Who Are Adolescents, and Does it Matter? (Answer: YES)

This is a clip from Hey Arnold that demonstrates how a community uses literacy in a cocurricular setting, as well as a comical example of why students need to learn literacy for fear of "saucier" pitfalls down the road. In all reality, I knew right away that I wanted to include Hey Arnold in my multi-modal blog post because, yes it is my favorite cartoon of all time, but also because it is such real and honest cartoon that I feel teachers could use in the classroom.

Anyhow, what resonated with me from this week's readings came largely from "Who Are Adolescents Today?" by Intrator and Kunzman. I found this article to be the easiest to read of any so far, as well as most enjoyable. The narrative format for implementing research and synthesizing other studies and articles really worked for me (Dear Rick, maybe we can have some more of these going forward?) Unlike a typical scholarly journal article, I was several times worked up about different topics brought up by the reading. These topics will serve as the body of this post, and I will try to ask a question after each.

The first thing I read that made me stop and say, "Woah" (either out loud, or in my head, it will be left up to the imagination) was on page 31 of the article, which reads, "Being bored, it appears, costs more to those who can afford it the least." This is true and sums up a major goal for educators in any impoverished area, be it inner-urban areas of New York, the poor country towns of south and midwest, or reservations for Native Americans. The fact is that poverty can be a great equalizer, and it does not equalize things in a good way, but it gives, according to this line and other parts of the article, a solid base to push off in teaching poorer areas: be interesting. Students who lose interest in school but come from middle and upper class families get second chances, support outside of classroom teachers, have alternative routes to education among obvious other resources; poor students get none. This all begged the question to me: is being interesting an accomplishable task by all people who choose the profession of teaching, and in all fields of education? What does it mean to be interesting? Does the interest need to remain with the discipline or is being invested in the wellbeing of each other (that is, teachers and students) the interest that is needed?

I sit here considering this paraphrase: in all the years up until the basic present, we have not opened an efficacious dialogue with students about what does and does not work for them in schools. That is astounding and perverse and very backwards. Somewhere in the reading it stated this notion concisely and right then and there, I had a flash-forward to the year 2150, let's say, when education has come a long way and we look back on present times and consider the practices of today rather stone-age. It is hard to believe an institution has been running so long without taking large steps towards integrating the ideas of those whom it supposedly serves. Just wow.

I will get to another line I read that seemed like a key idea, but first would like to preface it. Very near the beginning of this reading was a passage from Buechner (2: 1993) that reads, "Being not quite a child and not quite a grown-up either is hard work, and they look it. Living in two worlds at once is no picnic." This notion of adolescence being a transition period is in many ways very true: it is developmentally critical in the brain, it is the first taste of decision making in American schools. And yet, why must it be a transition period? Why can it not be treated as truly a stage? It is "no picnic" to live in two worlds at once, nor is it to be in between them, so what if we simply treated adolescence as what it often ends up being: a uniquely trial-by-error-acceptable, at times whimsical, funny period of every person's life?

The reason I set it up this way is that Intrator and Kunzman posit that "consistency of perspective and behavior cannot even be assumed within the same adolescent" which is such a true fact. Adolescence is a moody time. Have you ever stopped to notice how much your moods affect your opinions and motivations? When I begin watching a series on Netflix that I have heard great things about, if I cannot get into it, I acknowledge I am simply not in the mood. and 4 times out of 5, when I come back to the series, I revel in it. In this way, an adolescent's mood and take on their education can differ much from day to day--due to this ever-morphing emotional perspective. A part of my practice that I have planned on implementing as far back as when I was in 7th grade is: when I am a teacher, I will be taking kids' moods and daily lives into account when they do not seem to able to be motivated or put in the academic work that I am asking. As wonderful as this sounds, is it a realistic practice for teachers to use? Is there such a time as a kid's emotional perspective differing too much?

A word that I learned from this reading is "milieu" and it basically means "a person's social environs." This ties right into the John Dewey excerpts under the subheading "Conceptual Roots of Youth Voice Research." I agree with Dewey 100% in his notion that a consistent principle throughout learning of any kind is that there is a specific and direct relationship between education and personal experience. It is no secret that a person's milieu is their probably the greatest impacting influence on their personal experience at a given time. For example, students in rural Idaho are going to have an entirely different experience on a science field trip from students in Boston will on a history field trip--both because of geographic location as well as disciplinary 'location'.

I think it follows that different classes incite different emotional responses from different students, and to create and experience that all students can construct learning from, many different avenues of learning should be available but not required. There should be opportunity to read for learning, to watch videos for learning, to go out and interview or investigate the community for learning--as much as these fit. Is this too optimistic of a wish? Is it implementable? I feel I need to answer this one: anything that I believe will work for students is implementable and we need to do what it takes to enact that.

There is more from this reading that just reverberated off me but I am going to try and wrap this up so I will only touch on them for a moment or two.

• Relationships Matter. Yes, okay, this one should be obvious and yet I do not think there are methods classes for relationship-building or mentoring in more education programs. 
• Students have conceptual definitions of what it means to be caring, and more importantly an intuitive understanding of which teachers care and which don't--and this has major impact
• The top of page 41 gives an example of student who asked a question beyond-but-related-to the subject matter. The student was interested because it related directly to his life. But the teacher pushed the question aside.
• I remember Mrs. Boyd, my elementary school music teacher, who would for some reason never answer what the top number meant in a time signature. I asked all the time but she would never tell. I was so frustrated by this. 
• "Students are willing to do the hard work of critical thinking when the issues are important to them" (41). This applies to the above indented bullet points. It also shouldn't be surprising.
• The way I see it, not only do relevant topics engage students enough for them to want to think critically--they also actively prove why critical thinking is useful and necessary: to solve problems in their own lives. 

I hope that this was intelligible. If I missed any grammar errors feel free to let me know!

Take care folks, have a nice day in preparation for a good life,

Max