MVP #3

Insights on Adolescent From a Life Course Perspective

At its core, a life course perspective insists that development is lifelong and that no life stage can be understood in isolation from others. (Johnson, Crosnoe, Elder, 273)

The idea that “no life stage can be understood in isolation from others” strongly resonates with me. We kept saying that all the things that I have been through make me “me”, everything happened in these years is part of me, and if you want to know the whole me, you probably should take a look at every one of my life stage.

No life stage can be understood in isolation, nor can one person be identified by one single event. I think this idea gives educators a great clue that when the teacher is trying to know one student, she can never define him by what he has done in this period. It is important that the teacher does some descriptive review on what he performs under different situations and it will be helpful if the teacher also collects some information about what this student has performed in his previous years.

It actually reminds of the fact that a great part of students who are diagnosed of having a “learning disability” and are sent to take the IEP are over-diagnosed by teachers. I won’t say that these teachers are irresponsible or incompetent,but I’m more inclined to the assumption that they didn’t really get to know the student: they didn’t connect how the student acts now with what he acts before and they tended to ignore other influential factors such as language difficulty and culture shock.