#MVP 4 The impact of physical changes on adolescents

I really enjoyed reading Brown and Knowles’ article “Understanding the young adolescent’s physical and cognitive growth” because it addressed two important aspects of this special stage—physical changes and cognitive growth during adolescence, and it made me think about that as teachers, what can we do to respond appropriately to these dramatic changes? Here I focus on physical changes.

This article listed several physical changes happened in males and females. For example, female young adolescents experience weight gains, breast development and menstruation which are the main concerns for them and create challenges as well so that most of them see these in a very negative way. I remember one of my friends cried for a whole night when she first got her period and she didn’t even know why she acted like that, and she just knew that there’s something really bad happened. Also, I remember once in our gym class, a girl was in her period but felt very embarrassed to tell our male teacher so that she did a lot of intense exercise with other classmates but fainted after class.  I think the teacher should have asked at the very beginning of the class in order not to make students feel embarrassed about this. For males, one of the major changes is their deepening voice. However, adolescents experience this at different age and rate, which could be a problem for some students. For example, some boys who haven’t gone through a voice change (high to low) would be laughed at by their peers and labeled as girlish.

Additionally, other aspects such as nutrient needs, insatiable and peculiar appetite, and sleep needs of adolescents were presented. These are all normal things, nevertheless young people develop different thoughts since they would like to compare with each other and often times turn the differences among them into feelings of inadequacy and deficiency. As teachers, we should be aware of the huge impact that physical changes have on adolescents’ development and be responsible to guide them in the right way to view these changes.  We can encourage them to talk about these things and express their feelings to adults, either parents or teachers, and provide them the accurate information to eliminate their doubts and concerns.