Every year there are new student trends or patterns in schools and teachers may understand or may be left scratching their heads in wonder of what’s to come. Trends may be in types of clothing, hairstyles, a different set of words, even what classes will be deemed interesting for that year. A troubling trend began not too many years back with school shootings, making teaching a less safe career choice than it used to be.

Most recently a pact purportedly began in Massachusetts for teenage girls to become pregnant and have their babies to raise together.

Based on various internet reviews and commentary, I had expected the film Juno to be a touchingly light, introspective teen comedy in the same vein as Napoleon Dynamite or Ghost World; however, I had not expected it to be so sad and feel so personal. Sure, it starts with a lot of laughs, but a tinge of desolation soon sets in and it really gets to you by the end of the film.

You have probably heard that the teen pregnancy and birth rate is up in the United States, for the first time since 1991. As is reasonable, the primary issue most talking about this are addressing is abstinence-only sex education and, due to the way the U.S. has only given federal funding to those programs since 1996, the lack of comprehensive sex education.

The dramatic declines in teenage pregnancy rates noted in the United States between 1995 and 2002 were largely due to improved contraceptive use, not to abstinence, a new study shows.

The article goes into far more detail but I just want to point out that this is evidence that teens can and do make responsible choices when choosing to be sexually active. Indeed, contraceptive use accounted for 86% of the drop whereas abstinence can only claim 14%.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the number of births among girls in this age group dropped 38 percent from 1994 to 2002 alone, even though the number of girls 10 to 14 climbed 16 percent during the same period. CDC researchers attributed the decline to sex education.