When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant
I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be 21, I was astonished
at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
—Mark Twain
Orion is once more in the early morning sky (though a little harder to see with all the light-pollution). A few of the leaves have started to change color on my morning commute (despite a hundred-degree heat wave in September). And two weeks ago, I started my 35th year in the classroom (surrounded by colleagues, the majority of whom I could have taught).
In all that time, I have witnessed amazing and significant change. For example, when I started that fall of 1989, class handouts had to be produced using a hand-cranked mimeograph machine that left paper slightly damp from the evaporating acetone as the ink dried; today, I send a PDF file via a wi-fi signal to the many-times descendent of the Xerox-machine that prints, staples, and 3-hole-punches two-sided handouts that I pick up at my convenience. Back then, I wrote those handouts on a computer the size of a toaster oven (with a separately attached monitor) that required me to remember to save my work regularly on a 3.5-inch floppy disk that could store up to 1.44 MB of data (i.e. millions); today, I compose on a computer actually named after its size (tablet) that immediately autosaves any work I do to “the cloud” (computer servers that could be on the other side of the planet) and I currently have 4 terabytes of storage (i.e. trillions) but could pay for even more.
In addition, my students in 1989 had to do any research I assigned them in a library with limited hours and a finite number of books and periodicals; today, they carry pretty much all human knowledge ever generated in the palm of their hand with 24/7 access. Back then, when I gave them a group project to complete, they had to organize a gathering time and space to work on it, and they had to physically assemble the final materials for submission; now, they use group-chats to communicate anytime they wish and share on-line documents which they can work on simultaneously from anywhere in the world.
So, change. Dramatic change. And lots of it. In fact, I could go on ad nauseum with the change I have seen, and I obviously haven’t even touched on the social, cultural, and environmental differences of the past 34 years that impacts teaching and learning from outside the classroom.
Yet, I have passed out paper handouts every single one of those years, regardless of how they got manufactured. And my students still research topics about the natural world, and they still complete group projects for me where they have to cooperate successfully to create their final product. And that 3.5-inch floppy disk? A visual image of it is the “save file” icon on the screen of every software program on every computer on this planet.
I share all this because what I have been noticing most this particular fall is not the changes in my students over the years but rather their continuity. Watching the 14- and 15-year-olds in my 9th grade biology class, I see the same struggles with executive function and materials management that I did in 1989. I see the same awkward anxiousness when answering a question, the same tentative hand in the air when asked to respond to a query, the same timidity when assigned groups for an activity. Likewise with my seniors, I see how the four years have matured them, how the anxiety of learning has been tamed, the executive functioning refined, and I see a different tentativeness as they prepare for college admissions and the next chapter of their lives. I see 18-year-olds on the cusp of early adulthood.
But most of all, what I have realized I have been seeing at the start of this new school year is the adolescent brain doing what eons of evolution have hard-wired it to do: feel deep emotions; prune unused synapses; take risks; myelinate the prefrontal cortex; lay down new neural pathways; prepare for reproduction…in a word: be adolescent. And being adolescent hasn’t changed in my 35 years of working with them. It won’t in any future years I remain in this career—evolutionary change in something as complex as the brain doesn’t work on that brief a time scale. Hence, the children entering my classes today are fundamentally no different than the ones I taught over three decades ago; they are adolescents being adolescents.
However, the students in my classes this fall do live in a radically different world than the ones I taught in 1989, and because any good geneticist knows that we are all products of nature AND nurture, the changes of the past 34 years do matter. They have a direct impact on how adolescent brains experience their adolescence (as has been documented by the significant changes in teenage mental health over the course of my career).
The blunt truth is that the world my students live in today is radically different and radically changing—both all the time and at a pace undreamed of in 1989—and I have to account for that as the person responsible for creating the classroom environment they experience. But I also need to remember that I’m fundamentally working with the same adolescent brain I was working with 34 years ago and that “if adolescents seem imperfect, it’s only because most of the obstacles their brains were wired to traverse no longer exist, and we haven’t sojourned long enough in organized society for adolescent brains to get the memo” (Medina, p. 4). Therefore, I’m still responsible as their teacher for helping them to navigate the deep emotions, risk taking, synapse pruning, and myelinating their brains are experiencing.
How I and others might do so in our ever changing world is what I will address next.
References
Medina, J. (2018) Attack of the Teenage Brain. Arlington, Va: ASCD Books.
U.S. Surgeon General Advisory (2023) Social Media and Youth Mental Health. The Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf.
Light a Candle 