February 3, 2012

Parent Newsletter

Happy February! 

In case you have not seen it, here is the link /http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181351486558984.html to an article from the Wall Street Journal, asking the question “What’s Wrong With the Teenage Mind?”  It is worth a read.  Of course those of us who work with teenagers do not think that there is anything ‘wrong’, per se, but we do recognize that teenagers are not just big children or young adults.  They are different creatures, with brains that don’t entirely look like ours.

Human brains, and the developmental stages they go through, evolved over many years of hunting and gathering, and they have not had time to adapt for the modern world at all.  As this WSJ article points out, children used to hit puberty later, and become part of the adult world of work sooner. The stage cultural we now call ‘adolescence’ is a relatively new one, culturally, although not in the development of the brain.  One of the exciting and also daunting things about working with adolescent brains (and the bodies they come with) is that they are still enormously plastic.  We talk colloquially of ‘learning by experience’, but the actual biological reality is that brains do what we ask them to do, and by so doing, create those neural pathways. That’s what learning is.

I also recommend a book called Born To Be Good, by Dacher Keltner.  He explores the Darwinian roots of the pro-social emotions and social tools: compassion, empathy, laughter, embarrassment, even teasing.   He explains why ‘survival of the kindest’ over thousands of generations has created human society in which altruism and generosity are actually built into our genome.  Apparently Darwin understood this, and it is later selective use of this work that has left us thinking of Darwinian world as a dog eat dog one, something I didn’t realize.  It is interesting to think that in our efforts to nurture these pro-social behaviors, we are acting in concordance with our students’ natural tendencies, rather than against them, and understanding this will influence the way we think about this part of our education.

A reminder:  Mid-winter break starts after the last commitment on the 8th.  This is very unlikely to be before lunchtime, and we ask that you absolutely positively not take your children out sooner.  It is very disruptive to classes and disrespectful to the teachers when students decide to ‘catch an early bus’.   Students need to be back before 7:00 pm on the 12th.  We require that every student let us know where they are going, and with whom.

All the best,

Emily

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020380650457718135148655898...