Would you go back to high school? Shane Feldman is joining us this morning to talk about his new
docu-series Undercover High. Well done on convincing everyone you were a teenager
Come on look at this face, it wasn't that hard.
Well we need to play the game right now: How old are you?
I'm 23 right now
23 years old and you pulled off 17?
Yeah, being a senior in high school.
Can you tell us a little bit more about the high school where you went undercover?
Sure, it was a high school in Topeka Kansas very
representative of a typical high school in North America it was about a third
Hispanic a third african-american a third Caucasian and about 70% of students
on the free lunch program so a significant amount of poverty and
challenge in that regard but just a very culturally diverse school with a
lot of the challenges you would find in any typical high school here or anywhere
else in the continent really.
So you were one of seven young adults that went
undercover for a full semester taking the curriculum going through the motions
to appear that you are part of that class what did you experience that
surprised you in terms of what you saw and what you heard because the objective
of this was to find out how parents can connect with their kids
Absolutely, that was definitely my objective going in: how can we bring teens closer with their
parents with their teachers and what I found going in was that there is more
need for that than ever before there is this scary growing disconnect between
teenagers and really adults in general this is a generation that feels so
misunderstood rightfully so and they feel this lack of compassion and empathy
just because they feel like they are these foreign beings growing up in this
technological age and of course social media technology smartphones are just
bringing them further away from their parents and teachers so how do we close
that gap that's ultimately become my mission coming up
when I watched some of the clips of your show and you mentioned technology I
think that's one of the huge differences between when we as we went to high
school and today's high school students so how are smartphones coming into play
in the classroom?
As the ultimate distraction. Not just that, I mean it's
it's still something that's so new I mean you think about smart phones social
media in general we're really probably about 5,000 days into that so it's very
new even though we use it so readily in our everyday lives and in the classroom
a lot of teachers don't have strict rules in place they don't even know how
to use them necessarily themselves sometimes so they're really dominating
the classroom and students are so sucked into technology sometimes that they're so
disconnected not only from schoolwork but from community in general.
What's the biggest fear that you observed with students that exist to them and we've
seen 13 Reasons Why, people speculate what's going on, this show is not
Hollywood this show is an honest look at the challenges going on but the biggest
fear that exists and how do we overcome it?
My biggest fear is that not enough
students have a caring adult or mentor in their life that is really not only
looking out for them but showing up really showing up because that's
something that students can't get online through social media what we need more
than ever are teachers that forget about academics and teaching teachers that
just walk into the room with empathy and compassion show up and are there for
their students in every regard same with parents same with mentors that students
just desperately want to be seen and heard and it is our job to show up.
So Shane it's been what about five years since you were in high school?
Yeah, about a decade since I started, and in 2012 I graduated.
Is there anything about your undercover
high school experience and and what that you know culture was like that you
wished you had had four or five years ago?
You know what, it's interesting
in many ways I feel like as different as things are nothing has really changed
walking back into the walls of that high school I I felt like I was right back at
home in a sense high school was kind of like my stomping ground I had a really
difficult start as you guys know to my high school experience but I found my
ebb and flow I grew to love Count Me In of course grew out of my
high school experience now I work with high school students for a living and
mentor them online and you know I really feel like as challenging as things are
the overall high school experience is still what I remember it to be.
So perhaps not that different from 1997 Charles A Senior Secondary, Prince Rupert
and ESS pagers and pay phones that was the technology we had you know
Things have changed. Undercover High still many episodes left there's ten episodes in the run right?
Eleven. Eleven, yeah. You need to watch this experience on TV.
Shane Feldman .com where you can follow Shane and his adventures as well.
Congrats this is an important show thank you very much all right we'll take a break
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