major university in the United States announced that itplaced smart speakers in every dorm roomin 2018 to help students communicate with the university and learn about campus-wide events ( Montag, 2018 ), and two other universities were already using the devices in select environments on campus by that time ( Brown, 2018 ).

Given the widespread introduction of these digital devices into previously private settings, the same technology that is empowering our ability to monitor and potentially help individuals under stress is also prompting numerous questions about the validation, privacy, and ethics of this approach to digital health. With respect to validation, the main concern is that the race to promote widespread adoption of this technology will take precedence over making sure that voice-based approaches for assessing stress are validated against well-established biomarkers ofstress exposure and disease risk. Thefield of digital health, and especially the much broader field of “self-help”, are replete with examples of technologies that have become widely used before being well-validated.One such example is digital “brain training” programs, which acquired more than 50 million users despite possessing little-to-no-evidence that they worked ( Simons et al., 2016 ). Given that we are still in theearly days of being able to assess stress using speech, much more carefully conducted validation work is needed to ensure that the stress indicesbeing used have clear clinical utility.

In addition, there aremany serious questions about privacy and ethics. With respect to privacy, what if a hospital-based smart speaker discloses HIPAA-protected information to a non-authorized person? Companies that sell smartphones and smart speakers have spent substantial time assuring users that their privacy is not at risk. As summarized in Table 1 , however, several recent events have shown that privacy cannot be guaranteed even with huge investments in technology. For example, even Apple, whose leadership speaks the most about privacy and has more than $200 billion in cash on top of enormous technical resources, recently admitted that it had discovered a bug in its FaceTime communication platform that allowed callers to see and hear through the camera of a person they were calling before the person answered the call ( Johnson, 2019 ). Having a device that can listen to you, even if made by a reputable company, thus means not only that your privacy could be one day compromised, but that your stress levels or health status could be potentially revealed without your consent. Similarly, multiple cases have recently been documented in which speakers used for other purposes (e.g. Amazon Echo, which is usually used for shopping or for controlling simple household devices) have been manipulated to listen in on private conversations, save the recordings, and transmit them to a third party ( Charlton, 2018 ). Such hacks appear to be rare at present, but the point is that the technological capability already exists for using these devices for nefarious purposes, which is quite contrary to the goal of improving human health and wellbeing by assessing stress.

Examples of recent data breaches with smart speakers

Along similar lines, what happens if private conversations captured by stress-assessing smart devices are disclosed (accidently or on purpose) to a third party?Is an employer or boss allowed to take action if they accidentally overhear something about an employee’s health that may affect their work?If evidence exists that someone is currently under extreme stress, what responsibility does the monitoring party have to act?Do users of the technology have the right to be told, first and privately, that their speech indicates that they are increasingly stressed and may be becoming depressed?Will physicians be more guarded knowing they are also potentially being monitored? After all, their speech can be sampled not just by their own smartphone, but also by their patients’ phones.

In addition, what happens if an advertising company or business uses a voice-based stress assessment technology to take advantage of an individual’s compromised emotional state? Is it ethical to provide stressed individuals with information regarding nearby psychotherapy or anti-depressant medication options? If so, what about fast food options that are known to be strongly preferredwhen individuals are under stress ( Geiker et al., 2018 )?In sum, when it is appropriate to usesuch digital health information for commercial purposes and when is it not?

Finally, what if a smartphone transmits evidence of domestic violence, or if a smart speaker in a dorm room detects self-harm or suicide but a university does not intervene? Is the company that manufactured the technology or that processes the data responsible? What about the company, school, or organization that provided the technology to the user or that has partial or full access to the resulting stress information? All of these scenarios can happen with today’s technology, and the newer smarter sensing approaches will only amplify the accuracy of the information that can be gathered and the scale of the impact it can have—whether for early detection and treatments that may reduce human disease risk, or for accidental or nefarious harm.

Solutions for Minimizing Risk

To minimize the risks associated with using smartphones and smartspeakersto assess human stress levels and psychosocial wellbeing, wemust recognize and address the privacy and ethical issues that are raised by these devices with the same vigor that is directed at advancing the technologies themselves. For starters, we believe these challenges could be addressed by (a) clearly informing users what the devices are transmitting and assessing, and providing examples of the possiblerisks involved; (b) enabling users to easily turn the listening function of the devices on and off as they wish; (c) enabling users to also have the audio equivalent of a physical lens cap—a “noise jamming” or other device that insures that no audio from their speech can be detected in case the “off” button does not work as expected; (d) allowing users to easily control who can access their data and how it is used; (e) permitting users to opt in to having the devices in their surrounding environment; and (f) allowing them to opt out of having their speech logged or analyzed if they must live or work in an environment that listens.

More broadly, we believeit is critical for companies that develop and use these technologies to adopt strict policies to help ensure that users are immediately notified of technological malfunctions and data breaches. In addition, they should have comprehensive plans in place to quickly provide users with adequate identity protection services and compensation after a data breech has occurred.Stories of companies withholding critical information about a recent platform malfunction or data breachare common.When it comes to users’ data, we believe that individuals have a right to immediately know when their information has been inappropriately accessed or used, and that all companies that work with such data shouldaffirm their commitment toputting users’ data privacy and safety first.

In conclusion, stress is apowerful riskfactor for poor health that is in dire need of better measurement ( Slavich, 2019 ; Slavich & Shields, 2018 ), and speech is one process that we can now easily measure to help address this need. To maximize the benefits and minimize the risksassociated with monitoring speech, however, we will needto take very seriously the validation, privacy, and ethical issues that are prompted by these technological advancements. We will also need to do a much better job at educating users about these issues and innovating better ways to protect users’ data beyond simply having a device “off”switch.

Looking forward, there areseveral avenues that could be pursued to make these technologies better and less risky for users. First, as alluded to earlier, research isneeded to validate speech-based assessments of stress against stressbiomarkersand clinical outcomes. In addition, since much of the original work on assessing stress with speech was conducted in quiet lab settings or with vocal actors, additional research is neededto validate these technologies in a variety of contexts, given that different environments can change an individual’s vocal signature ( Giddens, Barron, Byrd-Craven, Clark& Winter, 2013 ). This will likely require a collaborative effort between private companies and research institutions to consolidate large corpuses of speech data with high-quality stress labels. Second, artificial intelligence techniques have been applied toassess emotional and behavioral states like depression and suicidality using speech (e.g., Cummins, Scherer, Krajewki, Schnieder, Epps, & Quatieri 2015 ), and although the sensitivity and specificity of these assessments have not yet been shown to achieve levels required for medical diagnosis, applying artificial intelligencemay well be helpful for enhancing the detection of stress as well.

Third, future methods for assessing stress will undoubtedly benefit from combining voice and facial recognition datato enhance the detection of stress and other emotional processes ( Giannakakis et al., 2017 ), with the addition of other biometric data in the future. Finally, we believe that more crosstalk is sorely needed between developers, privacy experts, and medical ethicists to help ensure that the information gathered by these cutting-edgetechnologies is handled properly. Digitally driven approaches for assessing stress can ultimately play a key role in the future of digital health. To realize the full potential of this approach while minimizing possible risks, though, balanced attention needs to be paid to the technological, validation, privacy, and ethical issues raised here.

Acknowledgements

Preparation of this article was supported by a Society in Science—Branco Weiss Fellowship, NARSAD Young Investigator Grant #23958 from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and National Institutes of Health grant K08 MH103443 to George M. Slavich.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

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Ukraine-Russia war latest: Vladimir Putin repeats warning he could send weapons to adversaries of the West

Speaking at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin also says he does not see the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons as set out in Russia's nuclear doctrine - but adds he could not rule out a change to it.

Friday 7 June 2024 17:15, UK

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• Russia economically strong despite 'illegitimate sanctions'
• Ukraine has right to strike targets in Russia - NATO chief
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• Big picture:  Everything you need to know about the war right now
• Your questions answered: Are there any signs of an underground resistance in Russia?

Thank you for reading.

We will be back soon with more updates from the war in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin has said he does not see the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons as set out in Russia's nuclear doctrine - but added he could not rule out a change to the doctrine.

"We have a nuclear doctrine which states that the use of nuclear arms is possible in an exceptional case, when the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our country is threatened," he told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum.

"But the doctrine can be changed.

"The same applies to nuclear tests. We will carry out tests if needed, but so far there is no such need."

Russia could send weapons to adversaries of the West, Vladimir Putin has warned for a second time.

The Russian president repeated the warning from earlier this week during the St Petersburg Economic Forum.

He did not say what countries or entities he was referring to, and he stressed that Moscow is not doing it currently.

"If they supply (weapons) to the combat zone and call for using these weapons against our territory, why don't we have the right to do the same?" he told the crowds. 

"But I'm not ready to say that we will be doing it tomorrow, either."

On Wednesday, Putin told international journalists that Russia could provide long-range weapons to others to strike Western targets in response to NATO allies allowing Ukraine to use their arms to attack Russian territory.

He also reaffirmed Moscow's readiness to use nuclear weapons if it sees a threat to its sovereignty.

Joe Biden has apologised to Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the recent delay in approving new US aid for Ukraine.

Last month, following months of political disagreements, the Senate passed $95bn (£76.2bn) in war aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan .

"I apologise for those weeks of not knowing," the US president said.

"Some of our very conservative members [of Congress] were holding it up. 

"But we got it done, finally. We're still in - completely, totally." 

The Ukrainian president thanked his counterpart for American assistance.  

"It's very important that you stay with us," he said. 

"It's very important that in this unity, the United States of America, all American people stay with Ukraine, like it was during World War Two - how the United States helped to save human lives, to save Europe." 

The two men were speaking in Paris, the day after D-Day commemorations in Normandy.

Russia needs to boost its use of non-Western currencies, Vladimir Putin said as he addressed the St Petersburg International Economic Forum.

He also said his country needs to reduce imports while calling for a major expansion of its domestic financial markets.

Trade with Asia is soaring, he told delegates, adding that almost two fifths of Russian external trade is now in roubles.

The share conducted in US dollars, euros and other Western currencies has declined.

Russia will try to boost the share of settlements conducted in the currencies of BRICS countries - which include Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, Mr Putin said.

"Last year, the share of payments for Russian exports in the so–called 'toxic' currencies of unfriendly states halved, while the share of the rouble in export and import transactions is growing - it is approaching 40% today," the president said.

Russia has referred to nations that imposed sanctions on it as "unfriendly".

 The session begins with an address by the Russian president. 

Vladimir Putin says there is a race among world powers to establish sovereignty. 

He speaks of the need for countries to both establish partnerships and also to look internally to tackle challenges presented by the current global economic landscape. 

Despite all the "obstacles and illegitimate sanctions", Russia remains one of the world's economic leaders, he says. 

He adds that "friendly countries" - those that have not joined sanctions against Moscow - account for three quarters of Russia's mutual trade turnover, and praises them for that. 

Countries including India and China have strengthened economic ties since Mr Putin launched his war in Ukraine. 

Vladimir Putin has taken to the stage in St Petersburg to address the International Economic Forum there.

He's joined by Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwais and Bolivian President Luis Alberto Arce Catacora. 

Chairing the session is Sergey Karaganov - a Russian political scientist. 

We'll bring you any key lines here in this live blog. 

A T-shirt is on sale at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum printed with a phrase attributed to Vladimir Putin, Sky News has discovered. 

"If a fight is inevitable, throw the first punch," it says.

The Russian president reportedly said it in 2015.

He apparently explained that it was something he had learned while growing up on the streets of Leningrad - a former name of St Petersburg. 

The Russian defence ministry has accused Ukraine of injuring 20 people, including children, in a missile attack on the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, using US-supplied ATACMS missiles.

Four of five missiles were shot down by air defence systems, the ministry said in a statement.

However, one of the missiles damaged two residential apartment blocks, it added, claiming it was deliberate.

Sky News is unable to verify the allegations.

There has been no immediate comment from Ukraine. 

The European Commission supports starting EU accession talks with Ukraine, the country's prime minister has said.

Denys Shmyhal said the commission had confirmed in a report that Kyiv had fulfilled the remaining steps required to start negotiations. 

"Now we expect our European partners to take the next step - to start negotiations on European Union membership this month," Mr Shmyhal said on Telegram. 

Earlier (7.43am post) we reported that the commission was reportedly ready to recommend that accession talks get underway.

It is part of an attempt to signal support for Kyiv before Hungary takes over the rotating presidency of the EU next month, the Financial Times reported.

The EU announced earlier this year that it was sending an additional £42bn in aid to Ukraine - but only after  weeks of resistance from Hungary , which reportedly has concerns about minority rights in Ukraine. 

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School-Based Speech-Language Pathologists' Stress and Burnout: A Cross-Sectional Survey at the Height of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Affiliation.

• 1 School of Communication Science and Disorders, Florida State University, Tallahassee.
• PMID: 36716449
• DOI: 10.1044/2022_LSHSS-22-00047

Purpose: Low retention of school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs) is a growing problem that can have drastic consequences at the school and student levels. Factors contributing to this shortage include features of the work environment, role ambiguity, low salaries, and a demanding workload with higher caseloads, which can result in limited time for paperwork and lesson planning for optimal service delivery models. The purpose of this study was to determine the current levels and predictors of occupational stress and burnout SLPs are experiencing in the school setting.

Method: Using a cross-sectional survey design, 453 school-based SLPs from across the United States reported their workload manageability, career intentions, access to social support, and their stress and burnout levels. Multiple linear regression was used to determine the relation between the variables of interest and the occupational stress and burnout scores. Data were collected in September to December of 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results: SLPs, on average, reported overall stress levels in the somewhat noticeable range, moderate access to social support, high levels of emotional exhaustion, low-to-moderate feelings of depersonalization, and moderate-to-high feelings of personal accomplishments. Based on a standardized burnout scale, SLPs in this sample are characterized as feeling ineffective and overextended. Results of linear regression models suggest that the perception of work manageability was the best predictor of Total Stress score, Emotional Exhaustion score, and Depersonalization score, in this sample.

Conclusions: Data from this study offer the beginning steps to making an informed change for school-based SLPs' workplaces. Results indicated that SLPs in the school setting are feeling ineffective and overextended. The perception of their workload manageability was the most significant predictor for their reported stress and burnout levels. Suggestions for SLP supervisors, administrators, and other stakeholders are discussed.

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WHO Director-General's keynote address at the New Education and Research Building Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony – 7 June 2024

University of massachusetts chan medical school.

Thank you Mike,

During the Assembly, talking a lot I lost my voice, so it’s a bit difficult.

I had dinner yesterday and it was a very good time, and Mike asked me to speak about myself and nothing else, so I told my story. Many of you were not there, but I think a good number of you.

As Mike indicated earlier, growing up in Ethiopia could be difficult, and in my early childhood I was trapped in a war and my mother’s prayer was for me to survive just one day. She has been very grateful for that one day, and of course, here I am as Director-General of the World Health Organization, and I fully agree with you that hope is the most precious thing, Mike. Probably that was what was going on in my mother’s head, to stay hopeful and be grateful. And that’s it, and here I am.  

So anything is possible, if we keep hope. Especially now, as our world is getting a bit crazy – not a bit actually, really crazy – but we need to stay hopeful and hope it will be better.

Chancellor Michael Collins, my brother,

President Martin Meehan,

Madame Vice-Chair Mary Burns,

Congressman Jim McGovern,

Distinguished guests, students, faculty, family and friends,

It’s such a great honour for me to be here, first to receive this honorary degree, which I accept with a mixture of pride and humility – humility, if there’s one thing that my upbringing taught me;

And second, it’s an honour for me to join you as we open the new education and research building here at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

I thank Chancellor Collins for the invitation, and for this great honour – and thank you Maryellen, wherever you are now, for your hospitality in meeting us at the airport yesterday.

Mike has been to visit us at WHO in Geneva, as he said, a couple of times, and we have discussed how WHO and UMass Chan Medical School can work together. So thank you for creating that bridge, Mike.

I offer my congratulations to you, and the entire School community, on the opening of this building.

Although the building is new, its twin purposes – education and research – are not.

They have always been central to the mission of this School, just as they have always been central to improvements in health globally, and to our work at the World Health Organization.

I note that this building is designed to facilitate expanded class sizes to meet growing workforce needs, in Massachusetts and beyond.

I also note that just a few days ago, the School graduated the largest class in its history. Congratulations to all graduates.

It would have been an honour for me to receive my honorary degree with you, but the World Health Assembly only finished at midnight on Saturday, and was followed by a board meeting.

I’m particularly pleased to note the School’s emphasis on primary care, which is the essential foundation of any health system.

WHO estimates that about 90% of essential health services can be delivered at the primary health care level.

And yet for too long, too many countries have focused their investments on advanced medical care in high-tech hospitals, but neglected investments in primary health care.

Certainly, high-quality secondary and tertiary care are very important.

But investments in primary health care are the most cost effective, in terms of the returns delivered in preventing or delaying the need for more costly secondary and tertiary care.

A primary health care approach is also vital for addressing the drivers of disease in the food people eat, the air they breathe and the conditions in which they live.

And as the eyes and ears of the health system, primary health care is also essential for preventing, detecting and responding to outbreaks at the earliest stage.

But of course, primary care does not deliver itself.

Vaccines do not administer themselves;

Caesarean sections do not perform themselves;

And care, compassion and kindness do not deliver themselves.

They all require a person – and not just any person – they require a health or care worker.

The simple truth is that there is no health without health and care workers.

Certainly, artificial intelligence and other technologies offer huge potential for research, and for diagnosis, treatment and service delivery.

One of our priorities at WHO is supporting countries to harness the power of technology for health.

But nothing will ever replace a health worker.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed us just how important they are.

And yet globally, we are facing a shortage of 10 million health and care workers to achieve the health-related targets in the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest gaps are in the poorest countries, although it’s a challenge you face here in the U.S. as well, as populations age and health needs grow.

That’s why one of our other major initiatives has been to develop the WHO Academy in Lyon, France, which we will open in December this year – and I’m glad to invite Mike to join us. It will be a game changer.

Our aim is that the WHO Academy will become a global centre for lifelong learning in health, and for building capacities for the health and care workforce globally, as well as for WHO’s own workforce.

The building is beautiful, but I think I have to admit this is more beautiful.

Our aim is not to compete with other academic and health institutions, but rather to collaborate and complement them through partnerships.

So Chancellor Collins, we would very much welcome the opportunity to discuss with you how the WHO Academy could partner with UMass Chan Medical School, to leverage your expertise and experience for the world.

So, just as this new building will provide a platform for education, so too it will provide a platform for building on the School’s impressive track record in research – in HIV, cancer, diabetes, infectious disease, and in understanding the molecular basis of disease.

And of course, Dr Craig Mello’s Nobel Prize-winning research on RNA interference has opened the door to new treatments against many diseases.

I’m pleased to see the School continues to build on Dr Mello’s work, including through the the RNA Therapeutics Institute and the Gene Therapy Center.

Research has given us so many solutions to so many health challenges.

Research has given us vaccines, antibiotics and other medicines, with which we can prevent, diagnose and treat diseases that were once a death sentence.

Research has helped us to identify the cause of diseases that were once a mystery, like malaria, TB, HIV, cervical cancer and more.

Research has enabled to us to peer ever further into what makes us human – to map our genome, and even to edit it, thanks to the research of Dr Mello and others.

And research continues to push back the boundaries of the impossible and the unknown.

The key challenge we face is to ensure that the fruits of research are available to all people; that they serve to narrow inequalities, rather than widen them.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a perfect example. The development and approval of multiple safe and effective vaccines in less than a year was a triumph for science and research.

But as you know, inequitable access to those vaccines globally was a stain on our collective conscience. This should not be repeated.

At the World Health Assembly in Geneva last week, the nations of the world took decisive steps towards making the world safer, and more equitable.

Based on lessons learned from the pandemic, they adopted an important set of amendments to the International Health Regulations – the instrument of international law that governs the global response to health emergencies.

They also agreed to extend negotiations for another year on a new Pandemic Agreement.

Initially, countries had committed to finalizing the Agreement in time for last week’s Health Assembly, and although they came a long way, they were not able to reach consensus in time.

The two-year timeframe they gave themselves was extremely ambitious.

The fact that they came as close as they did in just two years is frankly incredible, because as you know, international agreements and laws take many years.

If they complete negotiations this year, or by next May at the latest – that’s what they have agreed – it would still be a giant achievement in very short time.

They have committed to doing that for two reasons:

First, because they believe they can, and will, reach agreement;

And second, because they believe the Pandemic Agreement is still needed urgently, because history teaches us that the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if.

However, the negotiations have been undermined by a torrent of mis- and disinformation, including false claims that nations will cede sovereignty to WHO, which is not true.

So I ask all of you to speak up for the Pandemic Agreement, and to speak out against mis- and disinformation – because this Agreement belongs to you, it belongs to all of us. It’s about making the world safer for everyone.

Dear friends,

Dr Craig Mello said, “I want to make a difference in the world because I believe that’s what science is for.”

And that’s what this building is for. I think Mike said this buliding will change the course of the history of disease.

Not education for the sake of education;

Not research for the sake of research;

But education and research to make a difference in our world.

To save lives;

To prevent suffering;

And to close inequities.

That’s what this building is for, and that’s what the work that we do at WHO is all about. We share the same purpose.

We were founded 76 years ago, in 1948, as the world emerged from the devastation of the Second World War.

Like the United Nations of which we are part, WHO was born of the recognition that the only alternative to global conflict was global cooperation.

Our Constitution was the first instrument of international law to affirm that the highest attainable standard of health is a fundamental right for all people, without distinction. A fundamental human right.

Not a privilege for some, or for most; it’s a right for all.

That is the right for which as WHO we will continue to work.

And that is the right that I hope and expect this building will serve.

Thank you once again for this great honour.

And thank you for your commitment to promoting, providing and protecting the health of the people of Massachusetts, and the United States, and the world.

I would like to also thank my family, my wife Kedis and Brook, my son, and Blen. By the way, this is not the whole family, what you see.

We have five kids with my wife, four boys and finally a girl, that’s Blen.

From the start, I wanted to have a daughter, but she wouldn’t come, and then on the fifth she came.

I’m a bit stubborn, I don’t give up, because I always say it’s possible, you can get what you want. Then she came and she was born on my birthday, so we share the same birthday.

So as you can imagine, they support me well, so I would like to thank them for their support, and thank you also to Mike for bringing me into this family. We look forward to working with you closely. We have already identified something where UMass Chan has a comparative advantage, and we look forward to using UMass as a collaborating centre for WHO, and through that, your influence will continue to increase globally.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

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Is It a Sound of Music…or of Speech? Scientists Uncover How Our Brains Try to Tell the Difference

Music and speech are among the most frequent types of sounds we hear. But how do we identify what we think are differences between the two?

An international team of researchers mapped out this process through a series of experiments—yielding insights that offer a potential means to optimize therapeutic programs that use music to regain the ability to speak in addressing aphasia. This language disorder afflicts more than 1 in 300 Americans each year, including Wendy Williams and Bruce Willis.

“Although music and speech are different in many ways, ranging from pitch to timbre to sound texture, our results show that the auditory system uses strikingly simple acoustic parameters to distinguish music and speech,” explains Andrew Chang, a postdoctoral fellow in New York University’s Department of Psychology and the lead author of the paper , which appears in the journal PLOS Biology . “Overall, slower and steady sound clips of mere noise sound more like music while the faster and irregular clips sound more like speech.”

Scientists gauge the rate of signals by precise units of measurement: Hertz (Hz). A larger number of Hz means a greater number of occurrences (or cycles) per second than a lower number. For instance, people typically walk at a pace of 1.5 to 2 steps per second, which is 1.5-2 Hz. The beat of Stevie Wonder’s 1972 hit “ Superstition ” is approximately 1.6 Hz, while Anna Karina’s 1967 smash “ Roller Girl ” clocks in at 2 Hz. Speech, in contrast, is typically two to three times faster than that at 4-5 Hz.

Anna Karina, circa 1967. Photo credit: Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It has been well  documented  that a song’s volume, or loudness, over time—what’s known as “amplitude modulation”—is relatively steady at 1-2 Hz. By contrast, the amplitude modulation of speech is typically 4-5 Hz, meaning its volume changes frequently.

Despite the ubiquity and familiarity of music and speech, scientists previously lacked clear understanding of how we effortlessly and automatically identify a sound as music or speech.

To better understand this process in their  PLOS Biology  study, Chang and colleagues conducted a series of four experiments in which more than 300 participants listened to a series of audio segments of synthesized music- and speech-like noise of various amplitude modulation speeds and regularity.

The audio noise clips allowed only the detection of volume and speed. The participants were asked to judge whether these ambiguous noise clips, which they were told were noise-masked music or speech, sounded like music or speech. Observing the pattern of  participants sorting hundreds of noise clips as either music or speech revealed how much each speed and/or regularity feature affected their judgment between music and speech. It is the auditory version of “seeing faces in the cloud,” the scientists conclude: If there’s a certain feature in the soundwave that matches listeners’ idea of how music or speech should be, even a white noise clip can sound like music or speech. Examples of both music and speech may be downloaded from the  research page .

Knowing how the human brain differentiates between music and speech can potentially benefit people with auditory or language disorders such as aphasia—melodic intonation therapy is a promising approach to train people with aphasia to sing what they want to say, using their intact “musical mechanisms” to bypass damaged speech mechanisms.

The results showed that our auditory system uses surprisingly simple and basic acoustic parameters to distinguish music and speech: to participants, clips with slower rates (<2Hz) and more regular amplitude modulation sounded more like music, while clips with higher rates (~4Hz) and more irregular amplitude modulation sounded more like speech.

Knowing how the human brain differentiates between music and speech can potentially benefit people with auditory or language disorders such as aphasia, the authors note. Melodic intonation therapy, for instance, is a promising approach to train people with aphasia to sing what they want to say, using their intact “musical mechanisms” to bypass damaged speech mechanisms. Therefore, knowing what makes music and speech similar or distinct in the brain can help design more effective rehabilitation programs.

The paper’s other authors were Xiangbin Teng of Chinese University of Hong Kong, M. Florencia Assaneo of National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and David Poeppel, a professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and managing director of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience in Frankfurt, Germany.

The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, part of the National Institutes of Health (F32DC018205), and Leon Levy Scholarships in Neuroscience.

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Free speech controversy at Sacramento high school jogs memories of my own start in journalism

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Students at Sacramento’s McClatchy High School learned last month that if officialdom feels uncomfortable, it will trample on free speech.

The Prospector , McClatchy’s student newspaper, published a random collection of student remarks uttered in class or in the hallways, under the heading of “What did you say?” The last of nine items was an unnamed student saying, “Hitler’s got some good ideas” during a class discussion.

The remark could – and should – have been dismissed as a clear example of adolescent ignorance. But principal Andrea Egan overreacted, sent a message to parents saying she found the comment “alarming,” and suspended journalism adviser Samantha Archuleta.

Archuleta was told that the action was taken for “expressing insensitive comments toward students and staff, sharing confidential student information, failure to maintain a harassment-free class and environment” and “a lack of good judgment in the execution of professional duties.”

It was obvious punishment for Archuleta’s having defended her student journalists. She told The Sacramento Bee that the students “wanted to use a variety (of quotes) to show how varied the climate is on our campus from minute to minute. One moment they hear a harmless, funny, off-kilter statement, and in the same day they hear horrible things, like the Hitler quote.”

Despite Archuleta’s punitive treatment, Sacramento Unified School District board president Lavinia Phillips insisted in an article for The Bee that “no action has been taken against an employee or student because of the original comments printed in The Prospector.”

Not only did McClatchy’s administration trample on the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, but probably violated state education law , which protects the right of student newspapers to publish anything they wish unless it’s explicitly obscene, slanderous, libelous or inciting lawbreaking.

“It’s controversial, but that’s what free speech is,” David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, told The Bee. “It is not harassment to simply publish newsworthy information that a student journalist overheard someone say.”

I took a particular interest in the McClatchy dustup because exactly 64 years earlier I had been suspended from high school for practicing journalism.

In 1960, Antelope Valley Union High School District in Los Angeles County had asked its voters to pass a tax increase, warning that rejecting it could result in canceling high school athletics. The measure failed and some students organized a walkout to protest.

At the time, I was editor of AV’s student newspaper, the Sandpaper. The protest organizer was a fellow member of the student council and a football player. Although I was not one of the organizers, shortly before it happened he asked me to let the local newspaper, the Ledger-Gazette, know about it. The only phone in those pre-cellphone days was in the administration office and someone overheard me making the call to the editor, with whom I was acquainted.

Campus demonstrations were very uncommon in 1960. The administration overreacted and called the cops to suppress the protest. It got a little out of hand.

The principal suspended me and the organizer because we were the only names he had and I was already on his troublemaker list because of various Sandpaper articles. He also threatened to ruin any chances we might have for college scholarships if we appealed the suspensions.

In retrospect, it was a life-changing event. I learned that officials – even school administrators – hate bad publicity and will retaliate against the messengers if they can. But I also learned that it’s fun to watch them squirm when journalists do things they don’t like.

Later that year, I dropped out of high school and began a career in journalism. It’s still fun to watch them squirm, as the kids at McClatchy High are hopefully learning.

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SfC Home > History > Historical Speeches >

Ronald Reagan's Speech at Moscow State University in 1988

by Ron Kurtus (revised 17 February 2018)

U.S. President Ronald Reagan went to the Soviet Union to meet with USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev to discuss arms reductions between the two nations. While he was there, on 31 May 1988, he gave a speech to an audience of students at Moscow State University. Not one to mince words, Reagan told the students his vision of the downfall of tyranny and the success of liberty.

( Text of Address )

Questions you may have include:

• How can I use this speech to improve my writing skills?
• How can I use this address to improve my speaking skills?
• What is the historical significance of the speech?

This lesson will answer those questions.

Learning from speech

Read this speech to gain insight on writing speeches and public speaking.

Speech writing

You can read the speech to examine its logical flow and use of imagery and emotional appeal. Note the length of the sentences and use of pauses. Short phrases make for effective delivery.

You can also outline the the speech to show where new ideas are presented and grouped.

(See Speech Writing for more information.)

Public speaking

Read part of the speech aloud—perhaps to a small audience or to yourself in a mirror. Pause at the commas and periods to allow for better understanding by the audience. Vary your pitch, rate and emotional level as you see fit.

(See Public Speaking for more information.)

Historical significance

Many view this speech as President Reagan's most famous address. It was also probably the first time that many of these Soviet students had ever been exposed to some of Reagan's concepts about freedom.

The speech has been edited because of its length.

Audio of address

You can hear an audio of Ronald Reagan's speech to read along. Note that it is not Reagan's voice but a slightly mechanical computerized voice. Unfortunately, it does not contain the inflection and emphasis of a true orator.

Note : If you want to hear the text being read, click the Play button. It takes a few seconds for the sound to start. The voices are somewhat mechanical for computer use.

Length of speech = 11 min. 22 sec.

Text of address

President Ronald Reagan:

Introduction

Before I left Washington, I received many heartfelt letters and telegrams asking me to carry here a simple message--perhaps, but also some of the most important business of this summit--it is a message of peace and goodwill and hope for a growing friendship and closeness between our two peoples.

First I want to take a little time to talk to you much as I would to any group of university students in the United States. I want to talk not just of the realities of today, but of the possibilities of tomorrow.

Contacts between countries

You know, one of the first contacts between your country and mine took place between Russian and American explorers. The Americans were members of Cook's last voyage on an expedition searching for an Arctic passage; on the island of Unalaska, they came upon the Russians, who took them in, and together, with the native inhabitants, held a prayer service on the ice.

The explorers of the modern era are the entrepreneurs, men with vision, with the courage to take risks and faith enough to brave the unknown. These entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States. They are the prime movers of the technological revolution. In fact, one of the largest personal computer firms in the United states was started by two college students, no older than you, in the garage behind their home.

Some people, even in my own country, look at the riot of experiment that is the free market and see only waste. What of all the entrepreneurs that fail? Well, many do, particularly the successful ones. Often several times. And if you ask them the secret of their success, they'll tell you, it's all that they learned in their struggles along the way - yes, it's what they learned from failing. Like an athlete in competition, or a scholar in pursuit of the truth, experience is the greatest teacher.

Changes spreading

We are seeing the power of economic freedom spreading around the world--places such as the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan have vaulted into the technological era, barely pausing in the industrial age along the way. Low-tax agricultural policies in the sub-continent mean that in some years India is now a net exporter of food. Perhaps most exciting are the winds of change that are blowing over the People's republic of China, where one-quarter of the world's population is now getting its first taste of economic freedom.

At the same time, the growth of democracy has become one of the most powerful political movements of our age. In Latin America in the 1970's, only a third of the population lived under democratic government. Today over 90 percent does. In the Philippines, in the Republic of Korea, free, contested, democratic elections are the order of the day. Throughout the world, free markets are the model for growth. Democracy is the standard by which governments are measured.

We Americans make no secret of our belief in freedom. In fact, it's something of a national pastime. Every four years the American people choose a new president, and 1988 is one of those years. At one point there were 13 major candidates running in the two major parties, not to mention all the others, including the Socialist and Libertarian candidates - all trying to get my job.

About 1,000 local television stations, 8,500 radio stations, and 1,700 daily newspapers, each one an independent, private enterprise, fiercely independent of the government, report on the candidates, grill them in interviews, and bring them together for debates. In the end, the people vote - they decide who will be the next president.

But freedom doesn't begin or end with elections. Go to any American town, to take just an example, and you'll see dozens of synagogues and mosques - and you'll see families of every conceivable nationality, worshipping together.

Go into any schoolroom, and there you will see children being taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights - among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - that no government can justly deny - the guarantees in their Constitution for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion.

Go into any courtroom and there will preside an independent judge, beholden to no government power. There every defendant has the right to a trial by a jury of his peers, usually 12 men and women - common citizens, they are the ones, the only ones, who weigh the evidence and decide on guilt or innocence. In that court, the accused is innocent until proven guilty, and the word of a policeman, or any official, has no greater legal standing than the word of the accused.

Go to any university campus, and there you'll find an open, sometimes heated discussion of the problems in American society and what can be done to correct them. Turn on the television, and you'll see the legislature conducting the business of government right there before the camera, debating and voting on the legislation that will become the law of the land. March in any demonstrations, and there are many of them - the people's right of assembly is guaranteed in the Constitution and protected by the police.

But freedom is more even than this: Freedom is the right to question, and change the established way of doing things. It is the continuing revolution of the marketplace. It is the understanding that allows us to recognize shortcomings and seek solutions. It is the right to put forth an idea, scoffed at by the experts, and watch it catch fire among the people. It is the right to stick - to dream - to follow your dream, or stick to your conscience, even if you're the only one in a sea of doubters.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.

America is a nation made up of hundreds of nationalities. Our ties to you are more than ones of good feeling; they're ties of kinship. In America, you'll find Russians, Armenians, Ukrainians, peoples from Eastern Europe and Central Asia. They come from every part of this vast continent, from every continent, to live in harmony, seeking a place where each cultural heritage is respected, each is valued for its diverse strengths and beauties and the richness it brings to our lives.

Recently, a few individuals and families have been allowed to visit relatives in the West. We can only hope that it won't be long before all are allowed to do so, and Ukrainian-Americans, Baltic-Americans, Armenian-Americans, can freely visit their homelands, just as this Irish-American visits his.

Freedom, it has been said, makes people selfish and materialistic, but Americans are one of the most religious peoples on Earth. Because they know that liberty, just as life itself, is not earned, but a gift from God, they seek to share that gift with the world. "Reason and experience," said George Washington, in his farewell address, "both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. And it is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government."

Democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive: A system of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.

I have often said, nations do not distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. If this globe is to live in peace and prosper, if it is to embrace all the possibilities of the technological revolution, then nations must renounce, once and for all, the right to an expansionist foreign policy. Peace between nations must be an enduring goal - not a tactical stage in a continuing conflict.

I've been told that there's a popular song in your country - perhaps you know it - whose evocative refrain asks the question, "Do the Russians want a war?" In answer it says, "Go ask that silence lingering in the air, above the birch and poplar there; beneath those trees the soldiers lie. Go ask my mother, ask my wife; then you will have to ask no more, 'Do the Russians want a war?'"

But what of your one-time allies? What of those who embraced you on the Elbe? What if we were to ask the watery graves of the Pacific, or the European battlefields where America's fallen were buried far from home? What if we were to ask their mothers, sisters, and sons, do Americans want war? Ask us, too, and you'll find the same answer, the same longing in every heart. People do not make wars, governments do - and no mother would ever willingly sacrifice her sons for territorial gain, for economic advantage, for ideology. A people free to choose will always choose peace.

Americans seek always to make friends of old antagonists. After a colonial revolution with Britain we have cemented for all ages the ties of kinship between our nations. After a terrible civil war between North and South, we healed our wounds and found true unity as a nation. We fought two world wars in my lifetime against Germany and one with Japan, but now the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan are two of our closest allies and friends.

Some people point to the trade disputes between us as a sign of strain, but they're the frictions of all families, and the family of free nations is a big and vital and sometimes boisterous one. I can tell you that nothing would please my heart more than in my lifetime to see American and Soviet diplomats grappling with the problem of trade disputes between America and a growing, exuberant, exporting Soviet Union that had opened up to economic freedom and growth.

Closing remarks

Is this just a dream? Perhaps. But it is a dream that is our responsibility to have come true.

Your generation is living in one of the most exciting, hopeful times in Soviet history. It is a time when the first breath of freedom stirs the air and the heart beats to the accelerated rhythm of hope, when the accumulated spiritual energies of a long silence yearn to break free.

We do not know what the conclusion of this journey will be, but we're hopeful that the promise of reform will be fulfilled. In this Moscow spring, this May 1988, we may be allowed that hope - that freedom, like the fresh green sapling planted over Tolstoi's grave, will blossom forth at least in the rich fertile soil of your people and culture. We may be allowed to hope that the marvelous sound of a new openness will keep rising through, ringing through, leading to a new world of reconciliation, friendship, and peace.

Thank you all very much and da blagoslovit vas gospod! God bless you.

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In Normandy speech, Biden looks to inspire the push for democracy abroad and at home

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President Biden on Friday looked to summon Americans to defend democracy from threats at home and abroad — and cast an implicit contrast with Donald Trump — by drawing on the heroism of Army Rangers who scaled the seaside cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in the D-day invasion 80 years ago.

The same spot was etched in the nation’s political memory in 1984, when President Reagan honored the “boys of Pointe du Hoc” and drew common cause between their almost unthinkable feat in the face of Nazi Germany’s tyranny to the then-Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union.

Now, Biden sought to channel both historic moments to advance his own vision for the country’s global role amid two grueling wars and the persistence of former President Trump, who has continued to lie about his 2020 election loss and threatened to dismantle U.S. commitments overseas.

“As we gather here today, it’s not just to honor those who showed such remarkable bravery that day June 6, 1944,” Biden said. “It’s to listen to the echo of their voices. To hear them. Because they are summoning us. They’re asking us what will we do. They’re not asking us to scale these cliffs. They’re asking us to stay true to what America stands for.”

While ostensibly an official speech, coming a day after Biden marked the anniversary of the Normandy landings with solemn ceremonies alongside allies, Biden’s remarks were steeped in political overtones, as his campaign makes a renewed play for national security-minded Republican voters who lionized Reagan and have never warmed to Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

“They’re not asking us to do their job,” Biden said of the “ghosts of Pointe Du Hoc.” “They’re asking us to do our job: to protect freedom in our time, to defend democracy, to stand up to aggression abroad and at home, to be part of something bigger than ourselves.”

A day earlier, Biden paid his respects to the D-day force in an emotional ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery that was attended by dozens of veterans in their late 90s and older.

As a Navy officer recited “The Watch,” affirming that a new generation was taking up their post in defense of freedom, and a 21-gun salute cast eerie smoke over 9,388 white marble headstones, the president grew heavy-eyed, and he pumped his fist as an F-35 flypast performed a missing-man salute.

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Biden cast himself — and the nation — as their inheritors in the timeless struggle between freedom and tyranny.

“We’re the fortunate heirs of the legacy of these heroes — those who scaled the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc,” Biden said. “We must also be the keepers of their mission ... the bearers of the flame of freedom they kept burning bright.”

But the country’s willingness to take up their mantle has in many ways never been more uncertain amid the possibility of Trump’s return to the White House.

It comes as Biden is also seeking to end fighting between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip — to free hostages held by the militant group and surge humanitarian assistance to civilians — while also trying to reorient U.S. foreign policy to confront China’s rising power in Asia.

“Does anyone doubt they would move heaven and earth to vanquish hateful ideologies of today?” Biden said.

Before flying to Normandy, Biden sat down with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday in Paris, where he emphasized the U.S. commitment to Ukraine in the face of Russia’s invasion and for the first time publicly apologized to the Ukrainian people for a months-long congressional holdup in military assistance that let Moscow make battlefield gains.

It was their first meeting since Biden signed the legislation authorizing the additional military assistance. He also announced a new $225 million in ammunition shipments, including mortars, artillery rounds and air-defense missiles.

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“I apologize for those weeks of not knowing what’s going to happen in terms of funding,” Biden said, insisting that the American people were standing by Ukraine for the long haul. “We’re still in. Completely. Thoroughly.”

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, told reporters before the speech that it was focused on “the dangers of isolationism and how if we bow to dictators and fail to stand up to them, they keep going and ultimately America and the world pays a greater price.”

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Pointe du Hoc is on the sheer cliffs between Omaha and Utah beaches. Before D-day, the Nazis were believed to have stationed artillery there, which would have allowed them to shell crucial landing zones for Allied troops.

Army Rangers used ropes, ladders and their hands to scale Pointe du Hoc while under fire. When they reached the top, they realized that the artillery had been moved elsewhere and only decoys remained. The weapons were tracked down nearby and disabled, and the Americans spent two days repelling Nazi counterattacks.

The mission was memorialized by Reagan on the 40th anniversary of D-day in 1984.

“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc,” he said. “These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”

Reagan’s speech, during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, was also a call for the U.S. to not turn its back on Europe.

“We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars,” he said. “It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.”

It’s a view that would probably put him out of step with the modern Republican Party, which under Trump’s leadership has become increasingly skeptical of foreign entanglements.

Biden highlighted the contrast during his State of the Union this year.

“It wasn’t that long ago when a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, thundered, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’” a reference to another famous speech in Berlin. “Now, my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, ‘Do whatever the hell you want.’”

Trump made that comment at a February rally in South Carolina, warning European allies not to be “delinquent” in their military spending or he would refuse to help them as president.

Megerian and Miller write for the Associated Press.

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Gray-New Gloucester speech therapist accused of assaulting student is still working for the district

Thomas Morawiec was issued a summons on Thursday is scheduled to appear in court on Aug. 14.

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A Gray-New Gloucester Middle School speech therapist accused of assaulting a 12-year-old student is still working for the district.

Thomas Morawiec, 48, was charged with misdemeanor assault Thursday and is scheduled to appear in court on Aug. 14.

Superintendent Craig King confirmed Friday that Morawiec, who has been with the district for 12 years, remains employed there.

The alleged assault, which according to the Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office occurred on March 25, was reported by the parents to the school resource officer on May 28.

Gray-New Gloucester Middle School speech therapist charged with assaulting student

King said the alleged assault occurred as kids were leaving recess and coming into the school building. At the time Morawiec was supervising recess, said King.

The incident was reported to the principal and communicated to the parents that day, said King. Advertisement

Principal Richard Riley-Benoit then investigated the incident, which King referred to as a “physical altercation,” by speaking with witnesses and those involved, said King.

King said the school district is “committed to maintaining a safe and welcoming environment for our students and take action if and when we fall short.”

The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office and Morawiec declined to provide additional information about the incident.

“As this incident is still under investigation, we are unable to disseminate any investigative material at this time,” said Steven Pyles, the sheriff’s office’s Freedom of Access Act clerk, in response to a request for an incident report and other information.

Morawiec did not respond to questions about the validity and fairness of the allegations against him.

Directly prior to working at MSAD 15, Morawiec worked for the Cape Elizabeth School Department for two years, according to information provided by Maine Public Employees Retirement System.

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Harvard grad who went off script to address Gaza protests said she quietly revised her speech last minute

A Harvard senior who went viral for her graduation speech, in which she criticized the school for its response to pro-Palestine protests, has shared new details about the lead-up to the moment, including how she planned the addendum the night before. 

In a dramatic moment at Harvard’s university wide commencement last week, student speaker Shruthi Kumar, 22, pulled a folded note card she had stowed away in her gown and addressed the university’s decision to deny 13 fellow seniors their degrees because of their involvement in a pro-Palestine encampment on campus.

“This semester, our freedom of speech and our expressions of solidarity became punishable leaving our graduations uncertain. As I stand before you today, I must take a moment to recognize my peers: the 13 undergraduates in the class of 2024 who will not graduate today,” she said.

“The students had spoken, the faculty had spoken. Harvard, do you hear us?” she continued, receiving thunderous applause and standing ovations from many members of the crowd.

The clip, originally captured in a university recording of the event, has reached millions of views after it made the rounds on social media over the past week.

Kumar told NBC News that she had written and practiced the speech over the course of a few months with the help of a committee of other students and faculty. Her speech, “The Power of Not Knowing,” was selected by the university over dozens of others.

But the evening before graduation day, Harvard announced its decision not to confer the degrees of 13 students “who are not in good standing,” overturning an earlier decision by a faculty body that recommended they should indeed be allowed to graduate.

“I knew that this was not just, it was not fair, and that I needed to say something,” said Kumar, who graduated with a double major in the history of science and economics. “I spent a lot of time talking to students that evening. And then at night, around 11:30, I prepared this note card.”

She said she shared the revisions with two faculty advisers, but the university deans who had previously approved her speech wasn’t aware she was making changes — and heard the new version for the first time as she delivered it to a crowd of tens of thousands. 

“I was worried I’d be silenced or my mic would be cut,” she said. “Thankfully, none of that happened. I’m glad I was allowed the opportunity to say what I needed to say. But looking back at the video, it’s clear faculty are not very pleased.”

Harvard’s student encampment, like the many that were set up on campuses across the nation in the last few months, protested the tens of thousands of civilian deaths killed in Israel’s strikes on Gaza and called for their university to divest from financially supporting of Israel.

“It’s not just Harvard students that are setting up encampments,” she said. “Whether it’s what people think to be a very liberal university on the East Coast, or a state school from Nebraska, there are protests everywhere, from different types of people, different regions in the U.S. That diversity itself should show that there’s some truth to what we’re speaking.”

Hundreds of undergraduate students walked out of Harvard College’s graduation ceremony on last Thursday, also in protest of the 13 students who were barred from graduating. 

Though she didn’t participate in the encampment, Kumar said her name appeared on a mass list of Harvard students doxxed by pro-Israel groups in the fall, which she touched upon in her speech.

She said her parents, who came from her home state of Nebraska to watch her graduate, were worried that her speech might draw similar backlash or violence. Kumar said that, so far, the response has only been positive from both the university and the massive international audience she’s now reached.

The past week has been a whirlwind, she said, but now back home, she’s excited to take a few months off traveling and exploring entrepreneurship before looking for job opportunities. She hopes to apply to grad school next year.

“I didn’t know it would blow up in this way. I didn’t know it would become such a moment,” she said. “I just knew I had to say something, and I did.”

Sakshi Venkatraman is a reporter for NBC Asian America.