There were a couple aspects of this chapter which I found to be challenging to merely accept as true as I think about how to create a classroom of my own. They seemed to oversimplify and overgeneralize some aspects about students that I felt did not give children enough credit. One of these topics with which I took issue was their thoughts on the different developmental stages and how they affect how teachers should approach different age groups. When they were describing traits of middle school students that make them different from other people, I felt that it was rather demeaning and condescending to this age group. They describe middle school aged students, students generally aged ten to fourteen as “impulsive,” “impatient,” “preoccupied with popularity and self-conscious about appearance,” “deeply influenced by mass media,” and “plagued by mood swings,” among other viciously negative and demeaning remarks about the nature of people of this age group (5). To me, these qualities they described seemed true of many adult people I know. Adults may hide these adverse qualities more skillfully than a young adolescent, but I cannot agree that they are more prevalent at that age. I feel that this approach to young people, seeing them as being below ourselves as adults, contributes or may be the root of the very behaviors which in them we criticize and cast aside as “teen angst.” Seeing this description of young adolescents motivated me to find in my heart greater empathy for people of this age, as when I was this age my struggles felt real and I believe that made my feelings valid, so I believe that they deserve to be treated as such. I feel that as adults it is easy for us to feel that people of this age feel misplaced angst, yet I think that is simply due to the fact that if we lived past that age we see that a lot of the problems we had at that time have been resolved. Yet, this could be said about anyone's struggles after the passage of time, if they continue to live. I think it is reckless to classify these people as anything other than people who are dealing with the issues of real life and exposure to the world, for the events that happen to us at that age play a large part in shaping who we are going forward. The way this seems to play a
role in the ELA classroom, to me, is that children should be exposed to texts that healthily expand their understanding of the world and themselves, and should be engaged in meaningful conversations that allow them to have ownership of their thoughts and words.
I feel the same discomfort with the traits of high school students in their late adolescents posed in this chapter. This text seems to ignore the reality that the way children feel at this age is in large part due to the societal constraints placed on them—constraints placed, in large part, by the education system. I wonder why this text does not have more interest in shifting our outlook on the language language arts classroom as to enable teachers to not perpetuate the same systems which have not been working and have made teenage people feel “eager to assume more adult-like roles” (6). This chapter places this quality of late adolescents as an unquestioned fact, not analyzing its potential bias and inverity. Perhaps the reason that many late-adolescents are “eager” to assume such roles is because we have a twisted definition of what adulthood looks like and who is allowed to assume the title of adult. I knew teenagers in highschool who were employed at multiple jobs, taking care of families, and dealing with various social struggles. These people were doing far more “adulting” than many adults I am aware of.
This text says that the implications of these qualities for teachers is that we must allow students to move and try to cater to different learning styles. First, I think that this should be the case with people in general, from early education to late employment, not just teens. Second, they do not address these concerns of teens as valid, but instead seem to be interested in giving teachers tools to cope with them and quell them as problems. I think that these concerns need to, instead, be addressed in a systematic and ideological sense: why do we think of young people in this way, and how can systems be changed in order to more productively include them in society?