Brown & Knowles present an interesting quote in Ch. 3 highlighting the extreme influences of media in young adolescent lives as it is stated:

Technology increases every new generation of adolescents’ exposure to the world in positive and negative ways. Young adolescents have immediate and constant access to the world through the Internet, iPods, and the latest generation of cell phones. Understanding the constant bombardment of visual and auditory images is challenging for young adolescents. Yet what they experience shapes their views of the world and their perceived place in it (Brown & Knowles 47). Continue reading Insta Influences →

“At No. 6, between Rebecca Black and Tim Tebow, was Tyler Clementi, whose death ‘was a critical reminder that, even when we disagree with someone’s choices or lifestyle, we must always treat that person with respect, dignity, and compassion’” (“The Story of a Suicide,” Parker, 38). Continue reading Respect, Dignity, Compassion →

Joaquín noticed at the college’s orientation that he was one of only two Latinos in the entering class. In spite of this context, it took going to a college steeped in privilege for Joaquín to be given the opportunity to study his heritage. It was after this experience that he began the process of claiming both identities of Puerto Rican and scholar, and along the way he picked up even more ways to define himself (Raible & Nieto, 2008, p. 220).

Continue reading ♪ I’m NOT all the way up ♪ →

       “Many girls perform well academically during their elementary school years, but during middle school low confidence results in poor academic performance, less assertiveness, and lower expectations for future educational plans and career paths.” (p. 60 Brown, 2007) Continue reading Low Confidence →

An underdeveloped prefrontal cortex (PFC) of the brain is one reason that causes young adolescents to completely ignore or misread facial expressions of others (Brownlee 2005). Adolescents may interpret messages of surprise or concern as anger, threats, or insults. Misreading these messages may lead them to exaggerate their intensity and intention, saying “Ms. Green yelled at me today when I wasn’t doing anything wrong!” when the teacher calmly and politely asked the student to stop talking.

I chose this passage as my MVP because it reminded me of a true story happened on one of my male friends. He is an easy-going middle-aged guy, full of positive energy, sense of humor and responsibility to his hob and family; he is popular among his friends because he can always facilitate the atmosphere during their gatherings or parties. But surprising enough is that one day he confessed to us that he had very dark teenager years.

It is when he was about 10 years old, he started to find that every time when he was not at home, whether he was at school, on the street, or in the supermarket, he felt like almost all others were looking at him and teasing him. It made him very upset and even very sick. He dared to go to school, refused to go shopping with his family and declined neighbors’ greetings by simply lowering his head coyly. Gradually, he became a shy boy with a strong sense of inferiority and extreme loneliness. But no one noticed his change, neither his parents nor the teachers. They just said that he was an introvert and quiet boy, but they didn’t know that he even had had serious mental illness at that time. The nightmare lasted for about ten years throughout his late elementary and whole secondary school years, and the degree of his illness had been escalating gradually. Then, the breakout happened on the first day of he attending gaokao (the National College Entrance Examination in China). He threw up in the test room and eventually gave up the test and repeated 12^th grade.

Perhaps this explosion provided him a chance to rethink about himself, or perhaps his adolescence was about to finish, after that he started to find ways to make himself more confident and happier. After reading Dale Carnegie’s Lifetime Success Book, he forced himself to attend a speech contest when he was a freshman in college. Although he completed his speech by closing his eyes, sweating, and getting booed all the time, he felt fulfilled because it was the first time he made a public speech in ten years and it was a meaningful breakthrough! Since then, he used another ten years to gradually recover by adopting a lot of active measures like that. Now he has become a totally different man with a smiling face and a powerful inside.

Although it is a happy ending, he thought that if his parents and teachers could give him necessary information and support at the very beginning, he would not have experienced so much pain when he was so young and taken so long to heal himself.

Indeed, since adolescents begin to form their own identity, they tend to pay a lot of attention to not only their physical appearance but also others’ attitudes toward them; even a neutral attitude could be interpreted as a negative one and can cause serious effects on them. Therefore, it is parents and educators’ responsibility to detect the negative mentalities in youth as early as possible and to offer them necessary knowledge, patient tolerance and emotional support to help them turn the corner successfully.

Reference

Brown, D., & Knowles, T. (2007). Who am I? The social, emotional, and identity trials of young adolescence. In What every middle school teacher should know. (2^nd Ed., pp. 37-66). New Hampshire: Heinemann Press.