Using Literature to Help Teens Develop Healthy Relationships

During the pandemic, we all experienced difficulties in coping and lack of our regular activities.

The book, Love Hurts, Lit Helps, by author and teacher Andrew Simmons talks about how a high school English class can improve the way teenagers relate to each other. The literature offers models and warning stories. Through writing, listening, and speaking activities, teachers can help teens become better at consent as well as rhetoric, thoughtful of both love and metaphors — empathetic, authentic, and voluntarily vulnerable in the exploration of courtship, romance, and friendship.

A dozen graduates were interviewed to make the book, and some of the results in the book say boys often suppress emotions, seek dominance, and valorize sexual conquest, and girls often struggle with subjective standards of beauty and want respect as they question its importance.

The results led the author to think that everything that is intensified on social networks can be processed within the teaching process and thus lead to facing the distorted image set by social networks.

Returning to the classrooms, some students forgot how to have a face-to-face conversation. And now they are learning how to treat friends and how to court each other. In addition to the stories that the teacher presented to the students in which the point is that everyone knows that change is inevitable, for better or for worse, he also did the activity "Ask me if I care" where he asks students to enter the text and communicate with clarity and with a force that eludes the characters. From the perspective of a concerned friend, they write a letter offering advice to a teenager. Covered with a protective layer of fiction, they write what they would say to a real friend - or they should tell themselves. They practice empathy and advocacy, preparing for challenges they may not yet know.

They write 150 words about what they want to never lose about themselves. Self-documentation allows students to think about how their own choices - often in love and friendship - reflect or contradict their values. They send their work anonymously to be published in a digital journal that they can still access.

The world is full of people who can steal our time, and Covid-19 stole everyone’s time. Bad relationships and friendships are often to blame, and teenagers can read these stories and think about how to get away from them. Students may have felt hopeless and lonely during quarantine, but life may soon feel normal again, even if they have changed, in part because of the experience.