Do you Remember, Would you even Want to?

It's a subject that many people: adults, parents, teachers, peers do not feel comfortable talking about, but face it- If your in secondary education, puberty is everywhere.

Not only are your students going through it for 3-5 years, but at some point they will be enrolled in the infamous "Health Class." Some of these even start as early as fifth grade or as late as tenth. It will be whispered about in the hall and sex will become the subject of all jokes and under the breath laughter.

The point is, as an adult, you can't hide from it,and, as a teacher, you need to be prepared to deal with it, whether that means doing some research on your own to keep yourself updated on all the new studies, or simply remembering back to those formative years in your own youthful experience and being able to sympathize and empathize with your students. If the subject does come up in your class here are some helpful questions to guide your students' understanding.

Discussion
1. Puberty is often referred to as a “roller coaster ride.” Debate whether this metaphor accurately represents the difficulties, challenges, and rewards of the human development toward adulthood.

2.Both boys and girls go through a wide variety of physical and emotional changes during their teens. Discuss how boys’ and girls’ experiences of adolescence are similar and different.

3.Explain how the many intellectual and physical changes that boys and girls go through in becoming men and women serve to make them better able to perpetuate the species.

4.Teenagers are well known for feeling anger toward authority figures—their parents, their teachers and principals, celebrities, religious figures, and so on. Discuss the factors that, in your experience, give rise to these feelings. Be sure to consider both societal and biological influences.

5.There is more to being an adult than having an adult body. What other qualities do human beings acquire in their development toward maturity?

6.Discuss the challenges that teenagers must deal with in having their bodies develop more quickly than their emotions

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/lessonplans/programs/ragingteens/

Here is a quick refresher course on teenage boys and girls from the video Teen Species:

Boys:

The growth process of teenage boys involves the way they look, think, and sound. Starting between the ages of 10 and 14, testosterone is released and triggers growth starting with the hands and feet, then height. Boys can grow up to four inches in just one year. Physically, they will sweat more, develop more hair, gain weight and eat much more, and have increased muscle mass and stamina. All the growing also affects their ability to balance and many boys between the ages of thirteen and fourteen are clumsy and accident prone. Their voice also deepens as their vocal chords grow longer.

Late development in boys is slightly more obvious than in girls because of the height factor. The impacts on late developers will be an increased amount of bullying because of their small size, they may perform worse at school, have less friends, and deal with the fact that it is difficult to get a girlfriend, which will not help their self image.

Once puberty begins the body shifts into the “adult sleep mode” meaning that the melatonin necessary for falling asleep is not released until 10:30 so that many teenagers find it difficult to sleep before eleven at night. With school starting so early in the morning many teenagers build up a sleep debt because they are not getting their needed ten hours of sleep each night. The results are bad moods and difficulty concentrating in school. The switch to starting school even an hour earlier seems like a very positive solution with proven results. As a teacher, it is important to monitor the amount of outside work assigned that many keep students up even later.

I think it is very true that teenagers have been able to do less and less in the last fifty years. Teenagers no longer have the responsibilities that they did even fifteen years ago. I think that it’s important for young boys to have a way to release their competitive energy and gain respect in a safe way. I completely disagree with the specialist in the video implying that these crimes, minor though they may be, are an expected outlet for teenagers. I think adults need to put their children in sports, jobs, and safe settings with other teens where they can feel like they are making a difference in their lives and others. I feel like adult supervision, or lack of, has a lot to do with the rise in crime.

Some of the societal effects of puberty lasting longer are the ways that teenagers seem to rebel against society. The mood swings and changing thought processes lead to anger and frustration that causes them to lash out and be seen as disrespectful and annoying by society. When in fact they are just trying to establish an identity that keeps evading them every time a new change comes along.

I feel like teenagers have a clear role in society: go to school and work hard so that they can get good jobs, go to college, or support a family. I feel like school is a job, learning and participating and becoming involved in the community is the role for children and teenagers who are in the school system. I just think that many teenagers just don’t want that particular role that society has created for them and that the transition between child and adult can be a difficult one to define.

This video brought to light the fact that boys are just as self-conscious as girls as they go through their development process. It never occurred to me that they would feel left behind because of their height or size, or that it is something that boys even had on their radar.

Girls:

During puberty, a girl’s body starts to develop breasts, more hair, they sweat more and need to shower more, and many girls get blemishes and gain weight. Girls also lose muscle strength and are overtly more tired than usual. The hormones also change the way the girls think and feel about themselves.

Many emotional changes occur in girls, and their moods change constantly leaving them feeling like they really have no control over how they feel. They feel insecure about themselves mentally and physically, they become very sensitive, mood swings are common, verbal aggression with friends and family becomes more prominent, and they are very critical of themselves.

These changes are caused by growth hormones that generally kick in when a certain weight or body fat percentage is reached. Weight is the crucial factor, but genetics, color, and stress also play important roles.

The consequences are two to four years of ridiculous drama. Just kidding. A girl’s entire world changes when she is going through puberty and the consequences are the physical and emotional changes listed above…

Early development in girls is a difficult thing to handle. Emotionally the girl will feel self conscious, depression may set in, she might have a negative body image, and adults may treat the girl like she is more emotionally advanced because of her physical advancement, which is harmful. Behavior wise she may suffer from eating disorders, use of drugs, suicidal thoughts, drastic mood swings, and depression. Physically she will stand out from her peers and not be emotionally ready to deal with what is happening physically.

An adolescent fighting with parents serves the purpose of them learning to communicate within a “safe setting.” It is said to be healthy because it is the one place they can lash out and learn how to handle their anger and difference of opinion. I disagree with letting teens abuse or yell at anyone in the family, which is usually how girls handle their mood swings by saying mean ad hurtful things to those in the house. I think parents need to understand why their kid is doing it and then put a stop to it by immediately re-establishing boundaries and telling the girls when they are out of line, not locking themselves in the bedroom after work to avoid conflict.
Some strategies to remedy the self-image problems of teens today are to not idolize stars and models in the classroom, but to pick average women and pick out qualities in them besides how they look for the girls to respond to. Also it could be helpful to address the subject in class and let girls talk about how they. I think it is just difficult because most of the time the girls don’t listen anyway, or they just want people to tell them that they aren’t fat (its true). I think that telling girls they are beautiful on a constant basis is really the best thing to help.

This video brought to light the issues with bullying, which I had no idea were prominent among girls beyond verbal bullying like talking about each other behind their backs. I think that schools have changed a lot and for girls to be picked out for their clothing, hair, development, etc, is a lot different than when I was in school.

Knowing When to Let Go: Teacher vs. Student-Directed Activities

REFLECTIONS ON:
Teacher-Directed and Student-Directed Assignments

Information for this reflection was taken from Classroom Instruction That Works by Marzano, Pickering & Pollock

These teacher and student directed activities help students to focus on similarities and differences with the teacher-based instruction resulting in a more homogenous conclusion with the students and the student-directed activities having more varying outcomes in conclusions. So, the approach should change based on what the teacher wants the outcome to be: more direct or more diverse.

For activities in which students are comparing things, a teacher-directed activity would identify what is to be compared and the characteristics used to compare them. If it is student directed, it will be less structured and the students will pick what ‘A’ and ‘B’ are to be compared.

This can be applied in the same way to classifications, metaphors, and analogies.
These differences between teacher and student directed assignments can also vary from simply comparing and contrasting things. My classroom teacher intermixes the two ways constantly, using the more structured teacher-directed process to provide students with a given direction and then moves into a more student directed atmosphere.

For example, in a grammar lesson we did last week with appositives and prepositional phrases, her overhead notes of explanation had the definition of the new terms completely written out, for facts that were being reviewed, she left blanks for the students to fill in as the lesson progressed. Also, when she handed out a worksheet, it was a completely teacher-directed assignment because the sentences were already written and all the students had to do was circle the correct answer. However, the next day in order to review, they had to create their own sentences and demonstrate specific parts of speech within them.

Her class lessons seem to progress from teacher-directed to student directed, but they typically involve both ways.
I think that the students’ achievement level benefits from doing both simultaneously. Having teacher directed assignments helps set them on the right path as far as expectations and having someone show them directly first how it works, and then students are allowed to be more creative and put more of themselves into an assignment which helps them achieve more in knowing they can do something on their own with less guidance.

A last example my 8th grade classroom is the activity we did with poetry writing. Each student had to write a poem, a daunting task for many. So they divided the paper into three sections: verbs, adverbs and metaphors for the verbal phrase. The teacher did an example on the overhead, but left the choice of subject and words up to the student, so it was a mixture of both approaches and the activity was amazingly successful.

(Refer to "The Art of Poetry" for more details on the assignment)

The diagram on the left shows an example of a student-directed activty in which sudents can choose the letters to put in the box in the center and create their own mystery word, or if the teacher chooses to include the letters, it immediately changes to a teacher-directed activty. For more templates like this one, click on the picture and explore more links and print outs from Classroom Instruction That Works!

The Art of Poetry

Many can remember back to the days when English class was pure torture, trying to come up with a creative thesis, structuring the perfect essay, suffering through the endless lessons in grammar... and in most public schools, being forced to explore and even dabble in the genre of poetry.

What 8th or 9th grade kid likes to read poetry, much less WRITE it?

However, today I had the immense pleasure of not only watching a group of thirty students produce poems in less than fifteen minutes, but also, they were good, creative, and, honestly, made me question my own artistic ability.

What is the secret formula to poetry?

It's simpler than you think ((it even incorporates a simple grammar lesson!))

1) Have your student take out a spare piece of paper and fold it "hot dog" style.
2) On the left side ask your students to think of any object that has an action (s).

For example object = dog, which can sit, eat, stand, sleep, etc. List four to five actions.

3) Then create adverbs for each of these actions: sits lazily, eats sloppily, etc.

4) On the right side, have the student come up with a metaphor for each phrase.

"The dog eats sloppily like a starving man chowing on McDonalds"

5)On the bottom half of the paper, have the students combine all of the above and add their own personal touches.

Voila! An instant poem:

Real Life Example

Object= Leaves

like a cascading waterfall fall swiftly
like a spider's web hang delicately
like a school lunchroom rustle noisily
like a cyclone roller coaster spin violently
like wax about to drip from a candle dwindle precariously
like reflections of twinkle lights from a Christmas tree dance serenely

Leaves

Leaves fall swiftly like a cascading waterfall,

Hanging delicately like the threads of a spider's web,

Brilliant colors rustle noisily like a middle school lunchroom,

As the last few dwindle precariously by their stem,

Like the wax from a candle about to drip,

Spinning violently like a cyclone roller coaster,

The last signs of Fall dance serenely down the sidewalk,

Like the reflections of twinkle lights from a Christmas tree,

Out of sight.