Classroom Plan: 7B
Last fall, I took an Administration of Justice course called
Neurology and Law where we spent quite a bit of time talking about the
underdevelopment of the human brain, and why it was that the government has
decided that at 18 you are an adult. In fact, there is no good reason why
individuals are legally an adult at age 18: it most closely stems past the
typical age of the end of a 16th and 17th-century-modelled
apprenticeship, and more interestingly, some sociologists have recently said
that the “teenager phase” is a recent phenomenon, no older than about the
1920’s when America had a strong enough economy that children didn’t have to
turn to the work force in their teens.
That being said, understanding the underdevelopment of the
human brain before age 23 or 25 (depending on the sex of the individual in
question, not to mention other factors), and after having read The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine,
I’ve implemented policies into my classroom that help teach time management,
organization, and other higher executive functions so that I can train my
students well. I give them three bathroom passes every semester. If they need
to go to the bathroom, they use a pass. If the semester ends and they still
have their passes, they’re rewarded with 5 extra credit points each. This is
one of many policies I have teaching them to be aware of the choices they’re
making and to think outside of what they think and feel right now.
After
reading and pondering the debate about teens lacking adult reasoning capacity,
yet being held to adult consequences, what do you think this means for you as a
teacher?
Since I have recently taken Neurology and Law, and had
classroom debates about juvenile delinquents in relation to social process
theory and biological theory, I’ve already struggled with the concepts of
teenaged brains. On the one hand, how can we hold children responsible for
their actions when their biology leads them to think and believe things that
maybe they can’t control or foresee to control? But on the other hand, how can
they become responsible adults if we don’t model for them the expectations of
the real world? At least in the case of criminal law, the world expects them to
behave in a certain way, and we as educators are responsible for making them
aware that life is about choices, and that there are consequences to certain
choices.
Teaching summer school, I feel like I had this exact
challenge this week. One of my female students from a lower socio-economic
small town had a personal problem at home that she emotionally brought with her
to school this week (which is not altogether uncommon for high school students
to do). Because of this personal problem, she chose to fall asleep in class, to
be openly disrespectful to me inside and outside class, to not participate in
the group activity (she was on her computer instead, even though I asked her to
put her computer away), and she had no interest in taking up my offer to make
up a bad essay grade from last week. She claims she wants to do better, but
when it comes down to accomplishing the work, she gets distracted by Facebook
and Youtube. When I walk by and see that she’s on those webpages, she’ll close
them, and then distract her classmates around her.
I’ve been speaking with my colleagues about her and I feel
like this cognitive underdevelopment issue comes up a lot, second only to
conversations about how her home life is affecting her judgment. I feel like
this is the hard part about teaching: one the one hand, I want to be
compassionate, to understand that she is going through things that likely
require comprehension way beyond her maturity level –and to that end, I’ve
given her extra chances which in retrospect I realize isn’t fair to the other
students who don’t get those chances. On the other hand, I also realize that by
giving her extra chances that I’m enabling a set of expectations that the rest
of the world isn’t going to meet. Once she’s out of my class, the world won’t
say, “Wow, you had a bad weekend? That sucks. Just for that you’re exempt from
real work for the next week, and feel free to fall asleep in class.” This is
the hard part about teaching: I’ve been keeping my classroom policies and
keeping high expectations of her, but I meet those with kindness and with a
good word before and after class. While she doesn’t seem to respond well to my
face, hopefully I’m doing some good work in the long run.
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