“Unlike their high school counterparts, young adolescents haven’t yet gone underground with their experiments in who they want to be and how they want to behave. They try out the possibilities like actors improvising on a public stage, taking first one role and then another. They are still playing with lots of possible selves.” (Cushman, K., & Rogers, L. 2008, P14)
This is so true, and I like the last sentence “They are still playing with lots of possible selves” in particular. Young adolescents haven’t completely figured out what they want to be, what they want to do or how they want to behave because they are still going through a phase where they experience dramatic physical changes, amplified feelings and expanding minds so that they can act very differently when they are being different selves. The most important thing is that in this special stage, every “self” is extremely easily influenced by their peers, usually in bad ways.
As it mentioned in the reading, to better fit in the group or to leave a perfect impression for parents and teachers, adolescents often put a mask on. On the one hand, facing parents and teachers, these kids try their best to act well to meet the expectations of being a good student and a good child; on the other hand, in order to get in a certain group, they have to do some bad things on purpose under peer pressure. I’d seen this happen a lot during my adolescence especially in middle school. At that time, students who achieved excellence in academic are favored by peers but only under the circumstance that they did not put much effort in learning! For example, someone who did not do homework, did not listen to the teacher, did not participate in class but instead watched comic books in class, played computer games for a long time or was dating a girl/boy was the idol for all kids because he/she was assumed to be super smart and cool. However, those really well-behaved students who got good grades were seen as nerds or idiots. I’ve tried once not to listen in class, not to finish homework and I learned nothing and without doubt, I got a really ugly grade. Therefore, I was thinking those “smart’ and “cool” students were leading a very hard life because it was not like that they all had super high IQ, the truth was that they must have spent a lot of extra time to catch up! Maybe they learned by themselves till late night, or they took tutoring classes for the whole weekend. All they did was just to make them to be cool for peers.

Young adolescents do not have to act perfectly or pretend to do the right or the wrong things and deserve the right to just be themselves without wearing a mask all day long. As teachers, we should create an environment in which they feel comfortable to express the imperfect but true self.